Gaia Community: L'el's Blog

Small noticing

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:03:38 -0000

Whenever I call my Dad, whether at home or at work, his initial Hello? often inflects downwards, with a bit of tiredness, conveying that this phone-answering business is a bit of a chore.

But as soon as I say, Hi Dad, the instant he knows it's me and not some customer or telemarketer or divorce lawyer, his voice brightens with a sharp upward slant. It's all warmth and optimism and love.

That moment, poised between his unknowing Hello? and his cheerful Hello! is one that I've come to anticipate when I dial his number. It's like I have this secret, for a split second, knowing that he doesn't know his mood is about the be uplifted, in this parental pavlovian reaction, just from the sound of my voice, a mere moment down the line.

Tonight was the first time I told him that I noticed the change in voice tone, and that I appreciated it. Of course he said "Of course! I'm always glad to hear it's you."

...

I don't think I've ever not appreciated what a wonderful presence my dad has been in my life; for all of the affirmative things he has been to me.

But it's only lately I've thought more, in an internalized way, about how lucky I am about the things he was _not_ to me; about the baggages he and my mom didn't burden me with.

A friend confided in me recently about the troubles in his marriage, and revealed that many of their issues stemmed from sexual abuse each had suffered at some point in childhood at the hands of trusted adults (the wife from her father; the husband from his nanny).

I've heard similar tales from other friends. But although my upbringing was not perfect --especially in the unhealthy relationship (non)communication modeled to me through my parents' marriage-- there were enough of the right ingredients, most notably an absolute knowledge of my parents unconditional love for me, that it has taken me a while to really feel through what it would be like not to have that basis in navigating life. To understand, on a deeper than cognitive level, why people have certain habits or reactions or patterns in their lives.

I am lucky. And I can pass it on. I was given much, so I have much to give.

Forest Kindergarten!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:12:50 -0000

This makes me so happy. Some of my best early childhood memories are from wandering the endless forest behind my house.

Waldkindergärten

Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or "forest kindergartens," in which children spend their days outdoors year-round... Only a fraction of German children attend Waldkindergärten, but their numbers have been rising since local parent groups began setting up these programs in the mid-1990s, following the lead of a Danish community. Similar schools exist in smaller numbers in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Austria. The concept is sparking interest far afield -- even in the U.S., whose first Waldkindergarten opened in Portland, Ore., last fall.

Ms. Kluge says no child has ever asked for a toy. The children improvise instead with what the woods have to offer.

"Painting Bitten By a Man"

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:00:45 -0000

The Disappeared

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:25:33 -0000

It's sad to see that someone has packed up their profile, and left this site. Goodbye?

.

Loss

The Train Robbery that Made Corporations Persons

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:20:57 -0000

Yep, I'm excerpting this article yet again. But this passage was really helpful to me in understanding how the intellectual foundations for corporatocracy came about.

The defense... of wealth must find a legal manifestation.

...Jacksonian and abolitionist ideas before the Civil War produced a constitutional vision of free labor and free contract. This constitutional vision celebrated the right of ordinary individuals to own their labor. Laissez-faire was defended as a means of keeping government from giving special benefits to the wealthy.

...In what Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of Intellectual History,” laissez-faire conservatives appropriated the words and symbols of early nineteenth-century liberalism— liberty, opportunity, progress, and individualism—and gave them an economic reinterpretation that served corporate interests. They massaged and refitted the existing rhetoric of free labor and the right of ordinary citizens to pursue a calling into a sophisticated defense of corporate power and privilege that smashed labor unions, protected sweatshops, and eviscerated health and safety laws. By the turn of the twentieth century, the best legal minds that money could buy had reshaped the liberal rights rhetoric of the 1830s into a powerful conservative defense of property that they claimed was the rightful heir to the best American traditions of individualism and personal freedom.

Of course, I said to myself while reading this, much of this flows from the idea that corporations have "personhood"-- but wait, this was BEFORE that decision. This revisionism was what made corporate personhood possible.

A similar transvaluation of values is overtaking the free speech principle today. The right to speak has been recast as a right to be free from business regulation.

...We are living through a Second Gilded Age, which, like the first Gilded Age, comes complete with its own reconstruction of the meaning of liberty and property. Freedom of speech is becoming a generalized right against economic regulation of the information industries. Property is becoming the right of the information industries to control how ordinary people use digital content. We can no more capitulate to the Second Gilded Age’s construction of these ideas than to the constructions offered in the first Gilded Age. We must offer a critical alternative to this construction, much as progressive thinkers did a century ago.

