Living in the Bay Area, I have convenient and easy access to any food I can think of. It is in my nature to think of food seasonally and locally, but it is also easy to forget that not everyone enjoys the luxury of choosing healthy food, like I do. And even though I benefit from our local and organic food economy, I am a consumer, completely dependent on our food system. With peak oil, wayward national politics, and earthquakes in the forecast, it is becoming increasingly clear that our amazing and abundant food system could be threatened just like it was in Havana, Cuba less than two decades ago.

Before 1991 almost no food was produced in the city of Havana, not unlike most modern metropolises. Up to 57% of Cuban caloric intake was derived from imported food. Domestic food was grown outside the capital city on state run farms that used industrial agricultural methods. Almost all food in Havana was channeled through a state operated distribution system and all residents were insured regular commodities, such as rice, beans, sugar, coffee, and poultry or other meat. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, agricultural inputs such as pesticides, fertilizers, and animal feed, were reduced by 80%, and fuel and tires for tractors and other agricultural machinery were cut by 50%, leaving the country without the means for industrial food production. Cuba was facing a food security crisis.

In response, the Cuban government established a series of urban agriculture programs and resolved to create a link between the people and the land, as a means of promoting self-sufficiency. One of the first steps that was taken to help feed a hungry Havana was the implementation of a community orchard program, in which citizen “cultivators” would participate in the reforestation of their concrete city. Initially 5000 community orchards were approved and established in unconventional spaces within the city, including patios, rooftops, balconies, and plots of undeveloped or abandoned land. Where there was no soil, raised beds were planted. In the words of the former head of the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI), Mario Gonzalez Novo, “the program has the simple objective of reversing the silent disaster of the city’s deforestation by operating on the basic premise that no space should remain where a tree can be planted.” A quantitative goal of the program is to plant 18 million fruit and timber trees in Havana.

The MINAGRI was created to support the urban cultivator in increasing crop health and productivity. Not your typical government agency, the MINAGRI researches and disseminates information and resources for sustainable food production, covering topics such as intensive farming and gardening, integrated pest management, composting, seed saving, and food preservation. The department runs seed banks, and supports locally organized gardening clubs, where people share knowledge, tools, and other resources. The decision to allow any unused space to be officially recognized and utilized for the purpose of food cultivation resulted in over 26,000 community garden plots in Havana. Until 1994, however, most of the food produced in these gardens was still out of reach to most citizens.

Then, the Cuban government legalized farmer’s markets. This eliminated the need for a fruit and veggie black market, equating to more equitable distribution, lower prices, and greater access to more food. Now, with a thriving food economy, over 22% of the city's population works in urban agricultural production or research. In 1998, 30,000 people were employed in over 8000 agricultural production collectives in the city of Havana alone.

Outside of the city, the super-sized national farms were also reorganized into cooperative production units. The state, in effect, gave control of its large, industrialized farms, which comprised 80% of Cuba’s agricultural land, to the people. The land is provided to government approved, micro-managed groups of citizens, including families, or “production units” rent free. The producers typically have contracts with the state, which still runs a national distribution program, but they are allowed to sell their excess produce and to keep the profits.

Within five years Cuba had recovered from their crisis. Today, with a bustling small producer agricultural economy, over 30% of Havana's food is being grown in the city. We learn from Cuba's strategy that it IS possible, in an urban center, to ensure an equitable distribution of food by promoting self sufficient production. And Havana is not alone, there are other examples of abundant urban harvests, some right under our noses.

At Village Homes, in Davis, CA, the community is touched by urban agriculture. The planning of fruit and nut trees, irrigation canals, and communal garden plots in the neighborhood design has provided village homes with a year round food harvest. Other benefits are greater economic stability and higher property values. People's Grocery in West Oakland, has established a network of urban micro-farms that nourish a hungry community. The next time I think about a sustainable harvest I will Imagine, instead of the farmer's market, walking outside and picking seasonal fruit year round on Dolores, Hayes, Polk, and Arguello. On Chestnut, Brannan, Webster, and Market.

Erin's Permaculture Garden and Its Chickens 

Erin Bullock is a permaculture consultant based in San Francisco. Living adjacent to the University of San Francisco campus, her backyard is literally spilling over with verdant growth. She embraces numerous varieties of plants.

Touring the garden, chickens enthusiastically greet her at the fence. In a major urban environment, they seem a bit out of place. They demonstrate a unique side of permaculture to urban neighbors.

It is perfectly legal for residents in the city to own up to four chickens without a permit. It’s a refreshing surprise to learn our feathered friends can thrive in a city known for its lack of yard-space.

“Our two Plymouth Rock hens lay eggs everyday,” Erin says, as her cat, approaching her, stops by the fence--eye to eye with gentle curiosity.

"They eat all our snails and slugs, as well as our food scraps." Chickens are great at returning nitrogen to the soil and keeping it cultivated. In addition, they have become conversation pieces with neighbors; a young boy next door peers into the coop from a ladder placed on his side of the fence.

A landscape architect by training, she is establishing her own niche as a permaculture consultant in San Francisco. Erin began her career designing landscapes for corporate campuses. Soon disillusioned about the conventional methods used to serve its clients, she learned about alternative and sustainable practices by living on an organic blueberry farm where she grew to appreciate the agricultural community.

Erin took a permaculture immersion training at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, in Occidental, CA. It was there that she became mindful of the fundamental importance of permaculture to all people and how it connects all aspects of healthy communities.

She applied her training--with organics in mind--by working for a landscaper in Marin. Recently she struck out on her own with Urban Earth, a design/build landscaping business focusing specifically on permaculture designs for clients. She currently lives in a vegetarian cooperative house.

The richness of plant diversity comes into full bloom in the yard itself. Loquat and fig trees, ground cherry, raspberry, and flowers—perennials mainly—and lots of vegetables. Examples include artichokes, fava beans, Jerusalem artichokes, scarlet runner beans, oca, yacon, mashua (from the Andes in South America), Red Russian kale; a number of herbs have medicinal properties, too. Walking through the back door, she is greeted with seedlings spilling over eagerly, waiting to be transplanted.

Erin explains that permaculture is a philosophy of life that focuses on living in concert with natural systems. New to most people, it is actually firmly rooted in the ancient traditions of native peoples around the world. Though the idea of planting various species in seeming disarray goes against the grain of our sense of neatly planted rows, it can be graceful.

One can begin living this life quite simply. For example, by composting vegetable scraps, one is helping “close ecological loops” by preventing the unnecessary expenditure of fossil fuels in transporting garbage. "Composting in any form, whether you have a worm bin, chicken manure, or you're sheet-mulching with cardboard and newspaper, builds healthy soil, which is what everything green depends on," she says. By so organizing one’s garden, a natural synergy emerges; pests and disease tend to decline, and a surprising abundance of food can be grown.

Erin emphasizes that one should focus on what resources are available. In SF, plenty of these are there for the asking. For instance, businesses of all sizes offer residents free compost materials. “You can get used coffee grounds from cafes—even Starbucks.” she adds. These are great for producing rich humus.

Although the art and science of the practice requires some study, it can be easily learned by experimenting in a small plot in a community garden.

