Sometimes I will watch a movie several times; only once in a blue moon will I see one twice in a weekend. I have read a several books twice and am planning to reread several more, but this usually occurs after years. while I do see my favorite bands over and over, it’s rare that I will see a band twice in a long weekend. I surprised myself last weekend when I ventured to the City on Thursday with my roomie, did a Santa Cruz road trip with friends on Saturday, and went solo to San Jose on Sunday, all to Katchafire. They are an all Maori reggae band from New Zealand - roots reggae at its finest.

My highlight was hangin’ out with Greenville, Jordey, and Jamey after the show Saturday night. We had a good chat and shared some nice local garlic chicken. I might as well as caught afire. For the record, Katchafire was on fire all three nights. Their concerts are massive singalongs. Reminded me of being in the Bahia for Carnaval where blocks full of people sing the top hits of the year and more generally of Brasil, where locals sing in clubs. Judging by the audience’s ability to sing some many of their songs, Katchafire clearly has a strong base in Northern California. And they all knew my favorite songs.

It seemed like everyone and deh mama was singing “Seriously“. Its about a guy telling his lady friend its time to calibrate. They haven’t been in communication lately; she hasn’t been calling so he doesn’t call much either. When they do talk, he’s been telling her the thumbnail of what’s real for him. He wants to explore the relationship.

He knows she’s been going through a challenging period adjusting to her new life, job, car, city, and home. He knows her job is demanding. But he also knows that she finds time to do her thing and that he does not feel like priority.

He has given a lot of space to get her life under control. He’s been as patient as brotha like him can be and still remain marginally engaged. He told her from the beginning that she could be real with him and he would be with her. Its difficult and they would practice together. But still she’s not communicating what’s really goin’ on…

He has this sense that there is a part of her - her inner hermit - that pulls away emotionally and physically, protecting itself. This part of her is capable of unmatched love and beauty. He knows that this vulnerable part of her is astoundingly beautiful, strong, and amazing. He’s never experienced that part of her. He wants that part of her to shine and he is willing to whatever he can to help support her shining as long as it does not compromise himself. He just wants to give it a real try. Circumstances have been challenging and now he wants to know wassup.

That’s what I imagine when I singalong.

You know you colour me life
You colour me thinking
Colour them cool
And if you’re feeling alright
Then why are we waiting

Another song that gets the crowd going is “Colour me Life“. Colour is about a woman whose very presence enriches this man’s life. Without trying and often not even realizing she positively influences how he sees the world and himself. She models a way of being that colors his thinking, that colors his life - and it colors them cool.

I imagine him seeing more - vibrancy, highlights, detail, connections. She brings out a richness of vision and points out new directions for his gaze. Her presence in his life is like living nearby the fountain of youth. He’s taking better care of himself - wearing his helmet, eating his veggies. The world is more beautiful - he sees lichen on tree trunks, delight in her smile, and new possibilities everywhere.

His life is rich. He wants to make sure she realizes the amazing impact she has had and that he really appreciates her and wants her in his life. He wants to fully explore the possibility of something beautiful and lasting. He wants a partner with whom to explore his newly colorful world.

That’s what I like! Songs that are real stories and bring forth goosebumps as I signalong the hooks. Believe me, Katchafire has show full of ‘em.

The guys in the band are awesome. I like how they carry themselves, from their celebratory stage presence to their grounded and friendly kiwi Maori backstage persona. One love! I especially enjoy watching them switch instruments between songs and share lead vocal duties. In concert, five different band members sang lead in one or more songs.

My recommendation: Buy their albums, go to their shows, catch afire! You won’t be disappointed.

Reggae Rising: please book these guys! They will bring it!

BIG ups to my girl G Fizzle who got me up on Katchafire last summer and made me a sweet Katchafire compilation CD a couple months ago.

I like the picture Clarence Page is painting in the article below. Very balanced and thoughtful.

I resonate strongly with most of the positions he articulates.

From the start, I have thought it utterly ridiculous that people got upset about Wright’s “the chickens come home to roost” comment. As Tim Wise noted in a blog post a week or so again, Wright didn’t say we love the chickens or that we are welcoming the back. In some circles, the “chicken roosting” explanation is about as benign as it gets. Some would say we financed the chickens coming back or monitored their entire journey back.

I also liked that Page brought in the quote from the young black woman about the origin of AIDS:

“Do I agree with what Wright said about AIDS being created by white people and given to black people?” she went on. “I don’t know. I hope not. However, we live in a country that did conduct the ‘Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment’ on 399 black men between 1932 and 1972. Those black men were used as human guinea pigs. We live in a country that has no problem segregating poor and usually minorities in segregated and typically substandard housing and sending their children to substandard schools with substandard teachers. Does this happen to White American also? Yes, but it happens to us at a larger rate in relation to our population in this country.”

This is a key point. Inequality and injustice is alive, well, and has been thriving in this country since its inception. Since the first African slave set foot on this land, the United States and its predecessors have created systems that institutionalized inequity and injustice. A particularly influential examples was the awarding of GI bills after WWII to mainly whites, financing white flight into the suburbs and the collapse of the urban centers.

