Turtle Island Economics

I'm Starting a New Blog

2009-01-14T09:50:00.003-06:00

I'm going to move Turtle Island Economics to the garage for the known future, as I'm starting a new blog with Urbana.org.

It's called All Things New: A Conversation about Who We're Becoming. I hope you join me there.

Here's the introductory essay for ATN:

All Things New is about exploring our world with an attitude of big-hearted curiosity. This blog grows out of three distinct spiritual-intellectual turning points in my life.

1. Curiosity

At the age of sixteen, my father taught me the attitude of curiosity. We were in process of relocating to the United States, after several years in Switzerland. Destination? Wisconsin, a quiet state in the north-central part of the country. I was unimpressed. I had hoped for someplace exciting, as defined by an expatriate teenager whose window to America was Hollywood.

“There’s nothing to do in Wisconsin,” I told him. I imagined cheese, harsh winters, and the Green Bay Packers. None very compelling to me. “When we get to Wisconsin,” my dad told me, “you’re going to find people who live there by choice. They’re not captives. Your job is to find out why.”

With that short little instruction, my life was changed. I found tallgrass prairies and persistent ethnic neighborhoods. I found a major American regional dialect shift taking place; I found all kinds of foods I had never previously tasted. In short, I discovered that Wisconsin—and by extension the entire world—had far more treasure to it than I understood as a media-saturated adolescent.

Curiosity is no accident: it is a willingness to remain enchanted by the world, when disenchantment is the natural response. If, as Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen asserts in his small masterpiece A Philosophy of Boredom, boredom “contains a rejection of—or rather detestation of—God and his creation (p. 50),” curiosity is boredom’s inverse. Curiosity and faith are intertwined.

2. Truth Grasped

A few years later, I was studying at the University of Wisconsin, a large and worldly institution dedicated to “ever encourag[ing] that fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found” (the school’s motto). I was genuinely saddened and, well, disenchanted to discover: not all thinkers were interested in finding the truth. Many seemed more interested in critique.

Two thousand years ago a witness to the intellectual climate of Athens saw a similar situation:

All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas (Acts 17:21).

To rephrase in terms of my school, they were more interested in “sifting and winnowing” than in “finding the truth.” They were dedicated to endless, rather than fearless, sifting.

Intellectual maturity, it struck me then and now, involves fearless sifting, followed by fearless grasping of what truth can be grasped. Skepticism, though useful as a tool for sifting and winnowing, can often paralyze the soul.

3. Big-Heartedness

Again a few years later, I was on staff with InterVarsity. An aging lion of the Civil Rights Movement addressed a national staff gathering, with a message of Christian humanism. Years of digging for truth had shown me the empty foundations behind humanisms of all stripes, which I confidently shared with my team during the subsequent debriefing time.

In return I received a stunning rebuke. My team leader bluntly warned me not to “become one of those people,” those critical souls so dedicated to correct doctrine that they miss truth in disguise. She went deeper:

“You have a choice to make here. Every time you choose to criticize, you risk becoming more of a critical person.”

To say that God and God’s truth are bigger than comprehension is not to succumb to cynical relativism. No: it is to balance our search for truth with a willingness to grasp it even when it comes bundled with nonsense.

If the risk of broad curiosity is seduction by untruths, the risk of unbending insistence on orthodoxy is that of becoming an unbending soul.

A Conversation about Who We’re Becoming

Okay, so what? Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish with All Things New: I want to invite you—readers—to join me in this quest. I will unearth treasures—cultural, ecological, theological, and interdisciplinary—and try to share them with you.

I want to hear your thoughtful, big-hearted opinions, and I want you to read others’. Together we might discover something important.

I read a lot of books. I cross cultures daily, in my neighborhood and through my church. I take my kids on field trips to the park. I listen to missionaries’ stories whenever I get a chance. Whenever my toe strikes something worth sharing, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, if you find a treasure of your own, that you want to discuss, let me know; I’ll see what I can do.

Yodelling is Alive

2008-09-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

I went to a nearby town recently, to hear a yodelling concert. New Glarus, Wisconsin is a town founded a hundred seventy years ago a Swiss emigrant community. They far more than cling to old traditions: they cultivate them, and keep them alive. Here are two members of a local choir, getting ready for a concert.

Mobile Citizenship?

2008-09-09T11:22:00.002-05:00

A fascinating article in Eurozine on Bulgarian migrant workers examines the ways global capitalism demands a deep rethinking of the very concept of home.

Basically, a huge percentage of Bulgarians are displaced laborers across the European Union, quite often "without papers." Their fate in many respects resembles that of undocumented Mexicans in the US: forever in danger of being deported, they end up under the control of coyotes, sometimes as near-slaves.

As illegal residents, they have a relationship to the host society that is ambiguous at best, and certainly offers no chance at integration.

Here's the question that kept returning to my mind as I was reading: to what extent are American citizens, in full possession of citizenship, thrown into the exact same cultural no-man's-land? How many condos are mere bedrooms for a transient class of professionals, whose belonging to their place begins and ends with their current job?

How many of us would suffer very little loss if our entire cities were to burn to the ground, forcing us to up and relocate?

How I Long For A Paw-Paw

2008-09-05T10:59:00.000-05:00

I'm reading a tasty book on endangered foods of North America. It's got everything from "Tennessee Fainting Goats" to all kinds of berries, beans, and corn varieties I'd never heard of.

The authors of Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods broke North America down into ecological "nations" sharing traditional staple foods, from "Maple Syrup Nation" in the northeast, to "Bison Nation" in the plains, to most appropriately, "Acorn Nation" (California).

For each region they highlight several perfectly good foods, that have been left along the wayside for any of several reasons. Mission grapes, for instance: A type of grape grown for wine at Spanish-Californian missions. The breed suffered two setbacks, from which it barely survived. The first, of course, was California's transfer to the United States, which hastened the end of the missions, after which many were abandoned. The second was prohibition, during which period most of the remaining vines plowed under for other crops.

When California's wine industry returned, it was designed in competition with French wine. French grapes like Merlots and Chardonnays were planted. Most growers had never heard of Mission grapes, until one grower discovered feral mission grape vines in a sage-covered hillside she had bought. Apparently left to their fate a century ago, these handful of vines survived and have now been restored as a novelty wine, produced in only a few cases a year.

Meanwhile, some fruits--like Paw-Paws--are too fragile to transport in trucks and crates. I have never had a Paw-Paw, although archeologists have found paw-paw seeds among native kitchen scraps right in my neck of the woods. It's possible to grow them here, but we stick to a half-dozen varieties of apples.

There are several stories like this, and page after page I grew more amazed at how impoverished my supermarket is. There can't be more than a few dozen fruits and vegetables in the produce section rotation; or a dozen meat animals. The authors of Renewing America's Food Traditions have opened my eyes to endless new possibilities.

Beyond the joy of variety, however, lies a deeper issue: if we're ever going to survive a national interruption to our transportation network - whether in the form of terrorism or simple unaffordability (fuel prices) - it will be because our neighborhoods and surrounding counties have figured out how to feed themselves with crops uniquely suited to their conditions.

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Photo Credit: Flickr user Blackstone Photography of WV

Hurricane Season

2008-09-04T09:40:00.003-05:00

Badgers are Back in Town

2008-09-03T10:58:00.000-05:00

One of the strange aspects of living across the tracks in a college town is seeing life go on, year round, with no hint that another part of the city is alternately bustling or vacant.

It is my pleasure to announce, then, that the Badgers are back in town.

This clip accurately portrays gameday atmosphere, albeit without profane chanting, drunken staggering and puking, and broken bottles on sidewalks. Badger games are fun (although I haven't attended one in three or four years).

These tribal gathering are impressive. It is to Badger home games that alumni typically refer in their fondest memories; the home games, then, are highly significant for "Badger Nation" identification, i.e. fund-raising.

It shouldn't be heroic to make room for the disabled

2008-09-02T09:50:00.006-05:00

This is an ugly man. Or was, rather. He was an Etruscan, one of the indigenous tribes of Italy, whose civilization was wiped out by the Romans.

Etruscan art is notable for its depiction of normal people, warts and all--a stark contrast to the heroic obsessions of the Romans.

The professor who taught me these things felt it important to note that a measure of a society's cruelty or kindness is its treatment of the disabled. In the case of the Etruscans, their willingness to depict ugly people suggests a similar willingness to include them in their society.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin.

Andy Crouch notes in Culture-Making that the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate's now-famous decision to keep her Down Syndrome baby is an instance of cultural leadership. In a nation where 85% of Down Syndrome babies are quietly aborted, Palin's is an expression of inclusivity.

So far, so good. But it's a creepy thought to consider that (in the media's eyes, at least), her decision is noble. In fact, if we really believe in inclusivity, tolerance and democracy, we oughtn't bat an eye about Palin's decision. It shouldn't be heroic to make room for the disabled.

The general acclaim about Palin's heroism testifies more to the hidden shame in our society of our hidden intolerance for the weak, the ugly, the disabled and the outsiders.

PHOTO CREDIT: Flickr user diffendale.