Interactivity on Their Terms

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:50:34 -0000

More from my reading assignment (reminds me of the uniqueness of Gaia's willingness to have a conversation about/alter its terms of service).

New telecommunications networks allow ordinary people to communicate with vast numbers of fellow human beings, routing around existing media gatekeepers and offering competing content. People are no longer simply consumers of prepackaged content from mass media companies that are controlled by a limited number of speakers. Instead, people can use the new telecommunications networks to become active participants in the production of public culture.

But the very same technologies that offer these possibilities also offer media companies ever new ways to advertise, sell products, and push their favored content. Thus, just as in the case of intellectual property, businesses that control telecommunications networks will seek to limit forms of participation and cultural innovation that are inconsistent with their economic interests. Once again, the goal is not necessarily censorship of unpopular ideas but rather diversion and co-optation of audience attention. Businesses want to direct the Internet user toward increased consumption of their own goods and services as well as the products of their advertising partners. Recognizing that there is money to be made in advertising, sales, and delivery of content, telecommunications companies do not want to be pure conduits for the speech of others, and they do not want too much content competition from their customers.

Instead, they want to use the architecture of the Internet to nudge their customers into planned communities of consumerist experience, to shelter end users into a world that combines everyday activities of communication seamlessly with consumption and entertainment. In some respects, businesses seek to push consumers back into their pre-Internet roles as relatively passive recipients of mass media content. In other respects, however, they openly encourage interactivity, but interactivity on their terms—the sort of interactivity that facilitates or encourages the purchase of goods and services.

[bold added]

Other types of businesses may be able to get away with this more, but I think there will be more pressure for social networking sites to be more responsive and acknowledge user participation in shaping terms of service (as Gaia has). This has already happened to some degree with those other sites MyBook and FaceSpace, but primarily as isolated incidents regarding specific points (rather than as an ongoing dialogue process). When Google et al. get the open source social network model up and running, that is likely to shift TOS norms toward user interests, and perhaps towards having more user participation in the drafting of such terms. Maybe. Possibly. IMHO.

A Capitalist Theory of Freedom of Speech

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:37:42 -0000

Excerpt from a reading for my Cyberlaw class, in the context of how Telecommunications companies claim that regulations (such as requirements to devote some portion of bandwidth to public broadcasting) violate their First Amendment rights as speakers and editors "to convey they content they wish to as large an audience as possible" (while simultaneously claiming their intellectual property rights trump the freedom of speech rights of users):

Implicit in these arguments is a controversial capitalist theory of freedom of speech. The theory is controversial not because it accepts capitalism as a basic economic ordering principle, but because it subordinates freedom of expression to the protection and defense of capital accumulation in the information economy. The capitalist theory identifies the right to free speech with ownership of distribution networks for digital content.

The argument that structural regulation of telecommunications networks restricts the First Amendment rights of telecommunications companies ties the right to speak ever more closely to ownership of capital. Arguing by analogy to print media, the capitalist theory of free speech
identifies the right to produce and control digital content with ownership of a communications network.

Nevertheless, conflating the right to speak with the right to control a communication network is problematic for two reasons. First, because they are conduits and networks, digital communications networks are designed to provide access to multiple voices. However, under the capitalist theory, these conduits exist primarily to promote the speech of the owner of the conduit, just as newspapers exist to promote the speech of the newspaper’s owner.

The second problem follows from the first: Content providers who also act as conduits have
incentives to favor their content over the content of others. For example, cable companies may be tempted to favor streaming media and digital music coming from the company’s content providers and advertising partners, while slowing down or refusing content coming from competitors, or, for that matter, from subscribers who want to be their own broadcasters. Broadband companies may seek to provide “walled gardens” or “managed content areas” which limit consumer access to that of the company’s proprietary network and its approved content partners.

[bold added]

Dispatch from Edwin on Helping Kenya

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:56:22 -0000

The last few weeks have been tough ones for Kenya and Kenyans. We have seen what started off as a political problem sparked by the December elections turn into violence and tragedy. While I continue to be hopeful that current mediation efforts led by Kofi Annan will lead to a return of some level of normalcy across the country, I also recognize the destructive spiral things are taking in some parts of the country, notably in the Rift Valley. Every passing day without a solution makes this become a longer entrenched conflict that is beyond the elections. And I fear we have turned that corner.

All leaders at all levels need to understand that the current increase in militia activity is just a marriage of convenience. Once the “reason” for the sponsored conflict is resolved, the young men will still be there, hungry, with no incomes, with machetes in their hands. And they now know how to kill and maim.

