Unstrapped: Dealing with Money

Friday, March 4th at 7:30pm
Random Row Books
(on West Main across from the Greyhound Station)
contact Sky for more info: 434 806 9486, peacewithinchaos@gmail.com

Most people feel confused, stressed, and isolated about money and the money system.  Money touches our lives in so many ways, and our experience is at the same time personal, local and global.  What’s possible is people working together to understand money, deal with their relationships with money, and to take action in generating wealth for themselves and their communities. This gathering is to begin a dialog in the community about money and explore ways to foster and facilitate that dialog.

Watching the performance, I was reminded that the various “environmentally friendly” lifestyle decisions that each of us makes is ultimately of little practical value.  Mass numbers of people making different decisions is important, but we’re a long way from that.  In the mean time, why inconvenience ourselves?

The performance was a good reminder that we are all complicit in the many environmental and humanitarian catastrophes and atrocities committed in order to preserve “our way of life.”  There’s no way we can avoid being part of the problem. Every time we turn on the lights or write a blog post on our laptops we are participating in mountaintop removal, just as we are participating in the occupation of Iraq every time we get in a car.

We can’t help but contribute to the problem.  We can try to minimize our contribution.  But that’s not enough; it won’t change the system.  Some people choose to find ways to resist the system.  Some people try to create alternatives.  Some people work to educate others.  Ultimately I think all are important and necessary, and all require a certain attitude of service.  Each of us need to find the ways to do this that inspire us most and that we believe to be the most beneficial.

If  you can make it to the last performance of Cry of the Mountain next Thursday at Play On! Theatre, please do – it’s amazing.  There’s also a great documentary on the same subject called Coal Country, which will be screened at the Jefferson Theater on August 12th.

mountainjustice.org

ilovemountains.org

appvoices.org

heartwood.org

At the last Potluck, Raven lead us through a process that started with this simple exercise: Imagine it’s one year from now, Feb. 3rd, 2011. What has happened in the realm of community-building, stimulated in part by these very potlucks?

It’s a simple exercise that I’ve done before, but I found myself quickly getting very into it. So, here are the combined and edited lists from Kassia and I:

We’ve started a new Urban Commune which is rapidly developing into an urban homesteading educational and experimental center.  It serves as a hub for radical culture and fun activities.

Alexander House Hostel has expanded into two additional locations and is hosting a variety of community events and gatherings.  One of the new locations is a rambling old house with wrap-around porches and a large fireplace.   Weekly potlucks there draw local folks who flock out to join the crew of interesting and international hostel guests.

Food Not Bombs is operating out of the Haven and has expanded to serving at every park in Charlottesville.

A vehicle co-op has formed and now has 4 vehicles and 30 members.

Critical Mass is thriving, hosting monthly themed bike ride parties that draw people of all ages, including families and visitors to Cville.

The City Council has sponsored a coalition including ACCT, the city traffic engineer, UVA faculty and students, and citizens which is developing plans, to be implemented in Fall of 2011, to transform W. Main St. into a pedestrian and bike-focused multi-use street.

UVA has begun paying all hospital and university employees a living wage.

A new food co-op has started up and is rapidly expanding.

C’ville Foodscapes has been so successful that it has split into two co-operative business working in parallel and supporting each other.

Another favorite vision shared by an older woman in Kassia’s group was this (paraphrased):

Folks on my block start holding potlucks at each others’ houses.  Eventually our bonds grow and we start supporting each other by taking care of each others’ kids, lending and sharing tools, and caring for sick and elderly folks on the block.  Our block turns into a thriving and intimate community!

Karen Kerney/Syracuse Cultural Workers

We both came away from this exercise feeling inspired and re-juiced in our efforts to transform Cville into an Urban Utopia!

]]> http://urbanevolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/imagineering-the-year-to-come/feed/ 0 skybluestar buildcommunity http://urbanevolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/cville-foodscapes-about-to-launch/ http://urbanevolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/cville-foodscapes-about-to-launch/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:14:59 +0000 karmakas http://urbanevolution.wordpress.com/?p=273 ]]> As you may (or may not) have heard, Sky and I are part of a group of folks starting up a new collective business here in Charlottesville. Its called C’ville Foodscapes, and the basic service is installing, building, and/or maintaining vegetable gardens in people’s yards. We’ve been working on this project for almost a year now, and are very excited to be on the cusp of launching this winter/spring.

Our website (www.cvillefoodscapes.com) is coming soon.  Here’s a snippet: the story of how we began.

When Angel moved in across the street from Patrick in the winter of 2008, the idea of an urban agriculture project was little more than a brief, neighborly conversation out on the front porch.  That conversation quickly snowballed; and as they continued chatting about the idea of creating a backyard CSA in the city,  they soon found out that some other folks in town had also been scheming.  Sam had recently posted a similar idea on the Eat Local list-serve, and Wendy had responded to his post.   Soon, Kassia and Sky came onto the scene; fresh from West Coast travels, and they had their own dreams of expansive urban farming.

