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What if we give it away?

Published November 28, 2010 CJMP FM , development , economy , gift economy , growth , Manfred Max-Neef , neoliberalism 2 Comments

By David Parkinson

A tiny jungle of kale plants hunkers down for winter

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin.
(John Ruskin, 1860, “The Veins of Wealth”)

Yesterday, to celebrate Black Friday, Democracy Now rebroadcast a couple of recent interviews: one with economist Manfred Max-Neef and the other with environmental activist Derrick Jensen. They’re both worth listening to, but I was really caught by the interview with ‘barefoot economist’ Max-Neef, who proposes an economics in radical opposition to neoclassical economics and its trendy offshoot neoliberalism, which can be summed up as the belief that the market is the supreme force underlying and determining all aspects of human life.

Max-Neef proposes a new set of principles on which to base a sane economics. From the transcript:

The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle.

  • One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.
  • Two, development is about people and not about objects.
  • Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.
  • Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.
  • Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

These principles lead to an economic (and social) system which is extremely different from the one we are stuck in now. I believe that events beyond the control of the economists and politicians are going to compel us to shift to a more human-scale economics within the next decade or so; and this process of humanization and relocalization will continue for the foreseeable future — played out against the ongoing consequences of the overshoot and damage caused by clinging for too long to an anti-human and anti-biospheric way of living. Everything in our media and societal belief system sets us against these coming changes, but I’m not alone in hoping that their net effect will be positive. The way we do things now is extremely out of balance in every way, and the pendulum needs to swing back. Other values need to start trumping the relentless voracious consumption of the planet and its conversion to junk.

The lucky thing is that the seeds of the new economic arrangements are everywhere around us, many lying dormant but many others beginning to sprout and take root. And the place to look for these seeds is in the gift economies that perform an absolutely staggering amount of the good work that goes on around here, and in every community.

The essence of a gift economy is that “valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. no formal quid pro quo exists).” And where do we see that most often? It’s the not-for-profit and volunteer sector, where people regularly contribute enormous amounts of work for no tangible benefits — at least not of the sort that economists know how to measure, at least not without converting them into ‘in-kind donations’ measured in conventional units of currency. Volunteers and givers work to be part of a healthy community with arts, culture, recreation, and strong social ties among  people and groups. This is not something we can or should expect the cash economy to produce; if anything, the relentless need to work and consume undercuts the hard work of the gift economy.

To take an example which is front and centre in my life lately: I am bowled over by the amount of cooperative work and passionate energy that people are putting into the resuscitation of our local community radio station, CJMP FM. I’ve been involved in plenty of volunteer projects in and around Powell River, but I have never seen anything like the work that people are devoting to this one: they’re showing up to meetings, doing research, and contributing their time and their skills. Local DJs and promoters are offering to donate proceeds from music shows to help get the station off the ground. And the energy is growing. It’s very inspiring to see.

The most interesting thing about this particular project is that operating a community radio station is unlike many other not-for-profit initiatives in that it requires relatively small amounts of capital for startup and ongoing cash for operating expenses. Once you have the gear you need to get the signal from microphone to transmitter to tower, then you only need to rent a space, keep your gear dry, and you’re pretty much ready to get going.

What you do need, and in large amounts, is the time and energy of dedicated and cherished volunteers. And in order to attract and keep volunteers, you need to create an environment which rewards people for contributing their time, expertise, and energy. It has to be the case that those who contribute more, instead of feeling taken advantage of, get even more out of the experience than those who contribute less. Participation has to become its own incentive.

The radio station is only one of many such examples, but it happens to be one that is much on my mind lately. And I’m certain that as the current economic system continues to shift and shudder we’ll start to see more of these seedlings of mutual support and community-building take on more importance in people’s lives. We have surrounded ourselves with an economy which produces unimaginable amounts of what we call ‘wealth’ but which at the same time has impoverished the world by trashing the non-human world and lessening our dependence on each other. We need to start figuring out how to give away our wealth and our labour with the expectation that it will come around again, although not necessarily from the same person or place we gave it to.

For the last half-century or so, we’ve created a system in which extreme dependence on large-scale systems has rewarded us with the most widely-distributed wealth ever seen in the history of the world. Everyone in our society, except for the very poorest, still lives in greater comfort and security than the richest people in previous ages. But the dark downside of this total dependence in huge centralized social, political, and industrial systems is that, once they start to fall apart, we find that we have lost the simple ability to connect, cooperate, and build an economy to sustain us. This where we’re heading, and we’re going to have to find the ingenuity to flow around the eroding remnants of the broken system on our way to saner arrangements.

We’ll find our back to relationships among people and groups which are based much more on the free, uncoerced giving of our labour and our belongings in the knowledge that we will not be abandoned by a system imposed from above by people who have no interest in our local struggles and needs. Of course it’ll be scary and weird at times; but along the way we’ll gain the perspective that permits us to see how scary and weird this supposed best of all possible systems has been all along. That’s something to look forward to.

You’ve got everything now

Published November 20, 2010 archery , autumn , Tom Atlee Leave a Comment

By David Parkinson

Condensation

Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls-eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
(Brian Eno)

The days grow short. Nights are cold and mornings misty and moist. It’s the time to withdraw into the household, cook to keep the house warm, read for pleasure, and sleep long nights. And think about this place, and the people in it, and the people who aren’t in it yet but who will be… who knows… maybe in 2011?

Some kind of shift in energy seems to be underway. The old storylines keep their hold, but they start to feel worn thin in places. At time you can see the light of something else showing through, or so you think.

We aim our arrows at other people’s targets, but the payoff grows less each time. We can make our own targets and aim at them; but surely, after some time has passed, we won’t remember why we put them there in the first place.

It might be time to call the arrow’s stopping-place the target, and see what it means to have scored the bulls-eye by landing there. Looking around, you can see that many have been doing this all along. For one thing, you always win. For another, you get to ask yourself each time why this was a winning shot — why even just to shoot was already a victory.

