A springtime sustainable soup

This weekend the farmer's market will open in our town. I don't anticipate there will be many fresh vegetables yet, but I'll be there to purchase a few plants, to greet the organic meat man, and perhaps to buy some good cheese.

I feel a tremendous rush of optimism this time of year; spring is definitely my favorite season.

With the sunshine comes all the little spring wildflowers, morel mushrooms, and dreams of garden bounty to come. Not that I am a skilled gardener. I am trying to learn as much as I can about permaculture, a term coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, referring to permanent agriculture--growing practices adapted to the unique growing conditions and mix of plants found in the existing landscape. Our backyard is populated chiefly by black locust trees, considered a pest in many parts of the country. Our trees are about 70 years old. They wait until June to leaf out, have small leaves that do not need to be raked, and delightfully fragrant flowers. To implement permaculture in our yard, I'll be gradually adding perennial plants, especially edibles, that take advantage of the unique qualities of our particular site.

Last year I planted some asparagus on the edge of our yard, theorizing that the late leafing black locust would permit the asparagus to get the early sun it needs. This year, I am trying to nurture an apple tree that also grows beneath the canopy of the black locust. I pruned the apple tree, and hung a homemade moth catcher in its branches. The following ingredient are mixed in a plastic milk jug: 2 cups of water, a banana peel, 1 cup vinegar, and 1/3 cup black molasses. I cut a 2" hole in the jug and hung it in the tree. This brew is supposed to have a fermented smell that will attract the moths that afflict the early blossoming apples.

The other thing that is coming up all over is garlic mustard. I've written about garlic mustard before. It is another invasive plant that has millions of seeds. The spring seedlings grow quickly and crowd out the native plants. It is very difficult to eradicate once it gets established. The plant has gained a foothold in our neighborhood, the seeds no doubt carried by the prolific deer who live around here.

I think about garlic mustard a lot; for some reason it seems to capture the dilemmas of the changes we humans have wrought on the landscape. I had heard that garlic mustard was edible but found the raw leaves bitter. This afternoon I boiled some garlic mustard leaves in chicken broth for 15 minutes, and found the taste quite palatable.

So, I present herewith a recipe for Kielbasa and garlic mustard soup, which we will have tonight. I'll update this blog with our reactions to the recipe. As I picked the leaves for my garlic mustard I went through the field of growing plants with my grass clippers and snipped off the little white flowers. Next year's crop of garlic mustard will be prolific enough without letting all the plants blossom.

A Springtime Sustainable Soup

Kielbasa & Garlic Mustard Soup

Ingredients
1 19 oz. can Cannellini beans
1 14 oz. can chicken broth
12 ounces turkey kielbasa
1 medium onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp. hot chili sauce
½ lb. potatoes, sliced
½ lb. cabbage, thinly sliced
3 cups fresh garlic mustard leaves, washed and sliced coarsely

Directions:
Place chicken broth, beans, onion, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, and chili sauce in a pot. Simmer covered, for 25 minutes. Add to the pot the potatoes, cabbage and garlic mustard. Simmer, covered for 25 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Options: substitute kale, spinach or collard greens for the garlic mustard.

Here are some more recipes for garlic mustard, which I found on a website called Prodigal Gardens. I would like to see a nutritional analysis of garlic mustard. According to Wisconsin herbalist Rose Barlow, "Mustards provide lots of calcium, potassium, and vitamin B & B2. Research has shown that all mustards, even commercial ones like broccoli, contain concentrated substances which help prevent cancer, including isothiocynates, beta carotene, vitamin C, and fiber."

Happy spring!

How One Thing Leads to Another

This piece of artwork went through a considerable metamorphosis from its early beginning, illustrated in my April 9 post. I seem to be launched on a new series of paintings, and am feeling good about making art once again.

It is easier to explain why I stopped making art for six months, than to explain why I started again. I stopped because of the commercialism and superficiality of the whole art-making enterprise, because of the difficulty of finding audiences who actually take the time to look at one's work, and because art-making seemed fundamentally less important compared to the other things one could do, such as respond in a communitarian fashion to the big issues of the day: global warming, violence, and public health.

I stopped making art for long enough to remember that doing good is a lot trickier than it looks. People don't respond to pious lectures about what they ought to do, they don't do things that the times seem logically to demand, such as conserve energy, carpool, and start managing their land according to the principles of permaculture. Moreover, the community of do-gooders, the 150 people in town who can be counted to show up at the same music events, fundraisers, and lectures--are too pressured for time to engage deeply and collectively with the issues. My need for community and depth around sustainability is unmet.

What really made artmaking possible again was an appreciation of the gift aspect of art. I remembered that the process of making art was a gift to me. We all have our critiques of how society is. It is healing and affirming for the creator of art, to use artistic forms and media to visualize and bring into existence a version what beauty and wholeness could look like.

Giraffes sighted in Minnesota

Four African giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) were recently sighted in southeastern Minnesota this Saturday, surely a sign that the planetary ecosystems are profoundly out of whack. There is much speculation about how the creatures, native to tropical zones, wandered onto a local university campus.

One theory is that the creatures are not actually true giraffes, but are a local mutation of the burgeoning white tailed deer population, a close relative to the giraffe. Vince Gray, a local biologist, suggested that a small band of Odocoileus virginianus (white tailed deer) mutated through natural selection to have much longer necks than normal. He theorized that deer populations have grown so huge that the low lying shrubs and trees normally consumed by the voracious mammals have all but disappeared, leading to mass starvation in some districts, and favoring those creatures whose necks allow them to find more food within reach.

Another more laughable theory, offered by environmental extremists, is that increases in planetary temperatures drove the animals to a more temperate climate, as is available in southeastern Minnesota, the region's "banana belt". Observors were unable to explain how the furry ungulates showed up in Minnesota, but Odin Skukrud, retired Marine Corps officer, speculated that Greenpeace orchestrated the kidnapping of the giraffes and their subsequent release in Minnesota in order to further the vast media-entertainment-environmental conspiracy of global warming.

A more practical concern aroused by the giraffe's visit was the damage a few of them could wreak on the university landscape. Giraffes eat 140 pounds of leaves and twigs per day, and the potential destruction to an urban forest is a matter of concern. Darrell Hedges, landscape supervisor at the University, was frantically looking for a trailer large enough to pick up and transport the four animals to an area where the effects of their tree-top browsing would be less pernicious.

