It’s an old story, trying to control living organisms for profit. Somehow they just won’t stay in line.

I don’t think that there is a scintilla of a doubt that gardening and eating well-gardened food are practices that combine a very steep learning curve (on multiple subjects) with a healthful result. I really honestly truly and most enthusiastically believe that an exponential proliferation of community gardens in the United States would affect people and communities in ways that fundamentally undermine the system.

Little ones are where we learn this craft, it seems, as well as becoming the basis of new system of social service (what a phase-shift in numbers of CGs would become) that exists off the grid.

Really seems the best shot we have at dealing with whatever comes down the pike at the hands of finance capital and peak oil, at least in the ambiguous stage US society is in right now, is to learn these things… really learn them, as opposed to learning about them.

Still trying to learn more about Hezbollah and how their model worked (anyone, anyone?)… just need more time..

The Greening of Detroit is doing some work that others might draw some inspiration from: “Over the next five years a collaborative comprised of The Greening of Detroit, Capuchin Soup Kitchen’s Earth Works Garden Program, O.W. Holmes Elementary School and the Detroit Agricultural Network will join forces to develop an extraordinary public park around a centerpiece 5 acre farm and fruit orchard. The park located in Southwest Detroit along with new programming will provide increased access to food and promote nutritional awareness among residents of the neighborhood by creating a mixed-use community farm surrounded by athletic fields and playgrounds.”
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/romanowski.htm

Detroit has lots of vacant lots, because so many houses have been demolished. Grace and James Boggs promoted city lot gardening in the context of their promoting post-factory living here ( see Detroit Summer) I think I’ll start looking into gardening food. We used to grow tomatoes and peaches at The Yard ( the country in the city speakeasy).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Lee_Boggs

( how do you do that thingy where there’s a link in different colored letters of the word you link ?)

I also have been trying to think and research “alternative fuel manufacture technology enterprise”. We are still going to have to discover alternative fuels to petroleum and gas, I believe. I mean even if oil depletion is 100 years later than now estimated, we have to think about our great,great,great..great grands. That’s how human culture/society got started. The Creating Mother thought about passing on her experiences to her descendants who were born after she died, no ? Ancestor “worship” is the result of Ancestor Anticipatory Care for Descendants passed on to us. We must be good ancestors to our future descendants to be real humans.

On the ideas-practice relationship, I wonder if it is better formulated ” NEW ideas are far more a reflection of practice, than vica versa. ”

When contradictions arise in practice based on conventional ideas, the ideas can change. Today, the contradiction of global warming is arising in our practice , and that is forcing us to formulate new ideas, change the status quo, conventional ideas.

Actually, status quo practice in society _is_ a reflection of long standing, socalled dogmatic ideas. Practice in the U.S. today is a reflection of conservative ideas, and the contradictions of that practice are forcing changes in the conservative , conventional ideas. Necessity is the mother of invention (of new ideas and practice).

Anyway, it is only consciousness that is seeking new ideas that will discover them from practice.

At bottom, economic processes have that old dual-character: they are simultaneously social relations and practical (as in instrumental) activity. We move ourselves around and move other things around, and the sum of these activities is directed by norms that are rooted in social power.

The old-left formula for that was to seize the political power as an essential step to make changing practices possible. I wouldn’t flip that formula, because that just falls back into the same dichotomy backwards.

Strategic interventions into existing power gradients (political activities) are still very necessary, but if the practices are what we are aimed at, then prioritizing direct political intervention over DESIGNING new practices (which is what permaculture is about) seems like a mass-scale case of dogwaggery.

While capitalism is still stable (I would argue both that it currently is, and that we can begin to see future instabilities), there are very real and (for the time) immovable political structures against which we haven’t the capacity to intervene (except symbolically, and at great cost to overall capacity).

The direction in which we DO have a great deal of latitude and even political freedom that we can effectively exploit is in… DESIGN. Designing the actual practices that are sure to be required anyway — no matter the day-to-day twists and turns of the river, we know it is headed for the sea of an energy crisis — is a form of activity that not only makes an ontological impact on our environment; it makes an indelible mark on our consciousness, too. We become the problem solvers to which many will eventually have to turn; and we begin turning every small patch of land into a laboratory for eco-socialism (whether people know it or not). People cannot do these things without being psychically and epistemologically changed by the lived experience of being “designers.”

Even those who are not far along in their political development are fundamentally changed by permaculture’s practices. As noted before, e.g., community gardens tend to make the people who use them WANT to give away food. How much more anti-capitalist can we get than that?

We won’t be seizing political power until things get a good deal more intolerable, and until that magic formula arrives: simultaneous economic, political, and security crises. No deep political transformation has yet occurred without this alignment.