This way, no one has a reason to stand aside and only watch. The game is about taking the next shot, not counting the score.

Tom Atlee says:

I’ve started viewing both optimism and pessimism as spectator sports, as forms of disengagement masquerading as involvement. Both optimism and pessimism trick me into judging life and betting on the odds, rather than diving into life with my whole self, with my full co-creative energy. I think the emerging crises call us to transcend such false end-games like optimism and pessimism. I think they call us to act like a spiritually healthy person who has just learned they have heart disease: We can use each dire prognosis as a stimulant for reaching more deeply into life and co-creating positive change.

Sometimes, in the evening, now that the evenings darken early, I walk around the neighbourhood and see the uncanny flicker of television light from the insides of the warm quiet houses. Every show is optimism. Every show is pessimism. Every show is stay inside, keep watching, engage, disengage, close the curtains. It’s cold and wet outside.

We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that the outcomes are the most important thing; hitting the bulls-eye on someone else’s target. No wonder so many drop out for fear of falling short. For fear of making a fool of themselves. For fear of being the nail that sticks up and gets hammered the hardest.

This may be changing.

The right to useful unemployment

Published November 12, 2010 Agricultural Land Reserve , anarchism , community development , decline , development , economy , Ivan Illich , Kale Force , mutual aid , PRSC Limited Partnership , Ran Prieur 7 Comments

By David Parkinson

The past? the present? the future?

The title of this week’s post is an homage to Ivan Illich, about whom Ran Prieur writes, “Ivan Illich was so smart, and wrote so clearly, that I can barely stand to read him — it’s like looking at the sun.” That’s an accurate description of the effect of reading Illich: I find myself having to stop after every few paragraphs because the writing is so dense; unlike a lot of intellectually rich material, though, it is written in language as clear and simple as the thoughts allow. It’s the depth of thinking under the surface that makes it a joy to read. And Illich’s amazing prescience: he diagnoses our situation from his vantage point more than thirty years ago and points towards solutions which seem more apt now than they might have done at that time.

The theme which runs through his work is that of the counterproductivity of social and industrial systems: how any system which addresses some aspect of human need eventually acquires its own internal logic and, if not resisted, begins to work against human interests. Illich investigated this trend in education (Deschooling Society), medicine (Medical Nemesis), transportation (Energy and Equity), and in very general terms in Tools for Conviviality and its sequel, The Right to Useful Unemployment (And its Professional Enemies). It’s a superficially simple concept with very profound consequences for the way I see the world.

At the Kale Force meeting this week, Carol Battaglio was present to talk about her evolving plan to create a therapeutic farm on the 31.6-acre lot she bought from PRSC Limited Partnership (known locally as ‘the joint venture’). I am personally thrilled to see this project happening, as I was deeply involved in the 2006–07 campaign to stop the City of Powell River from excluding this and other parcels of land from the Agricultural Land Reserve. The conversation around the table was a freewheeling one, and we made some solid connections among existing projects and concepts that Carol might use to realize her vision. The most tangible outcome is that Carol found someone to help her clear the land, which is overrun with stumps and brambles. (But sometimes those seemingly small steps forward are really crucial ones.)

We had one of those huddles near the door that are the sign of a satisfying conversation: people know they need to get going, but stall on the way out because the ideas are flowing. Someone suggested that this region is at a tipping point because there are now so many little projects brewing, underground, semi-underground, just starting to connect to each other and create an alternative economy, barely visible now but growing fast. Another person suggested that this alternative culture is on the rise because the prevailing culture really only has one big idea, whereas the ‘new guard’ comes equipped with any number of schemes all along the continuum from crackpot to surefire; so many of them that they are sure to overwhelm the monocultural approach just as weeds of all types will overrun a field of all one crop.

I think there is something in this. The prevailing mindset of our local economic leaders is to focus on a few large big-ticket projects, among them the quixotic rescue of the Catalyst paper mill. At the same time, citizens watch the City take on heavy debt to pull off what are essentially gambles that the global economy will continue to grow, sustaining the consumerist lifestyle that will see people retiring wealthy, traveling, and shopping as far as the eye can see. I sense a growing unease at what this is going to do to people’s tax burden, especially when the other expensive projects are added to the tally.

Meanwhile, there is a mass movement, disorganized and provisional but gathering speed, to opt out of this worldview and instead focus on the essentials: food, shelter, transportation, health in the holistic sense, and more. If the economy continues to destroy jobs and wealth as measured in money, people will inevitably shift their allegiance to those things which are the real foundation of wealth. And here our economic leaders are (so far) of very little use to us. If anything, the social systems we have created during the past century or so are actively inimical to people’s efforts to build a vernacular culture: for a good example, look no further than the insane amount of highly-paid make-work it took to overcome the provincial Meat Inspection Regulation, which proposed to deprive people of their ability to buy locally-produced and -slaughtered meat as they have been doing for thousands of years. This is just one example, although a particularly egregious one, of trends which have become almost universal: the creation of classes of phony professionals to intervene in the simple exchange of goods and services between people, making them onerous and needlessly expensive; or the outright criminalization of these exchanges, making them dangerous (and needlessly expensive).

Which brings us back to Illich. His life’s work was to argue for a convivial culture, one in which people’s right to create their own culture, tools, language, and social systems is paramount. I like to think we are perched on the edge, maybe even sliding down the slope towards the time for Illich’s deeply humanistic vision to be realized. And it won’t happen because suddenly we’re all attending seminars in ‘sustainability’, or being told how to grow our own food by self-appointed experts — if it happens (when it happens) it will be because the elaborate and meaningless barriers to imagination and creativity are unsustainable. People will start to act as though they are no longer there, and an exhausted tradition of phony professionalism and bureaucratic pantomime activity will be revealed as laughable.