Myra Earnest, member of a local pagan meditation group, said the visit from the giraffes was "a good sign." A giraffe's heart is about two feet long and weighs 25 pounds, making this the biggest hearted mammal in existence. Earnest said "the giraffes were lured to Minnesota through the power of attraction to the many good hearted people living in this area of the state." Her group planned a celebratory ritual which included the construction of a sculptural "Green Man" out of buckthorn bushes. She said the Green Man would then be thrown into the Mississippi River. Her group planned to seek a location for a permanent, year-round giraffe refuge/ritual center.

What to listen to?

I've been engaged in multiple house projects, and also working on a painting, so my head has not been in blog-land. That doesn't mean I've weaned myself from the internet, however. These activities involve physical and manual labor, but not necessarily mental fire-power, so I've been wearing my Sennheiser wireless headset, while I walk all over the house listening to internet radio. It's a great product, by the way. Our house has an open floor plan, and I can listen to whatever I want without disturbing my spouse.

In between painting, I scan some favorite aggregator sites to find good things to listen to. Here's my top ten list of listening sites, one costs subscription $$ and the others are totally free.

1. Public Radio Fan. This is a directory of public radio sites from around the world; you can find out what is playing in music or non-music right now. I have become particularly addicted to Dig Radio in Australia, an eclectic radio station that has introduced me to some new musicians I like. I just ordered a CD by Joanna Newsome, for example, that seems very interesting.

2. New Dimensions Radio. We pay $9.95 a month for a listening club membership to this service, whose purpose is "to deliver life-affirming, socially and spiritually relevant information, practical knowledge and perennial wisdom through the voices and visions of those who are asking new questions and are looking at the world in positive and inspiring ways." When we first joined the club we spent hours listening to some of the best minds in the world, including David Bohm, Krishnamurti, Natalie Goldberg, A.H. Almaas, Larry Dossey, and on and on. Their offerings in the area of spirituality are extremely strong.

3. Global Public Media. This service features readable and listenable article on a "post-carbon world, " aggregating radio programs such as Canada's "Deconstructing Dinner," and covering a wide range of sustainability topics. Great place to learn about peak oil.

4. On Point Radio. This is public affairs programming on a broad range of topics, including the current news, science, arts and culture, and much more. Well organized and accessible radio archives.

5. Speaking of Faith: A program on religion, ethics and ideas, with host Krista Tippett. Her most recent interview of evangelical Christian Richard Cizik explodes conventional ideas of what evangelical Christians think. This program is the cure for stereotypical thinking about the major religions.

6. TED Talks. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and it features some of the big thinkers featured at the annual TED conference in California. Most of the presentations are short, maximum 1/2 hour, and video is provided, but I usually find it easy to listen without attending to the video. Most thought-provoking recent experience on TED was listening to Bjorn Lomborg explain which of the major world problems should be tackled first.

7. The Infinite Mind. Exploring topics like, Place, Laughter, and Bullying, among a host of others. Programs are available for free for a limited period after their first broadcast, but after awhile you may have to purchase to listen.

8. Learn Out Loud. Hundreds of audio and video broadcasts; politics, history, religion and spirituality are some of the best represented topic areas.

9. A-Infos Radio Project. This site aggregates offerings from a host of independent radio programs, a lot of them left of center. The quality of the shows is very mixed, and it can take a long time for the requested radio program to boot up, but this is a great place to search for info on obscure topics.

10. Democracy Now. I have to confess I have only listened to a couple of recent programs, but I invariably find host Amy Goodman well-informed and provocative. I plan to spend some more time here in the future. If you think the mainstream media is missing a lot of important information about the world, you are right. Listen to what's falling beneath the cracks here.

What are your favorite internet radio sources? I'm always looking for new finds. If I have any complaint about the current state of internet radio, it is that is strength is in breadth, not depth. If you have a topic you'd like to explore deeply, you still need books and other print media. For example, I'm looking for extensive information on permaculture, and a host of introductory programs are available but there is very little that lends itself to my practical "what's next?" focus.

In praise of carpooling

I get a little discouraged from time to time that fuzzy green minded activists give so little thought to the real potentials of carpooling, as a way to save time, money, help the planet, and get to where you need to go. About a year ago I put a rideshare board up at the local natural foods store, and although there were a few people who used the board, 99.9% of the population never looked at it and never gave it any thought. In the basis of more than 20 person surveys, I have found that liberals and conservatives alike are reluctant to carpool.

I posted a card on the board that said the following: "Older lady in Hertown, Wisconsin periodically needs rides to Ourtown. Time and dates flexible, " including my name and contact information. It goes without saying that there is no bus, train or plane service between Hertown and Ourtown. And the older lady is quite sprightly but nervous about driving 185 miles across the state. She is sensible about this. One man saw my card and responded to it, saying that indeed he periodically made trips between Ourtown and Hertown and would be willing to help out. It finally worked out that I was able to take advantage of his offer. I understood that he was planning on leaving Ourtown on Thursday, and could drop me in Hertown. I was planning on returning with my husband, who had a related trip planned to visit elderly relatives, so this was a one-way carpool.

Steve and I talked on the telephone several times, and then exchanged emails so we could work out the details of the carpool. We must have both decided we could trust one another, because the way the carpool worked was this: Steve's son came to my house with the car and the dog. I dropped Steve's son off in Ourtown, and headed for LaCrosse in his car (with trusting dog observing it all in the back seat), where Steve works. We planned to meet at 3:30 in a parking lot near his place of work. For about 15 minutes I was worried that something had gone wrong with our arrangement, when I didn't see Steve. What I didn't realize was that he was going to arrive on roller blades--instead I was looking for a driver to drop him off. We eventually found each other in the large parking lot and headed for Hertown, a 3 hour drive away.

We found lots of talk about, but what I was most interested in was the socio-demographic background of someone who was willing to go to great efforts to carpool. The two of us must share a certain number of traits in common. So, following my conversation with Steve, I discovered where to look for enthusiastic carpoolers: people who are involved in mentoring children (we both are); people who are thrifty; people who are sociable; people who place a high value on civic responsibility; people who value the simple life; people who are practical problem solvers; people who have had enough good experiences in Midwestern small towns to be basically trusting of strangers; people who are physically active.