Overall, I’d say the United States has not been a friend of the black man so it is not surprising that there is profound distrust as reflected in some of Wright’s comments as well as the surveys of Black public opinion. Do we condemn them or do we change the system?

Barack Obama and His Pastor—First Not Black Enough—Now is He Too Black?

Clarence Page

Hey, what happened to all those people who wondered whether Barack Obama was “black enough” to win black votes?

Now all I hear is people asking whether he’s too black to win white votes. Those who walk the highwire of crossover politics—black to white and back again—must strike a delicate balance. It was in the process of learning that balance that Barack Obama met the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Obama was learning how to be “black.” This much is for sure, he’s learning more all the time. One lesson he’s learning these days is how hard it is to be black without being thoroughly misunderstood by whites.

Years ago, Obama was trying to gain a better understanding of black folks when he met Wright in the first place. Ryan Lizza described the encounter in an excellent profile in the March 19, 2007, issue of The New Republic. He wrote that Wright was unimpressed when Obama the community organizer first approached Trinity United Church of Christ. “They were going to bring all different denominations together to have this grassroots movement,” explained Wright, a white-haired man with a goatee and a booming voice. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Do you know what Joseph’s brother said when they saw him coming across the field?’” Obama said he didn’t. “I said, Behold the dreamer! You’re dreaming if you think you are going to do that.’”

Obama’s problem was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but he didn’t have a “church home” of his own. That means a lot among black church folks. One reverend put it to him like this, according to Lizza: “What you’re asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you’re getting yours from.”

Imagine Obama, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia with a white mother from rural Kansas, shopping for a church on Chicago’s Southside. He was intrigued by Trinity’s guiding principles—what the church calls the “Black Value System”—which included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”

Ironically, contrary to its militant Afrocentric image in Washington’s punditocracy, some of the older pastors warned Obama that Trinity was for “Buppies”—black urban professionals—and didn’t have enough “street cred.”

Having visited Trinity and having friends who are long-time members, I personally find it has a refreshing mix from the upper class to the underclass. I am particularly impressed by its healthy proportion of young fathers. In too many black churches you find old folks, children and lots of women in between, and you leave wondering, where are all of the young men?

The mix of prophetic activism and traditional old-time black religion appealed to Obama as it appeals to many of us in the black community. The black church was founded in slavery as an underground church, a haven from the plantation. Black slaves and freedmen established their own congregations mixing Africa-rooted traditions with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the liberation imagery of Moses and the Children of Israel.

White pundits who grumble that they don’t go to church to hear politics obviously don’t feel the need for politics. The black church has a different tradition. While many black preachers speak only of personal salvation, many others speak of the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power. Among other legacies, this prophetic wing of the black church produced the Underground Railroad, slave uprisings and the modern civil rights movement. Obama found the cultural community of black churches to be more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than his own brand of organizing.

Trinity gave Obama an extension of the street organizing education he had received at the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by late community organizer Saul Alinsky, which emphasized a focus on people’s self-interest.

“Sometimes the tendency in community organizing of the sort done by Alinsky was to downplay the power of words and of ideas when in fact ideas and words are pretty powerful,” Obama told Lizza, continuing, “’We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal.’ Those are just words. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. But they help move things. And I think it was partly that understanding that probably led me to try to do something similar in different arenas.”

What about Wright’s words? Yes, I’m troubled that Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor made remarks such as, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

But I’m more troubled by polls that show a substantial percentage of black Americans also believe that the government lied about AIDS. About half of black Americans surveyed in a 2005 study by Rand Corporation and Oregon State University believed that AIDS is man-made. More than a fourth said it was created in a government lab, and 12 percent actually claimed that the virus was spread by the CIA. The paranoids include black church members, according to polls as far back as 1990, when a New York Times/WCBS-TV News poll found that 35 percent believed AIDS was a form of genocide. Overall, one African American in 10 believed the AIDS virus was “deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people” and an additional 2 in 10 thought that might be so.

Based on my experience with black folks, sadly that sounds about right. Wright’s words may sound wacky to outsiders, but they resonate among a lot of black folks—and not just in Chicago.

“I don’t always agree with what Rev. Wright says or how he says it,” a female member of Wright’s congregation e-mailed me in response to a column I wrote. She didn’t think I had given Wright a fair shake. She added, “But a lot of what he says is the truth.”

“Do I agree with what he said about AIDS being created by white people and given to black people?” she went on. “I don’t know. I hope not. However, we live in a country that did conduct the ‘Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment’ on 399 black men between 1932 and 1972. Those black men were used as human guinea pigs. We live in a country that has no problem segregating poor and usually minorities in segregated and typically substandard housing and sending their children to substandard schools with substandard teachers. Does this happen to White American also? Yes, but it happens to us at a larger rate in relation to our population in this country.”

The trouble with such endemic anger, fear, distrust, resentment and suspicions of the government is the health risks that it poses. Information is power. Ignorance about AIDS is death. Even the professionals know that. “It makes my job harder because I have to devote time and energy to addressing those concerns,” the director of an AIDS counseling effort in Brooklyn told one newspaper. When she speaks to black groups, she said, “there is almost always someone in the audience that has the answer: ‘AIDS is part of a plot, a white man’s plan to eradicate black people.’ If I dismiss it out of hand, then those people who believe in it have turned me off.”