The depth and breadth of the creativity bubbling under the surface of every town and region is an unstoppable force compared to the decreasing returns of the business-as-usual projects we’re supposed to look to for future economic development. The culture we build here will be made up out of semi-employment, improvised solutions, the invention of work, civil disobedience in the face of outworn and unenforceable regulations, and mutual aid in place of phony professionalized ‘services’. This collection of (maybe) unappealing characteristics won’t come out on top for any reason other than pure necessity: the failure of our experts and leaders to have any ideas worth pursuing. Better to have useful unemployment than all of the useless economic development schemes in the world.

Why don’t we have a local food incubator?

Published November 4, 2010 canning , food , food preservation , food security , local food economy , Skookum Food Provisioners' Cooperative 4 Comments

By David Parkinson

Early dawn of a bright and warm November day

The more I think about building a local food economy, the more I believe that the key to success is creating an economy that sustains growers and producers, processors, and consumers all year round. We focus so much of our energy and attention on the growing aspect of the food system, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But we can see at this time of year that the abundance of the summertime is waning fast. Scour the local farmgates and the Winter Farmers’ Market and you’ll see some carrots, potatoes, late greens, winter squash… and not much more than that.

And for as long as I’ve been working in the local food-security scene I’ve been hearing the same ideas popping up again and again: common root cellars and other storage facilities, and community commercial kitchens for processing and preserving the harvest while fresh. Many people still do a good deal of this essential work, but many no longer do. And more (including myself) never learned how.

This summer, Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative organized a tomato-canning bash in the kitchen of a local church. About a dozen people got together to learn how to can tomatoes and everyone walked away with a few pints of canned tomatoes. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: if we’re seriously contemplating an extremely local food economy, we’re going to need to boost production and we’re really going to need to learn how to store food efficiently, inexpensively, and safely.

Food-growing is becoming highly visible and a recognizable and important part of our embryonic local food scene. And if you can grow food, you can preserve it; in fact, preserving food strikes me as the easy part (although that might just be because I’ve never had to do it for extended periods). I don’t think my talents really lie in the garden, and so I’m increasingly drawn to food preservation as a slightly neglected and uncelebrated aspect of food security.

This coming summer, I want to organize many more community-kitchen get-togethers along the lines of the tomato-canning bask in September. The model is simple enough: we buy a good amount of whatever is in season in a given week, find the best way to preserve it, get a bunch of people together, split the costs (supplies, facility rental, etc.), add something on top for the organizer and something for the community,  and work together to stock our pantries for the winter.

One tantalizing way to organize a project like this is to run it along the lines of Community-Supported Agriculture: people sign up at the beginning of the preserving season, pay some amount in advance to help the organizer(s) buy materials and ingredients, and then each week they receive a supply of something for their pantry. This could be a great way to strengthen demand for local food — by extending the time of the year during which we can continue to eat local food. It’s the way people used to eat, and it seems poised to make a comeback.

Eventually this sort of collective activity can generate the demand for a proper community-owned and -managed processing facility, along the lines of the ones discussed in this article that came to me this week and got me thinking again about food preservation. Somehow we need to centralize at least some of the work that goes on in isolation, in the interests of getting more people involved, lowering costs, and minimizing the barriers to participation such as knowledge of health and safety regulations.

So do we spend our time hunting for grants to help start a project like this? Or start small and build our way up? I don’t know the right answer, but I hope to do some on-the-ground investigating and learning when the growing season returns. We need year-round local food.

New rules

Published October 27, 2010 CJMP FM , community development , community radio , conversation , David Korten , Dmitry Orlov Leave a Comment

By David Parkinson

Fog on the town.

When taking part in community organizing activities, if your envisioned community is to survive the transition to a non-fossil-fuel-based existence, it is important to keep in mind a vital distinction: is this community going to operate under the old rules or under the new rules. The old rules will not work, but the new ones might, depending on what they are.
(Dmitry Orlov, “How (not to) to Organize a Community“)

I’m not sure it makes sense to lead off with this short excerpt from Dmitry Orlov‘s latest black-humour-laden meditation on how to do community organizing more effectively; anyone who goes off and reads the whole piece will see why not. But it struck me as a topsy-turvy enough piece of writing that it got me thinking about how our efforts to sketch out the future we’d like to see are likely to be as wrong as they are right. Recognizing this and living with it should be the first step for anyone who wants to make an impact, no matter how trivial.

Orlov, always a contrary sort, proposes that the most resilient communities in the future are the ones least likely to look viable in the present — in fact, he predicts that the sketchiest and most marginal communities will carry on as though very little has changed, while those who took the most care to prepare will face the most drastic reversals of fortune. Although he has his tongue in his cheek to some extent, I see the larger points he’s making: that we are fools if we think that the future will radically break with current trends, or if we think we can create the future at will based on what we think is needed and what will work. He is also making the point that the raw materials of the resilient future might be in the places we’re least likely to look. And that’s the point that really struck home for me.

The smartest overall approach is to try as many things as possible, making sure that each project is getting the attention and energy it needs in proportion to its likelihood of creating positive change. To remember that even the best intentions can go sideways and that we need to accept the curveballs and reverses that come our way. Taking this humble approach makes those little successes and advances all the more precious.

Last week I promised to follow up by applying David Korten’s five characteristics of successful social change to “a local project which I believe has huge potential to create vast amounts of positive energy in the region while connecting our efforts to others elsewhere.” This project is our community radio station, CJMP FM, which has a new board and has started creating working groups to get the station back on the air broadcasting music and spoken-word programming of local interest. I’m already deeply involved, because I have long been a supporter of community radio. I think it has huge potential for increasing and improving communication and connections in the region.

Korten’s questions sound a little bombastic for a low-power FM radio station in an obscure corner of BC, so I’m going to answer them from a small and local perspective rather than from the perspective of a global movement, which is where Korten is coming from. And his questions are posed as though we have already built the project in question; CJMP is tottering along right now, but with many hopeful signs and many new people getting involved. So I’ll answer these questions in the future tense instead of the present — as though we were a little further along.

Does CJMP FM help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?