Erin is one of the few with the opportunity to witness the abundant growth of luscious avocados here in the City. Her neighbor’s established tree is chock full of them, and is happy to share. "Every San Franciscan with a backyard should have an avocado, lemon, or apple tree. Fresh-picked fruit grown locally just tastes better than stuff that has to be shipped in from Mexico or New Zealand," Erin points out.

She recently offered a workshop on urban foraging at her community garden on 7th Avenue. To her surprise, thirty people showed up at 9:00 am to participate. She plans to conduct more in the future. Harvesting seaweed along the Sonoma coast and acorns as the Native Americans once did are some ideas.

She is clearly excited about the prospects of permaculture in our urban environment. It points towards a future solution in a land challenged by the full spectrum of environmental issues we hear about in news and in movies such as An Inconvenient Truth.

Contact Erin Bullock at urbanearthgardens@yahoo.com.

Three Stone Hearth Mission Statement:

We heal our community, our planet, and ourselves by building a sustainable model for community-scale food preparation and processing that honors culinary traditions and provides nutrient-dense foods for local households and beyond.

The Three Stone Hearth is a Community Supported Kitchen (CSK) with a powerful mission. The business is a new model for healthy and sustainable food production that is like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)...with a twist. Each week a box of gourmet, nutritional, artisanal prepared and preserved foods made from organic, local, farm fresh ingredients, is delivered to the kitchen's supporters, or subscribers. Members select staples from a weekly menu that contains items such as chicken coconut milk soup, North African vegetable tajine, sourdough crackers, herbed cultured cream cheese, lemon verbena sparkling cooler, Italian style pickled vegetables, and multi-grain porridge. Just like CSA, subscribers directly support the business, in this case the kitchen. The kitchen directly supports local sustainable farms, providing a connection between the farmers and the community and providing an alternative to store bought food. The Three Stone Hearth is a prototype for a sustainable kitchen that grows and nurtures community.

Sound impressive and intriguing? It only gets better. The business, which began delivering food boxes in July of this year, is a worker-owned collective. Of the five founding worker owners four are Bay Area chefs (and restaurateurs, authors, and activists); Porsche Combash, Jessica Prentice, Misa Koketsu, and Catherine Spanger. Larry Wisch, the fifth collective member has decades of experience in urban ecology, horticulture, and marketing. To understand more about the kitchen and why the five worker owners have chosen this business structure and model, I sat down with Larry to discuss the brand new collective and how it evolved from an idea to a reality.

According to Larry, the idea for the CSK was the brainchild of Jessica, as is much of the written message behind the business. The Three Stone Hearth CSK is guided by three poignant principles, or Hearthstones: Health, Earth, and Heart. These three Hearthstones are the foundation of the business and are a symbolic tribute to ancient hearths, used to cook food and warm people, that were made by forming a triangle with three large stones. With a pot on top of the stones and a fire below, the Three Stone Hearth fuels human relationships with each other and the earth. This year Jessica also published a book and helped create a Bay Area local food wheel (www.localfoodswheel.com). These are just a few of Jessica's projects in nutritional justice and her words describe the group's collective vision of a sustainable business. The meanings behind Health, Earth, and Heart have everything to do with everything the CSK does and everything it represents.

Health- is about human nutrition. The CSK follows the dietary wisdom of thousands of years of humanity and builds upon the research of the late Dr. Weston A. Price (www.westonaprice.org). In the 1930's Dr. Price travelled the world to study the diets of fourteen non-industrialized cultures from the Caucus Mountains, to Swiss villages, to South Seas Islands. He found commonalities such as cultured dairy products, fermented vegetables, sprouted grains, animal fats, organ meats, and other pro-biotic, nutrient dense foods in all of their diets and linked these characteristics to nutrition and physical health. The CSK is devoted to preparing the finest whole foods in this tradition of native nutrition.

Earth- is the commitment of the Three Stone Hearth to environmental justice, ecological stewardship, and urban sustainability. This principle is manifested in the conscientious way they conduct business: They package their foods in reusable glass containers (which are returned to them), use local ingredients from sustainable farms, conserve water and energy resources, minimize transportation costs by encouraging community drop off locations, and minimize waste at every opportunity.

Heart- means building community and relationships. From the farmers they partner with for sustainably raised animals, to the artisans that supplement them with cheese and breads, to the subscribers, the CSK is all about providing a transparent, learning, respectful community that unites people of diverse backgrounds on the common ground of healthy nutritious food. Subscribers are encouraged to work in the kitchen, volunteers and interns are welcomed, and monthly feasts are hosted to link people and ideas and to perpetuate relationships. In this kitchen recipes, methods, and ingredients are not secrets, but shared information, a way of strengthening heart.

With such a deep and moving doctrine guiding the Three Stone Hearth, it is no surprise that the founding members have chosen to become a democratically run collective. Larry says that it was the natural choice for their vision of a sustainable and replicable CSK. Neither is it surprising that Larry comes from a lineage of cooperateurs. He was raised in what is now the country's oldest housing coop, in the Bronx, "the Amalgamated," (www.amalgamated-bronx.coop) and recalls childhood memories of equity, justice, chicken soup, and cooperation. The CSK, like the housing coop, is a platform for cooperative ideals such as democratic governance, shared responsibility, constant education, and mutual respect. Impressed by the positivity and vision in the collective model, I asked Larry if there were any drawbacks. While admitting that it takes more time to come to collective decisions, he notes that there is depth and vision added by the diverse personalities involved. Larry summed up his experience with the CSK by stating with a grin that, "my search for right livelihood has brought me into a world of incredibly conscious people."

For start up capital the collective relied on a base of community supporters for small loans, which earn 7.5% interest over a period of five years. Additionally, advance subscriptions, $1100 worth of product for $1000 cash, allowed the CSK to pay farmers up front for raw materials. Even ceramic crocks for pickling vegetables were lent by the community to ensure that a batch of fermented vegetables would be ready in time for the first delivery . The Three Stone Hearth community includes of members of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, Center for Ecoliteracy, Berkeley Farmer's Market, and San Francisco Food Systems, among other organizations and affiliations.

A bright new face in the sustainable community, the Three Stone Hearth is a learning company, a prototype for a new kind of collective, the Community Supported Kitchen. It is their goal to see this model perpetuated in other locations by other people, with boxes of healthy prepared foods supplementing wise households everywhere . The Three Stone Hearth is a re-solution for social, environmental, economic, and nutritional justice. Visit threestonehearth.com for more information about this evolutionary food production collective.

Permaculture… What is permaculture…? It is a term coined in the 1970s by a man named Bill Mollison, a citizen of Australia. Let’s look at the historical and cultural context of his fascination with permaculture (“permanent culture”) before we go into applying it to our own lives.

Bill, like many of us, is a transplant in a country that he is not “native” to. And, let me pause before I continue and make a brief announcement. Much of what I will say will be assumptions and generalizations, so bear with me. Further, opinions that I hold will definitely shine through the text as well.

Bill lives in a country that was populated and inhabited by aboriginals about 40,000 or so years before his arrival. During the 1780’s groups of people from England sailed down and inhabited the island. These people from England had been evolving in their European area of the world for hundreds of thousands of years.