So when I try to figure out the big question of Barack Obama’s pastor drama—and why indeed did he stay with that church and minister for 20 years—it is not hard for me to picture the Illinois senator as a Chicago version of that Brooklyn AIDS director.

Obama, too, was looking for ways to bridge the divide that could help him organize black folks on Chicago’s south side. Wright had found a way. What has been lost in the inflammatory rhetoric of talk radio and cable TV and Internet bloggers is that Rev. Wright grew his church from 80 members in the early 1970s to more than 6,000 now on its membership rolls today with 3,000 seats in its sanctuary. Trinity is among the largest churches in the predominately white United Church of Christ denomination. Wright inspired Trinity to create more than 100 ministries, including a “young fathers” ministry and, yes, a major HIV/AIDS prevention, detection and treatment ministry.

Also lost is the side of Wright that ABC’s Nightline showed in a video clip on the evening after Obama’s now famous Philadelphia speech on the issue. In striking contrast with the fiery minister replayed endlessly on YouTube, the clip showed a subdued reverent Wright praying, “Oh, God, we come from many different places and different races, but we are of one race, the human race.”

Unfortunately, a fiery sound bite goes around the world before a video clip of a quiet, reflective Wright gets out the door. So does another nugget of truth that Obama himself pointed out: Even in his most inflammatory sound bites, Wright never attacked anyone else’s race. He only attacked racism. But when tempers and nostrils are flaring, it’s not a good time for a thoughtful discussion about semantics.

The irony of Obama’s pastor problem is how the senator’s critics have turned on him for doing what his fans have always wanted him to do, help bridge America’s differences of race, ethnicity, party and interest groups.

I, for one, don’t find it extraordinary that a man who has promised to talk with Cuba, Iran and Venezuela without preconditions would have no trouble talking with a friend of Louis Farrakhan, another divisive figure in black America.

When I see Obama being pressed to choose between Wright and white voters, I am reminded of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, being pressed by his Republican arch foe Alderman Edward Vrdolyak to denounce Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. The alderman’s goal was to drive a wedge between Washington and his Jewish supporters. Mayor Washington did back then what Obama has done today, he condemned Farrakhan’s inflammatory words, but not the man himself. What credibility would Mayor Washington have with black folks who, like Wright, had seen Farrakhan’s movement redeem addicts, prostitutes and prison gangsters on whom the rest of society had given up.

In such circumstances, black folks tend to condemn the sin—in this case the sin of anti-Semitism—but not necessarily the sinner.

I myself criticized Mayor Washington for that in my Chicago Tribune column. Farrakhan was not worth the bad blood his words stirred up between blacks and Jews, I wrote. But Washington had a lot more constituents than me to listen to. Like Obama, he reached out to Chicagoans on all sides of the racial, ethnic and religious divide. Mayor Washington rallied supporters to avoid being distracted or bamboozled by wedge issues like Farrakhan. He kept his coalition together and won election and reelection in a city that was less than 40 percent African American. And he managed to do it without letting his rivals drive wedges between blacks and Jews in his coalition.

Like Mayor Washington, Obama put the Rev. Wright’s hurtful comments in the context of Wright’s generation and its experiences. He put himself in the context of a young community organizer, raised in a white world, yet still learning the political ways of the black community in Chicago’s South Side. “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes,” admitted Obama in his big Philadelphia speech on the topic. “Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely—just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed,” Obama added.

And yet, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Was Obama throwing his grandma “under the bus,” as Fred Barnes on Fox News Channel asserted? No, Obama was merely pointing out the misguided views we’re willing to put up with in our loved ones, knowing that their attitudes are passing from the scene, along with their generation.

“The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama said. “It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country, a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old, is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”

The good news, Obama pointed out, is that “America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

With that, amid great applause, he moved smoothly from what divides Americans to the common concerns of jobs, schools, health care and housing that should unite us.

So how does Obama bridge the canyons of distrust between blacks and whites without losing the trust of both? Quit the church? I don’t think that will solve Obama’s pastor problem. His critics will not let it rest. If he’s gone, they’ll badger the airwaves by asking why he stayed so long. Some would even have the audacity to razz his departure as a cynical political move. That’s what the conservatives want. So what if Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other conservative evangelicals can blame 9/11 on liberals and pro-choice activists and accuse feminists of practicing witchcraft and still be welcomed into the Bush White House. Yeah, so what? Black folks are used to being held to a different standard, aren’t we?

Or Ron Paul can speak of how 9/11 attacks came in response to decades of American adventures overseas and get away with it. But when Obama’s minister says the same thing, Obama is castigated.

Yes, black folks are accustomed to having to be twice as good and twice as smart to get half as much, so the Obama scenario does not look all that new.

Obama’s not asking me for advice, but if he did, I’d tell him to tough it out. He found the best way to do it. He realizes he gets in trouble when he tries to run a conventional campaign, as he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Conventional politics is Hillary Clinton’s specialty. Back to insurgency mode, says Obama.