There are so many little efforts percolating away in our region, many of which are coalescing around the Transition Town concept.  Communication among these projects and the people involved in them is still fragmentary and sporadic at best. If we’re going to work better together to connect these various efforts and cooperate amongst ourselves, it will be hugely helpful to have a focal point for communicating and sharing information. Radio has the advantage of being very direct and immediate: it does not put up the barrier of written language, so anyone with something to say can get their thoughts out. And the message is heard as it is spoken. All of our attempts to build the pieces of a local economy not based on desperate resource extraction and other worn-out ideas need an ongoing conversation. We’re lucky to have a community radio license, with the explicit mandate to “provide a local programming service that differs in style and substance from that provided by commercial stations and the CBC.” Everything that is happening in our region is appropriate for our airwaves. No bottlenecks and phony barriers. Let the community talk amongst themselves and stand back.

Is CJMP FM connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?

Well, we won’t have millions of leaders anytime soon. How about hundreds? Community radio has an incredible power to bring people together, to expose them to the hidden treasure in their own backyard: the people, places, and things that they never knew about. This is what CJMP FM can be for the region: a place where anyone is welcome to say or play whatever is on their mind; to reach out and find friends, allies, and adversaries; to host the never-ending conversation of who we are and where we’re heading. Commercial media are fine for some things, but the presence of an explicitly non-commercial alternative is a great thing for everyone. It makes some people nervous, and that can’t be bad.

Is CJMP FM creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?

In a word: hell yeah. I can easily imagine the numbers of talented and imaginative people all around here who just need some basic training in order to seize their rightful chunk of the airwaves and get going. When the community owns a slice of FM bandwidth there is simply no reason not to put the welcome mat out and get as much input and support as possible. As far as I can see, this region has never had genuinely open media, meaning that those who care get to participate and those who participate get to make the decisions. This will be a wonderful experiment in seeing how much we can unleash the potential of all corners of the region and let the conversation roll on by itself.

Everyone has something worth saying and hearing. Commercially-driven media simply cannot let all these voices through and continue to satisfy the advertisers who pay the bills. Hence the need for the alternative. It’s just that simple, and we can celebrate that the Canadian government continues to support this way of thinking.

Is CJMP FM providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?

Let us sincerely hope so. Funding is always a challenge for community radio, even when the economy is doing well. Now that we appear to be heading into a prolonged downturn, we need new models for continuing to make change happen when the grants and funders are hurting and as the government withdraws money from social spending. This challenge faces many local organizations and projects many of which have been out there for much longer than this baby radio station. So how do we do it? This is all up in the air right now, but it seems to me inconceivable that CJMP will survive without a large number of enthusiastic listener-members who are willing to put their money down to support something that gives them what they cannot get anywhere else: immediate, real, representative news and opinions about what’s happening around us. We cannot compete with commercial media, especially radio stations, which sell listeners to advertisers and need to create a homogenized sound that will attract the greatest number with the least passion. We are in the position to transmit the real sound of the community, in real time. That has to be worth something to people.

Is CJMP FM mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?

We’ll see how much CJMP FM worries about the structures and institutions that create the imbalances and pathologies that are dragging our social systems down. It will be enough to create a marketplace of ideas and to get people connecting around the authentic life of the region. We need to build all the alternatives that we need, in ways that meet our local needs; and in order to do that, we just need to communicate freely and openly without the outright censorship or self-censorship that comes from having heavy-handed advertisers or funders hanging over us all the time. Some people believe that people want more honesty and genuine connection; others fear it. For myself, any future that I care to live in is full of different voices, outlandish opinions, wild sounds, and the unending chatter of a community finding itself and declaring its own needs and desires. No authority can impose these things on us. And somehow out of all this cacophony we will build something that people can’t do without — because it’s irreplaceable.

Can we make a difference?

Published October 19, 2010 activism , climate change , community , David Korten , engagement , Kevin Carson , solutions Leave a Comment

By David Parkinson

Fennel seeds maturing on the plant, bathed in the cool light of an October afternoon

We’ll already be well on the road to victory when we realize we can build the kind of society we want right here and now without permission, instead of waiting for some bureaucratic committee to spend a hundred thousand man-hours getting everybody on the same page.
(Kevin Carson, “Civic Engagement is for Suckers“, Center for a Stateless Society)

If this blog has a theme, it’s probably my musings on the subject of how to get from here to there, wherever there is. Change is afoot; things are shifting; and meanwhile the systems within which we organize ourselves socially to get things done are becoming ever less appropriate for the challenges ahead. The whole of society feels paralyzed, stuck in inactivity or futile pretend activity when the real action is elsewhere in places we’ve stopped looking in or have forgotten exist.

What are we supposed to do if we look straight into the blinding void of the collapse of the current economic arrangements which, for better or worse, produce everything we need and provide the jobs that allow us to pay for those things? If we acknowledge that we’re coming to the end of cheap fossil fuels, what are we supposed to be doing to prepare, especially when almost every aspect of our lives has evolved symbiotically with the era of cheap fossil fuels? Worst of all, if the climate is indeed changing too quickly for our slow-moving adaptations to keep up, where will that leave us?

It’s no wonder that so many people feel paralyzed, unable to fix their minds on these questions. The mass media, with their perfect instinct for the Zeitgeist, contrive at all costs to keep us diverted. Our so-called leaders are no less implicated in this mass hypnosis; since their positions depend on keeping the myths alive and kicking, they’re not leading the way towards any new arrangements. And most people are just trying to make it through the day, unable to make much sense of things, maybe feeling that all is not right but seeing no clear alternatives.

Even those who feel impelled to act in some way to prepare for a worsening economy and more austere living conditions can get caught up in counterproductive narratives that end up by blunting the possibility of creating real meaningful change. One of the most paralyzing of these stories we tell ourselves is that we need to effect massive change at higher levels. All other things being equal, of course, if you can make widespread change that will affect large numbers of people or a big system, that’s a better use of your time than messing around on a small scale.