Waste is a Spiritual Matter

2008-08-30T08:22:00.001-05:00

A conversation about ethanol recently took a surprisingly emotional turn. My friend, from a large Asian country never far from food emergencies, told me how wrong it feels to him when Americans waste food, or play with it, or in the case at hand, drive it.

This was refreshing even as it was urgent. Because food is life. It should be felt, not just consumed. In fact, there's something deeply human about strong feelings about wasted food.

Meanwhile, the New Republic's Vine - their environmental blog - takes a look at wasted food. As it turns out, roughly 50% of the food we humans produce gets wasted. In poor countries it's market inefficiencies (food rotting in the fields etc.); in rich countries it's too much market efficiency (Food is so cheap that we buy more than we can use and throw it away.

Vicarious Vicariosity

2008-08-28T12:06:00.004-05:00

My beloved FC Basel qualified for the UEFA Champions League this week. Today they were matched for the group phase against FC Barcelona, Sporting Lisbon, and Shakhtar Donetsk of Ukraine.

I've followed Basel since the 1980's, when I lived there. Back then, the team was in the Swiss division 2, so I can claim to have followed them since they were really bad.

Here is the Question: what does it mean to follow a team vicariously like this? I mean, I live in another country, never watch their games, and know no other fans.

Photo Credit: Flickr User keepthebyte

Manufactured Landscapes

2008-08-27T09:47:00.002-05:00

My iPod doesn't actually come from a copper mine in Arizona. It comes from China. And when it eventually gets destroyed, a lot of it will go back to China a scrap and possibly as toxic waste.

Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary I saw recently, on DVD from the library. It's really stirring in its silent depiction of the industrial landscape of the workshop to the world, China.

Here's the trailer. I really recommend it.

Where My iPod Comes From

2008-08-23T09:06:00.000-05:00

It is sometimes difficult, in our globalized economy, to conceptualize the connectedness of our consumer products. If, for instance, our bread contains foodstuffs from a half-dozen states and three or four countries, we can be excused ignorance of truly complicated items like computers.

It was a little sobering to recently visit an enormous copper mine in Arizona. (Copper, of course, is needed for circuitry.) It's kind of hard to represent just how enormous this production was, so here are two attempts.

First, a few pictures. The first two are satelite images, screen shots from Google; the third I took from the blue shed in the background of the tire picture above:

Now, here's a panorama with my pathetic camera:

They extract miniscule amounts of copper from all this rock a few grams to the ton, I believe. So mines have to be this big to even stay in business, even at today's sky-high prices. It's the only business model that works.

I'm trying to grow beyond knee-jerk opposition to mining. We oughtn't judge mining in the Sonoran Desert under the same criteria as mining in Armenian forests, for instance.

Reclaiming Friendship

2008-08-20T09:57:00.004-05:00

Andy Crouch has a new essay on culture-making.com about online social networks (scroll to August 18, because I can't find a way to link to individual articles).

[Courtesy of Andy's comment: here's the link. Thanks, Andy!]

Looking at Twitter in particular, he points out that there is a limit to interpersonal relationships people can handle: somewhere around 150. Beyond that, as he says, "our little brains get overloaded. But online social networks are not just relational tools; they're also tools for "broadcasting".

It may well be that many of the most powerful media of the next generation will have this hybrid quality—keeping us connected, in some thin but real sense, to our "real" friends, but also allowing us access to the thoughts of folks like Barack Obama. And the second group, the "broadcasters," will likely be the drivers of whatever business model eventually makes these networks sustainable.

True enough. But it's important to add one detail, important from the perspective of humanness: online friends are not identical to real friends. The difference lies in love.

Dr. Venn can help us here:

In this model, set A represents people to whom I am bound by love (broadly conceived); set B represents people to whom I am bound by online social networks. The intersect are those people I know online, and whom I love.

This is an idealized, of course: love resists facile quantification, so it's hard to know where real loyalties lie. One test, of course, is the sickness test: who will come for a visit weeks and months into a sickness? Survivors of such illnesses often testify of surprise about who came and who didn't.

The other source of the confusion is cultural, not technological: as a culture of individualists, we really have no handle on loyal friendship. We are lonely, we don't know how to have friends, and we don't know how to be friends.

So when Myspace et al. use the human word friend to denote a morally neutral technological relationship, our confusion only grows. Adolescents, of course, who are in the process of that most traumatic of splits--away from parents--are doubly confused here.

Then there is the cross-cultural. Americans as a rule are far more prepared to use the word friend than people of more communal cultures. I have, for instance, found old Swiss classmates of mine on Facebook, people with whom I spent years in the same room. But I wouldn't dare add them as friends, because they weren't friends, in the Swiss sense: they weren't people who'd cross the world to be by my deathbed, or visa-versa. And so they remain unconnected to my Facebook account.

But since we live in a hybrid culture, and since Facebook and Myspace remain thoroughly American, I am also friends with people I don't even know, or in the case of Johnny Cash's Myspace account, people who are dead. (I share the latter relationship with 302,000 people, around the population of Pittsburgh.)

Culture-Makers, to use Andy Crouch's term, have low-hanging fruit here: Friendship, real friendship, is a lost art, but one which has strong support in scripture and church tradition. Culture-Makers concerned about the individualism in American culture could do worse than look at Reclaiming Friendship, to steal the title of Ajith Fernando's out-of-print, pre-Myspace gem.

Sense of a Place that Never Really Was

2008-08-19T08:12:00.000-05:00

I’m not big on graphic novels, because the stories too often play second-fiddle to less-than-compelling artwork. Sometimes I read about such and such a story being “deep” or “sweeping” and I end up feeling like I’ve eaten unseasoned soup.

This is one of the wonderful exceptions. White Rapids, by Pascal Blanchet. It's the story of a company town in remote northern Quebec, built around a hydro-electric dam. The company provided amenities resembling mid-century North American middle-class life, in exchange for the hardship of living in utter isolation [map] with a few hundred other employees and families.

It's a short book, with fanciful art deco drawings conveying a Utopian nostalgia, something I normally find quite off-putting. But the Never-Never-Land effect works here, in part because it feels like outlandish propaganda by a loaded and megalomaniac company, one willing to impose an impossible town on an unforgiving landscape, at great expense, for the even greater profits that would follow.

In light of that history, Utopianism is the only possible design choice, like Las Vegas in the desert.

Here's the artist's website.

Not all racial boorishness is racism.

2008-08-16T14:28:00.011-05:00

Racism is alive and dangerous, from genocide on down to exclusion. It's an issue of the heart, and needs to be dealt with as such.

That's why I'm not all that upset about the Spanish basketball team's "slant-eye" photo-op. Making fun of somebody's facial features is just provincial. It's something that's funny when you're a child, and is no longer interesting when you grow up.

But when we use words like racist where stupid would suffice, we risk dilluting the importance of addressing racism.

Consider this, from Feyenoord (Rotterdam, Netherlands) fans, chanting against Ajax of Amsterdam (a team associated with Jews, albeit with no Jews on the roster:

Hamas, Hamas, the Jews into the Gas

It's around 0:25 of this clip. the Dutch is "hamas, hamas, joden aan het gas":

Comments below the clip (in Dutch) argue the finer point that they hate Ajax Jews (the largely gentile fans), not Jews in general.

Ian Buruma attended one of these matches while writing Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerence:

"F__ing Jews!" [Feyenoord fans] went again every time an Ajax player touched the ball, even if he was a black Surinamese. "Cancer Jew!" they shouted when the blond referee from the northern province of Friesland whistled for a Feyenoord foul.

And then I heard it for the first time, a sinister hissing sound from hundreds, maybe thousands, of beer-flecked mouths. I didn't know what it meant, until [Buruma's friend] Hans explained it. The sound got louder: the sound of escaping gas.

In Budapest soccer stadiums, players of a side owned by a Jewish businessman were greeted by rival supporters shouting: "The trains to Auschwitz are ready!" In the Olympic Stadium of Amsterdam, the fans were a touch more inventive.

In light of such creepy populist passion, it seems trite to accuse the Spaniards of racism. Racism is deadly, and shouldn't by dilluted by association with stupidity.

One Week's Haul

2008-08-15T16:13:00.007-05:00

One Week's Haul
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant

Becca and I have been members of a local CSA for several years, and this summer's been one of the best.

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), for newcomers, is simply pre-buying membership in a farm's produce, in exchange for weekly baskets during the growing season.

Basically, you buy into the risks and bounty of a given farmer's year, and you commit to a relationship with that producer.

CSAs put the eater and the grower in close contact. We have to speak to one another on a weekly basis, something that rarely occurs at the supermarket. The system also helps the local economy in big ways and small: together we're helping our region, our county, become a little closer to agriculturally self-sufficient.

If, as Homeland Security is always saying, our national food supply is at risk for bio-terror attack, the best solution is to diversify the supply.

Meanwhile, there's an added benefit to a CSA: the food is way fresher, and tastier. So, for example: this week we got okra, chiles, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, apples, peppers, onions, and a melon.

The produce is seasonal, of course. Earlier it was lettuce, garlic and strawberries; later it'll be acorn squash, potatoes and the like.