I paid Steve $20 to cover some of his gas costs, and gave him a bag of homemade scones. I hope this was sufficient payback for him. One thing we never did was agree on what I would contribute beforehand. But things appeared to have turned out well.

Our civic celebration of Earth Day is coming up soon. I hope to continue my carpooling advocacy by surveying people about their attitudes toward carpooling, in the hopes of learning the formula that will make people accept this practical solution to so many transportation issues. I am perfectly willing to develop a reputation as a carpooling fanatic, even though I all too often drive around by myself.

Art: product or gift?

I visited family over Easter, and while I was there, I went shopping, not because I needed anything, but I thought I would be interested in the novelty of stores that we don't have in our town.

I visited a major label store with employees who were gifted at chatting with customers. I rapidly discerned that I didn't need the green slacks that were on sale, so I sat in a chair to wait while my mother tried on hers. Stacked next to a display of marked down purses were 4 hand-painted canvases, all by an artist named Parker, featuring decorative floral patterns. Like the clothing in the back of the store, all four canvases were 70% Off The Original Price, once $142, now $42. What a bargain! I could hardly resist, but I did. Seeing these paintings gave me the clearest possible example of art as a product, something that has always been difficult for me.

Here's the dilemma of my creative process: my art-making skills are a gift. When I say that, I'm not claiming that I am a genius, but just that the process of making a painting is a gift to me, and the result is a gift for some people, but clearly not all. The problem is, I often feel uncomfortable about showing my work to others. I regard my work as a gift, but most viewers regard it as a product, and I can't stand having it assessed as a product. There is something about turning a painting into a commodity that feels horrible to me. And I felt a little horrible when I saw those canvases in the store, stacked neatly, marked down, firmly in the commodity category.

I wandered up to the store entry-way and a cheery employee asked me whether I had found anything. I confessed that I hadn't, but that my problem was, I didn't really need anything. She backed away with an awkward smile--the stores depend on people who keep shopping, whether they need anything or not.

As I watched the hordes of women bringing their purchases to the busy cash registers, I thought about all these people eager to give a gift to themselves--buying something, forking over their capital for a little emotional lift. But shopping is a dysfunctional form of gifting; its satisfactions are transitory and for the most part it tends to be wasteful and unnecessary. Jonathan Porritt, "environmental guru" and advisor to the U.K. government, says that our shopping is killing the planet, and we need to shop much less.

Perhaps what is needed is to start becoming aware of the function of the products that we buy: are they necessary commodities, like food or shelter, or are they gifts--an expression of gratitude? We are drowning in our piles of goods, transitory and shallow products that we don't need, that are no gift to ourselves and others. What is needed is a more imaginative way at looking at the gifts of our time and labor. I am re-reading a book that examines the role of creative works like art and poetry in a commodified society. It's called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde. Like the just-begun painting at the top of today's thoughts, this book is helping me begin to re-imagine my work and my life as a gift, an expression of beauty and gratitude that has the potential of contributing to sustainability.

Mapping a positive future

I spent some time today constructing a map for myself. Mapping is a wonderful process for anyone who periodically feels unclear about things. I was introduced to the Mind Mapping process through The MindMap Book, by Tony Buzan. I’ve kept a journal of my thoughts and activities for the past 30 years, but Mind Mapping helped me overcome the weaknesses of the linear thinking that prevails in most journal writing. I learned that the structure of our cognitive, sense-making process is radiant, that is, radiating out from multiple nodes and centers. The kind of writing I am doing here is linear, and its plodding, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other format makes it difficult to see the connections between different ideas. Mapping allows us to tap into insights from multiple directions.

I have had several breakthrough insights as a result of being able to make maps. In November of 2005 I was feeling oppressed and discouraged by what I had recently learned about some of the challenges our world faces, including: bird flus and other pandemics; economic meltdown caused by high debt levels; global warming; peak oil collapse; and on-going violence in the Middle East. I spent a month or so feeling depressed about it all, but then I realized that my gloom and depression served no constructive purpose. I needed to visualize some positive outcomes that represented a response to the life changing conditions that were going on. This consisted of some future-oriented statements that reflected what I would like to see happening in my own community:

1. Community Builds with a greater sharing of time & resources. People will be thrown back on the resources of other people. Those who thrive will be those with the greatest connections to community.
2. People spend more of their time creating, rather than spending. If money is in short supply, goods and services will still need to be offered and shared. As an example, if imported fruit is no longer available, people will need to garden and get creative with local food production.
3. People learn about and focus on healthy foods. Once we realize that the old industrial agriculture system is contributing to lower immunity and resilience, we will need to learn about the healthy alternatives.
4. People walk and use sustainable forms of transit to get around, resulting in healthier bodies. Too many of us are now obese, so if we use the car less, it would be a good thing. We can visualize a positive outcome of “imagining the future without cars" as peak oil pessimist James Kunstler predicts, or even much less car use.
5. People start looking at themselves as producers of something of value apart from the money economy. Economic collapse could be a great equalizer. Suddenly, the unique gifts of each person would come to the fore. We would need the community builders, the people with knowledge of plants and animals, the people with knowledge of practical health.
6. People become inventive on a local and personal level. Innovation flourishes. With the old systems breaking down, new solutions will be cobbled together, using the resources and materials at hand.
7. The creation of beauty is not limited to the specialists but becomes the province of many. The economy supporting the arts could collapse. The creation of things of beauty, art or music will be freed from its economic straight-jacket. All who wish to create will be able to do so.

This list could be dismissed as being too optimistic. However, the writers of the gloom and doom scenarios have no crystal balls. None of us know how events will unfold. My preference is to work on things will have positive effects, regardless of how events unfold. Keeping a vision like this in mind brings more resilience and power to my individual efforts to cope with whatever comes. Mind maps helped me bring it all into focus.

Real vs. virtual conversation

I finally finished the book: Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller. The last pages of the book came just after a day spent in conversation. Yesterday, I took off to visit friends in a small town where I lived for 15 years, and spent from about 10:30am to 4:30pm in continuous, almost nonstop conversation. Then, when I returned home I needed to share the gleanings of the conversation with my husband.