So, what happens when two cultures from two completely different places collide (and one having developed intense hierarchies, weapons, domesticated crops and animals, etc)? The British with its protestant, righteousness intertwined with good will and philanthropy, did not know what to do with these aboriginals. What they did know was that in order to survive as they did in England, the island would have to change drastically (of course, THEY wouldn’t change!). They needed domesticated animals (dairy, meat), they needed their governmental organization, they needed clothing, they needed their typical British homes and buildings, they needed many things that the aboriginals did not need and had evolved without. Of course, they shipped much of these items from the England.

The British culture brought with them all of their cultural baggage. This can be very heavy stuff! They brought their religion, technology…essentially – their way of life.

This is where permaculture can come in as I just mentioned the key words – “way of life.” I suppose Bill Mollison was keenly aware of the impact of his culture on the island continent of Australia.*

Mollison started experimenting with his life! Indeed, he started farming in zones (something like Von Thunen’s model of agricultural location). What was close to Mollison’s home was the most perishable and needed more attention (such as vegetables). What was further from his home needed less attention and was not as perishable (such as fruit trees and native plants). Thunen’s model concerned a group of people such as a village, while Mollison’s model mostly concerned an individual home. In this difference, we can even see why Mollison’s modern application of Thunen’s agricultural model has been altered for the individual and not for a group or village.

Mollison’s model makes apparent a modern paradigm that we are experiencing. People are interested in Thunen’s agricultural model based around village patterns of land use. However, we are not in villages! If you look at our land use patterns in Western lands and Western colonized lands, they are either a rural home amidst fields of crops isolated from neighbors or the urban single-family home amidst intense zoning laws and regulations that sets land aside for enterprising industries and not urban agriculture plots. People want sustainability, but we are almost forced to approach it individually and with great exhaustion – because the dominant culture has set our world, the United States, up that way (and Australia, for that matter).

Where do we begin? Gasp… Wheez… Sigh… Where do we begin?

I think that if you are reading this article, you know exactly where to begin. I believe that most of you have already begun looking at your world in a new way. Many of you have already started with the bare bones of sustainability: eating in a healthy way that suits your body type and your local foodshed, learning about herbal remedies, finding a comfortable pace of life, planting some greens in your garden for food, finding a work place that allows you to be creative and compassionate, finding some kind of inner peace, forgiving family members or friends, paying back your loans and debts, bartering and trading items with your friends or neighbors, understanding your place in the natural world, and/or connecting with the natural world.

These are all aspects of permaculture. A friend of mine once said after a permaculture training in the city of San Francisco (and, it was free!), “you know, I have been doing permaculture for some time and didn’t know what to call it!” I am sure most of you can relate. If you have been doing some of the items above, you have already been doing permaculture.

However, for the sake of ending this article with some tangible, palpable, chewable, take-home ideas… check out a few quick suggestions in the "Sustainability Tips" section below.

I wish you the best on your journey and I hope that you find your village.

(*No, I am not going to go on a rampage against the British here. There are actually quite a few cultures and ethnic groups that have caused great harm to other people, animals, and other life forms throughout history. However, the British of Western Europe – have a modern reputation that is appropriate for this article. In my opinion, it is the framework and the rubric of living (based on Western economic and social systems) that has pitted people against people and against nature for some time.)

“No people should allow themselves to be vulnerable to the disruption of their food supply due to natural disasters or wars elsewhere, or to the political manipulation of food exports by foreign governments.”

-- Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

When Lappé and Collins wrote these words in 1977, the world of post-Katrina New Orleans was 29 years in the future. In this world, people in the richest country on the planet have had lack of access to proper food and water supplies in any number of situations: grocery stores flooded and looted; Superdome evacuees trapped for days without food or water in crowded and unsanitary conditions; post-flood neighborhoods still without running water or sewer systems one full year after the storm; box-store grocery chains opting to close down outlets in flooded neighborhoods; emergency funds being denied small business owners attempting to re-establish corner grocery stores. These issues tend to be inextricably linked to factors of race and income level in the city: predominantly poor and Black neighborhoods are those that have suffered worse, not from the flooding itself, but from the economic and political systems that make food insecurity an epidemic.

Indeed, the level of catastrophe unleashed upon the southern United States in the summer of 2005 has been experienced by many peoples the world over in varying degrees, and it was these experiences that Lappé and Collins were describing, predominantly in the so-called Third World. In the face of many overwhelming case study situations, it may be tempting and easy to dismiss food security as just one more situation for the “experts” to deal with, and for the poor to bear without mercy. What is the solution in a city such as New Orleans, and indeed for any city in the world faced with rebuilding itself from the ground up? Who will take up the task of developing a food security policy that assures equitable distribution and access to healthy, safe, and culturally appropriate food?

In New Orleans, that call has been answered by groups such as the New Orleans Food and Farm Network (NOFFN), working in conjunction with the national organization Community Food Security Coalition. NOFFN (www.noffn.org) works with local food producers, consumers, and retailers, such as the Crescent City Farmers Market, as well as larger groups such as the Sierra Club, The Urban Conservancy, Local Harvest, Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Farmer’s Legal Action Group, The National Family Farm Coalition, and World Hunger Year to ensure that food security is attainable and realized. Recently, NOFFN hosted a public forum on the topic of food security and unveiled its plans to help develop a food policy council that will present a comprehensive and community-voiced charter to the city’s planning commission, in which food security will be addressed systematically and with equitability as its main goal.

In the mid 1960’s, a functional definition of food security was developed by policy groups: Food security means that community members (in this case, all residents of Orleans Parish) have access at all times to nutritious, affordable, culturally appropriate foods, through food systems that are ecologically sustainable and socially just, in ways that build household, community, and regional self-reliance. Explicit in this definition is the integration of community development in the process of becoming food secure. Again quoting Lappé and Collins: “Food self-reliance depends on the initiative of the people, not on government directives. [Moreover], food self-reliance based on popular initiative presupposes group solidarity and therefore equality.” This is the goal of the intended development of New Orleans’ food policy charter.

In order to understand the future of development and rebuilding in New Orleans, including the creation of a food policy charter that gives voice to community members across the board, a brief summary of the proposed Master Plan is necessary. The city planning commission, down to 9 members from a pre-Katrina number of 24, has decided to entrust the rebuilding planning process to a local non-profit group, the Greater New Orleans Foundation, which has structured the re-planning process on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, rather than a comprehensive city-wide basis. According to the New York Times, “On Aug. 1 the foundation opened a series of public meetings in which groups representing more than 70 neighborhoods would begin selecting [private] planners to help determine everything from where to place houses to the width of sidewalks. Armed with a $3.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greater New Orleans Foundation has chosen 15 planning teams who will develop designs for the various neighborhoods. Groups of neighborhood residents, many of them still displaced, met directly with the teams for five hours to get a sense of which ones they may want to work with. (Not surprisingly, the more affluent neighborhoods have been the best organized.) Eventually the proposals will be woven into a single citywide master plan.” While this represents good intentions- putting the development process in the hands of the people- many fundamental elements are being left out, including updating zoning requirements, reducing the city’s ecological footprint, integrating neighborhoods, dealing with infrastructure development (because that is a city and regional issue, not a neighborhood one), and importantly, the development of sustainable food systems.