This is significant. Eating is, as Wendell Berry put it, an agricultural act. It is profoundly humbling to understand just how connected we are to the work of growing food in fields.

In the abstraction of our daily lives from the real world of gaining our life from the dirt, we are impoverished where we needn't be, and in the ease with which we fill our bellies, courtesy of our convenience culture, we are robbed of the very humility that can help us retain our sense of human finiteness.

To visit, then, with Mr. Pierce, as he asks about my baby, while packing my food--this brings about way more than entertainment and tasty tomatoes. It is goodness (broadly conceived).

Segregation as euphemism

2008-08-14T11:20:00.002-05:00

Segregation simply means keeping things apart. But a word so burdened with history means nothing simply.

Segregation (along with its South African cousin apartheid) has a long track record as a prescription (not just a de-scription) for racial life in America: black and white were to be kept apart by force of the law.

But a thought has crossed my mind in recent days: segregation is a euphemism. That is, it's a delicate way of saying something far worse.

Segregation is a euphemism for isolation. Keeping people apart was not really the goal; after all, even in Bull Connor's country black and white were in constant contact. Somebody needed to cook and do laundry and change diapers, after all.

No, it was never about keeping people separate. It was always about keeping people in their place.

And while segregationists were able to distort scripture to justify their purposes (i.e. don't marry Canaanites), isolation can't be justified with scripture.

Isolation gets uglier the more you look at it. It's dehumanizing, degrading and destructive.

That's why segregation is shameful. That's why isolationists needed to hide behind the euphemism of segregation.

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[photo credit: sxc.hu user pixelstar

I'm reading about headscarves

2008-08-12T10:50:00.004-05:00

I'm now reading a terrific book called Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Religion, the State, and Public Space.

This is by American anthropologist John Bowen, who was living in France for a few years while the French were debating (and passing) a law banning Muslim headscarves in the public schools.

Far more than a political story, Bowen explains the French political/social worldview, which proves incredibly useful. I've been following this story for years, and having it explained in worldview terms helps immensely.

For instance: Bowen notes that the French tend to view social freedoms as coming from, and being guaranteed by, the state. Any weakening of the state will ultimately threaten human rights.

Since Muslims believe that Islam contains ultimate truth, most believe their religion needs to be lived out in all areas of life, not just in private.

But the French tend to view publicly assertive religion in terms of their lengthy struggle with the Catholic Church. For a century after the revolution, the Church insisted on "integrism", or the Church's dominance in all of life.

The French state prevailed by the creation of laïcité, usually translated as secularism. All public life is to be secular, according to this line of thought, because only a secular public space can guarantee freedom of thought and conscience.

When a Muslim girl wears a scarf--a veil as it's called--in school, the guardians of laïcité feel this is an assertion of Islam's superiority over the secular space.

Wisconsin Citrus

2008-08-08T11:56:00.005-05:00

Despite its harsh winters, Madison (and the surrounding Dane County) is one of the United States' food capitals. Between year-round farmers markets, seasonal ones in almost every town, dozens of community gardens, abundant Community Supported Agriculture offerings, farmer-owned cooperatives, and an environment teeming with fish, turkeys, and other cuddly edibles, this is one of the country's regions best prepared to survive a national disruption in commodity food supply.

But some foods simply can't be grown here. Like Lemons, and Coffee. It's too cool in the summer and the season is too short.

So what's a place-conscious person to do? Find stand-ins, of course. This summer I've been making "lemonade" from sumac berries—something I'd never done before, and which frankly always sounds just a little too granola for me. But it's cheap (free), and fun, so why not? And it's good. Sort of citrus-y tart, and beautifully red.

Meanwhile, the Isthmus (a local paper) is profiling a berry farmer who's experimenting with seaberries as a legit substitute for oranges.

[Farmer] Secher is thinking big. He's not looking to create niche products, but a new fruit market "we can mainstream regionally—one that's sustainable environmentally, economically and socially." He dreams of regional processing and marketing and the infrastructure to make it happen.

This isn't necessarily starry-eyed thinking. Kiwifruit, for example, was a niche crop, closely associated with New Zealand (but native to China) until the mid-twentieth century, before it gained institutional support from big bad USDA. The USDA is now looking at Lingonberries and others.

Ecologically speaking, we should put a lot more work into feeding ourselves at a local level. There are countless foods we could be eating—far more than the twenty or thirty in the supermarket rotation. Most are either too widespread to be marketable (Dandelions, for example, make great salad), or too fragile to be industrially processed or transportable on a national basis (Paw-Paws, for example).

Introducing ...

2008-08-02T14:01:00.005-05:00

His name is Silas.

Boomers Approaching, Hat in Hand

2008-08-01T18:06:00.000-05:00

A new study shows what any fool could have told us: the majority of the Baby Boomer generation will outlive their savings.

In other words, we their children and grandchildren will have to pay for them.

The Baby Boomers, long ago nicknamed the "Me Generation," the people who brought us Woodstock and Yuppies, are now eligible for AARP membership. Millions of them are woefully unprepared for the challenge of old age.

Somebody will have to care for them, and that somebody will be whoever's in their prime productive years. In fact, loving elderly Boomers may well be the main thing we do with our next forty years. It will be an awesome responsibility, and an opportunity, too: we have before us the chance to reshape the history of generational relationships.

Adults throughout history have taken care of their parents and children simultaneously. What sets our generation apart is that we will have more old people than children to care for. Taking care of the Baby Boomers will be the greatest moral challenge our generation faces—how we do it will be the measure of our character.

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Photo Credit: Winnebago Industries

Highways are Rivers

2008-07-23T13:20:00.003-05:00

The current oil crisis has cities all over the country thinking about mass transit. But some of our basic transportation problems won't be solved by quick solutions. Not that streetcars are cheap, but they're a lot cheaper than solving the underlying problem: our transportation infrastructure is built around cars. And highways are rivers: they can't be crossed, except by expensive bridges.

Urban transportation projects, starting in the fifties, focused on the automobile above all other forms of transit. Specifically, on how to quickly and efficiently move cars from the suburbs into city centers.

Poor neighborhoods tended to get in the way. David Hilfiker points out in his book Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen:

As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be placed so as to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants (p. 8).

If we're really going to break our addiction to oil (as President Bush calls it), we're going to need to redesign our urban infrastructure, a multi-decade project.

Sorry, Al Gore, while your plan for energy independence is grand, energy independence can only be achieved by efficient consumption (not just generation), which in turn requires a fundamental rethinking of urban planning. We're in this for the long haul, no pun intended.

Reverse White Flight?

2008-07-20T22:11:00.011-05:00

I'm going to be chewing on this article from the Wall Street Journal for a few days. "The End of White Flight" reports on the return of middle-class whites to the urban centers of America, after a half-century of flight to the suburbs.

What interests me most, of course, were the cultural conflicts reported in the story, such as white parent demands the PTA stop selling ice cream (for diabetes). More importantly, the churches:

Old inner-city white churches are reviving after years of decline, while black churches are following their parishioners out to the burbs. One black church in Washington D.C. is looking to hire a white intern to reach the new neighbors.

Obviously this is anecdotal. But I must point out: 99% of interracial outreach by the American church is done by black churches. That's how, 11 years ago, I became a member of my (majority-black) church.

There's another element here: As African Americans flee the cities, the poorest of the poor African Americans are left behind, and what was a race matter becomes a class matter.

Elsewehere I've seen predictions of exurbs becoming the ghettos of the future, as gas prices make living way out of town decreasingly desireable.

[Photo Credit: Flickr User Boyznberry]

Who's Your (Caveman) Daddy?

2008-07-16T20:09:00.007-05:00

Nothing quite like loving your hometown. DNA testing has connected two rural German men to a 3,000 year old caveman, whose bones were dug up on the hill outside the village.

In other words, in 3,000 years (i.e. 500 years before Buddha or Socrates), these people haven't moved beyond the village. Puts a whole new meaning to the concept of roots.

It also brings to mind the verse from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (who, incidentally, was several centuries younger than that lineage in Germany):

Let [people] be content with their own homes, and delight in the customs that they cherish.
Although the next country is close enough that they can hear their roosters crowing and dogs barking, they are content never to visit each other all of the days of their lives.

photo credit: Flickr user Andrea Pi

Spirit Dance

2008-07-11T13:00:00.007-05:00

Here's an album I've been listening to not quite constantly this week: Bill Miller's Spirit Dance. (iTunes has song previews)

I've been a Bill Miller fan for several years. He's a folk singer from Wisconsin (currently Nashville, of course) who has blended his Native American musical skills with the mainstream American singer-songwriter folk style.

His songs are at once heartbreakingly real and powerfully hopeful, as he manages to look hard and long at the poverty and hardships of reservation life through the lens of Christian hope at its concrete best.

More importantly, he consistently manages to create a meaningful sense of place in his music. The songs are never wishy-washy, even as they're often fictional. They're in "paper mill towns" and along "reservation roads", on "sacred ground".

Nobody's Hands Are Unbloodied

2008-07-07T14:04:00.000-05:00

The German arts media have been in a tizzy this year (summary, in English) over European architects' "collaboration" with non-democratic regimes--especially China, and especially around next month's Olympic Games.