It was an exhausting feat for an introvert, but at the beginning of my first conversation I felt almost a giddy feeling of happiness, at being in the presence of intelligent, conversible friends. I engaged 3 different conversational groups; each friend has particular gifts that I delight in, and each conversation had a totally different quality. I felt tired, but wonderfully rewarded at the end of the day, as I returned home.

What I harvested from the book Conversation was a sense of how the nature of conversation has changed over time. Miller posits that good conversation is composed of a felicitous mix of politeness, good humor, raillery and substance. Conversation is as good a lens as any with which to view our American culture. We have a great number of people who are tuning out of real conversation with any of the myriad conversation substitutes available: Ipods, TVs, video games, cell phones, email, and blogging, for example. We also have many visible examples of unproductive or violent conversation (e.g. Jerry Springer).

In my own life, I relish the opportunities for conversation that arise in my book club, in the course of my tennis games, in our nonviolent communication group (in which conversation itself is the subject of conversation), and in our dinner club. Fortunately, I have a partner who is interested in many different topics and is willing to discuss them with me. I am thankful for the conversations that I do have. I seem to be thirsty for much more.

It is possible to learn a great deal even from the virtual conversations that one has on the internet. But I celebrate the benefits of real face-to-face conversation, which yesterday allowed me to ponder aloud some of the following topics: who is to blame in our dysfunctional agriculture system? How does an artist who thinks of her work as a gift cope with a world in which art is primarily viewed as a product? How will we baby boomers care for one another when so many of us get old together? In the world of global warming, will it be possible to grow peach trees in Minnesota? Should we fear the melt-down of society in a post peak oil world? Is there anything wrong with us when we crave solitude?

Real conversation on these topics tires and satisfies; virtual conversation leaves one hungry. I love the evidence that from time to time someone reads these words. One step at a time, however, I hope to find more and more real (flesh and blood, conversations. I'm convinced it is essential to a sustainable world.

Group mind and the speed of change

Not too long ago I finally got pissed off enough about the insanity of the ethanol situation that I posted a blog about it here, and also made some posts and diaries on other blogs. Not too long after that, I started to see negative news reports about ethanol in lots of places, including an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. It seems as though a whole group of us are having our minds made up at the same time. One year ago, the issue was on the radar of only a few people; now it is getting attention from many different sources and a new (not necessarily conventional) wisdom is in the process of being shaped.

What we see arising, in more powerful forms than before, is group mind. The internet is continuing to make massive changes in the way we think about things. I don't see it as bad; we need the wisdom of groups to tackle the complexity of the problems we will be facing. But it is an eerie feeling to sense that you are operating in the midst of a group mind.

Blogger Dave Pollard is concerned with the costs of group mind, suggesting that we are so affected by what others think that we are in danger of losing contact with our essential self. He says: "unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us – we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else."

I think that the notion that we are separate from everyone else is an illusion. A statement like that demands proof from someone older, wiser, more well-read than I am. So many different mystics, philosophers, poets and theologians have already come to this point of view, I am hard pressed to find only one to confirm this statement. More than 60 years ago, Teilhard de Chardin hypothesized the development of a global nervous system, fueled by the communication which has now been made possible by the internet. "A world network on economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at increasing speed, " Chardin said, in The Phenomenon of Man. "It constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every passing day it become more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively."

For some, this statement may evoke the fear of being caught in a collective trap. But for me, it is hopeful, because the more we can inform one another's point of view, the better decisions we can make for all of us. The painting that I have been working on illustrates my notion of the self within the whole. I am a speck within one of the small circles, which is itself in the midst of a larger circle, which overlaps with other circles and is itself encompassed by a larger circle and square, and so on. When I see my emerging views about ethanol, or any other topic, begin to merge with, and be informed by those of others, I feel hopeful. In the past year, the discussion about global warming and its consequences has begun to move at a very fast rate. Will it be fast enough to make a difference? Who knows? At the very least, it will be very interesting to see how our collective consciousness grapples with, and addresses this reality.

Continuing the search for balance

One of Murphy's Laws that operates in my life is a law of attention: the more focused attention I give to a particular project, the more attractive contrary activities become. For example, the more effort I put into blogging, expressing my opinions, researching topics, and so on, the more attractive free time and unproductive play become. The more time I spend on an introverted activity like making art, the more I crave sociable community action. The more time I spend on sociable community actions, the more I crave quiet walks in the woods. The more time I spend with heady intellectual people, the more I crave the company of expressive feeling types. And so on. In me at least, there is a constant search for balance, the balance between inner and outer, introvert and extrovert, action and contemplation.

In the North American culture, productive, external action is highly valued. The search for balance receives little external support. The cost of tuning into the prevailing norms is that we feel a constant pressure for MORE: more money, more happiness, more time, more play, more possessions, more activism, etc. I did a painting several years ago on this topic, illustrated in today's blog entry. It is called "Thick and Thin," and it portrays the two sides of a duality. I called this a family portrait of a ravenous cat who constantly wants more, despite her corpulent body; with her opposite who, by refusing sustenance, has reached a certain skeletal perfection.

This painting is one of a series of 15 I did, beginning more than 10 years ago, documenting my effort to overcome my fear of depression and identify limiting patterns in my life. The book on the topic is written, but my search for balance meant that I eventually abandoned the single-minded quest to find a publisher. You can read a little more about the topic here.

The image of Thick and Thin reflects a human habit that includes but also extends beyond the material realm. Whether we feel there is not enough money, not enough stuff, not enough time, not enough attention, not enough love—whatever our fundamental lack is, all these cravings blind us to the abundance that is potentially available to us at every moment. Our relationships with money, matter, and the body have an impact beyond our own corpus. Becoming conscious of our habits of consumption and attention can provide respite from the restless and relentless desire for more, that is destructive to us and to the world.

A balanced life: what can be more sustainable? I feel a little sheepish about encouraging visitors to come to my blog, and then disappearing for a week. On the other hand (and with me, there's always another hand), it reflects my healthy and necessary search for balance.

The saturday mess

I was going to call this post, "The Saturday Gestalt", but then I looked the word up and found that gestalt means: "A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic entities that creates a unified concept, configuration or pattern which is greater than the sum of its parts, " from Wiktionary, and its hard to see what unified concept I can make out of this particular Saturday. In addition, why use a complicated word like "gestalt", when "mess" comes a lot closer?

