Manifesto of the Garden Party
Concrete victories won daily.
There is a spectre haunting the earth, and it is the spectre of environmental and social collapse.
Collapse and the Erosion of Denial
The news from this collapse has penetrated even the most powerful and sophisticated firewalls of the rich and powerful. An idefinite blowout of underground oil is turning the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic, mortally damaged ecosystem. There is something wrong with the atmosphere. It is heating up. The seas could rise abruptly. People die now in European heatwaves. These are stories in the mass media today. They are too frequent and alarming to ignore. The denial that served as a wall against understanding still stands, but it is crumbling.
Even now, in a time when people are being lashed through their days by the agitated pace of our lives, the impressions of collapse are penetrating the smokescreens of power that would conceal the nearness and completeness of that collapse. For those who take the time to actually investigate our condition, the facts are as clear as they are alarming.
Ice caps are melting. The seas will rise, flooding human dwellings along the global coastline, pushing salt water further into adjoining lowlands, killing crops and salinating the aquifers. Habitats for thousands of species will disappear or be displaced.
The weather is changing. Inundation and drought are both more common and more severe. Storms are stronger and more unpredictable.
The coral reefs are dying. The fisheries are being strip-mined out of existence. The oceans are filling with trash, with poisons, and more and more with the petroleum that has facilitated these other forms of destruction.
Topsoil, the living skin of the biosphere, is disappearing to erosion. In the United States alone, topsoil is eroding into the rivers and oceans at ten time the rate that nature can replace it. Irrigation and chemical inputs are salinizing — and sterilizing — millions of hectares of the arable soil that remains.
By 2025, almost 2 billion people will be living with critical scarcity of fresh water. The sources of fresh water have been microtoxified. Ground water is being depleted faster than aquifers can recharge.
The runoff from industrial, monocrop agriculture is destroying waterways; and disrupted waterways disrupt communities.
Forests are falling so people can sell lumber and livestock, and because millions of people have been pushed onto the forest edge to slash and burn for subsistence while arable land elsewhere is used solely to make money. Half the tropical forests that existed in 1947 are gone. By 2030, at the rate we’re going, only ten percent of those forests will remain intact, and ten percent in a highly degraded condition. Forest in the other regions are falling as well. The billion acres of forest that once covered what is now the United States has been reduced to less than 15 percent of that number.
The interconnectedness of these phenomena can be understood from two distinct perspectives. First, these interpenetrating natural systems have been violently destabilized, and each consequence is pregnant with more consequences. At the end is a catastrophic cascade of events caused purely by the physics of this unravelling. Second, the social relations that developed on the physical forms of the past will be disrupted along with these changes.
One of the key intersections of our built environment and social organization is the use of fossil hydrocarbons to channel useable energy into our built environment. There’s good news and bad news on that front. The good news is that these hydrocarbons are being used up, fast. The bad news is that these hydrocarbons are being used up, fast.
The age of cheap energy is closing out. It was a one-time event. We are in the final days of the hydrocarbon Homo sapien. Peak oil is already here.
In short, the past fantasies of our technological optimism about the future have been based an a faulty assumption, that we could consume energy the way we have before. Physics tells us we cannot. Therefore, we will not.
This is hard news, because we depend on high-energy infrstructure as much as we depend on money. We are the dual captives of hydrocarbon energy and money. We see it every day, even we profligate Americans. You pay to put the gas in the car, to drive through the traffic you hate, go to the job you’d rather not do, because if you don’t have money you can’t eat and sleep indoors. Nor can those who may depend on you to get money for their necessities. And you have to burn the oil to get the money, part of which you will use to buy more oil.
The end of cheap energy — coming soon to a theater near you — will eventually slow the industrial depredations we have visited upon the planet, though not fast enough to stop the worst of our consequences. Many points of return have already been passed.
The list of deep concern grows daily, and the word is out there now, bypassing the semi-official media, penetrating the consciousness of more people every single day. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused us on our capacity to damage more than any event in recent history.
People are learning, slowly sometimes, and even violently at times. But they are learning now, faster than the institutions of the current order can obfuscate them.
The wall of denial is crumbling, and it is already breached. No reason to hesitate. All we have to do is go through that breach.
With the collapse of the planet’s biospheric systems has come the beginning of a social collapse growing directly out of the universal-money system. The irony is that the univeral-money system was what made this abrupt mutation of the biosphere possible.
Six and a half billion human beings inhabit the planet, and half of them now live in cities. Within 40 years, that number could be 70%. One-third of those living in cities now live in slums.
One billion people now live in slums. Poverty, crime, and disease are the terrible triple-threat characterizing slum life. Social disorder in the slums is recurrent and inevitable, often explosively. Surrounding populations begin to seek military solutions for their fear. On a larger scale, society becomes organized around the identification and extermination of “enemies.” All of society becomes armed and dangerous.
On Cities
Dependency on “the outside” in cities is neary absolute. The materials for shelter come from “the outside.” The electricity comes from “the outside.” The food comes from “the outside.” The water comes from “the outside.” For every hectare of land in the city, excluding the inputs for local industry, 120 hectares are used (up) from “the outside.”