The main question is of the political meaning of art: does building for a totalitarian regime lend legitimacy to said regime? The jury is out on the matter, at least in part because of China's non-pariah status in the business world--and architecture belongs as much to business as to art.

A bigger problem, in my eyes, is the question of ambiguous guilt. We all sense that our hands are bloodied by virtue of being in this world, yet we can't discern why, or a way out.

The resultant Puritanism of the secular left is the main reason why America by and large hasn't joined the progressive movement: there's more guilt there than you can shake a stick at, and no hope for salvation (see obsessive carbon-counting).

Europe (European cultural leaders at least) is much more sold on ambiguous guilt, which is why Architecture finds itself in this debate.

I don't have an opinion about the answer: where is the boundary between engagement with a totalitarian regime and endorsement of it? I don't know. But my sense is that the answer doesn't lie anywhere on that axis.

Photo Credit Flickr User Theo W L Jones

Window on Our Ongoing Segregation

2008-07-05T12:20:00.011-05:00

I was at first surprised, and had to rewind. It came during a podcast I enjoy—which will remain unnamed—targeted at young leaders in the evangelical church. The moderator asked the audience to email in responses to this question:

“How many of your evangelical friends are truly considering, or have already stated, ‘I'm going to vote for [Obama]’ --versus McCain? How many of your evangelical, Christ-follower friends are saying, ‘I’m not going to vote at all’?”

The fact that this question is asked makes one thing obvious: The black church is not on the radar screen here.

Nine out of ten African Americans are planning on voting for Obama. Since far more than 10% of African Americans would consider themselves “Christ-followers”, it's safe to say that a runaway majority of the black church is voting for him.

But the question tells us that we still live in different worlds. And since a large chunk of my life straddles this divide, it makes me sad—and makes me feel a little homeless.

Please note: I’m not calling these people racist. I’m merely noting that if we—as a church—were in real communion with each other, we wouldn’t wonder if “Christ followers” were voting for Obama. We’d just understand that the church has not made up its mind about the presidential vote.

Photo Credit: Flickr User PhotoMuse!

Revolutionary Roadkill

2008-07-03T20:00:00.013-05:00

Leave it to the counterculture to glamorize scavenging.

I've just finished a most engrossing book, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements. It was a lot of fun, reading about unpasteurized cheese, organic farming, and the slow food movement.

Then the chapter on "Feral Foraging". Author Sandor Ellix Katz profiles some former vegans who've taken to eating roadkill--not as an act of desperation, but as counterculture. One he quotes as redefining roadkill:

"Transforming dishonored victims of the petroleum age into food which nourishes, and clothing which warms."

Victims of the petroleum age! And you thought you were a progressive. These guys are way ahead. If they don't die first.

Photo Credit: marta rattlesnacks, from Flickr

Sustainable Swiss Soccer

2008-06-07T14:00:00.001-05:00

The world’s third-largest sports event is underway: Euro 08, Europe’s tournament of national soccer teams [cue Europop Soundtrack].

Alongside hooligan-control and Spice-Girl appearances, co-hosts Switzerland and Austria have put sustainable development at the center of their strategic outcomes—as defined on three levels: ecology, economy and society.

Basically, the hosts want to be better off for having held the tournament. This is by no means an obvious goal: Glendale, Arizona lost $2.2 million on this year’s Super Bowl. Massive sports tournaments are basically one-time events, capable of permanently reshaping entire landscapes.

The Alpine hosts’ great insight is that one-time events take place in locations with histories and futures—natural and human—and that events of this variety are only worthwhile in the short run if they’re worthwhile in the long run.

What's really needed here is a new global standard for measuring cost and benefit (like the Genuine Progress Indicator) that can help us count more than money, and the Swiss and Austrians deserve some praise for bringing us a little closer to that goal.

[photo credit: Flickr user 'Host City Salzburg']

Life Imitates Telenovelas

2008-06-04T11:07:00.013-05:00

The more you watch Brazilian telenovelas, the fewer children you have.

This according to an amazing working paper (pdf), brought to my attention by my favorite blog, Salon's How the World Works.

The gist of it is that Brazilian soap operas, over a period of forty years, have consistently starred female characters with one or fewer children—far fewer than the Brazilian norm (see table below, taken from the paper).

Here's where it gets interesting. The researchers—Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea—then look at the relationship between novella-watching and child-bearing. Since Brazil in this period was wiring the hinterlands, they can map a difference between regions which received a TV signal and those which didn't.

In regions with the signal, the more someone watches those glamorous, single-child soaps, the fewer children she will have. They also can trace a huge incidence in children being named after the stars of the soaps.

No great surprise there: In the US, Aiden (Sex and the City character) has become the 27th most popular boy's name.

Cities Are Good for the Environment

2008-06-01T14:46:00.003-05:00

This shouldn't come as a surprise, but cities are efficient. That's why we built cities in the first place, thousands of years ago. Cities require far fewer resources per person.

Still, much of the environmental movement remains fixated on "nature," and for a variety of reasons—Jeffersonian individualism, puritan suspicion of urban decadence, etc.

It's been a matter of some joy for me to see the American evangelical church discover the environment. These are, in many respects, my people, and it's good to see needed change.

Still, my people, by and large, have bought into the contempt for urban life so characteristic of the American soul. The trouble is, almost no American lives a truly rural life: even those of us who live in small towns or exurbs drive long distances, for the purpose of accessing urban amenities. (Like stores, workplaces, entertainment etc.) Basically, we're long-distance city-dwellers.

What we need is a change in expectations. We need to learn to love cities.

Al Jazeera talks to Farmer Jim

2008-05-16T13:09:00.007-05:00

You know biofuels are a force to be reckoned with when the world’s media start turning up in the rural Midwest. Record-breaking global corn prices are responsible for the attention, and this mostly because rich countries have taken to driving our food in the form of ethanol.

Al Jazeera talks to Illinois farmer Jim Robbins, and connects the dots to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where global commodity prices are set:

Not to be outdone, France 24 talks to farmers in Indiana. This segment is worth watching, if for no other reason than the sneering reporter’s accent:

Both segments highlight short-term market fluctuations driven by long-term changes in the world. Farmer Jim says:

“We’re going to need these high prices to continue, because our input costs … are going to go up, and that’s going to catch up with us.”

In other words, this is an economic bubble—froth on the sides of our transition away from fossil fuels. As France 24 points out,

“Ethanol … may only be a transitional fuel; even if the whole of the US were covered with corn fields, it would not produce enough ethanol to replace oil.”

Jeremiah and Me

2008-05-10T10:42:00.004-05:00

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright and I have a lot in common.

We’re both by nature eggheads and idealists, who’d rather talk ecclesiology than politics, and who’d rather take action than work the machines of law.

But here’s one difference: when duty called, he joined the marines, and served his country with distinction.

I, on the other hand, didn’t lift a finger. Still, his patriotism is questioned, mine is not.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here is Wright, tending to his president:

Where My Computer Comes From

2008-04-20T10:12:00.002-05:00

I just got back from a week in Arizona with my Dad. Along the highway to Tucson, we drove past this copper mine:

It's a simple reminder that technology is not as clean as it feels. But our demand for copper (to run our computers, phones and laptops) makes it profitable to tear up land at this scale.

Obama used to party here

2008-02-13T09:53:00.004-06:00

Barack in Madison, Wisconsin
Originally uploaded by Barack Obama

I was not part of this 20,000. No, I was part of the overflow crowd stuck in the adjacent practice facility.

We stood in line for an hour and a half -- it was in the single digits, with the wind whipping snow into our faces, before being told that homeland security wouldn't be letting us in to the main arena. Alas.

On the plus side, Obama poked his head into the overflow room before his speech, and was a little more personal:

"I love Madison. Back when I was a community organizer in Chicago, before I went to law school, I used to come up here for some R & R. I can't tell you what we did, but I love Madison."

Coming to Madison

2008-02-12T13:03:00.001-06:00

College Park Rally
Originally uploaded by Barack Obama

The fever is certainly catching in Madison, with a rally for tonight at the Kohl Center. I am planning on going, although I've heard people are standing in line all day to get in. Not today, for me, at least.

This guy is the real deal, though. I've followed his work on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee.

Still, I'm a little unhappy at how little the environment features in this campaign so far. And nobody seems to be talking about the dollar policy.

Nine Springs Creek after a big storm

2008-02-07T19:29:00.001-06:00

We got more than a foot of snow yesterday. I went snowshoeing this morning.

A great winter so far

2008-02-05T10:38:00.001-06:00

A Great Day for Snowshoeing
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant

This is the first solid winter we've had in several years. So on a beautiful January day, we went snowshoeing in Governor Dodge State Park.

Felt a little wierd about driving 40 miles to enjoy nature. That's a new sensation, but we've really cut back, what with $3 a gallon.

I guess we're getting 8 inches tonight, so I might be able to do this in the UW Arboretum, which is about 400 yards from our house.

The Corrupt Judge

2007-05-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

This is the most selfish story I've heard in a long time.

A judge in Washington, D.C. has filed suit against his Korean dry-cleaners for $65 million for a lost pair of pants - a pair of pants that was found and returned a week late.