Maybe this is what happens when a crowd of blog ideas meets a multi-tasking Saturday. The hardest thing to fit into the whole mess was my central project this afternoon: the creation of Potato and Cabbage Bundles, for my Irish-themed dinner group which meets this evening. Since my dinner group members do not read my blog, I can confess that this must have been the most complicated cabbage dish anyone could possibly envision, that is, for a normal culinary human being. It involved steaming the cabbage, mashing potatoes with a whole host of yummy ingredients, burning the oil on the stove and filling the entire house with smoke while I searched for new radio goodies to listen to on the internet, cutting up parchment paper... and on and on, more steps than is necessary or sustainable--to stay connected to one of my central themes.

Anyway, the cabbage bundles are assembled and ready to bake, and I thought it might be interesting, to me at least, to list the other ideas, worries and funny things crowding into my brain on this particular Saturday. My last blog entry was on the theme of conversation, and the book, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, arrived and is beckoning to me right now. Author Stephen Miller provides a fascinating introduction to the role of conversation in ancient times, whetting my interest with this description of Socrates by the politician Alcibiades: "Whenever anyone hears you [Socrates] speak or hears your words reported by someone else...whoever we are--woman, man or boy--we're overwhelmed and spellbound." Socrates was reportedly an excellent listener, and treated his fellow conversationalists with respect, urging them to examine their assumptions. If I were to meet such a conversationalist, would I be capable of examining my own worldviews, or am I totally bound up in my current positions?

I love to consider a range of ideas around a theme, so I particularly enjoyed Stewart Staniford's entry, "Innovation in Hard Times", posted on The Oil Drum, one of my favorite blogs. Staniford ponders how humans will respond to the coming challenges of peak oil, the melt-down in the housing market, and the damage caused by the Iraq war, to name the major crises de jour, by examining the number of patents granted each year, and analyzing the perspectives of the gloom and doomers like Jim Kunstler(author of the Long Emergency, which argues that peak oil will destroy life as we know it) to the optimists like futurist Ray Kurzweil, a computer visionary who foresees a future time when artificial intelligence will create technological innovations far beyond our current level of knowledge or imagination. This got me to thinking about whether I am fundamentally a pessimist or an optimist. I think I must fall on the side of the pessimists, mostly because of the ability of a small number of people--disaffected and angry--to make life extremely difficult for the peace-loving majority. So if the number of people whose lives go into crisis mode increases, it could trouble the comfort of many. And it certainly does seem as though a number of crises could come together and start to have spiraling impacts in ways that we cannot now foresee.

The melt-down in the housing market is beginning to receive more attention. Mainstream economic observers, such as Merrill Lynch, are now saying that housing troubles could cause a recession in 2007, and economic bears like Noureil Roubini say that we will have an economic hard-landing making waves throughout the world economy. After reading some of these assessments, I went for a walk through the new subdivision adjacent to my neighborhood. I saw that 4 McMansions, built on speculation by area builders, still remained unsold. At least two of these have been for sale for at least 2 years. This kind of information is not being reported in our local media, which usually rely on local Realtors for the predictable sound byte: "we are having a market correction but the turn-around is right around the corner." When you realize the level of inertia that supports mainstream economic optimism, you begin to worry about how people will cope when the difficult times do come.

As an antidote to all this pessimism, you might want to listen to Radio Canada International's audio feed on the topic: "Laughter is the Best Medicine," featuring about 6 minutes of hilarity with Surjit Lalli from Vancouver. It got me laughing.

The other recent humor source came from a paper sent to me by a group called Sustainable Belmont (SB), from Belmont, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It described efforts of SB to persuade community residents to cut down the amount of time spent in idling cars. SB received a grant that allowed them to obtain anti-idling signage, handouts and stickers, the Board of Selectman granted permission to hang the signs, the police agreed to issue complaints, and city staff was enlisted to distribute some of the signs. They must not have believed in the whole idea, though, because staff were observed idling their vehicles while hanging anti-idling signs. Somehow, this just hit my funny bone, especially since I also am involved in an all volunteer local sustainability group that has faced this kind of bureaucratic intransigence. I need to look further into the problem of car idling. I did find at least one case study that started to suggest some aspects of the problem.

So that's the Saturday Mess.

World Cafe, how to have a conversation

Last night our local sustainability group hosted a World Cafe on the subject of global warming.

About seventy-five people came together to discuss the question: “How can we meet the needs of current and future generations in the face of global warming?” Our assembly included students from local K-12 schools, university students, educators, elected officials, community activists, health care professionals, entrepreneurs, business managers, and people who question the reality of global warming.

The positive aspects of the experience included an extremely diverse group, who seemed to want to continue the conversation (we didn't lose people to breaks), and some truly phenomenal ideas that were reported at the end of the event. Many people said they enjoyed the experience...I hope they weren't just trying to make us feel good.

The challenges: our conversation patterns are pretty ingrained...in many cases the quality of conversation didn't meet the ideals I imagined. The World Cafe process is supposed to help people build on each other's knowledge, and I got the sense that many people found this difficult or counter-intuitive. It is much easier to hang onto our own ideas than to actively examine, respond to, and develop the ideas of others.

What constitutes good conversation? I suspect that our hyper-technological, fast-paced, individualist world gives us few good opportunities to really learn what good conversation is like. Every once in a while I have a really great conversation with someone: I listen, I learn, and I feel heard, and I can think of few more satisfying experiences. But it's rare. I have the same bad habits as others do. Joe states his opinion, I state mine. We think we're having a conversation, but in reality we are two people speaking into our own bubbles.

The next book I want to read is Conversation, a History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller. I just listened to a radio conversation on his book, and learned some succinct critiques on the state of conversation in the United States: first, we have a fear of offending people, so we shy away from in-depth conversation on the topics that divide us. Second, we are suffering from an epidemic of opinionatedness--we are not really interested in listening to others but instead believe we must hang onto and express our opinions as a way of being authentic. In other words, we wear our opinions on our sleeves as if they were essential to our identity. Third, most of our conversations are functional in nature: we want something from someone. The best conversations are purposeless in terms of outcome or accomplishment.