In the city, there is no stream if the water system shuts down. There is no soil in the city if the food doesn’t arrive, as it must, every day, a great river of trucks carrying calories to the urban captives. Mountaintops are removed on “the outside” to get the coal to run the power generators. The land “outside” is scoured for uranium, punctured to find gas and oil. Food is mass-produced on “the outside” in ways that destroy the soil and pollute the rivers, lakes, oceans, and air. Rivers of concrete, oil, lumber, steel, silicon, aluminum, plastic, nickel, glass, brass, paint and paper, from “the outside,” maintain this built environment in the city. Armadas of ships cross the oceans to deliver the daily inputs that keep the city alive. And armadas of warships — mostly from the United States — keep these critical sealanes open; especially those for the oil.
There is only one form of access to the imported means of survival: money. If the urban dweller lacks money, she must do whatever it takes to get it — it’s a matter of survival no less than surfacing for air from underwater. If the urban dweller lacks money and has no desire or no capacity to acquire money by subordinating oneself to a job, other means will be found — legal or not — to get the money. Money is shelter. Money is food. Money is water. Money is electricity. One cannot live in the city without electricity. Cities have to burn something to make electricity, because without the steady infusion of electricity, the modern city will begin dying as surely as a human will die without air to breathe. What we burn, whether gas, or coal, or uranium, comes from “the outside.”
The transformation of cities into self-supporting communities is Good Work.
On Money
Urban environments, as now constructed, are energy sinks. They are a cancer consuming the non-urban tissues of the biosphere. They consolidate the power of money as a hegemonic medium of human exchange, and they create an abject dependency on money that concentrates social power with all large accumulations of money, no matter their supposed ideologies. Money divides society into haves and have-nots. When money doesn’t work as a means of control, those with a lot of money will resort to using clubs, pepper-spray, and guns.
Money itself divides society into haves and have nots. This is an aspect of universal-money that asserts itself into all forms of social organization. Businesses. Homes. Churches, temples, and mosques. Service institutions. Sexual identity. Food. Water. Everything is bent to the logic of money, a medium that is designed to deny the recognition everything cannot and should not be trade-able. Money is powerful; it behaves like a blind, angry god, that admits of no value above itself.
There is an emergency, and we can no longer wait for the utopian fantasy that we will soon wrest control of all the established institutions. We cannot, and will not. They will wither in their own time of their own accord. All we can do is damage control, and not much of that.
We are money’s captives. We have no land. We have no immediate access to water. We depend on money to ensure the flows of food, electricity, materials, clothing, and medicine. We are the captives of a sheet of government paper with a gun behind it. If we have to have it, we will subordinate ourselves to those who have more money to get some of it. We will obey, because we have to have the money. Money is what buys obedience. Dependence on money is what makes us obey. We will obey, even humiliate ourselves. That’s the power of money.
We are the slaves of a blind malevolence that chews through fields, forests, mountaintops, mangrove swamps, valleys, savannahs, rivers, oceans, deserts, and the suburban psyche with equal and unstoppable force. We are the servants of money. All of us, every one of us who reads this, serves money, whether we like it or not.
Someone once said something like… “You cannot serve money and the good at the same time.”
Money is far more powerful than any law. If history and experience has taught us anything at all, it has taught us this. The anecdotal “evidence” to the contrary is just that: highly anecdotal. The dominant reality that money trumps law is a thousand times greater than the occasional blip where law subordinates money.
Appeals to the law for the solution for the problem of money can never work, because the phenomenon of money is more powerful than the phenomenon of the law. Money controls the law, so if we are to seek solutions for ending our dependency on money, those solutions will not be legal solutions. Elections and legislation and judges are bent to the logic of money so firmly that they never speak of it. They pretend it is invisible, when it’s the most visible thing in the world. We will not wrest control of the establishment’s institutions. That’s a fixed game.
On Violence
Nor will we consider the use of violence. That’s an even more fixed game. It results in annihilation. Violence begets violence, and at the end of the road, violence becomes about annihilation. Violence is inherently nihilistic.
Nihilism is not an option. We have too much of that already, of people who believe in nothing and want to destroy everything.
The opposite of violence is not counter-violence. It is concern, care, and love.
On Doing
What needs getting done is more urgent than pursuing elections or laws. So we have to do it ourselves. We have to get to the basics as soon as possible, in whatever ways present themselves to us, and apply the basics to our own survival.
We need to begin making where we are part of a massive repair… revelation… reconciliation… and redemption. A repair of our little piece of the biosphere. A revelation about our own creative capacities in the pursuit of this repair project. A reconciliation of ourselves with this world we’ve treated so shabbily. And the partial redemption of our species. Other species will profit by that redemption.
We need to bring our interdependence back to the local level. The most local possible. Local is where you are accountable to one another based on values other than, and more important than, money.
We need to systematically and progressively re-design our most local environments to counter the most destructive trends leading us toward a very painful collapse for human beings. And for a lot of other life, too. We don’t need a law to get food. We need some land, water, seeds, compost, and mulch. And if that means breaking the law if the law says we cannot engage in the most fundamental of human rights, the right to produce one’s own food, then we ought to be prepared to break the law or in any other way — without violence — defend this basic right.
We have to become an army of gardeners, organized into local bands around the world. We have to grow worms, rehabilitate soil, build new soil, plant trees, host wildlife, grow food, recycle water, and a host of other practical actions that take a small piece of the surface of the planet and begin our repair. This can happen in a suburban yard, an urban rooftop, an abandoned parking lot, a community garden, an intentional community, or a transition town. It can happen in a barrio. It can happen in a park. But it can’t happen unless someone does it.