Judge Roy Pearson is on all kinds of civic groups - a regular good citizen and neighbor, right? Here's where he has been a volunteer:

Columbia Heights Youth Club, the nation's first racially integrated youth club.

Fort Lincoln Civic Association, Inc. Fort Lincoln is a leafy enclave in Washington DC - a community planned as racially integrated in the 1960s.

Black Seeds, Inc -- a nonprofit that has sponsored the "African Heritage Family Festival".

the DC chapter of the National Council of Black Lawyers. This is an outfit whose mission is

"to serve as the legal arm of the movement for Black Liberation, to protect human rights, to achieve self-determination of Africa and African Communities in the Diaspora and to work in coalition to assist in ending oppression of all peoples."

See a pattern here? Judge Pearson is a man of great power (as a judge). He is also a community leader for civil rights, racial justice, and ending oppression.

But compassion for the people who wash his dirty clothes? Out of the question. I really don't want to make this a racial thing, because the power dynamic seems to be the main issue here, but I have to wonder if the corrupt judge would be suing if the cleaners were, say, black.

Mr. Pierce's Veggies

2007-04-26T17:15:00.000-05:00

It's time for the South Side farmers market again!

While I can't stand Madison's downtown market, which combines a uniquely Madison admixture of hippies and yuppies, both of whom are quite elitist in their own ways, the South Side market consists mostly of farmer Robert Pierce and a revolving cast of others.

I love it, and Mr. Pierce's veggies are the best anywhere.

Army retreats from Indian Territory

2007-03-29T14:57:00.000-05:00

A mothballed army ammunition plant near Madison is getting returned to the land's original owners, the Ho-Chunk Indians. The deal marks a beginning of a lengthy restoration process, as the rich prairie along the Wisconsin river is currently mostly dead.

Before the buffalo can roam once again (the tribe's long-term goal), the soil will have to get restored. And that is slow work: it might not be finished for another century or so.

Waving the French flag is unbefitting a Frenchman.

2007-03-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

Great to be at the World Cup!
Originally uploaded by WorldCupBlog.org.

The French presidential elections are upon us, and in a tight three-way race, things are beginning to get caustic.

So we have two contrasting appeals to national identity—a fascinating quarrel. Ségolène Royal, a Socialist from a military family, who has made a career advocating for the environment and small-scale local farmers, suggested the French people fly the French flag.

Not a particularly risky thing to say, even among elites who consider themselves above flag-waving. Still, she elicited a stinging rebuke from the third of the three main candidates.

François Bayrou, a practicing Catholic of the more socially conservative UDF party, who’s got the most to lose at this stage in the election, saw low-hanging fruit in Royal’s banal appeal.

“I love France, and I am well at home in my country, but this obsession [with flags]—and a president who makes declarations of good and evil—such things don’t belong in my country. Such things are American.” (rough translation and emphasis mine.)[1]

In other words, waving the French flag is unbefitting a Frenchman.

For what it’s worth, Bayrou's campaign website features video from Youtube, which belongs to that national enemy of France, Google.

[1] "J'aime beaucoup la France, je suis bien dans mon pays, mais cette obsession qui fait qu'il va falloir avoir des drapeaux et les mettre à la fenêtre tel jour, et que la présidente de la République va vous dire ce qui est bien et ce qui est mal, ça ne ressemble pas à mon pays, a déclaré devant la presse le candidat UDF à la présidentielle. Tout ça, c'est la société américaine."

Wisconsin in Zimbabwe

2006-09-07T12:32:00.000-05:00

School Children
Originally uploaded by Obi-Akpere, ObiAkpere.

What do you know?

I was browsing Flickr, and found this classroom in Zimbabwe. Bucky Badger, front and center.

How did he get there? Probably a clothing merchant bought a crate of used clothes, which were originally dropped off at Goodwill.

Problem Solved

2006-08-24T09:53:00.000-05:00

Problem_Solved
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant.

There has been a bit of a buzz lately about T-shirts advocating domestic violence and relationship aggression. Before they disappeared altogether, I ripped a bunch of them and uploaded them to my Xanga photo gallery.

I do this to keep this transgression in front of Kohl's face. (Transgression is the word: this shirt is intentionally cool, and cool is inherently transgressive.) If we let Kohl's merely sweep these shirts under the rug, the conversation won't take place.

Kids will wear shirts like this precisely because of the reaction they get from adults. That's why we're adults: our job is to shape them into healthy, mature people, not perpetrators. So we can censor their jokes.

Kohl's is free to print whatever they want, of course, but - as Pamela Paul noted in her brilliant book Pornified - there is a third way between censorship and eternal tolerance. It's censure. It's shame. We need to shame those adults who tell kids it's ok to throw people out the window.

We can't uncool domestic violence. It's too late for that. We can only uncool ourselves. We can't uncool our children. We can only set models of compassion for them.

Neighbors and Food

2006-08-22T14:22:00.000-05:00

Copp's Grocery, South Park Street, Madison, WI
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant.

I go back and forth on the issue of access to quality food in the inner cities. On the one hand, the grocery stores are a scandal. Copp's for instance: there's a filthy store on S. Park Street in Madison, with low-grade produce and flickering lights. Two miles to the south, there's a beautiful store full of high quality, low-pesticide food. The difference is the neighborhood. Copp's should be ashamed of themselves.

On the other hand, they have a business to run; why should they have to carry quality food that people don't buy? Food is more than a supply issue. If the south side demanded good food, it would materialize.

Here's a secret: the demand is there, and so is the supply. There are several small neighborhood grocery stores all along south Madison. But they are owned by - gasp - immigrant families. Yue Wah (below, bottom right) is a huge store, with great produce, albeit largely Asian and Latin American. Marimar (top right) is smaller, but much more familiar to mainstream American tastes. They've also got quality produce, including the best Avocados in town. Sundays they make their own corn tortillas from scratch. Then there's this other store - the name escapes me - on Fish Hatchery road (below, on the left). The owners are Vietnamese and the food is fresh.

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In all three cases, when I shop there, the owners are helpful and friendly, but there are no other whites or blacks in the stores. So whose fault is it if quality food is hard to come by?

It's the fault of the prejudiced shoppers, who won't condescend to crossing cultures when they shop. To be fair, there are occasional language barriers in the stores. But I chafe every time someone complains that there is no good food to be bought on the South side. It's anti-immigrant prejudice - the notion that there is nothing for me in a store with foreign-looking products - that is killing us.

Hip Hop: The Polka of Today

2006-08-17T11:09:00.000-05:00

Club Majestic
Originally uploaded by Gordon_McMullan.

Madison the white city isn't going down without a fight. It's not really a hip hop thing; it's not really about race, either, even though the debate has been largely held on racial grounds.

No, it's a class thing, and it's been going on for well over a century. They did it to the Germans first, by cracking down on their peaceful - but noisy and raucous - parties.

Today our city fathers are busy trying to ban hip hop nightclubs because of "violence," which translates as people being having fights in the street outside a hip hop event. Never mind that people have fights outside UW-Badger events every single day. A few years ago a bar banned athletic wear, but chose to enforce it along obviously cultural lines, allowing Wisconsin varsity garb full access.

Hip Hop's crime is bad taste (in the judgement of Fred Mohs and the Downtown Madison inc. crowd), taste as adjudged according to the aesthetic minimalist standards that built the Overture center.

It would be an entirely avoidable waste if we (as a city) hold this debate without remembering the previous rounds in this fight. David Mollenhoff's incredible book of Madison history tells the story. In the 1870s, hordes of Germans settled in Madison, and unsettled the "native" city fathers.

The Germans' main crime was being ethnic. They held enormous beer parties in Brittingham Park on Sundays, parties that tended - like Club Majestic's hip hop nights - to spill into the surrounding neighborhood. Worse, the Germans favored raucous, low-class polka music. The kind with tubas that can be heard for blocks around.

Madison's big cheeses know that upscale, wine-sampling, art-buying tastes don't stand a chance in the free-market of arts and culture, so they need to enforce the standards with the support of government.

If hip hop fans started wearing sedate clothes, started driving quiet imports, and managed their disputes with lawyers instead of fists, the city fathers would be all smiles.

Sweet is Kitchy?

2006-08-13T12:37:00.000-05:00

New Glarus Hotel
Originally uploaded by mizidymizark.

The Wisconsin State Journal published a positive but snarky review of New Glarus' Chalet Landhaus Inn restaurant the other day, and dropped a few cultural mistakes into article.

Author Chris Martell summed up his review with "Great service and food in a homey, if kitschy, environment." I've been to that restaurant many times, and I've never found a trace of kitch anywhere. So what is it that Martell found?

Authenticity.

Switzerland is a modern country completely at peace with its peasant heritage, its "Volkstum". Go into any cable car, restaurant or tavern in the mountains, and they'll be playing Alpine music over the stereo. It's not kitch; it's a celebration of heritage.

Trust me: Here is a TV ad for Switzerland, from YouTube. It ran in Germany during the buildup to the world cup. The idea was to suggest to soccer-weary German women a vacation in Switzerland during the tournament.