As such, NOFFN has stepped into that void to help develop a comprehensive food security plan, and of course, a plan for food security in disaster situations. What this looks like remains to be seen: it’s a vision for the future in a city that is essentially a blank canvas. The recent “Food for Us” forum lasted two days and brought together individuals from high school students hoping to create edible school yards at Frederick Douglass High School to organizations such as the Second Harvest Food Bank, which is developing an emergency food bank and distribution system, Common Ground Collective, and the Renaissance Project, which plans to revitalize the formerly thriving St. Claude Avenue in the Upper Ninth Ward through community development and participation. Additionally, the forum included panelists from the Wayne State University Planning Department in Detroit, Project Jubilee in rural Eastern Tennessee (which has created a sustainable community kitchen and farmers collective), and Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. Incredible examples of initiatives created across the United States were presented and discussed, including Growing Power of Milwaukee (www.growingpower.org), People’s Grocery of West Oakland (www.peoplesgrocery.org), the Toronto (Canada) Food Policy Council (www.toronto.ca/health/tfpc_index.htm), and Focus: HOPE, one of the nation’s longest running and most organized food security programs based in Detroit (www.focushope.edu). Each represents a model of sustainability and hope in the realm of food security, and each can be replicated and tweaked to fit any household, community, and region. For example, Growing Power has seven greenhouses, a kitchen, indoor & outdoor training gardens, an aquaculture system, an anaerobic digester, and a food distribution facility, worms, fish, rabbits, bees, goats, chickens and ducks, all within Milwaukee city limits. Additionally, the organization offers intensive training for anyone interested in duplicating the program or just learning more about worms. There is no reason why this project, livestock and all (legal in Orleans Parish), can’t be replicated.

A highly stressed and much lauded strategy is to USE EXISTING RESOURCES. Corner stores, usually associated with Cheetos and Coca-Cola, can be enhanced with fresh produce sections (a technique used with great success in places such as West Oakland and Boston); networks of interested people can create community kitchens (see last month’s article on Three Stone Hearth Community Supported Kitchen); school yards can be turned into gardens providing healthy produce for the cafeterias as well as teaching children where their food comes from and how it is grown; abandoned plots of land can be turned into community garden space; and of course, supporting local agriculture through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs and farmers markets is essential for keeping your food system local and economically viable. The Crescent City Farmers Market, with two markets running on Saturdays and Tuesdays, brings $4.5 million dollars in revenue to the city of New Orleans each year. This is a tremendous impact- imagine the additional revenue of more markets serving each neighborhood. Additionally, two New Orleans neighborhoods, Mid City and St. Roch, are currently in the process of developing food cooperative grocery stores that will sell locally grown, fresh food to their constituencies: poor, predominantly Black residents.

One of the largest resources that New Orleans has is its people, a group of folks fiercely dedicated to this city, who are interested in developing solutions themselves after the government turned its back. The field suddenly seems wide open. While the rebirth of New Orleans remains an overwhelming and massive task, this growing movement of dedicated residents, non-profit organizations, institutions such as the Ashé Cultural Center- an “incubator for the creative and cultural community” in flood-ravaged Mid City, planners, partiers, umbrella groups such as the NOFFN, volunteers, parishioners like the highly organized Vietnamese community in New Orleans East (who are hoping to open a farmers market in that area featuring culturally appropriate produce grown in the city), young and old alike, are taking control of the rebuilding process, including developing food systems that are equitable, ecologically sound, and socially just. They are not waiting for the government or FEMA to do it for them.

“Self-reliance does not exclude planning but uses it in a way that sets into motion a process of diagnosis by local people formulating practical proposals for action.” --Lappé and Collins.

The music is loud, but not too loud for conversation between strangers. Often the folks behind the counter are singing along with Bob Marley: "The Babylon system is a vampire!" It's infectious, and soon the customers are singing along as well. Everyone has a plate of beautiful food, lovingly crafted in the slow food way, in front of them, and a steaming mug of homemade chai or fair-trade coffee. Vegan chocolate cake tempts those in the mood for dessert. There is no end to the people streaming in: little old couples, young people with their shining organic babies, neighbors, friends, employees of the nearby grocery co-op Other Avenues, beach combers; in short, everyone.

This is the scene at Feel Real Café, located at 4001 Judah (at 45 th Avenue), near the terminus of the N-Judah train at Ocean Beach. Open for just over one year, the café serves a 100% plant and grain-based, organic menu; everything from the salads and beverages to the main dishes and desserts are vegan, and they are delicious. Often a meal takes upwards of half an hour to make, in fine Slow Food tradition- on my first visit, shortly after the café opened on April 20, 2005, I ordered a salad called "Mystic Journey to the Center," and it showed up on my table 30 minutes later. This is a style choice, according to Feel Real's proprietors, Tim and June: "We talk to the people, find out what they like, what mood they are in, and we make their food especially for that." I came to find out that a Mystic Journey salad varies entirely from person to person, started from scratch and added to based on personal taste. And it was well worth the wait.

June, the chef often singing the loudest and dealing with cooked food- from potato pancakes and steamed greens to hand-made veggie burgers served with homemade mustard- talks about the Feel Real menu being soul food. How did Feel Real's food come to be this way? Slow Food means that time is taken to understand the food needs of the person eating, what they like or dislike, whether they are vegans or omnivores; additionally, the origins of the food are carefully taken into consideration, to ensure optimum health and taste; and of course, the food is prepared with care and attention to detail. As Carlo Petrini says in his book Slow Food: The Case for Taste (Columbia University Press, 2001), the making of slow food is a craft, and this craftsmanship gives pleasure, for the producers, the chefs, and the consumers. This process often means that a relationship is built between the food eater and the food maker, and between the food and people; hence the soulfulness of the Feel Real menu. As June says, "Food represents life."

Feel Real seems to operate largely on this premise. The structure of the business reflects the dedication of June and Tim to an egalitarian way of working with each other and providing nourishing food to their customers. According to Tim, "everybody works together to make it one. There's not an 'owner.' It takes these certain people to make this happen... It's not really a 'business' then, because we don't have ownership. Even calling ourselves a co-op is too structured. We are very loose and flexible; since we are in the early stages of development, we have to have lots of flexibility to work. It's going to be changing in the future- our business is growing, in baking, in this, in that- so we need to be able to change. Maybe in the future we'll settle into a system." Indeed, on my latest visit, to interview the boys, I ended up taking orders and answering the phone. They have had a changing cast of co-workers over the past year, people who have dropped in to help, or who accentuate the high quality of Feel Real's food, including their vegan pastry chef, Phoenix, who makes yummy cakes, cookies, and pies. The food, the atmosphere, and the camaraderie are part of what makes life soulful.

This view also extends to the way Feel Real charges its customers for the food they eat. When the cafe opened, there were no prices listed next to the dishes on the menu. People were asked to pay what they thought it was worth for the food. "After all, price is an arbitrary number," say June and Tim. Initially, this presented a problem for a few customers- they were unsure of how to handle the money situation. So a compromise has been struck: a price range. All dishes are now priced in a range, for example, from $7-$10 for steamed greens, grains, and grilled tempeh or tofu, and people pay what they feel the food is worth within that range. It usually works to an advantage for Feel Real, as people will often pay a good sum for the food, which is another indication of how much people enjoy its taste and preparation.

