Dove's Eye View

Farming Urban Asphalt

Create business profits for poor people, feed the city, and reduce carbon emissions, too: City Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market - New York Times.

more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

...One key to financial success is having customers with the wherewithal to buy your goods. In New York, Bob Lewis, the head of the city office for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, helped make this happen by getting 21 farmers at 16 sites approved to accept checks from the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, a supplement to the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and senior nutrition programs.

...

But land and demand are not all that successful farmers need. They have to know how to run a business or a farm.

So Growing Power, the Milwaukee group, offers several training sessions each year, and Just Food’s City Farms project holds an annual series of workshops on running farm stands.

For more formal training there is the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1967, the center runs a six-month course for 39 students each year on its two farms.

Patricia Allen, the center’s executive director, said roughly three-fourths of her students today were interested in urban growing.

“We’re not looking at a back-to-the-land movement in any sense,” she said.

The article reports that the Wilkses of Brooklyn sold $3,000 worth of produce last year, and a high school group in Brooklyn sold $25,000, while a co-op in Philadelphia sold more than $60,000 worth of home-grown food. Look at the piece for more info and great pictures of a two acre farm in abandoned Detroit's "urban prairie."

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I remember when New York City began mandatory recycling of paper and cans. Nobody thought New Yorkers would ever cooperate, but within a few months everybody was bagging or tying up newspapers and setting them at the curb. Those of us who used to set out redeemable cans for the homeless to collect now put them in recycling bins. It seemed miraculous that citizens could change their behavior so quickly.

San Francisco diverts 70% of its trash from the landfill, but wants to do even better: A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More - New York Times.

Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. “The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper,” Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box stores.

It's sad that a once-great industrial power now exports mostly scrap and raw materials. To save the planet we all need to reduce what we consume so that we reduce what we trash (and reduce our carbon emissions). But I admire Gavin Newsom for fighting this good fight.

Here in Oakland we recycle paper, glass, plastic and kitchen scraps. The county subsidizes expensive back-yard compost bins for those of us who want to make our own mulch; we also have green bins for yard wastes, kitchen scraps and paper contaminated with food (i.e. pizza boxes and cardboard egg cartons).

In my father's hometown, Sidon, Lebanon, the municipal garbage dump keeps falling into the Mediterranean; it's a long-running, slow-motion environmental crisis. Naples has a similar, horrific garbage problem, and the press is full of reports of massive electronic waste dumps in Africa and South Asia. Being rich is a sickness that causes ill-health to the sea, the soil, the climate, and ultimately to ourselves. Fish, insects and birds are part of an interconnected web of life that supports our own life; we cannot survive long in a monoculture. We need all manner of bugs and life forms we don't even know. Garbage pollutes the world that is supposed to sustain us.

Mundane and stinky, garbage is still important. We can't just "throw it away" and forget about it. We have to confront our garbage if we want to survive as a species.

Scraperbikes

Local kids - two miles from my house - turn old bikes into colorful showpieces; they do tricks and parade around in formation. The song lyric says "don't need no car"; they make bicycles into a pop culture phenomenon.

I need a new category called "My Oakland": Local scraperbikes ride into global consciousness. From the Oakland Tribune.

The video shows the intersection of High Street and Foothill - about two miles southwest of my house. Last year I was driving on 35th Avenue at Foothill when I saw a Latino youth on a three wheeled bike just like the ones in this video - decorated with metal foil and colorful paint. I rolled down my window as I waited at the stop light and spoke to him. "Did you build that yourself?" I shouted. "It's amazing. You could sell it for a lot of money! Great job!" The young man looked a little bewildered - middle-aged white ladies driving through East Oakland normally don't call out pleasantries from their cars to passing youth.

I had no idea this was a cultural movement in the making in my front yard. I don't "hang out" in that area much, usually just drive through on my way somewhere else, or pop in and out to visit a library branch or a friend, so I have only spotted the one scraper bike in real life.

This phenomenon is good for the planet (bikes, not cars; recycled materials), it's locally-grown, it's fun, it builds community and it features pop music. The Dove has always liked hip-hop since the late 70s in NYC, and I appreciate the high spirits and creativity of these young men - not only do they fix up bikes and careen around on them, they made a video and started a contest.

Update: Oakland Parks and Recreation Dept. has been offering Earn Your Bike since 1994 - where kids learn to fix up old bicycles, and upon completing the course earn their own bicycle to refurbish. Also several local recreation centers offer film and video courses. These scraper bike entrepreneurs could have gotten their skills at the local community center.

Go, Oakland!