They play with all the national stereotypes, including the alpine music in question. It's modern, folksy, sweet and a little racy all at once.

[A rough translation of the voiceover is "Dear Women, consider spending your World Cup-summer in a place where the men care less about soccer - and more about you.]

The Chalet Landhaus Inn plays the same music. It's just like in Switzerland.

In fact, the entire hotel is uncannily authentic - not only the old-fashioned volkstum stuff, but the minimalist DESIGNsuisse architecture of the rooms. Alas, Chris Martell misunderstood the sweetness of "yodeling on the sound system" as phony heartland kitch.

The Killer's Caught; the Burglars Aren't

2006-08-08T10:13:00.000-05:00

The suspect is under arrest in the Cypress Street murder. Looks like a standard domestic dispute resulting in a decidedly non-standard double murder. As in, a jilted lover killed his girlfriend and the man she was with, who happened to live next door.

The suspect has already served time for homicide in the early eighties.

While it's a relief to know that 1. They caught the guy, and 2. it was a relational issue (meaning it doesn't affect others), there is another problem going on: a series of break-ins and robberies on my street, including my next-door neighbor and his neighbor.

We've lived on this street for three years, but last night we locked the windows for the first time in a long time.

Neighborhood Murder

2006-08-07T11:44:00.000-05:00

There was a murder a block from my house this weekend. A double murder, acutally. Stabbing.

It was a huge crime scene, with 23 cop cars present. (The Wisconsin State Journal counted "at least a dozen police vehicles".)

As I was standing around gawking with others, two people from the DA office came by, explained some of the details, and offered us counseling services.

The victims included a fifty-one year old white man and an unidentified black woman. Police are looking for a "person of interest".

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Here are a few more pictures ...

Above, here are some of the cop cars. Below, the "Dane County Emergency Command Center." Didn't know we had one. Fortunately, it says, right there on the bottom left, that it was paid for by Homeland Security. In other words, "we didn't spend your local tax dollars on this Winnebago."

Update: I'm trying out a new feature called Filmloop. Click here to see all these pictures in a scrolling bar.

Sweet Land

2006-08-04T14:36:00.000-05:00

A recent movie I've seen better expresses the sadness of immigration and the meaning of land than anything I've ever seen: Sweet Land.

This is about a mail-order bride from Norway, who arrives in early twentieth-century Minnesota to meet her husband, a Norwegian immigrant farmer.

Olaf picks up Inge at the train station, and like so many other young couples right after World War 1, they head straight for the chapel. But as they are getting married - having spoken only a few words with each other - the young bride is found wanting. Inge is a German, not a Norwegian.

And we (Norway and the US alike) are at war with Germany. Worse, she is a member of the Socialist party.

Sweet Land tells the story of this young couple, as they build an international love in a land strange to both of them. It is a story of making a home.

The 1920 plot is set as a flashback; the surrounding story takes place today, after Inge's death at an old age. Her grandson Lars - an entirely assimilated American - has to make a decision about his land. It's worth millions of dollars as a suburban subdivision. How should Lars honor Inge and Olaf with this land, this home?

I was enchanted for days after seeing the film. Unfortunately, it's on the film-festival circuit, and is not slated for broader release. I emailed Ali Selim, the filmmaker, who replied that the DVD might be out by Christmas. Sigh. Until then, if you're interested in the story, it's loosely based on a short story by Will Weaver called A Gravestone Made of Wheat. The story is slightly different than the movie, but equally moving.

Homeowner. Non-Native.

2006-08-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

As a homeowner in Madison, what responsibilities do I have, relative to the original, Ho-Chunk inhabitants of the area? Don't know. But the State of Wisconsin thinks I own the land.

That's not a real problem. The solution to complex evils (like the European conquest of North America and the subsequent settlement here by Europe's outcasts and peasants) is rarely to run away from the problem, but to meet it head-on.

Accordingly, I think I will try to find out as much of the history of this plot of land and the surrounding neighborhood as possible.

Happy Birthday, Switzerland

2006-08-01T14:30:00.000-05:00

It's the first of August, and we all know what that means, eh? Swiss Confederation Day!

Some of my fondest memories of childhood relate to August 1 - bonfires, singing, fireworks, lanterns and festivities and more.

Representatives of three alpine counties gathered on a secluded meadow on this day in 1291 - that's right, 700 years ago - to declare independence from the Habsburg Austrians.

August 1 always makes me a little sentimental like July 4 doesn't. I'm not patriotic for Switzerland, mostly because I'm not Swiss. But having spent much of my childhood there, and because much of my heart is wrapped up in Switzerland, I feel secretly joyful on this day.

A Downpour out our Front Door

2006-07-31T11:30:00.000-05:00

Our house is in a flash-flood district. While we're on a hill, and are thus not susceptible to flooding in our own right, runoff from our neighborhood flows past our house into a nearby creek. Here's our street, during a recent storm.

Here's what happens moments later, when several square blocks of impermeable surfaces start flowing downstream. A standing wave in the middle of the street!

Tomato!

2006-07-30T10:16:00.000-05:00

My tomatoes have arrived--the first ones at least. Now is the sweetest time of the year. Is there anything better? Perhaps growing one's own, from seed. We cheated this year, going with plants from the garden store. Our neighbor still has no fruit, and he started from seed.

A Nearly-Missed Opportunity

2006-07-28T08:49:00.000-05:00

There’s an intentionality about meeting neighbors. It can be a drag, sometimes. Becca and I decided long ago that we need to live, on a daily level, the way we want to be. Annie Dillard said it, in The Writing Life:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we live our lives.”

In other words, how we approach our moments with our neighbors is how we live our lives. Do we want to be rushed, hurried and on our own? We have to make that choice over and over again.

For example: Yesterday we walked to the library. It was going to be a short trip, because we needed to be back in a half hour. We wanted to do some internet business on a faster-than-dialup connection.

Alas, two hundred yards from the library, we ran into a neighbor, an older man from the Philippines, who told us two years ago to have a baby, because “Baby makes you
Happy!”

It was obvious that he wanted to more than say hello. He talked at us about his grandchildren. Then about his mortgage. Then about something else. I was anxiously thinking of the time slipping away, the time I could be spending uploading a document.

But Becca and I had already had this conversation: this is the kind of people we want to be – accessible to others, not too hurried or important to linger, love, and laugh. We didn’t need to discuss, even as Bert droned on and on: It was more important for us to talk with him than to go accomplish our petty errand.

In hindsight, we didn't miss the chance to upload a high-resolution photo. Rather, we almost missed an opportunity to become the kind of neighbors we want to be. Fortunately, we survived.

It’s hard. Because we didn’t actually get to do what we wanted. We had to turn around and go home. We were a little frustrated, but we knew that neighbors are made, not born. Without planning, precious opportunities to live life will pass us by.

Meeting the Neighbors

2006-07-25T17:26:00.000-05:00

So Becca and I bought a house, and had a baby.

That's why I haven't posted here lately.

But I am now on a mission to meet my neighbors, so posting will begin shortly as I tell our stories ...

New Orleans and Old Naples

2005-09-01T09:50:00.000-05:00

It’s not Katrina’s fault. New Orleans survived the hurricane relatively intact. The current disaster is manmade. More later. But first an historical note on ecological disasters.

Southern Italy is notoriously poor and underdeveloped. Many communities are continually fighting epidemics of yesteryear, like cholera. Global trade is a rumor; wealth creation is a bizarre notion.

Southern Italy, also called the Mezzogiorno, is one of Europe’s backwaters, but unlike other underdeveloped districts of the EU, not much is changing. Ireland, Europe’s erstwhile poorhouse, is now among the richest countries in the world. Spain, a dictatorship until 1978 (the same year as the Iranian Revolution), is now prosperous but for a few quarters. Even Greece successfully pulled off the 2004 Olympics.

The Mezzogiorno, on the other hand remains poor, corrupt, and isolated. It shouldn’t be this way: the South of Italy stands in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and is thus immediately at the nexus between the Middle East and Europe. Unfortunately, history is once again bypassing southern Italy. Today the real crossroads of the Middle East and Europe are London, Paris and Rotterdam.

It all started long ago, as Roman infrastructures failed at the beginning of the dark ages. When coal became harder to get, the urbanites of the southern Italian peninsula stripped bare the hillside forests for fuel. The land could no longer absorb winter’s heavy rains, and flashfloods washed the soil away.

Without soil, crop failures ensued, which in turn led to famines and emigration. Since the educated and the strong are the ones most likely to avail themselves of the option to relocate, the poor and the weak were left behind – albeit without control of the land, as feudal princes became absentee landlords.

Without natural or cultural wealth, the world began to detour around the Mezzogiorno. Down through the centuries countless movements have arisen to uplift the Italian South, but few projects touch the heart of the problem: the Mezzogiorno’s poverty is in the first instance an ecological matter, paired with a political failure to reform. But that doesn’t solve the immediate problem: when people are hungry, undereducated and poor, planting trees doesn’t help. They need food. But in the long run, restoration may be the only option that will take.