So far, that means Obama turned to his special strength, his powers of persuasion through oratory. After years of generalities, he stood up and addressed the nation with specifics. He changed the conversation. You want to unify America, America? First, we need to talk.

Clarence Page is a an award-winning journalist, a syndicated columnist and a member of the editorial board for the Chicago Tribune. He can frequently be seen as a panelist on such network shows as Meet the Press.

My boy Jose hipped me to a news report by Dana King of KPIX on what’s happens to some of the old computers that we recycle. You have got to see the video - it’s horrific. The Ghanaian town of Agbogbloshie has a huge field filled with e-waste and burnt up computers. Young people including kids can earn the equivalent of $5 dollars a day extracting copper from the machines. The average person in Ghana lives on $2 per day. To get at the copper, they burn the machines which releases pollutants including highly toxic dioxins into the air. Goats feed on the remnants of the burned computers and the field is situated next to a play field for children.

Nutty as it may seem, this not an isolated incident. 50 to 80% of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. In destinations such as China, India and Nigeria, workers use hammers, gas burners and bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and local ecological systems to a toxic cocktail of chemicals including lead. And now some of these chemicals are coming back to us… embedded in toys that are touched and sucked by the most vulnerable members of our society… Our babies…

Assignment Africa: Dana King Reports from Ghana

Dana King

Accra, Ghana (CBS 5) ― CBS 5 anchor Dana King recently completed a trip to Ghana in western Africa. This week she reports on the trouble of toxic e-waste, the struggle to find clean water in remote villages, the journey Americans often take to find a bit of their own heritage in the history of slavery, and the clash between an ancient belief in witches and the standards of modern justice. Below is Part 1: e-Waste in Ghana.You smell Agbogbloshie market before you see it. It is filthy, crammed with people and junk. The path into the heart of the dump narrows the farther in we walk. We are obviously unwelcome. A young man grabs at our camera, asking “Why are they shooting?”

We need to get approval to be here. There is actually a tribal chief of Agbogbloshie. We sit with him and a group of men that are his elders. Since we have come unannounced, it’s touch and go, but young chief allows us entry, but only as far as the river.

Blackened sludge runs through the dump and out to the ocean. And what look like raindrops on the surface are actually mosquitos, likely carrying malaria.

We cross the river and meet the second chief. It’s another 25 minutes of diplomacy before we are escorted in to wander the littered landscape.

And that’s when we see it: an enormous pile of computers. In fact, there are acres full of these first-world relics chucked into a third-world heap. Where did they come from?

We find labels on them from Radius Incorporated of Sunnyvale and ViewSonic from Walnut in Los Angeles County. And those are just a few. All the major manufacturers are represented here: Apple, Epson, IBM, Dell - all these companies, all this waste in Accra, Ghana.

Kids can make a lot of money from this scrap because it’s loaded with copper. To get to it, the surrounding parts have to be burned. We’re told that a small bundle can bring in the equivalent of five dollars, pretty good when many Ghanaians exist on about two dollars a day.

But the cost is high. Computers release a cocktail of toxins when they are burned or smashed. There is lead, dioxin, and mercury, and many others toxic substances. Goats feed on the trash. Children seem unaware of the danger.

Apparently, so is Ghana’s government: the Ministry of Education and Sports has a field right next to where people are burning toxic material. The children play soccer in the smoke.

“It’s just horrific, these people are being poisoned right before our very eyes,” says Barbara Kyle of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition.

Kyle looked at our Ghana video with disgust. Her organization is a non-profit trying to get the government and computer industry to recycle responsibly. There are laws against dumping e-waste in poor nations and the Environmental Protection Agency considers computers hazardous in general. But Kyle tells us, there’s a problem:

“The EPA has deliberately created huge loopholes by tinkering with the definition of hazardous waste,” she explains. “They’ve created the circuit board exemption, the precious metals exemption, the scrap metals exemption, the recycling exemption.. the exemptions cover every product three times over so it doesn’t count as hazardous waste anymore.”

But it is dangerous waste and it’s filling up developing world dumpsites at an alarming rate. The United Nations environment program estimates the annual tally at around fifty million tons of electronic cast-offs per year. Even the best of environmental intentions wind up in places like Accra.

For more information on how to properly recycle your electronics, check out this link from the Electronic TakeBack Coalition

For more information on aid to Africa, call World Vision at 510-525-5665 or email amason@worldvision.org.

It was 10p. I was riding down San Pablo Ave in Oakland last night on my way to Luka’s Taproom to meet up with my colleague Ingrid. I happened to be thinking about a project I am involved with called the HOPE Collaborative which seeks to create fundamental and sustainable environmental changes that will significantly improve the health and wellness of Oakland residents. I am participating on the built environment team of the collaborative. For some reason, some of my best ideas come while I am riding. Anyway, I rolling pretty quick, grooving to some RNB down near 24th on San Pablo. Lo and behold, out of the corner of my little eye, I spied this sign in the window of a corner store.