Not Guzzling Quite So Much Gas

This is a sign of hope: Not Guzzling Quite So Much Gas.

some commuters are finding public transport to their liking. Aly Cohen, a 27-year-old financial analyst at Costco Wholesale (COST), first tried taking the bus to work in January. Now, with her employer picking up most of the $63 tab for a monthly bus pass, she has stopped driving to work altogether and cut her gas consumption in half. "It's nice," she says. "I can take a nap or read." Such a shift in commuting habits, if copied on a large scale, may alter U.S. energy consumption in significant and surprising ways.

The article says public transit use is now at a 50-year high. Maybe we really will adapt and change our car-driving ways...

Forgiveness: Cluster Bombs and Cancer

Chemotherapy is not my only approach to healing from metastatic breast cancer. My doctor, a top research oncologist (her first name is Hope - always stick with an oncologist named Hope), says her drugs cannot cure what I have got, only treat it; yet I know that in the ultimate reality, nothing is incurable and all things are possible. Even Dr. Hope says that sometimes tumors just disappear and she doesn't know why. So I use many alternative approaches as a complement to the Western medicines I receive.

Practicing forgiveness is one technique that gives me physical and emotional comfort. Just last week I was meditating on forgiving Charles Krauthammer. Go look him up if you want to know why he needs forgiveness. I imagined him as a crippled man who believes that he is hated, and suffers from physical and emotional pain. I focused on his face in my mind, and sent love and compassion to him as if I were thinking with love of my own brother or cousin; in a moment my liver relaxed. The congestion and hardness in my abdomen eased. I have no idea if this meditation will help Charles Krauthammer, but it sure helped me.

I also work with a professor of holistic medicine who is expert in biofeedback, physiology, and visualization techniques. Cancer patients who visualize their own healing have better outcomes - there is good data to show this, and major cancer hospitals in the USA and Europe now offer visualizing and guided meditation classes to their patients. The classic example is: imagine your white blood cells are sharks devouring the helpless, weakened cancer cells. That sort of thing.

Last week a kind of poem or rant came to me as I was meditating:

Cluster bombs
innumerable tiny lesions upon the flesh of my Mother
waiting to explode, maim, destroy
inextricably seeded into the structure of the earth.
Hail falls and cluster bombs explode.
The soil is sprinkled with death.

The earth is my Mother
her body is mine
her streams my bloodstream.
My liver is seeded with innumerable tiny microlesions
cluster bombs of cancer
too many to clear
waiting to explode.

The million cluster bombs Israel dropped upon the soil of South Lebanon in August 2006 continue to detonate, killing Lebanese shepherds, farmers and children. I find it difficult to forgive this. I can let go of the horrors of July-August 2006. The destruction of the war is done, and Lebanese are rebuilding. But the continuing destruction of cluster bombs, the toxicity of so many dropped upon the earth, and the ecological disaster to the land of Lebanon, seem like an unforgivable wound.

The connection between the cluster bomb infestation of Lebanese land and the diffuse metastasis in my liver felt right to me - symbolically right; emotionally right. Exactly one year after my father's death from cancer in September 2006, I was diagnosed with this diffuse metastasis, and I have long believed that the personal loss and the larger anguish and rage of the '06 war contributed to the illness.

If I imagine that my liver is seeded with cluster bombs, that perhaps this honeycomb of lesions might have an emotional connection to my fear, despair and rage at the bombs riddling the land of Lebanon, then what do I do now? I talked with the visualization doctor about it.

You could imagine the UN peacekeeping forces clearing the sites, he said. They have ways of locating the bombs and raking them up.

I need to forgive, I said. I can do that visualization, but I really need to forgive the people who did it, and that is so very hard.

You can think about the good side of these persons, he said. Very few people in the world are totally nasty characters. There are some. But most people have some good in them, somewhere. The evil they commit is situational, part of a larger system that is evil. Think about the good in those people.

Well okay. I knew I could probably do that. I have met Israelis and count a few as friends. I got up from the consultation chair, went out the door where my dear cousin N was waiting for me, and went home.

When we pulled into our driveway and parked, a young man with an Israeli accent called to me. "Could you move the car, because we can't get into the other one." My husband had summoned an emergency locksmith while I was away to replace the ignition on our second car; he had chosen a company at random out of the phone book. I moved the car, got out, and saw this young, handsome guy with dark eyes, pale long face and long nose, brown hair pulled into a ponytail, carrying an electric drill. Next to him was a friend, this one with a smaller face and head and short nose, dark olive skin, cute. The friend looked like an Arab, but the guy with the drill looked like a central casting Jesus, an Orthodox icon of the sixth century, a hippie Jewish guy who might be an Oberlin College student.