New Orleans is our Mezzogiorno: a man-made ecological disaster with humanitarian consequences. The entire city is below sea level because the land is sinking. Sitting astride the mouth of North America’s largest river, New Orleans should naturally be flooded nearly every year.

The floods play an important role in the ecosystem, dumping thousands of tons of silt onto the land. New Orleans below ground is a living geological history of the middle of the United States.

Unfortunately, our society has not learned to live with floods, preferring instead to fight them off with dams and dikes. The Mississippi River’s deposits of silt are currently washing out into the Gulf of Mexico. And the city, absent continual deposits of new soil, is gradually settling. Currently a few feet below sea level and several feet below the level of the Mississippi River, the city has been unsustainable for quite some time. This problem has not been a secret.

Hurricane Katrina came and went on Monday morning. It caused a lot of wind damage, but the storm surge was not as bad as it could have been. Monday night the city breathed a sigh of relief. New Orleans had been spared; Biloxi had been hit harder.

Relief was short-lived, however, as the storm surge on the ocean overwhelmed New Orleans’ pumps early Tuesday. No longer able to keep Lake Pontchartrain (actually, a bay of the Gulf of Mexico) on out of the city, the levee gave way, flooding those parts of the city lying below sea level.

Entire neighborhoods are now submerged. Currently close to a half million are homeless, and the situation is getting worse. Hurricane Katrina will get the blame for overwhelming the levees, but the real culprits for the flooding are the very same levees: the walls keeping the sea out also allow the land to sink further below sea level. This was not a natural disaster, but a human disaster and a natural correction.

The only sustainable solution for New Orleans is to learn to become a water city like Venice, or to relocate entirely. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen later – after more loss of life. But just like in Southern Italy, when people are drowning, it doesn’t help anyone to talk about the valuable two inches of silt the city is getting. Ultimately, man-made or not, this is a human disaster. And just like in medieval Italy, the poor will bear the brunt of the cost, while the rich and educated will simply move tohigher ground.

Home Sweet Construction

2005-07-26T13:44:00.000-05:00

We've been out of house and home for a month now, because of a botched remodelling job to the upstairs apartment. The project ultimately engulfed the entire building, sending us into hotels.

The contractors have lied to us repeatedly about the duration of the project - basically promising work they had no intention of doing, simply because telling us what they thought we wanted to hear would get us out of their hair. It didn't work, because that's not how we operate.

But the project has also given us a taste of what the poor go through on a regular basis. The poor cannot appeal to an authority, because the entire system is in place to protect the propertied, not the unpropertied. The poor are often in poor health, because they can't access healthy food. We found the same - when you simply can't access a refrigerator, or a kitchen, you are stuck with the high-chemical pre-packaged foods available at the 24/7 convenience store. Such food also costs more.

Overall, this last month has been an education in how it feels to be helpless and without rights. We haven't truly been helpless, and we haven't truly been poor, but our eyes have been opened.

Bowl of Cherries

2005-07-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

Summer means Cherries. Nothing in the world tastes better. I discover them new every year, having forgotten about these little bites of paradise in the intervening
eleven months. It's easy to forget about cherries, because they don't keep. Canned and frozen cherries are awful, whereas cranberries do perfectly well in a freezer.

But precisely because of this storage instability, cherries mark high summer like no other fruit. Peaches on roadside stands may provide a challenge to cherries' title, but cherries taste so good they make you happy.

When I was a kid, we had some friends with dozens of cherry trees, and we used to climb them on lazy summer days, reclining on shady branches, and eating cherries to our hearts' content. Every cherry I each today puts me back in those trees.

Happy July!

Cross-Cultural Bird Watching

2005-07-12T08:52:00.000-05:00

Last week I heard an incredible bit of insight into the spiritual dynamic of crossing cultures, and "home". At a commissioning ceremony for new missionaries, an older, retired missionary gave the new class some tips and pointers.

"When you get to your new homes," he said, "watch birds."

When one moves to a new country, and lands in a new culture, beauty will come in unexpected packages. One's ability to prosper in that new land will hinge in part on opening those packages. Birds are part of the natural environment, and are thus less important for a sense of home than the cultural environment, but important nonetheless. They also teach us about the cultural environment.

For one thing, in the international, jet-setting world, people are so abstracted from their natural surroundings that every place is no place. It's hard to gain a sence of place when the economy revolves around a globalized everywhere. But locals still live there. They often have a work face and a home face, and sometimes they can't wait till the end of the day when they can be themselves again. When we only get to know a place through the locals' work faces, we miss out on the best that place has to offer.

For another, watching birds teaches us about the seasons and times of one's new home. We get to know our own hearts, and our own homes, better by watching a new place.

Update on Allied's Bike Path

2005-06-21T15:43:00.000-05:00

Update on my post from May 20 ("Allied Gets a Bike Path"): A number of commuters using the Southwest Bike Path through the Allied Drive neighborhood have recently been attacked by some local teenage punks. No surprise here, because school has just ended for the summer. None of this changes my original point: Allied Drive is an isolated neighborhood, and most of the bike path's users are white commuters passing through. Predictably, the police are responding by taking care of the commuters - they've promised increased attention to the bike path, which means less attention given to the rest of the neighborhood.

Allied Drive needs police protection far more than the commuters migrating between tony neighborhoods to the south and decent jobs to the north.

Bounty

2005-06-01T11:53:00.000-05:00

Perhaps Wisconsin's greatest natural gift to the human experience is its stunning sequence of the seasons. No other habit will make one sink roots into the cultural soil of this place than keeping a close watch on the minute changes of life throughout the year. It's not just for the food that upper Midwesterners love to garden; it's the celebration of life's cyles - the hope of spring, the bounty of summer, the riches of maturity, and the inevitability of decline. Gardens teach us all these things, and more. Gardens teach us about the place we're living in.

2005-05-10T09:04:00.000-05:00

Spring has returned to Wisconsin. Some trees are more advanced, but here is a bud on a magnolia tree. I recently met someone newly returned from Zimbabwe, where he had lived for several years. He said he certainly loved the lushness of tropical Africa, with the huge flowers and crazy birds, but there was something different about springtime in northern climes, where plants and animals return after a lengthy absence. Africa provides objectively more beautiful flowers than Wisconsin, but Wisconsin provides that special delight known as spring. The farther north you go, the more precious spring becomes, because winter in harsher.

So now it is spring in Wisconsin. We've had hot days and snowy days in the last two weeks, but winter has finallly given up the ghost. And that is a delight indeed.

It's a Justice Issue

2005-02-10T17:07:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post is writing on evangelical environmentalists, of which I consider myself one, as part of their efforts to understand these strange critters called evangelicals, who’ve occupied Washington, D.C. After biting on an old chestnut, that the world is all going to be consumed upon Christ’s second coming, the Post profiles several new ecological approaches within evangelicalism, from mercury in the environment, to global warming.

The trick, the article claims, to enlisting evangelical efforts in ecology, is billing the issues in the language of family values. Pollution is a family value, because it affects children’s health. Likewise global warming, because it affects our grandchildren.

Let’s be honest: altruism won’t save the world. People will not serve the common good for metaphysical reasons. The trick for ecologists is to convince people that the common good is also the immediate good. Hence pitching to family values. The trouble lies in the boundaries to family values, as currently defined in our civil discourse. When we say family values, we mean nuclear families, and we mean privacy, not community. We mean the nuclear family’s capacity to protect its moral and physical environment.

It’s an inherently individualistic approach, and can become addictive for the impatient activist. But the family values approach to recruiting evangelicals into ecology can stunt their eventual participation.

One of evangelical’s best qualities is their orientation toward truth. They believe in truth and stick to biblical truth like glue. Significantly, they are also quite willing to change their opinions on issues, once convinced of the biblical stance on the matter. Consider justice. Evangelicals spent a century on the outside of the major justice issues, because they were convinced that God cared about people’s souls, not their temporal predicaments.

But recent years have seen dramatic changes, as evangelicals have reread their Bibles and seen God’s mandate for justice. Fairly rapidly they’ve gotten over their qualms about “liberalism” and have become leaders in several causes, including Darfur in the Sudan, human trafficking, and AIDS.

Most major ecological-social problems occur in the developing world and in poor neighborhoods of the wealthy countries. (The picture above is of a car wash in Nigeria, taken by a friend. People are washing their cars right into the creek.) These affairs are notoriously difficult to connect to everyday life. In the case of the Nigerian car wash, for example, why should I be concerned
about that polluted creek?

If ecologists truly care to add evangelicals to their ranks, they’ll need a different approach than family values. Convince evangelicals that ecology is a justice issue, and you’ll get longer-term and broader involvement.

Ecology is not a family value per se; but both ecology and family are profoundly biblical values.

Winter Wonderland

2005-01-28T14:01:00.000-06:00

Winter is at high tide in Madison. After last week's seven inches, this place is beautiful. I went out snowshoeing in a greenbelt south of town, and saw red-tailed hawks and whitetail deer.

It's tempting, when it's really cold and windy out, to spend the whole day indoors. But we really need to push ourselves to taste the season, and not just for the physical stimulation. Showshoeing is good for one's circulation, but seeking out beauty in a numbingly cold day is good for the soul. When the weather gets bad - and the weather gets very, very bad in these parts - and one hasn't learned how to live and laugh with the season, one could easily grow bitter about life in Wisconsin.

