Transition Chicago (TC)

by Douglas Rushkoff
http://www.arthurmag.com/

The national healthcare movement was doomed from the start. TV clips of shouting matches at town halls and fear-mongering by cynical politicians may be lamentable, but we are witnessing something more profound than the collapse of civic discourse. The failure of a movement that could rightly claim over 70 percent public acceptance just a month ago, exposes the inherent failure of movements of any kind to effectively address our society’s ills.

That’s right. Mass organization may just have been a twentieth century thing: collective actions of all sorts—good and bad—were responses to the corporatization of government and industy. As such, they took the form of the entities with whom they sought to do battle. But—like the top-heavy, highly abstracted creatures they were created to counter —they are proving utterly incapable of providing an alternative to what they would replace.

They did work for a time. When a corporation had the power to hire a police force to crush labor unrest, labor created its own collective, virtual structure to fight back: the union. When disenfranchised blacks faced Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights movement gave them a tent under which to organize, a charismatic leadership to follow, and a clearly articulated cause to promote. It was branded. Marches could be scheduled, buttons could be worn. And it worked.

Between the 1960s and today, however, the mediaspace through which these causes disseminated ideas and gained momentum has changed. The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out. The question often becomes the new content of the Sunday morning news panel, taking the place of whatever real issue might have been addressed.

But the problem is not simply that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real movements and cynically concocted fake ones. It’s that they are functionally indistinguishable. They may as well be the same thing.

In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.

This is why progressives are so disillusioned by President Obama. He was never anything other than a centrist Democrat. But “brand Obama” gave his supporters—a movement in the fullest sense of the word—an abstracted ideal on which to focus. At least until his election. Meanwhile, the real requirements of progressive activists to contribute to their neighborhoods, promote local business and agriculture, invigorate failing public schools, were again left to someone else. This is not the failure of a president, but the flawed functionality of movements themselves.

For while civil rights, suffrage, and many other causes were largely won through traditionally organized, long-fought, top-down movements, the scale on which these great battles were waged is one no longer appropriate to the tasks at hand. In fact, it is the scale itself on which we have been attempting to orchestrate human affairs that is suspect.

Activists would do more to fight Big Agra simply by subscribing to their local Community Supported Agriculture groups. We’d more effectively pull the rug out from under a corrupt financial sector by simply investing in one another’s businesses—our own town restaurants and drug stores—instead of outsourcing our retirement savings to Wall Street. We could more easily re-invent public schools by volunteering our time to them directly, instead of sending our kids to private schools while we sign petitions for government to re-prioritize. And even in health care, we’d end up cutting everyone’s costs by commuting less, smoking less, landscaping less, and, yes, hating less. For each of these actions triggers different responses, undermines industries, requires new legal structures, and so on. It’s tiny, but it’s almost fractal in its impact.

For as the alternative is now teaching us, one size does not fit all. Americans, in particular, have been living under the premise that there’s something to buy, vote for, or believe in that will simply change everything. And it’s certainly still possible that government could develop the single payer system that pretty much everybody knows deep down would bring the best of industrial health care to the most people.

But just as we are learning that industrially produced food is not ultimately nutritious, a top-down, passionately executed, and highly branded movement is not ultimately effective.

In fact, by creating and branding a movement, even the most well-meaning activitsts are disconnecting from terra firma, and instead entering the world of marketing, public opinion, and language selection. Potential participants, meanwhile, are distracted from whatever on-the-ground, constructive and purposeful activity they might do. They get to join an abstracted movement, and participate by belonging instead of doing, or blogging instead of acting.

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/15/an-end-to-movements-by-douglas-rushkoff/

By Lisa Shumaker – From Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters Life!) – Armed with pruning shears and a paper bag, Nance Klehm walks along a Chicago sidewalk, pointing out plants and weeds that can make a tasty salad or stir-fry.

She snips stalks from a weed with downy leaves and white powder commonly called goosefoot or lamb’s quarters.

“I collect a lot of this,” said Klehm, 43. “It’s indistinguishable from spinach when you cook it. I never, never grow spinach or other greens except kale. Everything else I forage.”

Klehm is among a small group of urban foragers across the United States who collect weeds and plants from city streets and gardens to use in meals and medicines. Some are survivalists while others are environmentalists or even gourmands seeking new flavors for cooking.

Klehm leads small groups of about 20 people a few times a year on urban forages in Chicago. In New York, Steve Brill’s walks in Central Park attract 50 or more people every weekend.

“People have a lot of different reasons,” said Brill, who wrote a book on edible plants and posts information on foraging at www.wildmanstevebrill.com.

“They’re freegans, vegans, foodies, environmentalists,” he said. “It’s definitely more middle class than working class.”

CHOICE RATHER THAN NECESSITY

Urban foraging in the United States is more a choice than a necessity. Most foragers see both the health and environmental benefits to eating a more natural diet.

“I do this to slow down, to not follow the grid, to skip out of technoconsumerism. I do this to realize that the health of my body is connected to the health of the land,” said Klehm, who has a website at www.spontaneousvegetation.net.