When the situation become clearer and clearer, those who have learned these arts of redesign first will teach those who learn second,and those who learn second will, in their turn, serve as examples for the rest.
There are plenty of people who are clinging to the old hope for changing the leaders of institutions as a way out. They don’t yet understand that leaders are invested in things as-they-are. The Garden Party is a party inviting those who want to pursue the practical, peaceful agenda of repair, revelation, reconciliation, and redemption. The Garden Party wants people with dirty hands.
The wall of denial is crumbling, and it is already breached. No reason to hesitate. All we have to do is go through that breach.
On Administration and Management
Modern administrative and management practices can trace their origins to military organizations. Therefore they are also patriarchal phenomena. Administration and managment are, more than anything else, about control. Mistrust and control. Conformity and obedience.
Administration creates a division of labor, separate from directly doing things. Administration imposes rules that supercede our practical activities, and ultimately interfere with them. Administration creates an administrative class that goes over and above the people.
The need for administration occurs when there are too many people in a group for the individuals to relate to others on a personal level. According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, there is “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” This limit is inscribed on our neocortex. Groups larger than around 150 (called “Dunbar’s Number”) begin to suffer disruptions that require third-parties to regulate and re-conform them. This is the beginning of administration. When administrators and their leaders decide to conform those under them to one way of being, administration becomes management.
When groups become large enough to require administration to maintain social cohesion, hierarchy is the ineivtable result.
If we wish to avoid heirarchy, then we need to avoid administration. If we need to avoid administration, we have to keep our groups small and local.
The (De-)Program of the Garden Party.
What the Garden Party is, is what the Garden Party does.
(1) The Garden Party is a collection of people who are committed to designing and implementing local, practical initatives that:
(a) increase food security through local sustainability
(b) reduce our dependency on money, on-the-grid jobs, expensive and entropic technology, service agencies, and the government to feed ourselves.
(2) The Garden Party is not seeking to acquire power for itself, but to deflate the structures of power by reducing people’s dependencies on those structures, in particular from the industrial food-grid, general-purpose money, and administration/management by employers, service agencies, and government.
The Garden Party is preparing for the ultimate General Strike, whereupon people can quit working for wages, quit requiring money to survive, quit paying taxes, quit obeying cruel, stupid, and unjust laws, and quit requiring resources that are not locally available for survival. This will not happen in one stroke, but little by little, spreading as both root and seed.
(3) The Garden Party is peacable. We do not accept the right of anyone to use physical force to bend the will of another; and we will not use any form of violence against persons as part of any campaign or initiative, no matter how much violence and force might increase our efficacy. The ends do not justify the means.
(4) The Garden Party can “bind and loose.” If we voluntarily participate together in a boycott, or pickets against some entity, or any other translocal initiative, then so be it. It requires no executive bodies, but can be suggested in the course of broad communication. Broad commuication is encouraged to share helpful, practical tips, and to describe local activities. If the majority decides to participate in translocal actions, then the majority will participate. No one will be coerced or expelled who doesn’t. If local groups want to initiate local projects, they need not request permission from anyone. Executive committees are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
(5) There are no geographic boundaries for the Garden Party. Anyone anywhere can join.
(6) The Garden Party is based on a concept of community that emphasizes the practical and personal, not the ideological. Local groups of the Garden Party should be friends. If you can’t be friends, and treat each other with genuine goodwill and affection, then nothing you do will last anyway. A communication network is a good thing, but it is not a community. Communities can share food with each other, tend to each others’ children, nurture one another through times of personal trial, and celebrate together. If you’re too far apart to do these things, then there’s a better word than community.
If your ultimate point of reference is yourself, you will never be in community anyway.
Five Unruly Rules for the Garden Party.
(1) Every member of the Garden Party has one membership requirement. S/He must garden. Whether on a windowsill or a field, members will have this one practical activity in common. There will be no testing of this criterion. It is not a contract, but a covenent. Membership is on the honor system.
(2) There will never be an administrative or managerial body for the Party. Administration and management are the first steps to hierarchy, and hierarchy is the first step to hypocrisy, prevarication, and compromise (called “pragmatism”). Administration and management are impersonal; and the Garden Party must remain personal. We aim to be a collection of bands. Bands are small, personal. They are bound by the convenants of friendship, not the suspicios nature of The Contracts or the stratifying impersonality of management.
(3) The Garden Party will never participate in elections, except when they are in defense of Garden Party local initiatives. Elections lead to administration, management, abstraction, compromise, and the squandering of precious resources that could be used to build soil, plant trees, and grow food.
(4) Formalizing organization is strongly discouraged. The Garden Party just does things, like neighbors cooperating to grow some food. If five people are working together, they need never name themselves “a committee.” Just do the work.
(5) The Garden Party will not adopt or endorse broad resolutions that state support for goals that are not locally and immediately practical. In fact, the Garden Party will not adopt any resolutions at all. Resolutions are postures, not actions.
If you can’t do it yourselves, don’t resolve to do it. If you can do it, you don’t need a resolution.
Our goal is not to ‘create global prosperity’ or ‘secure liberty for future generations’ or any other such abstraction. There are other groups for these kinds of goals. We do things locally, and we share information broadly. We don’t need resolutions to do any of that. Our resolve is expressed in our actions.
Welcome to the Garden Party! Membership costs nothing.
Stan:
The Garden Party has one member. It is seeking three.