Most of the food that Feel Real purchases and uses in their cooking is provided by one of two Bay Area organic produce suppliers, Earl's Organics. (The other is Veritable Vegetable.) So why not buy directly from a small local farm? "One small local farm couldn't provide enough for the volume of food that a restaurant needs. So small farms go to distributors and sell. For one single farm to be able to supply restaurants, they go to Earl's in order to make sure they can make a profit." These distributors then do business with many Bay Area restaurants to provide a whole range of produce, fruit, and grains. On the other end of the spectrum, a large farm's costs are too high to provide produce to a small scale restaurant like Feel Real. Tim pointed out that a collaborative of local, organic restaurants could make it worth a large farm's time to provide produce directly, but until that happens, "a middleman is necessary." Feel Real also purchases food items such as herbs and spices from Mountain Peoples, and items that it doesn't need in bulk, such as a single cucumber for a Mystic Journey salad, from the nearby grocery co-op Other Avenues (located at Judah and 44 th Avenue). Often, they will also purchase items from Rainbow Grocery as well.

Coffee and tea are provided by Café Mam and Té Tea, respectively. According to Café Mam's website ( www.cafemam.com ), "Café Mam is grown by fair-trade cooperatives of native Mayan farmers living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The growers, primarily of the Mam, Tzetzal and Mochó peoples, are organized according to egalitarian democratic ideals that stress responsibility to the co-op, hard work and high standards. Their programs provide countless benefits to outlying native communities." Té Tea's website ( www.teteas.com ) states that "Té Teas offer an exclusive selection of unrivaled loose whole-leaf teas from the world's most privileged single tea growing estates." Additionally, chai tea is hand-made all day long at Feel Real.

What about Feel Real's place in the community? They have made their mark as a place to meet and greet; strangers will gather at the large front table, which seats up to ten people, and leave as friends. The beauty of the space, the bright minty-green floor, the murals and sculptures made of salvaged tree branches, the constant music (records only) and occasional spontaneous live shows by customers, make Feel Real as comfortable as your living room. Tim and June have worked out any number of deals that amount to bartering with people for food, time worked in the kitchen, and taking care of the food scraps produced, which end up in a neighbor's compost bin. With a twinkle in his eye, Tim says of the compost Feel Real produces, "It's organic. It's in demand."

On a typical cold, blustery day in San Francisco's Sunset District, I have stopped into Feel Real for some food and company. I have a cold. I have brought some rosemary from home and my droopy state of being. I sit at the front table, surrounded by people I haven't met before. I say to June, "I'm sick... What can you make for me?" and I give him the rosemary. Twenty minutes later, I have a potato pancake, steamed greens, and rosemary in front of me. I've already had several conversations with the people sitting around me, and by the time I'm done eating, I feel quite a bit better. I leave, full, healthy, and satisfied, knowing that I will return, as I have every week, for more of that soulful food and company.

Details:

Feel Real Café, 4001 Judah @ 45 th Avenue
Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 3pm and 5pm - 9pm
Open Sunday 11am - 5pm
Cash only, Catering Available

What do we think about when we turn the shower on? Do we think about the water flowing out of the showerhead, or where it comes from, or where it is going? Or do we think of what it means to be able to take a hot shower at any given time, with clean water? Do we think, “water is part of a cycle,” as we step into the tub and the small part of the hydrologic cycle with which we have daily contact as urban dwellers streams over us and washes us?

“Greywater is water that flows down sink, shower, and washing machine drains, but not the toilet,” according to the Guerrillas’ soon-to-be-released book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Laura is hopeful that the book will be available within the next year. This book is the extension of the popular zine that the Guerrillas published for roughly two years, featuring a history of Bay Area water politics which led to the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite that provides San Francisco with its urban water supply. The loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley is considered by many to be an ecological disaster, reducing a once mighty water system to a concrete conduit which stretches hundred of miles from source to city. A side effect of this type of water transportation mentality is the utterly wasteful sewer systems that many cities have constructed. Greywater is thoughtlessly mixed with black water (water from toilets) and sewage, rendering a potential resource useless. The Guerrillas address this in their zine as well: included are detailed drawings of DIY plumbing alterations and self-build composting toilets, all designed to run greywater independently of the sewer system, and back into the soil.

“Greywater contains nitrates and phosphates from household cleaning products. If released untreated, these compounds pollute rivers and groundwater, but to garden plants, they are valuable nutrients. The easiest way to use greywater is to pipe it right outside and use it to water ornamental plants or fruit trees,” write the Guerrillas in their book. The group has two greywater systems in their own urban backyard in the East Bay. One, connected to the kitchen sink, is indeed a simple system: a long hole was cut in the house’s siding and a large drainpipe and bark-chip filtration box were installed which diverts tap water to a bathtub full of reeds, cattails, and bulrushes. The roots of these plants feed on organic compounds, removing them from the water itself, so that by the time the water flows out of the bathtub, it is clean enough to be reused. “The bathtub is attached to a perforated hose that is buried in this bed over here,” Laura says, indicating a large flower bed where the water from the kitchen sink flows. Grease from the sink is caught in the bark-chip biofilter before it gets to the tub. Grease becomes stuck to the chips as it pours over, while water is allowed to filter through. It is literally as simple as placing bark chips in an open topped box and letting the grease get trapped in the porous material. Every so often, the greasiest chips may be removed and composted, while fresh ones are put in the filter.

Recently, the Guerrillas hosted a workshop around the installation of their newest constructed wetland, in their backyard, which harvests water from their showers and diverts it to another bathtub, and which then flows to their bountiful vegetable crop and herb spiral. “We usually do a workshop at someone’s house whenever they want a greywater system installed,” Laura says, emphasizing the nature of performing several tasks at once for maximum benefit. The Guerrillas have installed around 15 systems around California, Seattle, and Detroit. While greywater may seem to many a natural and preferred method of dealing with waste water, installing wetlands made from salvaged bathtubs and reused pipes isn’t exactly standardized in building codes. The California Greywater building code, according to Laura, is much more expensive to follow, and more regulations apply: “Hence the word ‘guerrilla’ to describe what we are doing.”

Greywater “connects you personally to your own water use and the water cycle. When you use greywater in your house, then your house becomes more of a system too, and it becomes a really water aware place,” says Laura. This means not only being more aware financially about the benefits of reusing your water, but of the processes of cleaning greywater with nature’s own filters (roots and bark chips), and watching it flow from one system (the kitchen sink) to another system (a constructed wetland in a bathtub) to yet another system (a vegetable patch). A greywater system can be as simple as disconnecting your sink drains and placing a bucket under the open pipe. Once the bucket is full, use it to flush your toilets, or perhaps use it on your houseplants. Simple solutions such as this are excellent for apartment dwellers who do not have the space for wetlands. Of course, greywater systems can be as large and biologically complex as the wetlands at Heron’s Head Park. Either way, greywater use is an important and necessary way of preserving and respecting one of Earth’s resources.

For more information about the Greywater Guerrillas and upcoming events, visit their website at www.greywaterguerrillas.com.