But all other things never are equal. The larger the system you try to intervene in, the greater the chances that it will overwhelm you, wear you down, or subtly cause you to alter your goals. The myth of ‘changing the system from within’ is a myth for the simple reason that more often the system will change you from within. This process is so slow and gentle that you might not know it’s happening — this is how social systems maintain their integrity through generations: by absorbing and digesting all reformist and radical tendencies, rendering them harmless by pressuring dissenters into adapting themselves to the system (often while still believing themselves to be in opposition to it).

To my thinking, the most powerful form of change-making is the type which is idiosyncratic to a local community but connected to broader trends. This type of action draws its strength from its rootedness in those struggles or efforts in the local scene which resonate with one’s family, friends, and neighbours; and from its relevance to and engagement with the global.

The flip-side of getting neutralized by taking on a huge system applies here, and it is the possibility of frittering away one’s time on tiny high-maintenance projects which affect only a handful of people or make change in a very small corner of the world. This fear of engaging in futile actions or of looking like an ineffectual fool undoubtedly gets in the way of huge amounts of amazing projects and stifles more human creativity than we can ever know about.

David Korten is a critic of the current economic system who writes and speaks about alternatives to globalization and large-scale economies. He was a recent speaker on Radio Ecoshock, a weekly radio program from Vancouver Co-op Radio. After listening to his speech on Radio Ecoshock, I found an older article by him, titled “The Big Picture: 5 Ways to Know if You’re Making a Difference”. Korten says that “successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions.” He rejects the idea that real change has to come from top-down managed social programs, and argues in favour of a diversity of approaches, an exuberance of tactics and methods, some of which might fail while others succeed.

He claims that the following are five characteristics of successful social change, any one of which indicates an approach which has a chance of effecting broad change while working at the grassroots, at least initially:

  1. Does [your work] help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?
  2. Is it connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?
  3. Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?
  4. Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?
  5. Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?

Next time around I’ll unpack this and apply it to a local project which I believe has huge potential to create vast amounts of positive energy in the region while connecting our efforts to others elsewhere.

Another kick at the can

Published October 12, 2010 activism , community radio , media , Powell River Community Radio Society , relocalization Leave a Comment

By David Parkinson

Late-bearing golden raspberry enjoying the sunshine before the recent cold wet weather.

The problem with monocultures is that you eventually forget that alternatives exist. They begin by taking something well-adapted and useful, proceed to apply it to all situations as the only solution, and end by erasing the possibility of competition. Finally the monoculture becomes so all-encompassing that no small pocket of resistance can easily take hold — until the forces holding the monoculture in place shift or weaken. Sometimes counterforces make it possible to hold open a small space for alternatives to exist, often at the very edge of survival.

All of this is on my mind this week as our community radio station CJMP FM undergoes another period of crisis and once again teeters on the brink of dissolution. Last time, back in the spring of 2009, the non-profit which had been hosting and supporting the radio station decided to get out of the community radio game. After much back and forth, a new not-for-profit society formed, applied for another radio license, and spent over a year waiting for the CRTC to approve their license application.

On October 1, 2010 this society (the Powell River Community Radio Society or PRCRS) held their first Annual General Meeting, at which those of us who attended learned that most of the original board intend to step down and not seek re-election. Since the society had not signed up any members except for the board, if the board went so would go the society. And with it would go our community radio license, which is a precious asset that would be hard to replace. Since there were members of the community who did not want to lose our chance at having a viable community radio station, the Annual General Meeting was adjourned to a day and time two weeks later.

As I write this, several people in the community are considering whether they want to sign up as members and stand for election to the board. This will entail a considerable commitment of time and energy, since many of the problems that a community radio station faces are difficult and ongoing: the need for funding and volunteers, the purchase and maintenance of equipment, rent for the studio space and offices, utilities, and so on.

In a sense, though, the highest hurdle that community radio faces relates to the monoculture problem: commercial radio and commercial media in general are so widespread and popular that it is difficult, even impossible, for most people to imagine what the alternative would sound like. There is an almost irresistible pressure to make the alternative like a down-home and underfunded approximation of the commercial variety. CJMP FM has always taken this approach, and in my opinion it’s a mistake to try to make community radio compete head-to-head against commercial radio. Until the community is genuinely involved, though, we can’t easily know what community radio should sound like — in this community.

In its 2000 Community Radio Policy document, the CRTC defines community radio as follows:

The Commission’s primary objective for the community radio sector is that it provide a local programming service that differs in style and substance from that provided by commercial stations and the CBC. The programming should be relevant to the communities served, including official language minorities. The Commission considers that community stations should add diversity to the broadcasting system by increasing program choice in both music and spoken word. They should contribute to diversity at three levels:

  • Community stations should offer programming that is different from and complements the programming of other stations in their market. Their not-for-profit nature and community access policies should assist them in contributing to the achievement of this objective.
  • Community stations should be different from other elements of the broadcasting system, including commercial stations and stations operated by the CBC.
  • The programming broadcast by individual community stations should be varied and provide a wide diversity of music and spoken word.

What would happen if we kept the community radio license and involved the community as much as possible? What would that sound like?

For one thing, it would sound diverse; as diverse as the community. In the standard model of community radio, the type of programming often changes, sometimes drastically, from one hour to the next, encompassing music, spoken word programming, news, public affairs, and so on. With proper advertising, the reach of such a station is huge, since it can appeal to almost everyone within broadcast range, if only for a few hours per week. People who tune in regularly to hear a specific show are very passionate about that show and about the station that produces that show. Listeners like these will be very happy to find an alternative, to find a station that is playing something that they love, as opposed to the same old middle-of-the-road rock music that is available everywhere else up and down the radio dial.

For another thing, it would sound local. The one thing that no commercial radio station can produce, nor can our beloved CBC, is the sound of the community, its concerns, the things that people are talking about, what’s really going on out there. There is simply no public venue for an ongoing conversation about us. We have one weekly newspaper, a couple of monthly magazines, a cable TV station, numerous blogs, and other bits and pieces of local media; but we do not have any media which readily supports a high level of public participation in real time and at relatively low cost. The technology is simple. The rest is logistics.