When my family moved here, while I was in high school, I was unhappy about the prospect. "Wisconsin?!" I said, "there's nothing to do in Wisconsin." My dad told me something that has changed my life: "When we get to Wisconsin," he said, "You're going to find people living there, who've lived there for a while. Most of them have had the option to move away, but they've chosen to stay.

"Your job is to find out why."

I've now been here for twelve years. My parents eventually had the option to move away, back to Idaho, but I've remained, trying to answer my dad's question. Why do people live here? The sight of that red-tail, floating across a winter wonderland, is part of the answer. It's just a small answer to the question of land, culture and belonging.

Religion Kills

2005-01-26T13:18:00.000-06:00

According to a church in Atlanta, “Religion Kills.” That’s the message they’ve emblazoned on t-shirts for sale on their website.

But this is a church, after all. They have pastors and Bibles, and they preach about Jesus Christ. If that’s not religion, we’re merely quibbling over semantics. "Religion is death,” the reasoning must go, “and we’re about life. Therefore we must not be affiliated with religion.”

The folks at GetReligion quote the NY Times, which ran a profile of the church:

Revolution is one of several thousand alternative ministries that have emerged in the last decade, meeting in warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs, private homes or other spaces, in a generational rumble to rebrand the faith outside of what we think of as church.

So far so good. With clean-cut preachers and non-offensive worship services, the evangelical subculture in the United States is inaccessible to many down-and-outers. Revolution and similar churches provide that change. But then it gets ugly:

To travel among them is to feel returned to the alternative-rock scene of 15 years ago, just before Nirvana and Lollapalooza put it on the map. Instead of criticizing major record labels, these ministries criticize megachurches; instead of flattening the status of the rock star, they flatten the status of the pastor.

It's always a losing proposition to define yourself negatively – by what you aren’t. Revolution is a case in point. They're more afraid of looking like a “religion” than they are of spiritual immaturity. With their intentionally offensive “religion kills” campaign, they pronounce a radical gulf between themselves and the mainstream church. They are angered by the church, and with good reason: the church provides no home for these skater-punks.

But while it’s fine and good to give to the disenfranchised a Jesus who looks like them, it sure appears Jesus’ message of hope for the broken has taken a back seat to peer acceptance by those outside the church. After all, reconciliation and communion with the (embarrassingly conventional) Church would be “selling out.” In this twisted gospel, street credibility supersedes actual spiritual healing. And the appearance of freedom prevails over true freedom, because true power lies not in individual assertion, but in loving your enemies: just ask Martin Luther King.

Why does this matter? This is a blog about Home. Home is a place, but it’s also a state of belonging.

Revolution is preaching a gospel of individualism – a faith of alone. There is no belonging in their message, save in a metaphysical, “Jesus-is-my-home” sort of way.

But the gospel is not a story of individuals. It is a story of a community - one with dysfunctions, contradictions and major quarrels. God’s love, somehow, miraculously, manifests itself through this messed-up medium. Part of the miracle of salvation is the very existence of a community of eternal love and reconciliation. There is real peace, real well-being, real wholeness – in a word, shalom – in this message.

But the “good news” proclaimed by Revolution is partial good news: Yes, Jesus loves you, but you’re still alone. And your best hope at community remains the community you came from. You certainly don’t want to turn to the church for a home.

And the Revolutionaries are left with the same ghosts they came in with. They can’t grow up, and they’re not challenged to reconcile. It’s self-segregation and it’s ultimately unsustainable. After all, if we aren’t in community – if we don’t have a home - our souls will die.

I'll be Home for Kwanzaa

2004-12-22T15:42:00.000-06:00

Too often in our material society we propose material remedies for spiritual and emotional problems. Our solution to ecological alienation, for instance, is locally-grown food. Our solution to cultural pathologies is an abstract “sense of place”. I certainly affirm material remedies as necessary: Without looking at the real, empirical, physical conditions, you can end up with impotent ideology.

Unfortunately, material remedies are rarely sufficient to cure our emotional needs. Most of our alienation has multiple roots, including material, cultural, social, psychological and more.

As important as "sense of place" may be in Home-making, spiritual belonging is even bigger. African American culture knows a few things about creating a spiritual Home in the absence of a material Home.

This is something all Diaspora peoples - which ultimately includes all humans in the world, in one way or another, can learn from the African American peoples. Here is a group of people whose home was stolen from them in more ways than geographically, but who were able to find themselves a spiritual home. By creating a tender balance between being an ethnic club, a transcendent spiritual well, and a worldly activist tank, the black church has been able to foster the level of spiritual power that can turn a foreign land - a land of exile - into a home. It's a radical church, not an otherworldly church.

So while others may have gained greater sense of place in the cities where they live, African American churches have learned how to create community among the exiles. They create a social Home where others struggle to lay down roots. This Home is drawn on a tight canvas: a paradoxical here-but-not-yet-here duality. African Americans, especially African American Christians, teach their children that Home is beyond this place. At the same time, they teach a far deeper sense of community than mainstream America.

Kwanzaa is an invented holiday, Afro-centric and a little cheesy, but it's a holiday that attempts to systemetize these lessons. For the week after Christmas, Kwanzaa highlights a communal virtue each day:

These principles are umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith). Each day of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the principles and is organized around activities and discussion to emphasize that principle.

Together these values create a spiritual Home that all of us Homeless types can celebrate. It’s an invitation to neighbor-ness.

Abused, Alienated and About to be Wealthy

2004-12-16T11:52:00.000-06:00

It appears that two Wisconsin tribes may be building casinos in New York State, as part of a settlement with the state over outstanding land claims dating to the 18th century. The Oneida (along with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans) were driven from their ancestral home in a bogus treaty, and eventually ended up in their current location in Wisconsin.

They’ve been in Wisconsin for 180 years, during which time they’ve had major struggles with their new neighbors (primarily Menominee); with federal, state and county governments and agencies; and with their old kin in New York.

In other words, the Oneida are homeless in several ways: robbed of their homelands, rejected in their new country, and alienated from half of their tribe. They’ve been in Wisconsin longer than most Whites, but they remain an in-between group – not fully “native”, but still suffering from all the injustice Wisconsin could muster against them (in addition to stonewalling by New York State).

This gets to the heart of what I want this blog to be about: a discussion of home and its implications for the soul: ethnically, spiritually, legally and beyond. When does a place become a home? And how? What can diaspora peoples offer the world, and what is the relationship between our eternal home and our temporal home?

Commons

2004-12-15T17:30:00.000-06:00

Private land is the primary means of holding wealth in the United States; certainly the most stable. So I can understand people's reluctance to allow their land to be accessed by the public. But paranoia about the government, coupled with increasing individualism in our society, is the recipe for ecological disaster. When society no longer has the means of protecting its own health if that means limiting a land owner's absolute authority over his own land, we may be reaching a tipping point. Environmental problems are getting so biblical in scale, that absent timely land-use reform, we won't be able to adjust before some elements of society take away private land-ownership alltogether.

Both situations are lousy - absolute individualism and absolute socialism. But if climate change triggers drastic changes in our economy and ecology, socialist land reform might get shoved down our throuts unless we figure out how to reduce privacy's primacy in our culture first.

Boreal Species

2004-12-13T11:56:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin's ecology is built around winter. The plants and animals know how to survive it; and there are countless potentially invasive species that can't survive. Those overland-crawling fish they've been fighting in Maryland have actually shown up in Wisconsin, but the DNR's not greatly concerned, because the winter will kill them off.

Not so the soy fungus that landed in the US this autumn. Fungal spores from South America hitched a ride on one of this fall's hurricanes, and spread rapidly across the South. These won't get killed off by the winter. May be a good year to plant something other than soy.

It's also a reminder of our North American ecological connection with the outside world. What goes on elsewhere affects us. And we are responsible not only to our own citizens, but to people around the world for the ecological decisions we make.

Injustice in the Intermountain West

2004-09-16T09:24:00.000-05:00

The high desert of Idaho, Utah, Oregon and Nevada is dying.

Here are some culprits:

The military has poisoned enormous sections of land out there.
The east coast environmentalists are continuously striving to take away local control over the wild lands, ensuring stewardship by remote legislation, and alienating the most important people in the system: the people who care the most about the local tracts.
The mining and oil companies sometimes cause more damage in exploration than in extraction itself.
Recreationists who don't see the land, only an "emptiness" waiting to be filled. Burning Man and similar festivals attracting dozens of thousands of people, without decent sanitation infrastructure, are causing as much damage as some open pit mines.

Paul Grant

2004-09-01T10:07:00.000-05:00

Sole Owner and Proprieter, TurtleIslander Weblog
Penname: Locutus Est

Master of few trades, I am nevertheless willing to wax garrulous on the topic of your choosing. Despite blogging and maintaining a real job working in cyberspace, I'd rather be outside.

I read mostly about ecology, culture, geography, family and God.

American by birth, I was raised in Switzerland. After getting a history degree at Wisconsin, I married my best friend Becca.