The story of permaculture and its founder, Bill Mollison, is profoundly human and profanely inspiring. After spending 28 years studying natural ecosystems in Australia and becoming full fledged in the institution of academia, Mollison had a revelation. What he was observing in nature and studying in books had little practical application in real, human life. In fact, the systemic interactions that he saw occurring in nature were being destroyed, defied, and ignored by human civilization. Massive amounts of energy were (and are) being used to grow and transport food, to transport humans, and to live in modern cities. At the same time global decision makers were proclaiming that the Green Revolution would feed the world, he saw that this industrial agriculture "solution" was actually destroying the soil and perpetuating hunger. From this perspective, Mollison modeled the practice of permaculture -permanent agriculture- an integral design theory for human activity and prolonged existence, that very simply puts nature to work by combining maximum productivity with minimum expenditures of energy and resources.

Based on the intricate relationships in forest eco-systems, Mollison began creating food forests, of nuts and fruits and other perennial plants. His vision was of food production and human settlements that do not expend energy each season, but rather produce surpluses of it. In a forest system, layer upon layer from the canopy to the understory, to shrubs, flowers, and roots are utilized to create a "guild" or symbiosis of plants, each connected to the other and comprising a complex whole. There is no rotating of crops, fallow land, nor plowing of fields. The relationships in a forest regulate and thrive off of each other. This is nature at work. By intensifying land use, rather than trying to conquer nature, permaculture attempts to understand and design natural relationships that maximize energy and resources in order to minimize work and waste. Permaculture design builds a permanent framework that reaps continued harvests.

With the publication of his first book, Permaculture One ( 1978, co-authored by his student David Holmgren), Mollison unleashed an idea, of logic in design and respect for nature, that has become an unstoppable worldwide movement. Permaculture has expanded from its agricultural roots to express "permanent culture", designing and building culture and community that feeds and fuels itself. In Mollison's words, "permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate." From agriculture, aquaculture, and horticulture; to water, energy, and waste; to building, transportation, and community, permaculture is a design philosophy that can be applied to each and every human activity, in any setting.

While it deals with complex systems of interaction, permaculture is governed by a set of simple ethics: Care for the Earth, Care for People, Distribute Surplus, and Reduce Consumption (or reinvestment in the first two ethics). In the words of Scott Horton, editor of Permaculture Activist magazine, "Care for the Earth and Care for People have an implicit balance between them". By reducing consumption and distributing surplus we are caring for ourselves and other people, all of us components of the earth system. This set of ethics is what makes permaculture universal to any human activity, land use, or place and why we see it being taught and perpetuated in parts of the world as diverse as remote villages in Africa and South America, where permanent settlements have replaced foraging and hunting cultures, and dense urban centers, that are typically enveloped in energy consumption and dominance of nature.

In addition to ethics, permaculture is guided by a dozen or so design principles that emphasize the importance of the relative location of each element, in a garden, home, or community, and that strive to maximize their functional connections. If every element in a design has multiple functions, and each is related to every other element, then efficiency and productivity are increased, and resource and energy consumption are decreased. Taking the time to think about each component of a design and its cycle of life, and then utilizing every possible connection in that life flow, is what permaculture is about. Claude Genet, of Green Mountain Permaculture, uses the example of a kitchen to describe the logic of permaculture design. In a kitchen your sink, stove, and refrigerator are all located relatively close together, along with countertops, knives, bowls and other tools for preparing food. It would be inefficient and illogical to have these items in different rooms, but in a garden this is often precisely the case.

To apply permaculture to a garden is to recognize the value of every element, whether plants, ponds, greenhouses, or compost piles, and then place them in relation to each other. A keyhole or spiral formation is often used in planting. These are intensive design patterns that both benefit the gardener's expenditure of energy and foster symbiotic relationships among the plants. For example, the Native American combination of corn, beans, and squash provide a natural synergy; the corn forming a pole for the beans to climb, the beans fixing nitrogen in the soil, and the squash forming a ground mulch layer. There are endless similar beneficial relationships between plants, that thousands of years of human survival have uncovered and science has explained. This is permaculture design: ethically applied science that benefits from the logic of nature. The same concept of recognizing the intrinsic value in every thing can be applied to community or city design. Where homes are oriented in relation to the energy of the sun; where people are located in relation to food, transportation, and work; and how water and waste are cycled, are all questions that can be addressed in urban permaculture. Intentional communities that apply this design logic are operating in the Bay Area and all over the world, in urban and rural settings, and in climates from the Arctic to the Sahara.

Our fair city of San Francisco is currently hosting its first ever permaculture design course at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. A guild of seasoned veterans from around the world is teaching the three month series of classes, sowing permaculture concepts and sprouting design ideas in fertile minds. Inevitably, those learning now will in turn propagate what they have learned and teach more teachers. Uncannily, people that learn permaculture are inspired to action and activism. It is in this infectious way the permaculture movement has spread and spanned the globe.

A final important thought on permaculture is that it is a revolution without a center, a paradigm shift from consumption and capitalism to an ethical philosophy void of politics, government, and hierarchy. It is not anarchy either, but rather complete and utter cooperation, between humans and the environment. As Bill Mollison says, "You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things. You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system." Permaculture is building intentional communities, of plants and people, that sustain themselves over time. It is a dismissal of conventions and a reworking of values. As the idea of permaculture spreads among individuals, to their friends and their friend's friends, a collective conscious is being formed and a subtle revolution is underway, right before our eyes.

Most of the systems by which this modern, industrialized society has been organized are hierarchical and linear. They are designed to keep resources separated, and to keep people constantly working harder and harder, and often battling with their neighbors, for fewer returns. This is the case for political systems, as American democracy often takes direct action out of the political process. It is true of social and economic systems as well: families are increasingly living separated from each other in cookie cutter houses, with inequitable distribution of infrastructure development and taxes. A person’s income is intimately tied to their access to resources in every facet of life, although it is often distributed inequitably and is unequally taxed. Models for social and economic growth usually promote monocultures and rarely take into account anything beyond dollar value, especially the environment. Doing this ignores the fact that monoculture and poor environmental health will ultimately make scarce resources even harder to maintain. Meanwhile, hierarchical systems also mean a few people concentrate bigger shares of resources in order to maintain control and power.

Cooperatives are an answer to hierarchical political, social, and economic systems. They are much more democratic in daily activity than prevailing systems of politics and business management. They allow for much more equity in resource distribution, and live up to the adage of getting out of it what you put in. In all of their forms, co-ops are inclusive, empowering, and flexible. Co-ops offer the possibility of ownership to people who are likely shut out of that opportunity in prevailing society. Creativity and collaboration is possible in an environment of open communication and development, and co-ops are often places of incredible diversity, answering the problems of a monoculture. They are as close to a utopian ideal in a non-utopian universe as anything else. Belonging to and supporting collective governance is an amazing opportunity to cooperate for maximum resource benefit, and potentially influence policy development, as is the case with the Landless Worker’s Movement in Brazil. This group has instigated and gained great change in Brazilian agrarian reform.

What are cooperatives?