She also teaches groups how to compost food and cooks with solar ovens.

Stacy Peterson went on Klehm’s recent forage because she was curious and she loves urban gardening.

“There’s a big movement right now toward urban farming and slow food,” said Peterson, a graphic artist.

“I’ve been trying to eat more local, organic and unprocessed foods. I’m learning how to eat healthier and the urban forage walk taught me about the edible plants and weeds growing wild in my community.

” But urban foraging isn’t without risks. Klehm describes several plants as mild laxatives, while others are psychotropic, or even poisonous.

There are also environmental concerns in the city, such as lead and pollutants in the soil.

Brill advises people not to forage within 50 feet of major roads because that is where heavy metals tend to accumulate.

But urban foragers are quick to point out that food bought at the grocery store may not be without herbicides and pesticides.

“Adjacent to where I was doing a tour was a peach orchid. They came with trucks with nozzles larger than I am tall and clouds of chemicals went onto these peaches,” Brill said.

(Reporting by Lisa Shumaker; editing by Patricia Reaney) © Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved.

by Kirkpatrick Sale
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com

Cold Spring, NY–It’s getting worse and worse, and the wizards don’t have a clue. They don’t even know the economy is broken-and can’t be fixed. That’s why they keep doing more of the same with the same old solutions and same old people.

Nothing could be more obvious, and I think most sentient people in the land know this in their hearts. And nothing could be more obvious than the need to overhaul that economy entirely-which is indeed the opportunity we have now.

I don’t mean we have to scrap the capitalist system entirely, but we do have to reign it in. We have to fit it in to the limits of the real world. We have to understand that economics is a subsystem of the overall ecosystem. We have to realize that continuing to base it on the concepts of growth and consumption–and encouraging, “stimulating,” more of that–will lead to the collapse not only of the global economy but probably the industrial civilization it serves.

Isn’t it obvious that the Keynesian idea of growth at all costs, particularly growth fostered by large governments that can print money, has failed? Isn’t it clear that we can’t keep on throwing money at this failed economy and that something quite different is needed? The U.S. economy has been devoted exclusively to the idea of perpetual growth since the end of World War II, and it has allowed any number of evils-environmental destruction, greenhouse gases, pollution, resource depletion, military expansion, government inefficiency and corruption, corporate political domination, unregulated financial institutions, immense inequality, a perpetual underclass, the decay of public education, and that’s just for starters-in its pursuit. Isn’t it obvious that it doesn’t work and that the current Great Recession is the proof of that?

Let us posit that the three greatest perils we face are resource depletion (particularly oil, but don’t forget fish and fresh water, for example), global warming and the alteration of habitats and species, and an excessive human impact on the planet at all levels. They are all the result of unchecked economic growth, and on a planetary scale. If we continue business as usual we will surely meet up with their disastrous consequences.

The alternative? Nothing complicated: a non-growth ecnonomy. A human-scale economy. A steady-state economy.

The idea of a steady-state economy was spelled out by John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19^th century, and has been taken up and amplified by a whole host of thinkers in recent times, including Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Leopold Kohr, Hazel Henderson, Howard Odum-oh, and myself (Human Scale, 1980). There is today an organization called the Center for the Advancement of a Steady-State Economy, and in the UK a Sustainable Development Commission has recently issued a report called “Prosperity Without Growth.”

But what steady-state scholars have traditionally failed to emphasize, and what I have always held to be crucial, is scale. They have tended to picture such an economy, naturally but erroneously, on the scale of the nation-state, without realizing that it is the size and nature of the state in the first place that tends to foster growth and would be hard-pressed to do otherwise.

A true steady-state economy can operate only at a scale where the people involved understand they are living within, and dependent upon, a finite ecosystem, and make their economic decisions in the mutual self-interest of humans and fellow creatures in that system. The limits and possibilities of the bioregion they live in will constrain all economic activity, which would be primarily to ensure the continued existence of the bioregion at a harmonious and productive level and would preclude destruction or pollution of the sources of economic life.

And ultimately it would depend on community. That is, the level of a few thousand people-maybe five thousand or ten, maybe as many as twenty or thirty-who are able to deliberate and decide how their economy best fits into their ecosystem. They would grow their own food, make their own necessities, generate their own energy, create their own culture, to the maximum extent of human well-being and pleasure within the constraints of the other systems and species they live with.

That would be the kind of economy that this nation ought to be thinking about and working toward-not more, and more, of the same. Because if we don’t start doing that now, and in a serious and dedicated way, we’re going to have to start doing it when this current economy collapses-as surely it will if it goes on printing money to sustain a flawed and failing growth economy.

I don’t really think that the present political system will really come to its senses in time and turn the country in the direction I have suggested. It’s just that I can’t see how it can go on doing what it is doing without understanding that it is ultimately destroying the very world it lives in. And that I see this crisis as so blatant an indictment of corporate globalism that I feel it ought, as any good crisis does, to give us the opportunity for true and meaningful change.

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=4192