For those of you who are not familiar, hyphy is a local urban cultural movement. I would add of dubious benefit to the community, though I am not saying that everyone and every thing about the hyphy movement is bad. here is what Wikipedia says:

Hyphy (pronounced /ˈhaɪfiː/ HYE-fee) is a style of music and dance primarily associated with the Bay Area hip hop culture. The Hyphy movement started in the early ’90s but began to re-emerge in the early 2000s as a response from Bay Area rappers against commercial hip hop for ignoring the Bay’s influence on the hip hop industry.^[1][2] Although the “hyphy movement” has just recently seen light in mainstream America, it has been a long standing and evolving culture in the Bay Area.^[3] Bay Area rapper Keak Da Sneak takes credit for coining the term when, as a young boy, his mother would often tell him he was hyperactive. He would repeat the word “hyper” as “hyphy”.

Hyphy music is distinguished by gritty, pounding rhythms and in this sense can be associated with the Bay Area as crunk music is to the South; however, contrary to popular belief, the musical aspect of the Hyphy movement has very few similarities to crunk music as it is dictated by more up-tempo beats.^[4] An individual is said to “get hyphy” when they act or dance in an overstated, fast paced, and ridiculous manner.^[5] Those who consider themselves part of the Hyphy movement would describe this behavior as “getting stupid” or “going dumb.”^[6][7] In contrast to much of popular American culture where these phrases would be considered negative or even insulting, Hyphy is distinguished by taking this kind of behavior as a form of pride.^[8]

The Hyphy Movement definitely encourages some really nutty behavior, like ghost riding the whip in which the driver jumps out of a car in motion and begin dancing, sometimes alongside the empty if not the roof. I am also not feeling the glorification of dumb and stupid.

Anyway, the ingredients of Hyphy Juice are high fructose corn syrup, guarana, Vitamin C, taurine, caffeine, inositol, B Vitamins, and elutheroccoccus senticosus. Not all bad, but certainly enough bad. Below is what an energy drink aficionado says about the tasting experience from a blog on energy drinks:

Hyphy is a green apple candy in color, similar to PJ Tight although slightly less dark. When you crack open the tab, there is a strong artificial grape smell. The flavor is just as promised with a mix of grape juice flavor and apple juice. I definitely have not had that in an energy drink though I have seen a lot more grape recently with XO Grape and Xtreme Shock Grape. Hyphy has a pretty thick syrupy sweetness with a good amount of carbonation, but is so sweet it will leave you with a sweet aftertaste long after drinking. It’s definitely one of the most unique flavors I have tested and while it’s not my thing some people will definitely like it for its ripe sweetness in bursting of apple and grape (Grapple) juice flavors. I’ve tried Hyphy out a few times now and I think it’s best as a mixer for your nights out where the alcohol will dilute the thickness a bit and offset the sweetness. But I know some people like thicker energy drinks that are packed with strong flavors and if that’s your game, Hyphy is a good choice.

Anyway, one question in my mind is what impact does such marketing have on low income communities with respect to the food we eat, our collective health, and also reinforcing ineffective behavior.

I have advised the Hope Collaborative to document food marketing and advertising in their community/intersection mapping activities.

It is amazing how insulated we are from economic and ecological feedback loops. As we embark on a ludicrous plan to keep the automobile industrial complex going through corn ethanol subsidies, food prices are rising and people are having a hard time in developing countries. I have been hearing a lot about food prices rising and riots of late. I was particularly saddened to read that poor Haitans are now eating dirt cookies. Cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

My boy Tondre sent me this. Made me think “peak meat” among other things. Frankly, there are so many reasons for us to drastically cut down meat consumption (e.g., out health, our humane-ity, protect ecosystems and watersheds, reduce price pressure on food and especially for poor countries, energy, rain forests, karma) yet is really difficult to tell someone that they are not entitled to a meat every meal diet.

I remember when Melia was about on year old. One of my ex’s family got incensed with me and through a fit when I would not agree to feed my baby meat every day. In retrospect, the conversation was not worth the discord. The last laugh is Melia is not a big meat fan. My impression is that she eats chicken fairly frequently at her Mom’s but she is happy without it and never asks for it.
The article notes,

• The average American eats twice as much as the world average
• Despite being only 5% of the world’s population, we process (i.e., grow and kill) 15% of the worlds meat. Is this just another manifestation of an ethos grounded in greed?
• An estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production
• The average American gets about 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance (which is thought by many to be high); of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein
• If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius
• Nearly all of our ecological problems have their source in food production and in particular meat production.

The article suggests several things that can be done and hints at the one thing that really could make a difference - making the factory farms internalize their externalities:

• And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically

In interests of full disclosure, I really don’t eat much meat. If I go to friend’s for dinner, I may partake (especially if its a beef hot link) but I am not shopping for it. I enjoy fish and other types of seafood though I don’t indulge as much as I would were it not for mercury contamination and over-fishing.

How much meat do you eat? Post your comment

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

Gary Kazanjian for The New York Times

HERE’S THE BEEF This feed lot in in California can accommodate up to 100,000 head of cattle.

By MARK BITTMAN

Published: January 27, 2008

A SEA change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.

It’s meat.

The two commodities share a great deal: Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources .

What can be done? There’s no simple answer. Better waste management, for one. Eliminating subsidies would also help; the United Nations estimates that they account for 31 percent of global farm income. Improved farming practices would help, too. Mark W. Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute, says, “There should be investment in livestock breeding and management, to reduce the footprint needed to produce any given level of meat.”

Then there’s technology. Israel and Korea are among the countries experimenting with using animal waste to generate electricity. Some of the biggest hog operations in the United States are working, with some success, to turn manure into fuel.

Longer term, it no longer seems lunacy to believe in the possibility of “meat without feet” — meat produced in vitro, by growing animal cells in a super-rich nutrient environment before being further manipulated into burgers and steaks.

Another suggestion is a return to grazing beef, a very real alternative as long as you accept the psychologically difficult and politically unpopular notion of eating less of it. That’s because grazing could never produce as many cattle as feedlots do. Still, said Michael Pollan, author of the recent book “In Defense of Food,” “In places where you can’t grow grain, fattening cows on grass is always going to make more sense.”

But pigs and chickens, which convert grain to meat far more efficiently than beef, are increasingly the meats of choice for producers, accounting for 70 percent of total meat production, with industrialized systems producing half that pork and three-quarters of the chicken.

Once, these animals were raised locally (even many New Yorkers remember the pigs of Secaucus), reducing transportation costs and allowing their manure to be spread on nearby fields. Now hog production facilities that resemble prisons more than farms are hundreds of miles from major population centers, and their manure “lagoons” pollute streams and groundwater. (In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.)

These problems originated here, but are no longer limited to the United States. While the domestic demand for meat has leveled off, the industrial production of livestock is growing more than twice as fast as land-based methods, according to the United Nations.

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.”

Animal welfare may not yet be a major concern, but as the horrors of raising meat in confinement become known, more animal lovers may start to react. And would the world not be a better place were some of the grain we use to grow meat directed instead to feed our fellow human beings?

Real prices of beef, pork and poultry have held steady, perhaps even decreased, for 40 years or more (in part because of grain subsidies), though we’re beginning to see them increase now. But many experts, including Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, say they don’t believe meat prices will rise high enough to affect demand in the United States.

“I just don’t think we can count on market prices to reduce our meat consumption,” he said. “There may be a temporary spike in food prices, but it will almost certainly be reversed and then some. But if all the burden is put on eaters, that’s not a tragic state of affairs.”

If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.

Mr. Rosegrant of the food policy research institute says he foresees “a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption — one like that around cigarettes — emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet.”

It wouldn’t surprise Professor Eshel if all of this had a real impact. “The good of people’s bodies and the good of the planet are more or less perfectly aligned,” he said.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, in its detailed 2006 study of the impact of meat consumption on the planet, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” made a similar point: “There are reasons for optimism that the conflicting demands for animal products and environmental services can be reconciled. Both demands are exerted by the same group of people … the relatively affluent, middle- to high-income class, which is no longer confined to industrialized countries. … This group of consumers is probably ready to use its growing voice to exert pressure for change and may be willing to absorb the inevitable price increases.”

In fact, Americans are already buying more environmentally friendly products, choosing more sustainably produced meat, eggs and dairy. The number of farmers’ markets has more than doubled in the last 10 years or so, and it has escaped no one’s notice that the organic food market is growing fast. These all represent products that are more expensive but of higher quality.

If those trends continue, meat may become a treat rather than a routine. It won’t be uncommon, but just as surely as the S.U.V. will yield to the hybrid, the half-pound-a-day meat era will end.

Maybe that’s not such a big deal. “Who said people had to eat meat three times a day?”

The day before the second meeting on the New Green Deal, I put out the word to some folks of color about the meeting. Everyone was supposed to bring someone to the meeting. Several folks expressed interest. And Babak Tondre of DIG Cooperative said yes. I picked him up at the crib where I had the pleasure of saying hello to his wife Rainjita, daughter Kiana, and Joy Moore who happened to be visiting. After catching up a bit on the way to the bridge, we crossed the bridge in conversation about the homogeneity of sustainability movement. Lightly lamenting the paucity of colored folks involved.

Tondre said things are changing. A few years ago he would meet opposition when he mentioned that there was not enough color in the room, that he felt something was missing. People would try to talk him down from the position that the movement needed to be more inclusive. People would tell him people of color are welcome here, they could be here if they wanted, don’t trip, we’ve got a world to save.

But he says that’s not happening anymore. People really seem to want the participation of people of color and actually do things to make them feel comfortable. We both agreed that the Ella Baker Center-Reclaim the Future Green Jobs campaign and Van had a lot to do with it.

As we drove over the bridge to discuss a Green New Deal of green collar jobs, ecological restoration, and equitable urban sustainability, I had no idea later that night I would feel like someone was trying to talk me down from my feelings about the homogeneity of sustainability movement as I discussed in the previous post.

That’s what she told me. Huh? We were at a party closing out the Culture Catch Salon for MacWorld 2008. DJ Dragonfly had done an awesome set of organic grooves earlier and DJ KnowOne was most of the way through a fun set of breakbeats. I happened to taking a breather, saw and greeted a friend and then engaged in conversation with her female companion who says there’s no such as greenwashing.