Cooperatives range from business models to living situations, therefore encompassing most of society’s major structures of political, social, and economic systems. In the case of business models, cooperatives include employee owned worker cooperatives such as Rainbow Grocery and Other Avenues Grocery, credit unions such as the Permaculture Credit Union, and purchasing cooperatives, in which groups of merchants employ economies of scale as large purchasing blocs in order to get discounts and pool marketing. Housing co-ops are one type of intentional community, which encourage cooperation amongst neighbors who have created small-scale living situations. Each member of a housing co-op owns a piece of a legal entity, which in turn owns real estate held in common. As such, each housing member belongs to an association, which usually elects a board of directors to develop and regulate occupancy agreements. This is distinct from condominium situations in which owners purchase real estate directly and therefore have little intimate engagement in communality.

The modern cooperative, the “organization owned by and operated for the benefit of those using its services,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, got its start in the mid 1800’s in Britain. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers created a set of rules and guidelines that are in wide use today, including open membership, democratic control, a lack of religious or political discrimination, sales at market prices, and earmarking earnings for education programs. Development of cooperatives in the United States was mainly a rural enterprise into the early twentieth century, in the forms of agricultural marketing and supply co-ops. Marketing co-ops provide a stage for marketing common commodities, promoting cooperation between farmers and buyers. Supply co-ops provide common access to farming inputs, such as fertilizers and seeds, which once again promotes cooperation for maximum resource distribution. Modern agricultural cooperatives are thriving, including Tillamook Creamery from Tillamook, Oregon. This cooperative of dairy farmers provides cheese, milk, and other dairy products to consumers at very decent prices, and allows each farmer to reap the benefits of collective governance in the dairy farming industry. The second half of the twentieth century in the United States has seen the emergence of cooperatives such as credit unions and housing co-ops in more urban contexts, with increasing influence over reigning political and economic models. That being said, it is a rural cooperative movement from Latin America that is demonstrating this increasing influence most successfully.

A Model for Cooperative-Initiated Reform: The Landless Worker’s Movement

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), known in English as the Landless Worker’s Movement, is the largest social movement in Latin America. It is a highly organized answer to agrarian land reform in the country of Brazil, which has constitutional mandates for land use and yet has deep discrepancies in land ownership. Three percent of the population owns two thirds of Brazil’s arable land, which often goes unused despite a constitutional provision that states abandoned land will be seized by the government and given to those willing to farm it. According to the MST website, “Since 1985, the MST has peacefully occupied unused land where they have established cooperative farms, constructed houses, schools for children and adults and clinics, promoted indigenous cultures and a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality. The MST has won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government recognition. Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a ‘larger social function.’” The MST’s Commitments to the Earth and to Life encourages its collective members to “fight against latifundia for all that possess land, bread, studies and freedom.”

Much of the MST’s success in gaining title to unused land is due to its organizational abilities. Elements of the struggle that land reformers face are identified, and collectives are assigned to work on each element. These include production, cooperation, education, environment, gender, political education, health, culture, communications, human rights, and youth. Each sector works with international groups, the political left in Brazil, and the public sector to ensure maximum safety and success for the MST. While the MST has achieved massive success over its two decade struggle, members also face huge obstacles. Fierce battles in courts and private militias hired by land owners to harass and often brutalize squatters are but two of these, but the group continues. The MST counts many supporters around the world, mostly due to their exceptional organizational abilities, their dedication to equality, and their collaborative process of democracy. This particular movement is centered on agrarian reform; for both rural and urban contexts, there are any number of valuable lessons to be learned from the MST about collective governance influencing the highest levels of a hierarchy in order to ensure a shared living and dignity. If San Francisco’s small-scale cafés and restaurants belonged to buying co-ops and created business partnerships with farmers’ selling co-ops, a movement would be born and eventually influence how food is grown and distributed.

Indeed, there are already organizations working to encourage and promote cooperative business models. The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC) is one such group. According to their website, “NoBAWC (pronounced “no boss”) is dedicated to helping build the worker cooperative movement in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.” To realize this, NoBAWC provides support for members, including “maintaining and sharing information relevant to worker cooperatives, providing technical and organizational assistance, offering joint marketing and promotional services, developing group benefits, improving access to financial resources, strengthening ties between worker cooperatives and developing relationships with other segments of the cooperative/labor community. NoBAWC also helps develop new worker cooperatives by offering some technical assistance and referrals to those developing worker cooperatives and promotes worker cooperatives in our community.” Their member organizations include Arizmendi Bakery, Other Avenues Grocery, Rainbow Grocery, Box Dog Bikes, Woodshanti, New Leaf Paper, and the Lusty Lady, the world’s only worker-owned cooperative peep show. As this list shows, any field of business can be cooperative and governed collectively; as this model demonstrates, it is possible to create umbrella organizations that promote cooperatives in all forms, from agriculture to housing.

A Call to Cooperation

A cooperative can be as simple as a group of friends who pool money for shared rentals at the surf shop. It can be as complex as a credit union, with thousands of members and large sums of money floating around. It can be as evolutionary as the MST in Brazil. The idea is the same in all cases: people sharing resources in an equitable fashion for the greatest mutual benefit. Co-ops operate very well in capitalist and consumerist societies, because they are inclusive and flexible, and they offer the opportunity to create equitable systems that operate within these larger hierarchical systems. The multicultural nature of co-ops is a stand against the tenets of globalization and industrialization. Small scale collective governance, in the form of social, political, and economic cooperatives, is one very effective tool for controlling democratic processes directly and to influence overall social, political, and economic movements. This is true for any country in the world, and increasingly, for global interdependence.

UAS Development Team member, Kevin Bayuk, recently had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Ernest Callenbach the author, probably best known for, perhaps the most visionary novels of a sustainable, thriving future yet imagined, Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging [highly recommended reading for Allies!]. Illuminating the lonely imaginary fields of a truly sustainable food, energy and transportation system, built environment, even the economy, Callenbach shines a bright light on an easily possible future waiting for us to embrace that is neither Luddite nor naïve Viridian. Little acknowledged is Callenbach’s exploration of democracy and its functioning in a sustainable society. Kevin endeavored to probe deeper into Callenbach’s contemporary views on the subject to retrieve some essential insights and inspiration for the Bay Area Sustainability Movement. For without an inspired vision, how can we unite?

UAS: What is the state of our current democracy?

EC: Unfortunately the institutional factors are almost all pointing in negative directions because we have cleverly built up industrial consumerism as a kind of a self -consuming or self-destroying machine. Most of the major institutions in our society, not only the corporate ones and the WTO and international and national governments, but also some of the forces that formerly supported working-class people such as labor unions and so on are now so implicated in carrying on business as usual that society like a pile of rocks – you know how rocks sort of wedge themselves in with each other and you can’t move anything. And you think the only thing that will dislodge this is some kind of a flood that will have enough force to really loosen things up. And the Iraq war has been a very major force, you know clearly it has been loosening up a lot of things – mostly for the worse, but things like that take a long time to be digested by a body politic and we won’t see the end of it for probably a lifetime.

You know, Marx said a lot of good things. I’ll tell you two good things that Marx said. One was that “capital has no country.” In the era before globalization we really did not know what this means, now we face it in all its full horror. What it essentially means is a race to the bottom - which the American working class is now caught up in as well as the working classes of every other country.

The other one is, “The cash nexus (by which he meant the market) is a corrosive that will dissolve all other bonds between human beings except buying and selling.” In a consumer society such as ours you begin to see what this means. This brings us back to your theme of democracy -- almost all the connections between people that form a social polity are under severe attack. Whether we will be able to reverse this thing is in my mind is a very key element of our possible future.