It wasn’t long before we all found our way back to Angel’s porch on a sunny day in early February.  As we shared our visions for the project, a few themes immediately emerged.  We were all interested in supporting a sustainable urban food system.  We were all concerned with food justice; making healthy, delicious food available to people of all income levels and demographics.  We were interested in working collectively, and in creating a viable business model that would provide satisfying work at a reasonable income.

Our early meetings felt almost eerily charmed and magical.  Our skill sets and past experiences fit neatly together.  In addition to all of our own personal gardens, Angel and Sam had both spent time working on established CSA farms in the area.  Sam had also been certified in Permaculture design. Patrick had experience working in urban community gardens and doing community organizing work.  Meticulously organized and well-connected in the city, Wendy had previous experience running a small business.  While living at the Twin Oaks Community, Kassia and Sky had be able to live and work cooperatively, and gained hands-on farming skills.  They had also just spent months traveling in the states and abroad, researching successful models of urban sustainability and urban agriculture projects.

A bit giddy with excitement, our initial visioning was large and expansive.  We dreamed of backyard gardens blanketing the town, of an urban CSA run out of people’s yards, neighborhood veggie stands selling produce grown right on the block, and abandoned lots turned into thriving community gardens.  We wanted to help transform Charlottesville into a patchwork of thriving edible foodscapes.   As we continued meeting regularly, many questions arose and we discussed a myriad of different ways that an urban agriculture project could exist in the city of Charlottesville.  With guidance from local organizations and suggestions from friends, we spent many long hours hashing things out in living rooms and on porches over endless cups of tea. Eventually, we honed the project and emerged nearly a year later as C’ville Foodscapes.

Join us for our kick-off party Sunday, March 7th 1-5pm at Random Row books: live music, yummy food, seed swap, veggie fashion show and surprise, Cville Foodscaper/superhero Skit and more!

Check out the video: and website.

Start the New Year out right!

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilization.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at triple the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project….

6C rise: The consequences
If two degrees is generally accepted as the threshold of dangerous climate change, it is clear that a rise of six degrees in global average temperatures must be very dangerous indeed, writes Michael McCarthy. Just how dangerous was signalled in 2007 by the science writer Mark Lynas, who combed all the available scientific research to construct a picture of a world with temperatures three times higher than the danger limit.

His verdict was that a rise in temperatures of this magnitude “would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe”.

He said: “It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”

Very few species could adapt in time to the abruptness of the transition, he suggested. “With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean.

“As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

“The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But, with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.”

Recently, I heard Adam Berman, one of my favorite Jewish spiritual and environmental leaders speak. He asked us to consider Global Climate Change as the mother of all activist issues.  That if we don’t all take this issue on on some level in some way, independently or inter-meshed with the rest of our work, all other issues will literally be irrelevant as we will no longer be able to inhabit this planet.

If it were me, I’d emphasis more strongly the idea that we’re not acting like the house is on fire, and the idea that the solution is to come together and organize in new and profound ways.  But I think that’s more a style thing than anything.

So why aren’t we acting like the house is on fire?   For me, this issue huge, scary, daunting; far too much to contemplate and take on alone.  Which is why there is such a deep and dire need to start talking about it, thinking about it, and coming together to organize and taking action in profound, new ways.  With such a huge and overwhelming challenge before us, the solution/s will likely also be unfamaliar to us, outside the normal boundaries of our usual conception framework.  This is an amazing opportunity to revolutionize our relationship to ourselves, our communities and this planet!

http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html

It gives the global context for what could seem like an innocuous local tradition.  How much damage can a few plastic bags really do?

Apparently so.  They’re everywhere! The city provides the leaf bags free of charge and publishes a pick-up schedule so residents know when to put them next to the sidewalk.  I imagine that for many people this is an ordinary part of Fall, perhaps even an enjoyable marking of the changing seasons.  Maybe I just spent too many years on the commune.  Does anyone else think this is weird?

(pics are posted on blog if you need a reminder)

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what disturbes me about this practice.  Apart from being another example of our societies wanton use of plastic it’s an example of how we’ve turned an aspect of the natural world into something, well, unnatural.  It’s another break from the cycles of life.

This is our city’s soil, our city’s fertility.  The trees dig deep into the earth to make those leaves; the leaves fall, and are suppose to then decompose and create more soil for other things to grow. In the natural world nothing is wasted, nothing.  Waste is a human invention. But heaven forbid that these nasty leaves should blemish our carefully manicured lawns.

Many of my friends go around their own pick-up program; they use the leaves as mulch in their gardens.  I know that these bagged leaves, along with the loose piles of leaves the city also collects, somehow make it into big compactor trucks, several of which dump their loads at Woodfolk House each year.  I’ve also been told that the city pays Panorama Paydirt, a company that produces and sells compost and mulch, to take a portion of the leaves.  I can only hope the rest go to other good causes (though our society’s tendancy to commericalize anything and everything is another part of the problem in my mind).