My garden is growing in pots now, on two concrete decks with pretty good sun exposure. But it’s rainy season in Costa Rica, so the cloud cover is there more than it’s not. Looking toward herbs and medicinals, and hot chilis to supplement the farmers market fare here. Also ready to try some okra.
28 June 2010, 8:14 amDeAnander:
David Korten:
28 June 2010, 10:10 amDeAnander:
The madness of money-worship (and permitting the money-men to establish the “value” of all things) is expressed every day in every way. But perhaps most recently in the tragically absurd plaint of the Louisiana governor: he doesn’t want offshore drilling halted because in his estimation, the *financial* damage to his state from the suspension of drilling is *more costly* than the damage so far assessed from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
So basically, short term reduction of money transactions is more important and scary and painful than long-term, persistent reduction of the local ecosystem’s ability to function and provide food (not only locally but for the world, since the Gulf is a spawning ground or nursery for migratory fish populations). It is more important than the health and happiness of all the denizens (human and otherwise) of the Gulf and its coastline.
Hmmm. So by this logic, let’s see now… metaphor time, and the more shocking the metaphor the better, because we really need to wrap our heads around the madness of hegemonic money valuation. According to this logic I should rent my children out to a brothel, so long as the income I get from doing so exceeds the costs I have to pay (with help from some government subsidies) for remedial medical care for their (visible) injuries and infections. The fact that I am destroying their future health and happiness, committing a moral outrage, etc. is irrelevant. The identity and amorality of the *customers* of the brothel to whose appetites my children are sacrificed, is obfuscated by the impersonality of the money nexus. The “inexorable logic of the market” dictates that I must (however regretfully) destroy something irreplaceable — the integrity of my family, its health and happiness — because of a “rational calculation” that the *money* cost of refraining from destruction is higher than the cost of continuing to destroy.
How rational is it to destroy your own food supply? or your own children?
Challenges to money valuation (the price tagging of all things) are mounting but still feeble compared to the ideological stranglehold of “the market”. This is not a coincidence. The “market value” ideology is an ideology of apologia for power, and hence it’s promulgated very loudly, non-stop, by the mightiest Wurlitzers money can buy. The high priests of money are not going to preach heresy against their own highly successful god, after all
“Markets” have their place, without a doubt. Trade and commerce have great utility to all human cultures. But the boundary between what is “inside” the market (tradeable, priceable) and what is outside (priceless, sacred, part of the familial/covenantal/spiritual commons) has been shoved aside to the farthest margins (the commercialisation of Everything is almost complete). The money-profit-cult now owns almost every idea, every meme, and even the most intimate human interactions: it has achieved the kind of cultural/intellectual/emotional hegemony that marked the pinnacle of the (institutional) Catholic church’s power in Europe or the CP’s in the high Soviet era. To declare any thing, person, or interaction to be “priceless” — to declare that we are not willing to sell our grandmothers for the right price — is the new heresy (a *protest* against the totalising dogma of the market). We might expect that traditional confessional faiths such as Christianity would offer a “last stand” bastion against the new money-god, but of course (mutatis mutandis) we already have new schismatic sects co-opting the namespace of the NT to promote Jesus as investment banker. (“God is the perfect partner in any investment program.” footnote)
“Is nothing sacred?” [does anyone know who originally said this and in what context, and how it became a catch phrase?] — the answer of “the markets” is a resounding No. Nothing is sacred — except money and profit. Everything else is by definition disposable or consumable. If any act of protection, kindness, repair or preservation would “hurt the economy” (i.e., reduce the profits returned to investors) then it is “impractical” or “impossible.”
The Louisiana governor’s capitulation to the money-god tells us how “the system works.” It’s a rigged system. Living creatures will always be sacrificed to the market Moloch, because their “worth” is assessed by those same high priests of Moloch. Whole populations will find ourselves in the same no-win position as any battered wife dependent on an abusive husband for daily sustenance; suffering abuse daily, while begging him not to leave.
The sacrosanctity of money and profit is neither natural nor inevitable; it is a cultural convention no more inherently convincing than the divine right of kings. It can be challenged. It is being challenged. This is the latest chapter in the perpetual tug-o’-war between our lives in community and subsistence, and the grandiose aspirations of the elite castes that (for some reason) we humans keep exuding like some strange hypertrophied carapace on our body politic…
OK enough raving. Back to work
28 June 2010, 11:01 amBruce F:
This is brilliant!
Our rooftop gardens are now spreading, slowly, out of the city of Chicago.
And we just started a small community garden with the help of Neighborspace.
Thank you for, among other things, helping me to understand how my political views and my garden(s) can work together.
28 June 2010, 11:27 amStan:
STRONGLY RECOMMEND De’s comment above if you haven’t studied it. Just as strongly recommend Bruce’s link to rooftop gardens (just above this), because it will make you feel better. Thanks, both.
So are we three? 300% Party growth in one day! Wow. (-;
Send those stats to the Central Bureau of Party Administration.
28 June 2010, 2:22 pmHenry:
De,
The way I see it, the overarching tendency today is for all elements that are not quantifiable to be sacrificed to quantity. The “valuation” of almost everything in terms of money, is one–possibly at this time the clearest–example of this overall tendency. It’s inherent in machinism, in industrialism (units, uniformity, mass production), in the idea of the “masses”, of “collectivities,” and so on and on. Modern science essentially investigates those aspects of nature that are measurable, hence quantifiable, and its applications are our technology and industry. This essentially quantitative knowledge gives manipulative power over matter, as our modern world shows very clearly.