Current Red Cross numbers indicate about 1000 people dead, and over 300,000 displaced. The conditions in the make-shift camps across the country are simply
heartbreaking, which is why with a growing group of young professionals via the Pamoja Youth Foundation, we have launched “Jaza Lorry!” Literally translating to “Fill the Lorry/Truck!”, the initiative is motivating assistance for those displaced, and channeling it to them through the Kenya Red Cross.

For individuals in Kenya , you can buy items and
drop them off in the Jaza Lorry box at every Nakumatt, Uchumi and Tuskys.
For those outside Kenya ,
we have partnered with mamamikes (http://www.mamamikes.com)
Kenya ’s leading online marketplace to channel donations and vouchers.
For any donations which do not fall into any of the above categories (e.g., in kind donations from companies), feel free to email me back and we can discuss the most appropriate way of channeling them.

Please give what you can.

This is a long road we are on, and it will take quite some work to heal the tears we
have experienced in our social fabric. Let us have the courage to take the first step.

-edwin

macharia2007@gmail.com

A Modest Proposal for Congress

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:55:33 -0000

Those of you who watched West Wing may remember that the code name for the US President is "POTUS" = President Of The United States.

Similarly, the acronym of the judicial branch is SCOTUS = Supreme Court Of The United States.

The legislative branch, however, is simply called "Congress".

But wouldn't it be wonderful if it were nicknamed the Legislature Of The United States.

That is, LOTUS?

Imagine if that was the name, the peaceful image, associated with our major governing body. Wouldn't that be beautiful?

Caucus Like It's Hot (for OBAMA)

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:19:09 -0000

If your state is up at bat tomorrow (like mine!), please do the future proud and BE A PART OF MAKING IT.

Lawrence Lessig gives a great presentation on why he's endorsing Obama here
(even if you don't know who Lessig is, it's a well thought-out appeal)

For pretty much any other information you could want on Obama, my friend (a Precinct Leader for his campaign in San Francisco) has put together a great primer here. (With-- bonus!-- a link to a great interview with Samantha Power, leader of the Save Darfur movement, who has been working on Obama's campaign for the last several years).

See you in the future!

Community Control of Water in the Early West

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 01:25:50 -0000

More from my water-law text:

"A commonly-held assumption that the western states quickly and uniformly adopted prior appropriation is not accurate. Western history shows that the earliest irrigation developed around various quasi-utopian colony schemes, and these colonies were receptive to a variety of water allocation practices. Irrigation colonies in southern California and Colorado following the Mormon model [of collective management] were founded in the 1870s and early 1880s."

So the West's story of rugged individualism is not the full story of how pioneer populations dealt with the challenges of scarcity.

Funny how history conveniently forgets facts that don't fit into the dominant narrative our society tells about itself...

Dog + Snow = WOW

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:34:49 -0000

This made me hilariously happy. And, of course, reminded me of Farland's pictures of dogs bounding through snow ;)

A Tiny Bit of Dark Humor

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:43:55 -0000

I usually feel Gaia is not the place to post cynical web comics, but I couldn't resist this one. I mean, sometimes I feel like lonely, angsty fish in a barrel myself ;)

[On a brighter topic, my grandmother's valve replacement surgery went fine & she's expected to make a full recovery]

For you and you and you, and my grandmother

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:01:35 -0000

...

More Wine, Less Cattle!

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:19:57 -0000

[aka how else could I ever look Al Gore in the face?]

So I'm geekily psyched about taking Water Law this semester. I keep reading these articles that say "Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century."

Water privatization, droughts, fresh water shortages... How could I really go out and live and be lawyerly in California without knowing about something that's such a fundamental Big Deal to western states-- and lots of developing countries too? (I worry, e.g.: are NGOs et al. adequately taking climate change into account when recommending that farmers concentrate on certain crops? Say, cash crops over something more hardy and sustainable, over anything diverse?)

I cracked open the first chapter of the text a couple days ago, and I'm so glad to be getting a better understanding of the system. Yeah, lots of the stats about increasing use and future needs are scary, but it feels great to be learning information (and soon, legal tools) to be able to do something useful someday.

So, some stuff from my reading:

Three important facts about western water use & the related economy:

1) "Irrigation uses the overwhelming share of water consumed in every western state."

2) Surprisingly, the author contends "continued rapid population growth in the West, will not, in theory, overstrain the region's water supply." That is, despite the West's urbanization, water use by municipal areas and industries are insignificant compared to well, see 1.

"[I]n California and elsewhere, a relatively modest reduction in agricultural use-- on the order of 10 or 12 percent-- could free up enough water, in theory, to permit decades of population growth."

3) "[M]ost agricultural water grows low-value crops."

And what's the answer to that problem? How about, "Alex, what is vegetarianism?"