"Listen to that lovely accent," I said to cousin N, loud enough so they could hear. "I think we have some cousins visiting us."

"Cousins, are you Jewish?" Long haired locksmith asked. I felt utterly light and happy.

"We are cousins and neighbors but we are not Jewish," I answered, merrily. He ducked into our car and started messing with the ignition. We talked about the ignition, and I teased his friend for wearing body armor. It was this black plastic vest with a long spine like vertebrae down the back, worn over his shirt and under his jacket; the frontispiece actually said "Body Armor."

"Oakland isn't THAT dangerous," I told him. The friend got very earnest and explained he wore it to ride his motorcycle, and that it was only bulletproof in the back.

"She's making a joke," locksmith said to his buddy, who looked at me with concern. These young men and their gear, I thought. Both guys wore earpiece cel phones.

I quit kibbitzing and went inside, but I felt such affection for these two fellows fixing my car. They were shebab, young energetic men running around Oakland practicing their trade. Usually we only refer to Arab young men as shebab, but these Israeli guys were clearly shebab. I told my husband and cousin N that I am just predisposed to like Middle Eastern shebab. They make me happy. I don't know why. I have no idea if they understood that despite my teasing I actually felt affection for them. I felt a similar rush of affection and pleasure last year upon meeting a group of California cousins from my village - they were so energetic and handsome and full of life that I said "you guys make me proud to be Lebanese." But the Israeli locksmiths are no tribesmen of mine, so my good feeling about them is not clan solidarity. I laughed at myself.

My husband said if I could admire shebab in the driveway, he could admire "shebabas", and I informed him that the correct term was sabayah. If he wants to admire sabayah from afar that's fine with me. We all had a big laugh about it.

That night I realized that the Great Mystery had sent me some Israelis to forgive, to like, to appreciate. No cluster bombs came between us. What a coincidence that they appeared an hour after my doctor suggested I think of the good side of the Israelis I resent. Whatever their histories, their tribal affiliation, I got to experience human goodwill for these two guys. None of our history mattered in the California sunshine. They were fixing my ignition, and I was appreciating them for being clever, alive young men. The good in them was absolutely apparent.

I can't stop the horrors in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq. I can't make my president see reason, nor can I change the minds of the many people in the world who suffer from hatred and bigotry. But to save my own life, to relieve the torment in my own liver, I can forgive, I can feel good will, exactly where I am, with whomever shows up.

May the peace I feel ripple out like the circles around a stone dropped into a pond, may it affect somebody else, somewhere.

PS last week when my nurse checked my abdomen, her eyes got wide. "Where is your liver? What have you been doing?" The liver is measurably smaller (by three centimeters) and much softer - just in two weeks' time. I told her I'd begun acupuncture; but I didn't mention all this new meditation and visualizing I've been up to. "Whatever you're doing, keep it up," she said.

Preston Vineyards and Pugs' Leap

Leila, Joseph & Jacob
Originally uploaded by Debbie MacLeod

Here I am with my children at an organic farm in Sonoma County, CA, at the end of Dry Creek road. We played hooky from school Friday to visit my brother-in-law's friends who have a goat ranch and artisan cheese operation; then picnicked at Preston Vineyards farm and winery.

Eric and baby goats, Pugs' Leap Farm and dairy.

What an idyllic day. The owners of these farms are trying to live sustainably, farm sustainably, and feed themselves from the product of their soil, integrating all into the natural environment of this fertile valley.

EarthBox - Homegrown Vegetables Without A Garden

My kid wants to plant vegetables. Our garden beds are neglected, overgrown and full of clay. We don't have the energy to prep them for spring planting but we really want to grow something. What to do?

EarthBox - Homegrown Vegetables Without A Garden.

Part of me thinks it's wasteful to go buy a garden-in-a-box (and we paid more by shopping a local nursery, although on the internet you'd pay for shipping). But on the other hand, we just don't have the wherewithal to do anything in our garden at the moment, and it would cost us money to hire somebody to do all the work to get beds ready. So we're doing this. The system is "self-watering" in that it has an internal trough that wicks up water gradually so you don't have to water every day.

We bought bush beans, chard and salad greens. We'll let you know how it goes!

Hat tip to Pat Meadows for introducing us to the concept and the Earth Box company. She also links on her blog to sites that give plans for making your own.

For bonus points I'm going to try growing potatoes in an old plastic tub (bottom cut out) using hay and mulch. That requires no bed preparation either - you just set the tub where you want it, lay cardboard or layers of newspaper down on the lawn or soil or whatever (Sharon Astyk tried it on her gravel driveway, with good results) and hill with hay and/or mulch.