In the region of the 50-Mile Eat-Local Challenge, it seems like a no-brainer to have 50-Mile Radio.

It’s baffling to me that community radio seems to be such a hard sell here. In many other places throughout Canada, the community radio station is the place to hear what’s going on in the region, to find out what your friends and neighbours are thinking and doing, and to connect with the place you live in with all its idiosyncrasies and special character. I find it hard to believe that people really want to hear the same old music, the same old stories, the same voices (all sounding so professional and manicured) that you can hear in any place. It’s another aspect of the monocultural approach to creating the world that drops the same damn chain stores and crappy food in every town: many people find that comforting, but many do not. For those who do not, we need to keep the alternatives alive and thriving. Constant resistance to homogeneity and repetition is necessary.

The Canadian government in its finite wisdom has made resistance possible by creating and maintaining the category of community radio licenses which exist to let a community hear its own voice. As long as we have this tool for resisting monocultural media, we have the responsibility to use it. As we begin to enter the era of relocalization during which decisions made at the regional and neighbourhood level will take on increasing importance, we need as many media channels as we can possibly create and support.

If you are interested in helping keep our community radio license, please attend the continuation of the Annual General Meeting of the Powell River Radio Community Society on Friday October 15, 2010, 4:00 PM at the Life Cycle Common Room, 4949 Ontario Ave. in Powell River (at the dead end north of Alberni St.). I will attend, and I hope to bring back good news about the future of local media in this region.

Lower your sights, yeah, but raise your aim

Published October 5, 2010 collapse , community , consumerism , decline , food , food security , local food economy , Murray Dobbin , neoliberalism , relocalization , Situationist International , Stoneleigh , The Automatic Earth , trust 1 Comment

By David Parkinson

A late rose, blossoming despite the cold weather.

Last night I attended Murray Dobbin‘s lecture at Vancouver Island University here in Powell River. The title of Murray’s talk was “Globalization, Local Food, and Powell River”, and most of it was about globalization: where it came from, what its intended effects were, and what it has accomplished (if that’s the right term) since the mid-70s when the whole idea began to take shape among western elites.

Since Murray has spent a good part of his career as a journalist and activist examining globalization, there was a lot of information packed into his presentation, and I won’t try to do it justice here. But one thing he said struck me very strongly: referring to the neoliberal project of stripping away social programs and redirecting government revenues away from the general population and towards corporations and their wealthy owner class, Murray pointed to polling research that shows how resilient Canadians’ values have remained throughout this retrograde thirty-five-year project. Our support for social democratic programs like unemployment insurance, Medicare, and government-guaranteed old-age pensions has remained high during the years in which these programs have been under attack by a series of governments both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’; at the same time, what has changed is our sense of whether or not the government can achieve these things.

The takeaway is that it is far easier to diminish or destroy people’s sense of the possible than their sense of the desirable. We cling fiercely to our vision of the world we want to live in, not surrendering our hopes even when everything everywhere tells us that it is unreasonable and impossible.

No wonder, then, that people put into such situations have typically fled to religion, since it offers a way of reconciling our vision of the world as it could be with the shortcomings of the world as it is — or as it is made to be by malevolent social forces. With the disenchanting of the world and increasing social isolation, the refuge of choice for the western world has been the consumerist lifestyle, which only ends up strengthening the forces deforming the world and making it intolerable: a classic positive feedback loop which is now tighter than ever.

But underneath it all — even among a population that seems disaffected, alienated, tuned-out — the desire for community, solidarity, and shared purpose persists, submerged but not eradicated. The French Situationists had an evocative phrase to express this powerful urge for liberty and beauty in everyday life: Sous les pavés la plage (“Beneath the paving stones, the beach”). We have been given a paved world — worse, we have been made complicit in paving the world — but nothing can destroy our sense of a world lurking just below the harsh man-made surface. For the moment, we don’t know how to dig for it, but we know it’s there, waiting…

How can we narrow the gap between our aspirations and what we are told is possible? Many of us feel trapped in a world of such complexity that we can never see a way to make our mark, to connect and create something with others, and to change the things that threaten the integrity of our lives as individuals and as members of a community. Everything is all so huge, interconnected, and obscured with jargon and specialized knowledge that we’re lucky if we can carve out any small section and make sense of it. Another good reason for retreating from engagement into an unsatisfying but controllable mini-world of superficial pleasures.

Those of us lucky to be living in a country like Canada have been raised on the belief, drummed into us from an early age, that we all have what it takes to make a mark on the world. Our job was to find our special gift, apply it, work hard, and persist; then with some luck our efforts would be rewarded. It feels now as though this sense of future possibility is draining away, and quickly: we worry that the generation of young people now coming up will fall short of their parents in health, wealth, longevity, satisfaction, and security. Unless we pull off some kind of societal reboot, we are at or past the cusp of the curve of social progress and starting the downward slide. Imagine how it must feel to be a young person who realizes this: our secular culture has rarely had to contend with the idea of the end of progress, but decline may become the backdrop of all our planning and action from this point forward — unless we manage to tackle the multiple serious challenges ahead of us. The steps our governments and large social institutions are taking in this direction so far are way too little, way too late, and it’s hard not to feel that we’re on our own for now.

Stoneleigh, one of the commentators at the rambling collage of symptoms known as The Automatic Earth, has this to say in a recent post about the decline of trust in our culture:

Over time institutions become sclerotic, unresponsive, self-serving and hostage to vested interests, at which point they cannot be reformed, as the reform would have to come from those entrenched individuals who have benefited most from the status quo. Institutions become demonstrably less effective, while consuming more and more of society’s resources. Corruption, abuses of power, lack of accountability and the loss of the rule of law become increasingly evident, exactly as we have seen with unauthorized wire-tapping, extra-ordinary rendition and many other actions undermining the open society. Once this happens, trust is living on borrowed time. That is very clearly the case in many developed societies today.

