Support Local Food, Green Jobs, and Social Justice by Supporting Planting Justice

I am writing a special personal appeal this year to call for your support for an organization I am involved with called Planting Justice, an Oakland-based food justice organization.

I have had the privilege of serving on the board of directors since its inception last year and have seen it grow from seed idea to full-fledged force for food justice and urban agriculture over the past year and half. While my role has often been along the lines of communications, board decisions, and supporting in whatever ways I can, I have often been involved with the on-the-ground work that characterizes the daily work of Planting Justice (PJ).  I can tell you personally that you will rarely find a more dedicated, passionate, smart, and skilled couple of people than my friends and co-founders Gavin Raders and Haleh Zandi. They and the rest of the PJ crew have their eyes simultaneously on food access and social justice and on both ecological and financial sustainability.

I have enjoyed the garden work-parties transferring plant starts on the rooftop garden in Temescal and at Explore College Prep Middle School where Planting Justice planted and cultivated a food forest and facilitated a school garden program with the help of the students; I visited San Quentin prison H-unit, where men are learning gardening skills in a collaboration between PJ and the Insight Garden Program.  PJ has just recently hired its first participant from that program, a San Quentin parolee, who without the opportunity of the program to have gained these skills and knowledge and care, may have more likely become another statistic in California’s deplorable recidivism rate. I helped build raised beds at an affordable housing senior center just up the road. I have gone door-to-door in Oakland to connect neighbors with PJ’s work. I learned how to install a greywater system with the low-cost laundry-to-landscape workshop that PJ’s Gavin Raders and Andrew Chahrour teach. On the Global Work Party day 10/10/10, I was one of over 50 who joined a food justice bike tour of West and North Oakland that PJ organized along with Walk Oakland Bike Oakland and Peoples Grocery. We ended the day helping transform a plain Bermuda grass-choked yard into a beautiful edible garden.

Bioneers 2010: Dispatch from an Earth Community Movement

Once again, the 3-day Bioneers mother-ship has landed and departed, and a thousand pods of social and environmental change have dispersed across the globe, refreshed and re-energized.  Or to use the less technological metaphor by Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute,

“This is kind of a seasonal migration ceremony, Bioneers.  If we were migrating birds, this would be our staging ground, where we come and talk about what we have hatched this year and what breeding was like.”

The Bioneers Conference, hosted in San Rafael, CA on what is the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok, is a leading-edge forum presenting breakthrough solutions for people and planet.  Over its twenty-one years Bioneers has become a global community of some of the most dedicated, passionate, and creative thinkers and leaders facilitating a wiser way forward for the earth community.

Farmers, students, social justice workers, scientists, artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, indigenous leaders, environmental activists, peacemakers, and a motley assortment of engaged citizens come together to learn, network, and re-energize their efforts in creating a just and resilient world.  The topics discussed range from organic farming, green chemistry, and women in the media to cross-cultural education, traditional indigenous knowledge, and local democracy.

The experience is as intellectually stimulating as it is personally transformational. Over the next few days I will be discussing some of the most visionary and exciting projects, ideas, and people at Bioneers, including the Million Kid March, the new shift in environmental and community protection using a rights-of-nature framework that is taking root across the world, the Dreaming New Mexico local foodshed & fair trade work, the One World Youth Project that is creating a new paradigm for cross-cultural education, new models of clean energy, the transformation of urban landscapes and the work of Andy Lipkus and the TreePeople, Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots programs in 120 countries, the heroic ethnographic work of Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, the first female fellow of the National Geographic Society, and the move to amend the constitution to limit corporate person-hood and restore free speech for people alone.

Here I want to highlight what I take to be some of its core themes and messages and hopefully in the process capture some of the spirit of Bioneers.

1) Urgency of Action: All the signals from the biosphere and indicators from our body and economy are in: the time is past due for massive shifts in how we do things.

“This moment beckons us all to think big,” said Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons. “To match all we are each capable of with the needs of a planet” in peril.

Another panelist, Ami Marcus from Mt. Shasta, whose community is fighting corporate raiding of their water and manipulation of their weather, said, “It is not enough to feel it here,” she said, pointing to her heart, “we must codify it in our structures on the ground.”

And that takes the hard work of speaking out, organizing, speaking face to face with our neighbors about the issues, of challenging the status quo, saying yes to things not yet born but are in our imaginations, not accepting no, and of not waiting on leaders to come.  It means scaling up the work we are doing already. It means moving beyond bumper sticker activism and clicktivism.

Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel invoked Winston Churchill: “It’s no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”

The Four Years. Go campaign was presented, a global effort to awaken the best of our collective awareness and action.  It is based on the premise that what we do or don’t do in the very short term will effect generations to come and that we have the solutions at hand, but we need all hands on deck.  The mission is to empower “individuals and organizations to set and reach goals that will cause a positive global tipping point by 2014, setting humanity on a new path toward a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and spiritually fulfilling future.”  As the video suggests, it is not a new organization, it represents goals for every organization.

Connect with Four Years. Go on Facebook and on Twitter.

We are urged to plug-in, co-create, and act with fierce determination. We are the leaders. As one speaker urged, “Whatever you do, wherever you are, find a way to be ever more involved.”

Quote of the Week for Social Changemakers

Vandana Shiva at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, 2007

“[How do I do it?] Well, it’s always a mystery, because you don’t know why you get depleted or recharged. But this much I know. I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential. And I’ve learned from the Bhagavad-Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me to take on the next challenge, because I don’t cripple myself, I don’t tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.” (From Yes Magazine Interview, Earth Democracy)

Climate Ride Kicks-off, Promoting Climate and Energy Solutions

Bicycle tune-up: Check. Registration materials: Check. Hybrid support vehicles ready: check. Variety of Clif bars: Check.  Plan for morning coffee: check!

Today over 100 riders are launching the 320-mile, 5 day Brita California Climate Ride to promote meaningful political action on climate and energy and to inspire citizens to envision a renewable energy-based economy.

The ride kicks off in Mendocino County among the redwoods, winds down along the Pacific coast and through Wine Country, and finally across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco.

They will be joined by such notables as David Helvarg of the Blue Frontier, acclaimed photographic artist and social activist Chris Jordan, Hunter Lovins of the Natural Capitalism Solutions, Dr. Phillip Duffy of Climate Center, and Jenn Fox of ClimateWorks, from whom they will hear from each evening.

The Climate Ride also claims to be the greenest multi-day charity ride in the country, both in terms of carbon and waste. No plastic water bottles or disposable plastic waste is allowed and Climate-Riders will eat with reusable utensils and plates. The ride’s sponsor, Brita, is providing filtered water and reusable water bottles. And while it is a supported ride, they are using hybrid vehicles and purchasing full carbon offsets from Clif Bar.

Funds raised from the ride go to three non-profits, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, Green America, and 1Sky. The three organizations work on clean energy, bicycle & walking infrastructure, and growing the green economy through supporting sustainable businesses and consumer choices.

Next summer there will be another Climate Ride form NYC to DC.

Visit ClimateRide and stay up to date on their ride on Twitter: @ClimateRide

For the Love of Water: Art and Water Festival

I just got a call from Christina Bertea of Greywater Action to tell me about their awesome event called Water Works that is happening every Saturday and Sunday in September.  I had a chance last spring to sit in on one of their greywater training workshops for a laundry-to-landscape system and wrote an article on it.  It got my curiosity bones jumping, so I’m definitely going to check this out.

From the announcement:

Water Works is an effort to make sustainability appealing by showing that it can be attractive, whimsical, intriguing, and just plain fun affordable as well. Water Works has artists and tinkerers weigh in on the water conservation question and has lots of functional exhibits to show for it, plus lots of activities for kids  too.

Join 6 dynamic artist-designers as they rethink our daily relationship to water: personal hygiene, appliances and graywater, gardening and landscaping, recreation, food production, waste management, rainwater storage and management.

Every Saturday and Sunday in September: 11am -6pm at 5809 Ayala Avenue in North Oakland.

Confirmed speakers:
9.18 DL WEST MARRIN “Hydro-mimicry & Changing Our Perceptions of Water” 3PM
9.19 BETSY DAMON (Keepers of the Waters) “Water Revealed” 3PM
preceded by ANKA DRAUGELATES, “Ocean Music”
9.25 ELDER & BERTEA “Water Works and Future Think” 4PM
9.26 GIL FRIEND, JANE BYRD, AURORA MAHASSINE, MARTIN BERMUDEZ 4PM
“UrbanArchitecture and EcoSystems Surfaces”

Check out the blog to learn more
http://waterworksoakland.blogspot.com/

Quote of the Day by Wangari Maathai

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary
process.

~ The first African woman 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, Professor Wangari Maathai-The Greenbelt Movement