The general tendency, then, is that the qualitative, intelligible and “real” element tends to vanish in the face of the invasion of the pure quantity and its meaninglessness. This tendency is first of all in the mind and then gets represented in the human-made world, which has nefarious consequences for the entire environment. It is, in essence, a tendency towards pure quantity, and therefore towards dissolution, and thus to chaos, in the strict sense of the term.
28 June 2010, 3:02 pmStan:
James Carroll on our condition:
FULL
28 June 2010, 3:51 pmStan:
Danger of being free.
28 June 2010, 4:21 pmHenry:
Live from Planet Norte
The uniformity on Planet Norte is striking. Each person is a unit, installed in life support boxes in the suburbs and cities; all are fed, clothed by the same closed-loop corporate industrial system. Everywhere you look, inhabitants are plugged in at the brainstem to screens downloading their state approved daily consciousness updates. iPods, Blackberries, notebook computers, monitors in cubicles, and the ubiquitous TV screens in lobbies, bars, waiting rooms, even in taxicabs, mentally knead the public brain and condition its reactions to non-Americaness. Which may be defined as anything that does not come from of Washington, DC, Microsoft or Wal-Mart.
For such a big country, the “American experience” is extremely narrow and provincial, leaving its people with approximately the same comprehension of the outside world as an oyster bed. Yet there is that relentless busyness of Nortenians. That sort of constant movement that indicates all parties are busy-busy-busy, but offers no clue as to just what they are busy at.
More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25832.htm
28 June 2010, 4:46 pmDan:
We’re growing potatoes, peas, beans, corn, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, eggplants, spinach, beets, dill, basil, thyme, oregano, onions, leeks, garlic, cucumbers, squash, and zucchini (well… the zucchini are sort of growing themselves, and we’re kind of watching, in awe.
Deconstructing and reconstructing neighborhood house for a reclamation project…
And teaching oceanography, climate change, and volcanoes and earthquakes at local university.
Can I join?
Do I get a badge and a decoder ring?
If I bring some fresh greens and a few pints of fresh-picked raspberries, can I sit at the front of the room?
Very nice post, Stan, and it’s been far too long.
28 June 2010, 10:07 pmStan:
You not only can join, you can have an extra vote for the reclamation project. (: Your decoder ring is in the mail.
29 June 2010, 8:13 amDeAnander:
… early morning pre-caffeinated moment … a [cultural] decoder ring is kinda what Feral Scholar tries to be, no? one way to look at it anyway.
29 June 2010, 8:24 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Let me say I like this a LOT! We have started with an idea here called SOCCER (Securing Our Communities, Citizens, and Economic Resources) which has parallel ideas and (de)programs
It does, however, lack the catchy name of “Garden Party” and such an elegant manifesto. So believe me, I am looking at this for ideas and inspiration =-)
Are you soliciting editorial commentary? Forgive me for asking, but the compulsion to “tweak” is part of the real “white man’s burden”, if you ask me.
29 June 2010, 9:49 amStan:
Global warming grid vid.
Non sequitur conclusion, even after a good argument: “Change only happens through public policy.”
Still very worthwhile, and short.
29 June 2010, 10:30 amSteve:
Greetings from the land of Milk and Honey, also known as Northwest Oregon. The one thing that gives me hope these days is looking at the booming abundance in my backyard garden and reflecting on the fact that every one of those plants arose from one tiny seed. The thing that truly enrages me is the idea that anyone should go hungry in the Willamette Valley as so many do, many a few blocks from where I sit. I can think of no more damning indictment of capitalism and the money economy. Every seed I put in the ground is an intentional act of rebellion against everything “they” stand for, an open conspiracy between me and my plant and animal allies to keep life going. And it feels GOOD!
Thanks for all the good sense and strong words over the years Stan. All power to the Conspiracy of Life.
29 June 2010, 11:24 amStan:
The Conspiracy of Life. That’s one to hang your hat on. Thanks.
@Marcilla, tweak away. Inspiration is a two-way street. (-=
So I just scooped a bucket of volcanic sand from the creek bed. The humus I’ve foraged was from an abandoned fill dirt pile, and it was so pure it was slop when wet and concrete when dry. I mixed the sand with the humus to improve the drainage, and I’ll start okra seed today in a germination napkin. All this for a garden that lives in various containers (milk cartons, whatever) on two concrete decks with good sun through most of the day. There’s 700 feet in the housek but there’s probably 900 on the two decks. The back one has be kept partially clear to hang laundry… which casts shadows on the plants below.
Just to share. Today is a bright, sunny day, an anomoly right now in the Seattle-like gray that characterizes most days during rainy season (which won’t end until November). The untold buckets of rain per square foot here over several rainy season weeks has made greenery explode upon greenery exploding upon more greenery. Everything imaginable is in an orgy of blooming; and that has filled the air — bright and colorful today — with butterflies. I quit counting how many different kinds.
29 June 2010, 12:04 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
@Stan, I’ll do my best, trusting you’ll take from this what you need and using as you see fit:
Stylistically – I like the divisions making it more readable. I would accentuate the italicized headings more and find new ones rather than repeating the second one in order to convey forward momentum. Also, the first one begins with a sense of foreboding. I would hold off on that as fear is the strongest, but not necessarily first negative emotion people process. What about beginning with anger, then sadness, then fear, then hope, then a conceptual “how” (introducing the garden party), then the more concrete technical information, then conclusion?