Still, this to me is a small but poignant example of what we need to shift to create a sustainable urban habitat.  Even the urban environment must exist within a functional, integrated, and complete ecosystem.  We all need to have a basic understanding of that ecosystem, because we’re part of it.

We need to remove this concept of waste from our cultural consciousness, as well as any product or practice that cannot be seamlessly woven back into the fabric of life.  This needs to happen in the spheres of commerce and industry, municipalities, but if we don’t seriously start making different choices on a personal level I have little hope of it happening on larger scales.

Zero Waste is a concept that’s been around since the ’70′s and continues to be developed by a number of thinkers and organizations.  No one’s made it happen yet, and doubtless some of the intitiatives are well-meaning but misguided, but a number of businesses (including Wal-Mart if you can believe it) and municipalities around the world are giving it a go.

What would it take for Charlottesville to be zero-waste?  It would probably involve a shift in attitude away from thinking that putting leaves in plastic bags is a good idea.

Luckily, we have not been alone in this major life transition.  When we first returned the the area, back in September (before our euro-commune trip), we gathered with a group of current and ex-Twin Oakers, all of whom were interested in “building community” in C’ville. Many ideas and visions circulated through the weekend gathering at Shannon Farm, and various sub-groups got excited about particular projects.  But the thread that carried the entire group forward was creating a support group, which called the Fellowship of Personal Assistants, or FOPA for short (pun intended.)

It wasn’t something terribly innovative or radical, but it was clearly important for those involved.  Kassia and I were poised to land in C’ville, with grand plans and visions.  We needed the reflection of people who’d known us for a long time, not to mention supporting us in our relationship as we entered a new and sometimes stressful situation.   Kate had been living in Nelson County for sometime, had a new baby, and felt extremely isolated and out of integrity with the kind of community-based life she wanted for both herself and her child.  Robert and Thea were getting ready to leave Twin Oaks to move to C’ville.  Extracting themselves, and Thea’s children on a part time basis, from (for Thea) 10 years of deeply invested living at Twin Oaks and creating a whole new family life in town was quite a process.  Elsa was in the midst of figuring out whether to end a long-term relationship, and was also trying to figure out her relationship with Twin Oaks (complicated by her situation with 4 yr old son and ex-husband).  Craig was facing a growing need to be more active and engaged in the world, particularly in C’ville, and how that would integrate with his marraige and family life at Shannon Farm.

It was amazing, though perhaps not surprising, that this group of friends came together at a time when we were all in the midst of such radically changing life circumstances. We gathered as often as we could and focused on helping indviduals work on whatever they were dealing with in their lives or clearing baggage between people in the group.  We often struggled with divergent desires for the group (some wanted it to take on some project, while others wanted to keep it focused on group work, while others wanted to allow it to evolve naturally without any plan.) We spent what some of us found to be a frustrating amount of time trying to figure out what we were doing, not to mention scheduling around 7 busy schedules. But through the months it was clearly of enough benefit to keep going.

Last month we held the last session of FOPA.  For all of us, life has settled out in good and important ways.  Kate led her family in a move to C’ville, where she is now busily immersing herself in the extended community here in town.  Robert and Thea are co-owners of an amazing house with another family.  Robert has a job he likes and Thea is in school to becoming an Alexander Technique practitioner.  In the process of letting go of her relationship with Scott, Elsa was stunned to find that he came back to her.  They are now preganant and settling in at Twin Oaks.  Craig has been instigating creative collaborations right and left, the most recent being a second successful Healing Carnival adventure to Floyd Fest.  And Kassia and I, well, if you’re reading this you’ve probably read the other blog posts too ;0)

As we sat together and reflected on FOPA, it was clear that it had been a cruical support structure for each of us in moving through the chaos of life transition to something with solidity and positive foward momentum.  We agreed that we would continue to be an on-call Wisdom Council for each other, meaning that while we won’t meet regularly we will gather when one of us puts out a call for support.

FOPA was definitely an extension of the time we all shared with each other at Twin Oaks and the culture of that communal experience.  It’s hard to get to know others that well and develop that level of trust without a basis of daily, shared life-experience, and it’s hard to get that living outside of intentional community.  I feel very grateful that we were able to adapt our experience of community at Twin Oaks to an experience of community in C’ville.  Creating more of these kinds of opportunities for others is one of the many challenges, joyful challenges, we face.  It’s what urban evolution is all about.

The most recent, which we saw the C’ville’s indie theater, Vinegar Hill, is Food Inc. It is incredibly well done and does the most thorough deconstruction of food-related issues, and you’d be amazed how many issues are food related.  Unfortunately (for you C’ville folx) t just stopped it’s run at Vinegar Hill, but we highly recommend creating an opportunity to see this film, and share it with others.

Other documentarys on the topic that are worth seeing are:

• Fresh (this one touches more on alternatives to the mainstream food system)
• King Corn (this one is brilliant in it’s objective, down-home approach)
• The World According to Monsanto (Monsanto is a huge problem in the world today; while this film sensationalizes things a bit it’s still vitally important that we know what this multi-national corp. is doing to the world)