America has a history of seeing conversation as a means for getting ahead. Books like Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking with the Stakes are High, express the purposefulness behind many of our conversations. I had a great deal of enthusiasm for this book and even received training in Crucial Conversations, but I can't say it made me a better conversationalist. The implied aim of conversation in Crucial Conversations is to work things out, to promote harmony, to help a company or organization advance its purpose. But these conversations may lack the beauty, humor, and good natured disagreement which Stephen Miller says is one of the hallmarks of a good conversation.

Our World Cafe was purposeful, because we were interested in learning what insights people might have on a complex topic. I did learn from some of the viewpoints expressed at our event, even as sound bite summaries. But I long for something more. As one caller to the radio show above said, "conversation is an end in itself--it is part of being a healthy human being. You've got to be willing to have your mind changed." I continue to want to have this kind of conversation, both for the pure joy of it, and also for the way it sustains the human community.

A question of balance

After many months of not making art, I am once again working on a painting. This is a work in progress, which illustrates my current search for balance.

The sustainability of the earth is an issue of balance. When our own lives get unbalanced, our bodies become unbalanced; when many bodies get unbalanced, the parts contribute to an unbalanced whole. Al Gore's first book on environmental issues, which he wrote in 1992, was titled Earth in the Balance, and the title itself has become a popular metaphor for a world that seems to be tilting in a profoundly unbalanced manner, due to our human actions.

My recent meditation on the issue of balance was inspired by a memoir by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, entitled Balancing Heaven and Earth. The book describes Johnson's attempts to create balance in his own life, between being and doing, between his desire for community and his need for solitude, between his feeling orientation and the necessity of living in a world that values thinking and sensation. I felt profoundly connected to Johnson's sensibilities: in Myers-Briggs terminology, we are both INFP's, a shorthand that describes us as intuitive introverts with a feeling orientation. Certain personality types predominate in different countries, as Johnson learned in the course of many visits to India.

"America is," Johnson said, "collectively speaking, an extroverted culture that prizes rational thought above all else and values people accordingly. We also place a high value on material things and how much money one can collect, and in that way we are a sensate culture. Our thinking and sensation functions have brought the scientific, technological, and mechanical aspects of existence to an apex in the West, of which we are justly proud. But we have done this at the expense of our feeling. Practically everyone in the West becomes lonely, discontented, and uneasy because our capacity for feeling is in a terrible state of disrepair..."

I have recently become aware that my introverted feeling function was feeling desperate and deprived. I have been wandering in extroverted thinking realms for the last 6 months, blogging, starting community projects, speaking before the City Council, and doing volunteer work. At the end of the day, I became aware that I craved silence, that human speech itself felt painful to me. To arrive at some balance, I restarted my morning meditation practice, and set aside some of my continuous striving for community improvement in favor of painting. It's unsurprising that the subject of my current work is a mandala. Mandalas are visual manifestations of our need and capacity for for wholeness, centeredness and balance.

Several people expressed dismay over the past few months that I had stopped painting. Two of them were artists. This isn't because of a thirst to see my work; rather it reflects an anxiety that access to the creative flow that feeds us all can be interrupted. This is why we need art on some visceral level. It is not so much that we need the material manifestations of art in our life, but we need the lubrication that artists provide for the human spirit. If we truly are interconnected with one another, cessation of the creative flow in one person affects others. This extroverted sensate world may not fully appreciate the creative liquid of the arts, but it nonetheless craves the oxygen that creative expression provides to a world out of balance.

The wisdom of the markets is a joke

We Minnesotans have long prided ourselves on our problem-solving abilities, but today I read about a Minnesota first that should go down in infamy: the construction of the first coal-fired ethanol plant in Heron Lake, Minnesota. Folks, this is nuts! Is there any chance that this event will drive a nail in the coffin of the old "wisdom of the markets" adage? Investors, in their infinite wisdom, are putting their bucks behind a process that is going to burn coal, generating greenhouse gases, mercury and other pollutants, in order to fuel a corn-based ethanol plant. Robert Rapier, one of the main bloggers on The Oil Drum, recently wrote a lengthy overview of energy options which pointed out that the energy return on corn-based ethanol is very low, "Published studies put this number at around 1.3, but the return for fossil fuels in and ethanol out averages less than 1.1, " Rapier said. This means that for every one unit of energy input we expend on producing the energy, we get only 1.3 units of energy output.

The wisdom of the markets supported a coal-fired ethanol plant due to the rising price of natural gas, which is used in the 16 other Minnesota ethanol plants. The $97 million dollar Heron Lake plant is reportedly being financed by investments from farmers, which makes it clear whose interest this plant serves.

Could there possibly be a sugar lining to this whole fiasco? The idea of a coal-fired ethanol plant should remove all illusions that we are actually trying to solve our energy problems by producing ethanol. Instead, let's look at ethanol plants as what they are: an elaborate scheme to prop up corn prices in the Midwest, and to heck with any of the negative side-effects, including soil erosion, pesticide and herbicide use, increase in food prices, nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico, the drop in the Mexican peso and the rise in Mexican poverty due to the increasing price of tortillas, and on and on.

I'm also tired of Democratic politicians pandering to the corn-ethanol crowd. The standard party line is: "ethanol is a transitional fuel, until the technology improves so that we can..." and then they fill in the blank with something like cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol could come from a variety of materials, including prairie grass, wood chips, or agricultural waste. Credible people argue for the feasibility of cellulosic ethanol, but the fact is, the wisdom of the markets has yet to support commercial production of cellulosic ethanol. If politicians really believe that corn-based ethanol plants are a transitional energy source, then they are perpetuating the same throw away mentality that got us into all this trouble in the first place.

I live in urban sprawl

Some of the nicest people I know also live in urban sprawl. We are all creatures of our culture, we like big lots, open spaces and quiet, that's why we live in areas that provide these amenities. Everyone moves to their urban sprawl neighborhood hoping things will remain open and undeveloped. The things that attracted us here in the first place attract others, so the rural beauty that we loved is inevitably gobbled up by new development. But our world is changing, and our consciousness is changing because of what we know about global warming. It's time to stop doing business as usual.