Spellcheck – … or else make it more obvious that you are playing with spelling conventions
Word choice – Overall, it avoids getting over-jargon-ny. As some minor notes: I prefer blowout to gusher, coastal to littoral, energy-wasting to entropic,
On the environmental stuff – depending on your desired audience, it may sound a little too Al Gore-ish for some. A criticism of gov’t response to environmental collapse and how it further weakens community and individual security in the name of consolidating wealth might be useful here.
On technological optimism – I might develop this just a bit more, perhaps making a comparison to superstitious beliefs in a way that both the faithful (religiously-speaking) and skeptic could internalize as confirming their own position.
On money – some of it sounds a little too much like the old saw about how “there’s no black or white, just green.” I think the argument would actually be stronger by drawing the parallel between the valuing of people with the “right” bank account over others and the valuing of people with the “right” skin color, gender, religion, etc. Also, I would point out that money as it is used today is only of derivative value, not unlike the exotic financial instruments that are so unpopular right now.
On violence – I support tactics of anti-violence, meaning: non-violence whenever possible, counter-violence whenever necessary. I don’t see countering violence in self-defense as tantamount to violence any more than counter-measures are ever tantamount to the measures they intend to counter (although I recognize that “self-defense” has been a smokescreen used to justify aggression).
On doing – with SOCCER, we’ve looked at how to organize around providing people with basic needs (like food) first and foremost, with the idea of working up from there, akin to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
On localism and non-hierarchy – I completely support this ideal, obviously. In even the Anarchist movement, I find myself at odds with people who want to deny the necessity of creating large scale systems. I think any echelon must be subservient to all smaller echelons which come together to comprise the larger. Some things cannot be dealt with by <150 people (the North Pacific Gyre?). I don’t think it’s possible to go backwards in time, much as paleo-cons and anarcho-primitivists would like. We are already a proto-global society, I think what remains is to flip it from top-down to bottom-up. There are working models for practicing consensus democracy (Zapatistas and South African Poor People’s movements). Oh yeah, it doesn’t say “consensus” in there, which I would make explicit.
“The ends do not justify the means.” I totally agree. In fact, I say that if anything, it’s the opposite.
29 June 2010, 1:39 pmDeAnander:
@Steve — maybe it’s time to take back the “pro-life” label and apply it properly… a conspiracy to keep life going, keep life blooming and rich and robust and diverse and fractal and entangled, in defiance of those who want to define, control, and otherwise treat it as a machine. The most sophisticated machines are “dumb as rocks” compared to the smallest protozoa, imho. Hell, the chloroplasts alone are more complex and interesting, more amazingly efficient and elegant, than the whole sprawling refinery complex of the Texas coast.
29 June 2010, 3:35 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
What about AGI and machine sentience? Are you espousing an organic-supremacist definition of “life”?
29 June 2010, 4:27 pmDan:
The thing that always breaks my heart is that the technology we have devised is so damned amazing, so powerful, so potentially liberating… and it never fulfills that promise.
The reason, of course, is completely contained in the Einstein quote “Everything has changed, except the way we think”
The character of a machine is that it responds faithfully and completely to the will of the mind of the operator.
Our machinery was invented by geniuses, built by technical wizards, is operated by brilliant and highly competent workers… and is owned and directed by insane greedmongers.
I do not know if that situation can be remedied. I do not know if the technical marvels we have made can be recaptured from those who exploit people, machines, and the earth for their own enrichment and empowerment… But I fervently wish that those things could happen.
29 June 2010, 8:41 pmMac:
Hey Dan,
Check out “the sorcerer’s apprentice.” And the myth of Pandora’s box. And Faust. Technology, like ideas, has consequences. It cannot be isolated. It requires a context. The price is your soul. I think I’ll pass.
29 June 2010, 11:02 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
… he says via the internet
30 June 2010, 7:16 amStan:
Dan, my old friend. How are you and yours? (We are well and living in Costa Rica now.) Say hi offline if you get a chance. Sherry says hi.
I have a more materialist critique at hand of your point. Machine fetishism. The application of Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism to our understanding of technology.
Here is the abstract from Horborg’s treatment of the topic (unfortunately for most of us, the rest is locked up in Sagepub):
It’s that “attribution of autonomous agency” that I’ll highlight, since you make that the core of your own argument, even though the point you make is that technology cannot function without its operators, and the operators are locked into a system of hierarchical (class) power.
It is not so much the attribution of autonomous agency you cite, as the related attribution of autonomous innocence for technology. There can be no culpability here for technology, which, after all, without our participation would be a mass of dead – therefore – benign things.
This suggests that the whole character of the machine is this faithful obedience. But, as even the technologically optimistic Marx noted, the machines were designed in a way that forces the conformity of the operator. And machine design has other aspects as well; it makes certain demands on the environment. Those demands are for materials, miantenance, time-space, energy, and – as you point out – social organization.
Those demands have an historical account as well, and that account can be veiwed readily through the lens of a core-periphery imperial dynamic. A computer in Japan relies on the importation from abroad of coal, oil, gas, and uranium. So the social relation between core and periphery is hidden inside this apparent autonomy/innocence.