"In California... nearly 1 million acres of irrigated pasture requires about 4.2 million acre-feet of water per year-- as much as an urban population of 23 million. Pasture, though it is the single largest water user in California, is an extremely low-value crop, with a gross value of just $93 Million (1986) in a $480 Billion state economy. (Pasture's total economic value is several times greater if one calculates secondary benefits, but a much smaller amount of water used on high-value crops or in an urban setting would produce equal secondary benefits.)"

And the next largest water consumers in California? Alfalfa, cotton, and irrigated rice.

These top four water consumers accounted for nearly half of all agricultural water use in California. "By contrast, the value of California's grape crop- $1.5billion-- was almost equal to that of ALL the crops just mentioned, but the grape acreage used just 1.6 million acre-feet of water, about one-ninth as much."

MORE WINE, LESS CATTLE? Sounds like a motto to me.

(Oh and it's not just wine. Think of all the other yummy crops from Cali: avocados, strawberries, oranges, asparagus, almonds, walnuts... all are Higher-value but use less water than pasture/alfalfa/cotton/rice.)

Adelaide Exeana Writes Back

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:44:45 -0000

How about something a bit lighter today?

My second cousin Shana had a baby around Dec 11-ish. That was right before finals and holiday trips, so I didn't send out a gift until mid-January.

Rather than send a "Congrats on the baby!" card, I decided to send a belated birthday card, made out to my new niece herself.

Today I received a reply in the mail:

Thanks so much for the cool toy from Vietnam. Pretty soon I will know how to grab onto it-- but for now I'm enjoying the bright colors I see when I look at it. Don't worry about missing my birthday-- I'll take gifts anytime! I hear you might come visit? Will you mind if I spit up on you? It's a reflex so I'm just warning you!

Love,
Adelaide

How fantastic? I'm tempted to take up a correspondence "to Adelaide" as a regular thing.

...

Actually, how about a two-for-one deal? I also recently gave a souvenier from Mexico to an 8-year old girl who takes Spanish lessons from my mother. I got a reply from her, too-- but not ghost-written. It reads:

Thank you very much for the sombrero for Pig. He is wearing it right now! Pig has always wanted to learn the Mexican Hat Dance-- and now's his Mexican Hat Chance! I love the decorations on it and so does Pig. He didn't get anything else for Christmas, you know! --Julia

[Of course, it's even better when you see the meandering hand-writing and size-changing letters.]

FINE, I will just be my body right now.

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:11:07 -0000

I was standing on the lashed-together ladder up to my loft bed, reaching to tug at a blanket to carry with me to the couch.

I felt the ladder legs skid, then give out. The falling was slow, and I had a long time to think on the way to the floor.

My first thought was, Oh shit! I'm stupid. Then something else I don't remember. I was shocked how far into the fall it took me to even think maybe I should move somehow or alter my position, maybe do something to protect my head.

But by that point the ladder and I were already down for the count. I was-- am-- totally fine, no injuries, but adrenaline-stunned. I held stock still for a second. No sudden moves. Memory zoomed me back to my first conscious instant on the ground the time I was hit by a car, when I had to wait in shock to see if I could still breathe. And I had an image of my grandmother who is about to go into the hospital for surgery. Is this feeling the quality of helplessness experienced by elderly people who fall? I hadn't even felt my body do anything instinctive, reactive, on the way down.

Rationally, my brain informed me that I was okay, all clear, I could get up. But instead I crawled off the ladder, tossed the blanket (still somehow in my hand) into a bundle on the floor, and curled up on top of it. Giving in to being a body, letting its reactions play out. Sobbing without tears, whimpering. Slightly shaking. Breathing. Animals twitch and shiver after trauma, to let out their shock. It's natural. We forget.

And of course, I was brought back to all the other times sickness and injury and shock have showed me that I am really a body, in the end and that a Self is an illusion of arrogance. Surrender, surrender. You are the body. You are those waves of pain and intensity, of roaring inarticulate emotion and aching muscle.

I am I am I am.

Our Community is Dead; Long Live Our Community

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:08:23 -0000

"The King is Dead; Long Live the King"

Wikipedia informs me that this cry -- a traditional proclamation upon the death of a king-- comes from the law of le mort saisit le vif : the transfer of sovereignty occurs instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. Thus a particular king may die, but the country is never without a king.

The death of Zaadz has crept up on me-- what, it's almost the 15th, already? This is the last day of this form, this name?

We are an optimistic crew here, so eager to reassure each other of rebirth, to skip over to the constructive side of things.

But I wanted to linger here a moment, not to dwell on the past, but to let the death sink in... It's not really a rebirth until you've felt through the death, right?