I can’t put it better than that. A more conservative mindset will look at the same set of facts that Stoneleigh is looking at and see some bugs in the code, minor hiccups, a periodic readjustment, but nothing on the scale of a social realignment. Nothing we can’t get out of by doing more of the same, only slightly different. Only time will show which outlook is the wiser: the one which says that many of our systems are reaching the breaking point; or the one which says to hang on, hunker down, and weather the storm, because we’ll soon be back to normal.

One thing is certain, as far as I’m concerned: the combination of a generalized decline in trust with a repressed but uneradicated desire for genuine social connection and a meaningful and decent culture is going to produce some real turbulence. (And this might be as much productive and positive as it will be negative.)

Since the beginning of the neoliberal era, we have been under orders to sit tight and wait for the dividends trickling down from the project of cutting social spending and rewarding the class of owners. These dividends never did show up for the majority; and as time goes on, more and more people see that they were swindled (if they don’t always see by whom). Worse, they fear that the next generations coming up are going to have it worse than they will. Trust is dying, and we don’t know what will take its place.

Stoneleigh continues:

Working within the trust horizon is important, as it means individual small-scale initiatives can benefit from the same kind of social support at a local level that larger-scale ones once did at a societal level, when trust was more broadly inclusive. Local currencies work for exactly this reason. While the task will still be difficult, it has a chance of being achievable, especially where the necessary relationships of trust have been established before hard times set in. It is very much more difficult to build such relationships after the fact, but relationships built beforehand may actually strengthen when put to the test.

Trying to maintain a positive and constructive focus at the local level, where trust has a chance to survive, and perhaps even thrive in hard times, and to avoid being drawn into a blame-game, will be an uphill battle. It is nevertheless something we need to do as a society, if we are to have a chance to preserve as much as possible of who we are through what is coming.

I think that Stoneleigh is dead-on here. We need to set our sights on simpler things, to draw in the radius of our world and build trust within arm’s reach as it evaporates at higher levels. People who lose faith in the social contract (because our supposed leaders have torn it up), but whose belief in a decent society remains undiminished, will be casting about for reasons to re-engage and find meaning and connection. We see the early shoots of this new meaning in the many small amateur efforts around us, many of which revolve around our food sources.

The outline of the next few years is vague. There is a dim sense that things are breaking down; maybe not completely, but to an extent that makes it hard to know how to plan, what to expect. Uncertainty can lead to fear, but it can also be liberating. When the social systems we thought were unavoidable turn out to be flimsy and short-lived after all, we are freed to experiment with new ways of configuring our own lives and of organizing our social relations. Someday we may look back on the present moment and trace the lineages of the new structures that emerged — small, hesitant, and hidden at first — from the old ones deliberately and maliciously pulled apart by those we thought were looking out for us.

The Situationists had another slogan which is relevant here: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible! (“Be realistic, demand the impossible!”). This is good advice as we begin to learn that the so-called impossible might be possible after all — possible and desirable to us even though undesirable to those who no longer deserve our trust.

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A HOUSEKEEPING NOTE

I’ve decided to change my regular weekly posting day to Tuesday. Mondays belong to James Howard Kunstler; and Mondays are often holidays when it’s harder to get a post together. As always, I welcome a co-conspirator here, so if you relish the opportunity to blog about matters of interest to our little corner of the world, please get in touch with me.

Ymir? Why not!

Published September 28, 2010 BC Food Systems Network , food security , food sovereignty , Ymir 8 Comments

By David Parkinson

Beautiful downtown Ymir, BC, on a misty morning

I’m back in Powell River, publishing a day late after a week traveling to the Kootenays for the annual Gathering of the BC Food Systems Network. This is now the third time I’ve attended this event, this year thanks to the generosity of the good people at the now-defunct BC Healthy Living Alliance, which has wrapped up after a couple years of seeding all kinds of food-security projects around BC, including the ‘Garden to Table’ workshop series and the Sliammon Community Garden here in our region.

I followed a wandering route to Ymir (rhymes with ‘rhymer’), via Vancouver and then Kamloops where I visited my ninety-year-old aunt, who is amazingly still living alone in the house she has lived in since 1957. We agreed that we both hope that I got some of that good genetic background, although without the glaucoma and macular degeneration.

I caught a ride with a couple of colleagues from 100 Mile House and we spent the day driving from Kamloops to Ymir, via Kelowna, Grand Forks, Castelgar, and Nelson. Since I don’t have a car and rarely get around to see the province, this was all new to me: the amazing range of climates and topographies between our rainy coastal forest and the misty-sided mountains and river valleys of the Kootenays. What a huge and beautiful province this is.

Eventually we rolled into tiny Ymir at about 9:00 PM and settled into the absolutely amazing Hotel Ymir, decorated to the hilt with art and sculptures from all around the world. An uncanny and bizarre little place watched over by a taciturn German and a voluble Québecois. Already other participants were gathering in the bar, so we caught up with old friends and made new ones over locally-brewed beer.

The next day we got going with a presentation on the theme of the Gathering, which was water this year. Kindy Gosal from the Columbia Basin Trust walked us through some of the basics about water, shortages, climate change, and patterns of use. And then Marilyn James, spokesperson for the Sinixt people, followed up with a blistering presentation on the terrible history of the Sinixt people, declared extinct by the Canadian government in 1956 and denied rights to their traditional lands and waters to this day.

I can’t begin to do justice to Marilyn James’ very powerful talk. But she said something that was very resonant: when we have exhausted all avenues for change through reform and dialogue, when we have knocked on all the doors and had no proper reply, then what we must do is go home, find the source of our water, and protect it.

This resonates with me because it cuts through a lot of the crap we hear and tell ourselves; namely, the ridiculous notion that we can always take on the powerful systems causing destruction and damage and win. This is not to swing to the other pole and give in to despair, but I feel that a huge reason for alienation and isolation is that people have been fed this story about taking on the big guys and winning; and if you don’t win then you’re nowhere. No wonder it’s so hard to get more people involved with the big and terrifying campaigns to right the wrongs of the world: the stakes are so high, and there is nothing out there but a remote and almost unimaginable victory — or a frankly more believable and foreseeable defeat.