If I follow where this out, it says that once we wrest control from the greedy, the machines will become the faithful servants of a new order, and the technology will be placed at our general service. (I’ll leave others to say what they may on the subject of genius, brilliance, and wizardry. I’m not sure that brilliance and greed, as well as a lot of other not-so-benign motives, might not co-exist in the same people.)
There is not only no account of the oppressive relations (core-periphery) underpinning the development, operation, and maintenance of most modern technology; there is no account for its impact on the natural world, for its hyper-entropic character. In classical economics, this is the case, too. It’s all counted out as “externality.” This account alone argues for technology to be redesigned (from the ground up almost) to be more convivial, and necessarily more locally dependent for all inputs.
30 June 2010, 7:56 amPeach McDouall:
Your points (and De’s) are too true. You and Revd Billy are the prophets I wish I could share with everyone. Keep it up, Stan!
I have an herb garden, a pollinator garden, and a veggie garden (tomatoes, dent corn, and squash right now…). My hubby Ken is Mr. Compost! Gotta confess, I lose interest in it when the temp goes up in the summer, but it’s cool to see mid-size predators (a fox, an owl) move in and know it means that this little patch is healthy.
Recommended: Noah’s Garden, by Sarah B Stein
30 June 2010, 8:47 amFernando:
“There can be no culpability here for technology, which, after all, without our participation would be a mass of dead – therefore – benign things.”
Well, it had to be invented, which assumes lots of things: philosophy, science, given basis level for the very possibility of the invention (gasoline engines were not even possible prior to petroleum, for instance), social contexts of all sorts, and so on and on.
At any rate, I think materialism offers an accurate in certain respects but very “flat” explanation of human events. But the philosophyical premises are the very essence of the matter, I believe. If human beings are really as materialists and Marxists explain them, it would not be any human I know, nor would it be worth being human. I realize this outrages a certain “leftist” element.
30 June 2010, 3:44 pmld:
Apparently Robert Biel has a new book coming out titled _The Entropy of Capitalism_. Woo-hoo! And it also seems he’s quite active in the transition towns movement. Definitely a Garden Partier.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu/people/biel
1 July 2010, 7:22 amCurt:
To the Garden Party Agricultural Selection Caucus,
1 July 2010, 8:21 amAfter the Garden Party has been in existence for one year will a scapegoat be slaughtered in celebration of the event or will the celibritory diet be strictly vegetarian?
Stan:
Biel has been moving this way for a while. On gender, too. His exposure to Carolyn Merchant has done him good. Wish I had access to this book, but say-lavee, I’m here in the postal hinterlands. (:
Thanks ld. May your people prosper.
1 July 2010, 8:27 amm.c.:
Someone long ago(not too long ago) said a Fighter Jet is designed by PhD’s, built by people with Master’s degrees, flown by people with Bachelor’s degrees, and maintained by people with High School diplomas….
1 July 2010, 12:07 pmStan:
Viral non-violence. Now the moral compass is shifting. Something may happen.
teaser…
4 July 2010, 12:59 pmHenry:
Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation
Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made
actions.”
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html
5 July 2010, 3:57 pmHenry:
The BP/Government police state
By Glenn Greenwald
ABC/CNN
In June, Adm. Thad Allen told ABC, “Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we’re doing operations.” The new rule contradicts that statement.
(updated below)
Last week, I interviewed Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland, who has been covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf since the first day it happened. She detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts. She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who — after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because “BP didn’t want him filming” — was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official. McClelland also described how BP has virtually bought entire Police Departments which now do its bidding: “One parish has 57 extra shifts per week that they are devoting entirely to, basically, BP security detail, and BP is paying the sheriff’s office.” …
UPDATE: More evidence here (h/t bamage):
Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.
It’s a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN’s Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it “very easy to hide incompetence or failure”. . . .
More:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/05/bp/index.html
5 July 2010, 4:35 pmDiane Mashek:
Haven’t visited the site in many months, so glad I did. Our community is on a mountain just outside of Seattle.
This year we established a pea patch that not only feeds forty families but contributes generously to the local food bank and mission. The plot of land had sat idle for fifty years full of immature dogwoods and blackberry bushes. We now have many varieties of lettuce, spinach, carrots, peas, beans, strawberries, asparagus, tomatoes, squash, herbs and hopefully a small orchard soon. All of this came about when one woman, a member of the community had a vision and brought it to fruition.
Our family started keeping chickens a year ago. We have a supply of fresh wonderful tasting eggs we share with
our friends and neighbors. Recently we received a letter from the HOA contesting our right to do so. Should be interesting.
Please visit our website and keep up the good work. http://www.mirrormont.org/outdoors/p-patch/
Diane Mashek
6 July 2010, 12:13 pmHenry:
from Natural Life Magazine, November/December, 1994
What Really Matters
by John Taylor Gatto
Going to the moon didn’t really matter, it turned out.