Recently, the Mayor and City Council in our fair city signed on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. One of the elements of this agreement, which has been signed by 400 Mayors nationwide, is an agreement to adopt anti-sprawl land use policies. It's worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider what urban sprawl is. As the Wikipedia entry on the topic suggests, urban sprawl is a loaded term, but it generally refers to single-use zoning, low density zoning, and car-dependent development. Leap-frog development is also a type of urban sprawl.

Many of the Cities signing on to the Climate Protection Agreement live in areas that are defined by sprawl: Miami, Florida, Seattle, Washington, Austin, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia. These cities are located in regions facing huge pressures for development. If you go to the website for the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, and read the Best Practices guidelines for Cities, you see that there is a major focus on muncipal building improvements, green building principles, reducing car trips, retrofitting municipal fleets, and so on. These are all excellent projects and I applaud them. It is significant, however that the Best Practices Guide does not include any examples of Cities that are boasting about their efforts to combat sprawl.

Now, my car-dependent neighborhood is facing a proposal from a developer who wants to turn farmland into 37 single family housing units, done up in the traditional way. Everything the developer is proposing conforms to the current city regulations. How would anti-sprawl land use policies deal with the prospect of future development in my neighborhood?

Here are some suggestions:
1. Put a moratorium on new development in sprawl neighborhoods, until city planners come up with zoning designations on the remaining developable land that allow for a mix of residential, commercial, office uses, and even community agriculture that can be accessed by pedestrians or bicyclists. This implies a return to mixed use neighborhoods.
2. Provide incentives for developers to cluster housing in a manner that preserves open space, allows land for bicycling, walking, parks, and community gardens. Allow for housing diversity beyond single family housing.
3. Provide pedestrian and bicycle paths on pervious surfaces. This will allow natural water flow into the ground and prevent erosion. Pervious concrete is an idea whose time has come.
4. Avoid the use of curb and gutter and utilize vegetated open swales, preferably "engineered swales" with a permeable soil base.

Urban sprawl is energy-intensive because it increases our reliance on single occupancy vehicles. If we want to live more sustainably in the future, and become less dependent on our cars, we need to find ways to encourage city planners and developers to re-think how neighborhoods on the city's edge grow.

Snow Day

My brain is on hold again. Thursday I left to visit my mother, a 3 hour drive away from here, then Friday I was forced to return home to beat the big storm hitting the Upper Midwest.

This morning my decision to return early was vindicated by 12" of new snow. It is challenging to dig out from a snowfall of that depth, even the fresh powdery kind. But I'm not complaining. It's kind of lovely to be put on house arrest due to the weather, especially when you are well stocked with food and entertainment. I also experienced the pleasure of neighborliness; as we were shovelling our driveway, a neighbor came out with his snow blower and made short work of the some of the heaviest drifts.

It was an odd snow storm in that it was accompanied thunder, which we listened to in the middle of the night as we watched the snow swirl.

Added interest was provided courtesy the National Weather Service, which has a LaCrosse, Wisconsin website with many interesting and desirable factoids on weather conditions, including snowfall totals around the region, satellite images, radar images, probability maps, drought information, and so on.

This is the most substantial snowfall I can remember in the last four years, the first huge mound of snow I created by shovelling in a long time. Its rarity makes it a pleasure, and also, thanks to the Weather Service information, the knowledge that we need this precipitation; as the map shows that most of Minnesota and Wisconsin is either abnormally dry or in severe drought conditions.

It looks like the snowfalls generated by this storm are heaviest in southern Minnesota and southern Wisconsin. I would like it to continue snowing here, but also hope some snow storms visit northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Last summer we visited Copper Harbor, Michigan for the first time. It is a lovely place, but I have never seen a more parched looking woods in my years of hiking the woods of the Upper Midwest. I found myself thinking of those woods, and wishing they would get rained on. Not only were all the lawns brown, but the forest ground cover looked collapsed and thirsty.

Now, I hope they will get some snow. Some parts of the country just expect massive winter snows, and when they don't arrive, it's odd. Check out George's Eagle Harbor Web, which reports that the U.P. is at a record low snowfall mark, and that Lake Superior is a "foot below average for early February." The good news is, extreme weather events are convincing more and more people that global warming is real. Scientists hasten to point out that extreme weather conditions do not in and of themselves point to climate change. But you can start to sort through what reputable scientists are willing to say about global warming by visiting the website of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The findings have been praised, parsed, and pooh-poohed all across the political spectrum. I wonder how many of the deniers have actually gone to the website to review the data as presented by the scientists. Oh well. Enjoy the snow!

Prioritize solutions, rather than problems

I recently listened to a provocative talk given by Economist Bjorn Lomborg at the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in Monterey, California. I listened, of course on-line. If you go to their website, www.ted.com, you can listen to a whole host of interesting and mind-bending talks. When it comes to thinking about problems, says Lomborg, we have two problems: one is that we should be thinking about solutions, and the other is that we should be employing economic tools to prioritize the solutions.

Solutions to some of the pressing world problems include big ideas like providing clean drinking water, putting a tax on carbon use, eliminating communicable diseases, and so on. After looking at the top ten world problems and their potential solutions, Lomborg said the best possible solution we should be working on is providing needed micronutrients such as vitamin A, iodine and iron to malnourished children and adults. This could be done on a cost-effective basis, according to the World Bank, and it would have a big impact.

Lomborg, an economist at the Copenhagen Business School, is not popular with a lot of environmentalists. His book, the Skeptical Environmentalist (which I have not read), unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Questions were raised about the statistics used in his analysis, his more optimistic view of environmental progress, and his rejection of the carbon tax and a number of other environmental solutions. I can't weigh in on any of these matters. What I resonate with is the practicality of evaluating the cost-effectiveness of solutions. He does not deny the reality of global warming.

My focus tends to be on world problems with the context of local solutions. Global warming is a world problem that could affect several billion people, and it is a problem in which local and even individual solutions are relevant. All of the potential solutions that might be examined have social, economic and health effects. While renewable energies such as solar and wind (especially in Minnesota) need to be supported and expanded, they are expensive solutions that usually lack local applications. The biggest impact for the smallest expenditure will come from energy conservation. An article in today's Washington Post (subscription required), documents the effectiveness of California's long-term efforts to conserve energy, through regulatory changes, building efficiency standards, more efficient refrigerators, and changing the color of a home's roof.