Denied Entry

Earth activist and spiritual leader Starhawk has been denied entry to Israel - she was invited to teach permaculture techniques to several Israeli groups, but she had worked with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine five years ago, and wrote about that experience. So although she is a Jew, Israel denied her entry.

She sent around this letter today, which I reproduce in part. Update 3/20/08: link to full text here.

Denied Entry By Starhawk

Today is March 16. Five years ago, I was in a small village in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank of Palestine with a group of volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. We had gone because the villagers were being menaced by tanks from the Israeli military, and wanted witnesses, but by the time we arrived, the tanks had gone. Instead we wandered through the olive groves, studded with pink cyclamen and blood-red anemones, and ate barbecued lamb in the courtyard of an ancient stone house with domed ceilings and arched portals. It was a strangely
idyllic day—until on our way back to Nablus we got a call. Down in Rafah, in the Gaza strip, a young volunteer named Rachel Corrie had been crushed to death by a an Israeli military bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s house.

Today I sit in a room in Washington D.C. overcome by grief as in the next room my new friend Laurie writes out card after card with the names of the dead—American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, pile after pile of them. I’m grieving for all the dead, and a bit for myself, because I meant to be back in Palestine, or at least in Israel, now. But I have been denied entry and sent home, because of my past work with the ISM. I have been denied entry, even though my intentions this time were strictly to work with permaculture and ecology groups, including the three Israeli groups that have sent me formal invitations, and even though Israel claims to be a refuge of last resort for everyone born Jewish, as I am. The fact that I’m here, not there, is a measure of how much the Israeli authorities fear a movement of nonviolent resistance in general, and the ISM in particular.

Why is nonviolence so threatening? Violence attacks the body, but nonviolence threatens something deeper and more tenuous—the self-perceptions and rationalizations that let basically good people act in cruel and heartless ways. The Israel/Palestine conflict enacts on a mass scale some of the same dynamics as family abuse. Israel is like the abused child who grows up to be an abuser. Abusers generally feel like victims—and truly the Jewish people have been victimized, again and again in history, culminating in the still unhealed wounds of the Holocaust. Every rocket attack, every shooting spree in a Yeshivah, every suicide bomb in a bus reinforces that sense of fear and persecution that seems to cry out for violence in return.

Read the rest of Starhawk's article at her website, linked above.

Preppies Farm Organic

I see myself in this new young generation of farmers: urban, college-educated, they have been studying the connections between food and the environment and they've decided to farm to live out their values. I never took such a step but I understand it.

Some will sneer at elitism but if it takes trust funds and land-banks and upscale markets to revive the small farm, why should you complain? All that excess money at the top of the US economy ought to trickle down to the land somehow or other.

We can survive and thrive - together

Yesterday I spent an hour in the Edible Schoolyard Garden in Berkeley. This place has so much press that the name and the idea seem like “elitist” Chez Panisse silliness. But being there reminded me that when I moved to that block thirteen years ago, the garden was one season away from its beginnings as an acre of asphalt. I lived in that neighborhood for three years at the time, before moving to East Oakland. Since 1996, the garden has gone from heaps of compost to a wonderland, with chickens, olive and other fruit trees, and extensive beds planted right now with cover crops, winter wheat, favas, herbs and dinosaur kale. Many materials are reclaimed from the site or other Berkeley locations.

Next I went to a spiritual meeting at a run-down but well-loved clubhouse not far away. It was for a twelve step program to which I do not belong - I went to hear a friend speak. The unity and power in that room, in that house, reminded me of the reach of this quasi-anarchist movement. It operates under the radar, on shoe-string budgets with no outside support, and provides community as well as recovery to alcoholics, addicts, and people with all kinds of other afflictions. People who need comfort, hope and restoration find it in this world, without having to avow a religion or a creed.

Between the “magic” of the schoolyard garden morphing out of asphalt, and the “magic” of the twelve-step clubhouse bustling with people, I was reminded of our power to take care of each other and the planet, just by joining together.

Yes, the schoolyard garden receives enormous sums of money and huge amounts of energy from the rich and powerful, through Alice Waters and her lobbying. But the actual labor of making the garden is achievable, and you can see how to begin just by looking. Each of us could do it given the energy; the materials are all around us. Anybody could make the asphalt bloom if she had a neighborhood to help her. The Schoolyard Garden is intended to show people what we can do.

Whatever is coming with financial and political upheaval, we can survive it. To do so, we need to reach out to each other and we need to turn to our Inner Source, whatever you choose to call that.