She happens to be an acquaintance as well as an emerging sustainability consultant in the Bay Area.

I disagreed. Greenwashing exists. And there’s justice washing and equity washing as well. Greenwashing is when a company ignores the complaints of communities for decades and then in the interest of projecting a green image, buys their way into carbon neutrality. Yes, absolutely, if an organization is buying carbon offsets to deflect their inaction on other fronts, then it is greenwashing. And I extend that to people as well: if all you are doing is buying offsets, you are in my humble opinion greenwashing. Now I’d be more happy if they were buying local offsets and engaging with the community to resolve any grievances.

Anyway, we had got on that topic while talking about the possibility of collaborating. I was saying, hey, I could see us working together on a sustainability gig but I want to be clear ahead of time, I’m not about greenwashing. She looked at me so gently as if her eyes were saying, oh honey, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but greenwashing is myth, made up out of thin air by a misguided group frustrated activists. She did say “I don’t think there’s any such thing as greenwashing. Give me an example.”

After talking about carbon offsetting, I mentioned Nike and its efforts to hide their use of sweatshop labor behind the view of first amendment free speech rights. Interesting, I had just left the house of Mark Kasky, who brought the successful suit against Nike and prevailed in the supreme court, later settling for $1.5 million from Nike. A group including among others Kasky, Peter Berg (co-founder of Planet Drum and the originator of the term bioregionalism) , Randy Hayes (founder of Rainforest Action Network), me and Babak Tondre (co-founder of DIG Cooperative and all around wonderful brotha) were discussing the possibilities of a Green New Deal. Well, I guess Nike isn’t really greenwashing but it’s damn sure equity washing.

So we agreed to disagree about the greenwashing and started talking about sustainability consulting firms. She was saying that they don’t have the appropriate technical background. And I said yeah, they don’t even know what they don’t know. I couldn’t even get an interview with two bay area sustainability consulting firms. Not sure why. I have 7 years of environmental management consulting, including working on life cycle cost assessment and environmental performance measurement in the beginning, 6 years in the internet start up-technology game, and 4 years in energy and localization.

Furthermore, I am developing a consulting practice around energy and industry called Energy Preparedness. The web site presents a white paper that provides one of the only frameworks available for businesses to hedge themselves against potential energy scarcity in the future. Not to mention that I’m a good guy absolutely committed to a better world for every one and doing whatever I can already.

One of these guys blasted out a Facebook message saying that he was looking for people. I replied hey I’m the guy you’re looking for, let’s meet to talk about this and I also sent in a full resume and cover letter mentioning my environmental work in the mid nineties. Never heard back from either him or his people. I won’t go into the other situation now; but it is trip as well - ask me if you’re interested. Suffice to say, i did not get a face-to-face interview with either one.

I told her. I wish it had been a black man. I know a black man would’ve at least given me an interview on the basis of my experience and schooling if not just being a brotha - it’s hard out here. It’s a shame there’s not a lot of blacks or people of color running these sustainability operations. I know it’d be easier for me. I wish I had that option. But I don’t. That’s one of the reasons I started Energy Preparedness. My first client is the Local Clean Energy Alliance. My contract is to organize meetings and implementation of strategies, to talk up local clean energy with decision makers and thought leaders, to stay abreast of the latest, and more… Anyway, I wish I had the option to try to get a job in a more balanced situation. I mean really, I am highly doubtful that these jokers that wouldn’t even give me an interview have a significant amount of people of color on their staff or quite possibly their extended circles. Sustainability - give me a break. That’s greenwashing.

She could hardly believe I was saying that. You can’t be serious. It was if she said Pishaw. Race didn’t have any thing to do with that. What race do you think I am?

I said human. She looked at me disappointed. Since I had no idea, I pulled Armenian out of a hat.

She said no, and that’s the point. It doesn’t matter any more.

It matters to me. And the sustainability movement is the same as any other situation I haven’t co-created myself. Mostly older white men calling the shots and determining my fate and my possibilities. I said yeah, it bothers me when I’m at the Green Festival and I’m on the stage speaking, I look out, and I don’t see myself. That hurts. I don’t want my folks - from any of my communities - to be left behind. Black folks and other communities started out behind in America and have never caught up. It hurts me when I don’t see my myself or my daughter in the audience other than those that I bring. Face it - the sustainability movement has a long way to go with respect to involving people of color. Fortunately, the talk of Green Jobs has gained significant currency, holding the promise of uniting the environmental and justice movements.

For a moment, she looked as if she had lost her only silver dollar. “Well I can see what you mean”, her eyes then brightened like a wood stove as if she had found her dollar after all. “But there is Van Jones and he’s big!”

I said Van wants to see more people of color and youth in the audience! I am thinking to myself that I owe it my brothas and sistas to take a stand for them. Who would I be if their absence didn’t bother me? This brought me back to something Tondre has said earlier.

… Check out the prequel!

At the Whole Earth Festival, I followed the poem from Part I with a brief talk about my work.