According to the article: "Today, as an energy consumer, California is more like thrifty Denmark than the rest of the energy-guzzling United States. While the average American burns 12,000 kilowatt-hours a year of electricity, the average Californian burns less than 7,000 -- and that's counting renewable energy sources."

There are plenty of lessons in this story for us in Minnesota. In contrast to California, Minnesota gets a much higher percentage of its energy from cheap coal. Our electric rates are 7.2 cents per killowat hour, compared to 13 cents in California. "Cost drives conservation," according to Chris Cooper of the Network for New Energy Choices. Electric rates are supposed to be much, much higher in Europe, but I have been unable to find any sources documenting this. With our reliance on cheap coal, we have poor incentives for electric energy conservation in Minnesota.

What is the moral of the story I am trying to weave? It is that if you want to be part of the solution to global warming, energy conservation is the most practical, cost-effective thing you can do. Plant trees on the south side of your house, to provide passive cooling in the summer. Carpool, to save transportation costs by as much as 50%. Turn down the thermostat. Buy energy-efficient appliances. Check my other website for 101 other sustainable solutions you can explore.

How we pay attention

One of the biggest challenges when returning from a vacation is the immediacy of everyday demands and schedules that must be re-encountered, along with mounds of mail to be sorted, bills to pay, and so on. So you are penalized for the relaxation that you experienced while away, with a short period in which you try to catch up to your former self.

The other morning I woke up fully intending to blog about the transportation system in Costa Rica, but then life intruded and it never got done. So instead of the long, pithy essay I was going to write about it, I'll give you the extra short version: beware of the roads you improve, because they can lead to more tourism, which is a decidedly mixed blessing. Some of the Costa Rican roads I experienced close to the major ecological attractions are the worst I have seen anywhere in the world. They serve their purpose, which is providing access, but not to the hoards of people. It seems to be a rule in life these days: the beautiful places in the world are being loved to death by development and traffic.

Back to my post-vacation musing: it certainly does seem as though daily life quickly reasserts itself, with the half-life of travel memories fading rapidly by the minute. But the body seems to want to acknowledge the vast changes in scenery and diet, and so I am experiencing something like a sense of arrested development, not knowing entirely what to pay attention to next.

Prior to the trip I was feeling breathless with the speed with which more people are paying attention to environmental issues. The denizens of beaches, tour buses and hotels in Costa Rica and other vacation spots are paying attention to completely different things. The background chatter on the road is about logistics, beauty, expenses, opportunities, enjoyment. Who is to say that one thing or the other is what we should be paying attention to? What I know for sure is that we are what we pay attention to.

If you are in a situation like I am, where you have a choice about what you can pay attention to, rejoice! At times like these, when I am uncertain what to pay attention to, I return to the words of my favorite sages. In this case, the poet Rumi seems to capture a sense of what is necessary:

" When you do things from your soul,
You feel a river moving in you, a joy.
When actions comes from another section,
the feeling disappears.

Don't let others lead you. They may be blind,
or worse, vultures. Reach for the rope
of God. And what is that?

Putting aside self-will...

Don't insist on going where you think you want to go.
Ask the way to the Spring.

Your living pieces will form a harmony."

From RUMI: We are Three, Coleman Barks, trans.

Not living in future tense

One reason to go on vacation is not to think, to purposefully stop thinking about whatever was on your mind when you left, to see the world anew from your new perspective, on the beach at Playa Samara in Costa Rica, or as you sit in the spacious lobby of a hotel in the outskirts of San Jose.

The thinking work of travel is what to see, when to go, how to get there, and it flows into conversation with fellow travellers from Australia, Barcelona, Denmark, and Portland, Oregon, all of them coming and going, filing away their impressions, food fancies, gripes and satisfactions. The peak moments of travel arise from glimpses of beauty, sudden camaraderie with fellow travellers, the sensuous pleasures of fresh fruit or warm ocean water, all fleeting, fleeting.

It is good to spend time observing those who are not preoccupied with global warming, but are carrying on with daily life, from the boys playing soccer on a field directly across from the Catholic Church, to an old man watering his plants, to a toucan sleeping in a tree, to a tarantula hunkered in his hole.

Life will go on in some form, even if the ice caps melt. There is plenty of change unfolding in the daily rhythms of life without constantly sorting through future scenarios of gloom and doom or even of positive transformation. It is enough, once in a while, to float on the waves of the moment, content to be precisely where you are. Costa Rica has a wonderful slogan that captures this feeling: Pura Vida.

Carbon credits in action

I am writing this on the road, from Santa Elena, Costa Rica, where we recentlyvisited the Monteverde Cloud Forest, a vast preserve that protects manydifferent species of plants, animals, fungus and insects.We walked by a sign that indicated that the preservation of this particularforest preserve was funded in part, by carbon credits, funds given the CostaRican government by other governments and businesses to protect lands likethese, that are contributing positively to our carbon balance. It makes mevery curious to learn more about the financial side of how the carbon creditswork.It was good to see with my own eyes the good work that is being done in forestprotection. Our guide pointed out various plants that produce dopamine, usedfor Parkinson's disease, another one that was being explored for its benefitsin the AIDS virus, and a bee that produced honey that was supposed to be verygood for healing the eyes.

I asked if there were local herbalists who collected the knowledge about the plants and provided herbs to area customers. Our guides opinion was that the grandmothers had that knowledge, but now theypreferred to live easier lives. You can look at the forest as being a vast storehouse of knowledge, precious notonly for the carbon it is secuestering but for the healing properties that havenot been discovered. The forest is also intrinsically interesting for its beauty and diversity, the color and variety that is diminishing in most of theenvironments that surround us in the USA.

The roads that have taken us between various locations in Costa Rica range from good to horrible. One lodge owner said he hoped they would stay that way; good roads attract all the wrong kind of development. There is also an undercurrentof worry about tourism, the number one industry in Costa Rica. Since 9-11,tourism has been dropping. It is clearly a business that has its advantagesand disadvantages. The beautiful places in the world are being loved todeath--love expressed in the form of development. It is good to see theseissues being grappled with by a number of enlightened local lodging owners, whotake pains to use sustainable practices and educate their customers about thebeauty of this area.