Stillness, stillness. A heartline goes flat.

And we are still here, holding space, into the void.

Love.

Reifying Our Institutions

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:22:20 -0000

So, I just switched books for a moment-- to Presence, a book that Siona has been recommending to me for approximately forever-- and in the opening pages came across a passage that dovetails with the last post:

"The species of global institutions reshaping the world includes non-business organizations as well. Today, for example, it's possible to enter an urban school in China or India or Brazil and immediately recognize a way of organizing education that has become completely taken for granted in the West. Students sit passively in separate classrooms. Everything is coordinated by a predetermined plan, with bells and whistles marking time, and test and plans to keep things moving like one giant assembly line throughout each hour, day, and year. Indeed, it was the assembly line that inspired the industrial age school design, with the aim of producing a unform, standardized product as efficiently as possible. Though the need to encourage thoughtful, knowledgeable, compassionate global citizens in the twenty-first century differs profoundly from the need to train factory workers in the nineteenth century, the industrial age school continues to expand, largely unaffected by the realities within which children are growing up in the present day.

As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, a living system continually recreates itself. But how this occurs in social systems such as globl institutions depends on both our individual and collective level of awareness. For example, each individual school, is both a whole unto itself and a part, a place for "presencing" of the larger educational system. So, too, is each individual member of the school: teachers, administrators, students, and parents. In particular, adults carry the memory, expectations, and emotions of their own experience as schoolchildren. The same holds true in businesses: the organization's members become vehicles for presencing the prevailing systems of management because those systems are most familiar.

As long as our thinking is governed by habit-- notably by industrial, "machine age" concepts such as control, predictability, standardization and "faster is better"-- we will continue to re-create institutions as they have been, despite their disharmony with the larger world, and the need of all living systems to evolve."

Our Mismatched Characteristics

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:57:14 -0000

In the last few years, after a decade-plus hiatus, I've started reading science fiction books again. My interest was reignited mainly by the themes of reimagining gender (Ursula Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness), collective intelligence (Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End) and the future of communication and the nature of self-identity as communications allow our presences to become ever more distributed and multiple (David Marusek's Counting Heads). Things that are relevant to understanding ourselves now, and to better grasping where our energy may lead us in the near future. There are still times, however, even when I read sci-fi books I like, that certain tropes and clichés cause my interest to flag and make me wonder if it'd be better to switch back to something about *this world* and *these times* and becoming more awake and engaged with the world rather than "escaping." But of course, good scifi can serve as a reflection of our present world and societies.

Anyway. That was a bit of ramble. What I wanted to post was an excerpt from Dawn, by Octavia Butler (the first black woman to become an internationally recognized science fiction writer).

Alien to human: "You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you."

Human: "What [are] they?"

Alien: "You are intelligent. That's the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have to put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we've found, though your focus is different than ours."

Human: "What's the second characteristic?"

Alien: "You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing."

It's interesting that the author conceives as the urge to hierarchy as a genetic inclination. Maybe so; but humans are far more adaptable to different systems than other species are, and so I think have more potential to transcend hierarchy.

And I invite you to consider with me for a second. Beyond, possibly, genetics, where does hierarchy come from in our lives? Until I participated in Community Building workshops (and Open Space workshops) I didn't truly appreciate how much my upbringing, especially through our institutionalized school system, had ingrained in me an assumption that hierarchy was necessary to "get things done." And not only a visible necessity, but an invisible default strategy to be turned to even in situations where, with a little consideration, it would become obvious that more collaborative strategies might have worked better. What would society be like, if we had regular opportunities to practice solving problems by ourselves, collectively, from a young age? If we learned to trust group processes rather than fear them?

{This is why I am intrigued and encouraged by democratic "non-coercive" schools or even more mainstream projects such as multi-year classrooms, where children learn to teach each other.}

But let's bracket our early bruising. What about right here and now? Have you perpetuated hierarchical thinking lately? How so? I know there have been times that I personally have coopted the techniques of bureaucracy (perhaps the ultimate expression of hierarchy?) that have been aimed against me in the past and used them on others where it was convenient or seemed necessary to avoid conflict: speaking as an impersonal organization rather than as an individual, claiming recourse to "policies" that are written nowhere but the vapor of the moment, etc. etc. I try not to do that, and I tell myself I do it less and more fairly than those who have bureaucratized against me; but I know that, at least sometimes, my rationales are only justifications.

Another thought: isn't hierarchy the natural precursor of capitalism? Surely the more we think hierarchy is the natural means of ordering our social lives, the easier to believe it is the natural ordering of our economic lives as well...