If it happened today, most of the pure-politics left formations would have little to offer but counter-ideologies. There is enough Marxist in me yet to believe that this notion is fundamentally idealist (in the philosophical sense). It suggest that correct ideas lead to correct practice. Wrong on two counts. One — there is more than one “correct” and that changes by the instant, and Two — ideas are far more a reflection of practice than practice is a reflection of ideas. We are obliged by our structured environment (physically and politico-economically) to engage in most practices the way we do, and these structures are far less permeable to new ideas, than new ideas are to enforced action.

Without turning it into an orthodoxy (because it could develop that if people aren’t careful), permaculture seems to be the closest thing we now have to that kind of mass (networked) practice. I’m not elevating it to “the highest form of struggle”; I’m saying that this practice is necessary if not sufficient (a very useful category for many questions) to any viable revolutionary project in the US.

It is something that every leftist should be duty-bound to study (even as an avocation), because it does change us from polemicists into problem-solvers; but also because it can give us a new common language rooted in a science that is escaping the bounds placed on it by the bourgeois intellectual division of labor.

There is still so much to learn about the earth devastation, but there are some attitudes that seem correct. Will Earth heal itself?

Only if the human race gives it a chance. One of the main points made by Teresa Brennan (when she was still alive) was that the capitalist system had accelerated the processes of production past the point at which nature could regenerate itself… thus her recommendation was that world-society had to slow down in a great civilization-wide u-turn…

There is still so much to learn about the earth devastation, but there are some attitudes that seem correct. Will Earth heal itself?

^^^^^^

wikipedia says of Bookchin:

“In addition to his political writings, Bookchin wrote extensively on his philosophical ideas, which he called dialectical naturalism. The dialectical writings of Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, even ecological approach. His later philosophical writings emphasize humanism, rationality, and the ideals of the Enlightenment.”

“dialectical naturalism” - sounds like my type of person. He also was involved with “Social Ecology”.

And believe it or not, on the local progressive talk radio station last night, I heard a woman advocating
“natural capitalism”. She argued that environmentalism and alternative fuels and stopping global warming are the best capitalism, most efficient, etc. Hey , we’ll take all the allies we can get. Popular Front to stop global warming.

Oops. Here is a blurb on the book

http://www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid5.php

Book Excerpts and Downloadable Chapters

NATURAL CAPITALISM: CREATING THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

For decades, environmentalists have been warning that human economic activity is exceeding the planet’s limits. Of course we keep pushing those limits back with clever new technologies; yet living systems are undeniably in decline.

These trends need not be in conflict—in fact, there are fortunes to be made in reconciling them.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, is the first book to explore the lucrative opportunities for businesses in an era of approaching environmental limits. ( Oh really ? Wow ! -CB)

In this groundbreaking blueprint for a new economy, three leading business visionaries explain how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution—one that promises to transform our fundamental notions about commerce and its role in shaping our future. Natural Capitalism describes a future in which business and environmental interests increasingly overlap, and in which businesses can better satisfy their customers’ needs, increase profits, and help solve environmental problems all at the same time.

Natural capital refers to the natural resources and ecosystem services that make possible all economic activity, indeed all life. These services are of immense economic value; some are literally priceless, since they have no known substitutes. Yet current business practices typically fail to take into account the value of these assets—which is rising with their scarcity. As a result, natural capital is being degraded and liquidated by the wasteful use of such resources as energy, materials, water, fiber, and topsoil.

The first of natural capitalism’s four interlinked principles, therefore, is radically increased resource productivity. Implementing just this first principle can significantly improve a firm’s bottom line, and can also help finance the other three. They are: redesigning industry on biological models with closed loops and zero waste; shifting from the sale of goods (for example, light bulbs) to the provision of services (illumination); and reinvesting in the natural capital that is the basis of future prosperity.

Citing hundreds of compelling stories from a wide array of sectors, Natural Capitalism shows how these four changes will enable businesses to act as if natural capital were being properly valued, without waiting for consensus on what that value should be. Even today, when natural capital is hardly accounted for on corporate balance sheets, these four principles are so profitable that firms adopting them can gain striking competitive advantage—as early adopters are already doing. These innovators are also discovering that by downsizing their unproductive tons, gallons, and kilowatt-hours they can keep more people, who will foster the innovation that drives future improvement.

Natural Capitalism’s preface states: “Although [this] is a book abounding in solutions, it is not about ‘fixes.’ Nor is it a how-to manual. It is a portrayal of opportunities that if captured will lead to no less than a transformation of commerce and of all societal institutions. Natural capitalism maps the general direction of a journey that requires overturning long-held assumptions, even questioning what we value and how we are to live. Yet the early stages in the decades-long odyssey are turning out to release extraordinary benefits. Among these are what business innovator Peter Senge calls ‘hidden reserves within the enterprise’—’lost energy,’ trapped in stale employee and customer relationships, that can be channeled into success for both today’s shareholders and future generations. All three of us have witnessed this excitement and enhanced total factor productivity in many of the businesses we have counseled. It is real; it is replicable…”

The next Industrial Revolution has already started. Natural Capitalism will prepare you to be a part of it.

Thank you…