How are we supposed to find more allies for all of the struggles in all of the places over all of the things which sustain life and which are under threat from so many directions? What do we promise people when they take on the defense of some part of their world which they are not willing to surrender to an oil pipeline; or a dam; or a powerline; or a new regulation? What will it mean to win in these struggles? Or to lose? And if we lose, what then?

I expect that all committed people ask themselves these questions, whether explicitly or not. Everyone who defends something outside themselves — especially when doing so pits them against the ruling mindset of constant and total war on our natural world (only we call it ‘resource extraction’ or ‘economic development’) — must face the possibility of defeat. In fact, the ability to live with defeat and continue fighting is a quality that we all admire, judging from how often it crops up in the stories we tell ourselves and have done for thousands of years. In these fictional accounts, the hero usually triumphs over long odds; as Oscar Wilde would say, “That is what Fiction means.” Life operates by a different playbook, however.

The reason why I found Marilyn James’ injunction to defend our sources of water so refreshing is that it boiled it all down to something so simple that anyone could understand it. Our struggles are usually so complex and depend so much on specialized knowledge that it’s unfair to expect more than a small percentage of people to comprehend them. And who can care about what they do not understand? The power of the food-security movement and the related and more politically engaged movement for food sovereignty is that they are, at bottom, nothing more than the actions of people beginning to find the sources of their food and defend them. Water is so fundamental to all life, so infinitely precious and irreplaceable, that there is a natural connection between the BC Food Systems Network and all of the local, regional, provincial, national, and international struggles to preserve our waterways from relentless privatization and despoliation by forces who do not care about our access to the basis of all life. After all, if our streams, rivers, and lakes are ruined, they can always move on. As the Canadian government did with the Sinixt people, they can declare us extinct so as not to have to recognize our claims, our existence, or our humanity.

I know that speaking in this vein makes some people uncomfortable. (To which I could reply: “Good thing you weren’t there for Marilyn James’ talk, ’cause that would really have sent you over the edge!”) We all have times when we start to feel that the darkness is getting to be too much and we need to back away. And the edge of the comfort zone is always shifting for us; sometimes we’re too frail and exposed to take much more of what William S. Burroughs called the naked lunch: “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” But the inability to take in the whole picture or the inability to talk about it with one’s friends and allies is one of the greatest roadblocks to progress ahead of us. We’re all predisposed to remain stuck in infantile stories about creating a local revolution through opting out, going off-grid, having the grooviest parties, clicking on the right set of internet petitions, or what have you. When what we should do is go home, find the source of our water, and protect it.

And this brings me around to why I love the annual Gathering of the BC Food Systems Network: it brings together some of the hardest-working and most inspiring people I’ve ever met, who are engaged in tough work, often unrecognized (and always underpaid), able to contemplate the possibility of failure but unable to stop pushing forward even then. I am honoured to get to meet and know some of these heroic and hilarious people who can bring lightness and positive change out of what can be a very dark and difficult struggle. The Gathering culminated on Saturday evening with a beautiful feast of food from around the province followed by a dance. There were locals wandering in and out and dogs and kids running around on the dance floor, which was painted in the form of a traditional labyrinth. A wonderful symbol of traveling to the centre, following the lines at times and jumping over them at others; a precious noisy chaos and celebration of food and friendship and shared struggles.

Next year I intend to find a way to get more people from around here to the Gathering. There is talk that it will be held in July in or near 100 Mile House, July being a time of year when it’s easier to get farmers off the fields for a weekend. We need more locals who are connecting to the other folks around the province and getting inspired by the stories and projects that people bring with them to the Gathering. It really is one of the most wonderful feasts and festivals I can imagine. I hope some of you reading this will make the journey next year.

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A HOUSEKEEPING NOTE

I’d like to sincerely thank my collaborator Tom Read for his service above and beyond the call of duty to this blog. As I have told Tom, I don’t know if I would have had the discipline to stick to a weekly publishing schedule without his good example. Without him blogging weekly, I hope that I will continue to keep to a regular schedule. If anyone out there relishes the opportunity to co-blog about matters of interest to our little corner of the world, please get in touch with me.

Bye, for now

Published September 24, 2010 agriculture , Texada 3 Comments

By Tom Read

We're off on a new land-based adventure called Slow Farm, which also happens to be our home. So we'll see you sometime in the near future. Bye, for now!

I started this journal six years ago to provide readers a sense of our lives on Texada Island. Aside from occasional opinionated forays into local and global politics, I feel that I’ve mostly accomplished that purpose. Thus, regular readers may have noticed an inward-facing trend in recent journal topics, with more entries focused on our lives at Slow Farm and less coverage of the wider Texada community.

I may not be writing about the community quite as much as before, but the realities of our community have a direct impact on our lives. One reality, for example, is that the real estate market on Texada has drastically contracted since the fall of 2006. Linda and I have watched our joint livelihood as realtors gradually fade away, so we’ve decided to embark on a new approach to economic survival that fits with our way of life on the island.

As you might surmise from the many Journal entries on gardening and livestock raising during the past few years, we have a strong interest in micro-farming. So we’re giving it a try. I’ll take the lead “in the field” while Linda looks after administration and marketing. We’re also looking forward to working with a lively group of younger partners who share our passion for local, sustainable agriculture.

Given our new direction, there doesn’t seem much need to continue writing Tom’s Texada Journal. But we are interested in documenting our experiences in growing Slow Farm. Linda will take the lead in that effort, which we’ll launch online in the next few months. I’m not sure yet what this new entity will be called, but it will probably have the words “Slow Farm” in the title.

Before saying goodbye to TTJ, I’d like to thank those readers who took the time to provide feedback from time to time. I’m also grateful to David Parkinson for giving me the opportunity to cross-post at Slow Coast. It’s been a great pleasure, and your comments and support have been much appreciated. Thanks, and ‘bye for now!

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