I say that from the vantage point of my six decades living on Planet Earth, but also because of something I saw not so long ago. It was at Booker T. Washington High School where I watched an official astronaut – a handsome, well-built man in his prime, dressed in a silver space suit with an air of authentic command – try to get the attention of an auditorium full of Harlem teenagers. It was the Board of Education’s perfect template for dramatic success – a distinguished black man leading ignorant black kids to wisdom. He came with every tricky device and visual aid NASA could muster, yet the young audience ignored him completely. I heard some teachers say, “What do you expect from ghetto kids?”, but I don’t think that explained his failure at all. The kids instinctively perceived this astronaut had less control over his rocket vehicle than a bus driver has over his bus. I think they had also wordlessly deduced that any experiments he performed were someone else’s idea. The space agency’s hype was lost on them…
It surprises me how many graduates leave college assuming they know what matters because they got straight “A”s. If we can believe advertisements, what matters to these people most is the personal ownership of machinery: blending machines, cooking machines, driving machines, picture machines, sound machines, tooth-brushing machines, computing machines, machines to kill insects, deliver intimacy, send messages through wires or the naked air, entertainment machines, shooting machines, and many more mechanical extensions of our physical self. Indirect control over even more ambitious machine seems to matter a lot, too: flying machines, bombing machines, heart and lung machines, voting machines, and a great variety of other mechanical creations…
All these devices are meant to defeat what otherwise would occur naturally if they didn’t exist. They are all machines to beat human destiny and confer on human beings magical powers and the reach and longevity of gods.
Do they deliver what they promise? Is human life in a net sense better since their advent? I can’t answer that for you, of course, but you can look into your heart and answer the question for yourself. Someone has apparently convinced us that what occurs naturally cannot be the way to a good life, hence these battalions of machinery. What percentage of your life is spent talking to machines? Buying them, mastering them, ministering to their needs, then betraying them with ever newer and newer machine loves?
It takes a lot of time, but what does it take a lot of time away from? Television has cost the average 21-year-old about 18,000 hours of time. What would that time have gone toward otherwise? learning to build a house? Going to government-run school takes another 15,000 hours from the young life, 21,000 if you count going and coming and homework. What might this time have gone toward otherwise? From the very small amount of time remaining, machinery other than television gobbles a great deal. What does it give back in return? Hearts-ease? Love? Courage? Self-reliance? Friends? Dreams?,,,
More:
http://www.naturallifemagazine.com/9412/gatto.htm
6 July 2010, 6:44 pmStan:
FULL
FULL
6 July 2010, 9:45 pmStan:
BUILDING PROGRAM OF THE GARDEN PARTY
The Garden Party Program is practical. For the next five years from when you read this, we will pursue a strategy of built-environment conversion. Before we can pursue a direct political strategy to overthrow The System, we will change the environment to one where we have more advantages than disadvantages.
1. Build swales.
2. Build rain gardens.
3. Build compost heaps.
4. Build worm farms.
5. Build self-sustaining gardens.
6. Build chicken coops.
7. Build rooftop gardens.
8. Build composting toilets.
9. Build herb spirals.
10. Build gray-water systems.
11. Build forest gardens.
12. Build community gardens.
13. Build water catchments.
14. Build with cob.
15. Build local solar electricity systems.
16. Build local wind electricity systems.
17. Build local hydroelectricity systems.
18. Build local backyard farmers markets.
19. Build school gardens.
20. Build prison gardens.
21. Build apartment gardens.
22. Build seed-exchanges.
23. Build re-use flea markets.
24. Build urban gleaning systems.
25. Re-build and refit existing homes toward zero-carbon.
26. Build community tool lockers.
27. Build labor-trade networks.
28. Build church gardens.
29. Build raised beds.
30. Un-build buildings instead of demolishing them, and recover materials.
31. Build beehives.
32. Build local, sustainable septic systems.
33. Build food oases in food deserts.
34. Build greenhouses.
35. Build pavement gardens.
36. Build re-use exchanges.
37. Build medicinal herb gardens.
38. Build CSAs.
add yours… rule: nothing figurative, only direct and practical.
Seen together, the overarching goal of the program is two-fold: carbon sequestration and making it so people don’t have to do humiliating, compulsory, time-consuming shit to earn a living.
The Garden Party is aware of all the imaginary risks of all the deviance entailed in laying out a program without staff or administration, and we accept that risk without hesitation. Let the chips fall where they may, we say… we know the imaginariness of the risks because we are an imaginary party. No committees. No staffs. Ever.
Motto of the Garden Party: We have concrete victories every single day. (or “We don’t need administration,” Pink Floyd background)
21 November 2010, 9:52 amCurt:
I am looking for my monocle to study die List more carefully.
21 November 2010, 4:34 pmCurt:
Wow. that list ist clever. In fact it is so briliant that I bet that it could only have been compliled by a German, no I really mean a pRussian military scientist. Stan if you really came up with that on your own people will soon be spelling your last name with a J. You will be introduced as General Stan Joff of the Budnes Heer.
21 November 2010, 6:27 pmr graves:
here’s one for the quote list I came across this morning:
“Never build, but always plant. In the case of the first, nature will interfere and destroy the creation of your work, but in the case of the second, nature will help you, causing growth in everything you planted. The same thing happens in your spiritual life: those things which are in harmony with the eternal laws of hman nature will grow, but those things which correspond to the temporal wishes of people will not.” -Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, November 22
24 November 2010, 9:39 amStan:
Tolstoy’s ‘A Confession‘ is a lodestone for me.
24 November 2010, 10:07 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
This has sat in the dark recesses (redundant) of my mind for a while now, and I think (some) people (or maybe just myself) may respond better to the idea of a “Compost (non-)Party.” But then again, the whole idea (or one of the central ideas) is to focus on the material over the symbolic, so this may be beside the point.
If I may ask (randomly), have you read John Zerzan or other anarcho-primitivists, and what are your thoughts, if so?
31 March 2011, 6:36 pm