The context of our work is a stressed planet. I don’t think that I need to say much more about that to this audience other than if we continue on the current path, Earth will increasingly not be able to provide services that support all life on the planet. These key services are clean air, clean water, nutritious food, and habitat for rich biodiversity. Despite the precarious situation we find ourselves in, we have mentally and emotionally disconnected ourselves from the ecosystem and reorganized our lives such that we are largely oblivious to the potentially calamitous repercussions of further biosphere destruction. We desperately need transformation of consciousness that translates into a new way of interacting within the context of a healthy ecosystem.

With the imminent peaking of oil and natural gas, we find ourselves in a predicament reminiscent of a poem by one of the most popular poets in America. I am imagining him approaching the stage, billowing white robe, pensive gait. He steps to the mike, looks at it slightly perplexed, taps it. With the confirming thud from the speakers, he proceeds.

Salaam, I am Rumi, philosopher and Sufi mystic from 13th century Persia. I’ve got a piece that is just as applicable to your time as mine, if not more so. I don’t know the direct translation of the title, but it is something like “tough love”.

Sit, be still
and listen,
for you are drunk and
we are at the edge of the roof
~ Rumi

I am imagining that Rumi continues.

You are inebriated by the accoutrements of oil - convenience, mobility, and possessions - such that you do not realize the gravity of your situation. You are dangerously close to the edge, the fall is tall, and what you consider the foundation is nothing more than a house of cards. You need to stop - drifting towards the edge. You need to stop - contributing to the instability of the system. Sit down and look around you for local materials to build a ladder, down to a more sustainable way of living here on Earth.

Thanks Rumi. Your poem was flashed on the screen in the beginning of the documentary, Escape From Suburbia. The Director, Greg Greene, had seen me recite the poem as if you had came to speak to the New York Petrocollapse Conference in October 2005, almost 18 months after Whole Earth.

How things had changed. My wife had left and I was in a holding pattern, waiting for her to file. I no longer saw Melia every day because my ex moved 35 miles away, this as I was trying to wean myself out of cars. This was not my wonderful life. I was wondering “how do I work this”. I remembered that day in Davis. The oil crisis was wrecking havoc in my life. Yet I had to stand up and deliver Rumi’s message to New York.

Fortunately, sufficient time has past for me to heal. The divorce has been final for a minute and we collegially co-parent Melia. All is good; we even help each other out. We both know its over forever and even I - ever the romantic - have come to realize that it is for the best. I smile knowing how much I have evolved and that the other side of the pain I experienced is exactly the growth that I needed. I smile knowing much better what I want and need in a relationship. I smile knowing that many people truly appreciate the work I do. And widest of all, I smile knowing that Melia is the greatest blessing of my life.

This is an excellent article by Jim Kunstler on what a post-oil society might look like. Though Kunstler does dabble in it, I would have liked to see a bit more about reconfiguring cities for less energy and transportation. Cities are the largest contiguous and concentrated users of energy. Kunstler says in #3 that cities will contract. I agree but since I live in the city, my hope is that the contractions are orderly transitions to something like ecocities rather than the chaotic attrition. Hopefully, over the next decade, we will evolve existing tools like general plans, building codes, and zoning laws for the energy-constrained future a la the forthcoming recommendations of the Oil Independent Oakland by 2020 task force rather than abandon them as suggested in the article. All in all, Kunstler paints a realistic glimpse of a post-oil society that could potentially be healthier and more spiritually fulfilling than what we have today. As he says, its time to take off the iPod and get busy!

Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society

by James Howard Kunstler, American Social Commentator

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being “Mister Gloom’n’doom,” or for “not offering any solutions” to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions:

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed “greens” and political “progressives” are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

… trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse.

2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller and finer scale, and will require more human labour.

The value-added activities associated with farming — e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils — will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America’s young people (if they can unplug their iPods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform, not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We’ll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be re-inhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.

The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature — as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components — at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken.

The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism.

4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire U.S. trucking system). Get used to it. Don’t waste your society’s remaining resources trying to prop up car and truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit.

Let’s start with railroads, and let’s make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbours, and also for our inland river and canal systems — including the towns associated with them.

The great harbour towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind — yes, sailing ships. It’s for real. Lots to do here. Put down your iPod and get busy.

5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies of scale (and kill local economies) — they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the “warehouses on wheels” of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil.

The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public’s acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick by brick and inventory by inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned “middlemen”).

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead.

Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don’t want to work for a big predatory corporation? There’s lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap.

6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear.

As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America’s heyday of manufacturing (1900–1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We’re going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don’t know yet how we’re going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.

We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things.

7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to an end. It was fun for a while. We liked “Citizen Kane” and the Beatles. But we’re going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We’re going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We’re going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery makers, and singers. We’ll need theatre managers and stage-hands.

The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).

8. We’ll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less affluent society, we probably won’t be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away.

Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it.

But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage — and, in any case, will probably out-perform today’s average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line of work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.

9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called “doctoring.” Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let’s hope that we don’t slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail — everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you.

An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that’s the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

About the writer:

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, The Geography of Nowhere, and 12 other books, including nine novels. His essays have been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Sunday NY Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other places. He was