The one political measure I am really paying attention to lately is CA Proposition 89. Because I share the view that without reform of our legislative institutions there is almost nothing worthwhile that can be done. You can do cosmetic things – and the California legislature, for an unusual example, has done some pretty amazing things over this last year, but there is a sharp limit on it, because if you are sitting there as a representative, you know that any bill of real importance is going to hurt some of the people who have given money to you. And you are not free to vote against their interests if you hope to continue your career in politics. So there is a kind of a built in self-limitation on the representative process on how we built it up.

Michael Phillips and I wrote a book a long time ago called A Citizen Legislature, which in that time and now is thought to be a very crazy book. But I think in the long run it may be the one thing that Michael and I are really remembered for. We thought that far ahead, past the paralysis of our democratic institutions that we are now living through, there must be some kind of other side where something fundamentally new and different and not authoritarian might be devised.

UAS: That brings up a question. To further abstract from our current system -- that book [A Citizen Legislature] is an exponent for another kind of representation selection – by lottery – but it proceeds from a more fundamental question, is representation necessary?

EC: I think representation is necessary in any society above the tribal size. In human history, tribelets or hunter-gatherer tribes, or as I would rather call them gatherer-hunter bands (since it was the women did most of the gathering and provided most of the food), these were small enough that they could govern themselves by sort of an automatic interpersonal process that did not require institutions in any formal sense. But once you get beyond village size (and I would guess that this size would be around 200-300 people) you begin to have so many bodies around that they couldn’t possible decide everything all together.

I think that the Athenian populace, allegedly, would gather together once or twice a year in a plaza for deliberation. But a mob of maybe 50,000 people (because they excluded the women, the children and all the slaves) -- is not going to be capable to decide anything sensibly. You have to have some kind of deliberative process. And the same thing goes for people who talk about television democracy, or some kind of electronic system where you everybody would look at the screen and say “yea” or “nay.” Well, what people forget is that there is always a mechanism, always an institution that is presupposing the questions on the screen as well as counting the responses and managing the whole process.

You need deliberation so that people can, first of all, compromise with each other, second so that they can watch each other, and third so that they can prevent the whole system from being taken over by a determined minority. Or at least you hope they do that. This has clearly failed in Washington at present, but that is the idea.

UAS: When we look at the Survivalist Party (from Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging) we see their structure as highly decentralized and democratic - one individual, one vote. You wrote of this as applying to both the workplace and the popular government. When we talk about decentralized in today’s context, what might it look like? How decentralized?

EC: It would probably mean something like what Portland, Oregon has been trying where they have city districts; they call them neighborhoods grouped into coalitions, where you have a couple of thousand people living in a particular spot with, probably, particular problems, particular perspectives, maybe even a sub-culture, who have, to some degree, political power themselves. In Portland’s case this has been devolved onto them by the city council. In my opinion, as far as I know, Portland is probably the best governed city in the country. They do a lot of really incredible things up there.

And this means that a lot of the ordinary business of the city can be carried on in the immediate proximity of the people that are going to be affected by it. And that clearly is one of the underlying principles – that those who are going to be firstly, paying for it and secondly, subject to its effects are the ones who, as far as possible, should be able to decide it.

Now political money is a hydraulic system, it’s like water, it goes for the holes. Campaign reform of the traditional kinds; which Loni Hancock was trying to bring about when she worked for a foundation here in San Francisco before she became mayor of Berkeley and before she was in the state legislature proposing Prop. 89 and so on – these things, historically, never work, like the McCain/Feingold Bill and its predecessors. These measures are inherently flawed because they don’t address the structure; they only address how big the pipes are going to be and the like – that is not the point. The point is to break the link between money and representative power and I think it can be done, maybe not in our lifetime …well we’ll see what the electorate decides in California.

If 89 should go through, it would be the most revolutionary thing in California politics for all the years that I’ve been living here -- it would be sensational. And since Maine and Arizona and now Connecticut is installing it, we already have three very different states elsewhere doing it, adding California to this mix would give a tremendous surge of impetus to it happening all around the country. [Prop. 89 was soundly defeated in the November 2006 election.]

As far as I can tell it works very well in these states, it has not been a panacea for everything wrong with government clearly, but it has made possible some things that would not have been possible under previous systems.

UAS: Can you provide any stand-out examples of these possibilities?

EC: Maine, for example, has a virtually universal health coverage system now.

In Arizona, you have an amazing woman governor, Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who ran clean and won against a very rich and well-backed Republican. I don’t know about Maine, but in Arizona, free elections were installed after a particularly hideous scandal. I believe the previous governor was imprisoned for embezzlement. This created such a wave of revulsion with business as usual in the capital that even citizens that were not notably radical were like, “Hey, we got to clean this up.” It also, in Arizona, withstood some constitutional challenges that were brought against it by moneyed interests.

One effect it undoubtedly has is to bring a lot of new candidates (this is true in New York city too where something similar is done) who would not otherwise be there because even if they have wonderful ideas they have not had the funds to galvanize a significant number of backers.

One problem with our democracy is our lack of the ability to bring new ideas into the political discourse. I think this is a much more important than it may seem at first sight. There are a lot of other things that ought to be done with our electoral system. Instant run-offs is one. Proportional representation is another one. But we won’t see any of these things until we get clean elections.

UAS: What about the functioning of democracy and technology? In Ecotopia we saw people communicating with the TV network with cameras mounted on the televisions. Now, of course, we have the internet (though not as widely distributed as TV). What are your thoughts now with a functional bi-directional democratic communication system of that nature?

EC: Well, I think it was a pretty good idea, but it’s never been really tried unless some of these community channels have tried it and I have not heard about it. The idea is, and this connects with the random selection of A Citizen Legislature, that the process of the input has to be determined, not by some producer’s idea of whether you fit the show or whether you’re photogenic, but simply by whether you are representative, which can only be determined by random processes. We have to learn to love randomness. This is very hard for Americans to do, but if you had a political show in which the callers were in fact selected randomly you would get an accurate picture of what people out there are actually thinking, not just the articulate or the photogenic, but a wide range. And if the number is fairly large you get this good sense for what people care about.

UAS: That brings up a question in terms of what types of rules or structures to effect civil communication might be appropriate. And what models historically have been effective or which ones could we look towards to reinvent and elaborate on?

EC: I would like to see actual groups attempting to use random choice of leaders. There have been some in the past -- feminist groups I heard of and small-scale groups where essentially people are kind of anti-leader and nobody wants to be a leader, but I would like to see some groups a little bigger than that where there would probably people that would like to be leaders and try rotating leadership on some kind of random basis among them and see how it would work.

In our A Citizen Legislature scheme we were thinking of the House of Representatives, renamed the Representative House. One third of its members would be replaced every year. So it would kind of be in principle like the US Senate is now, with overlapping changes of membership, so that you would always have a continuity of people who had been there for a while who would know what was going on and capable of orienting and training new members. And if you had an organization that had a couple of hundred members and wanted to try something like this, I think that’s the way it should be tried.

That’s the way it often it happens informally anyway. There will be some kind of board of directors or council and people will serve on it for a couple of years and other things call to them and they drop off and other people are put on, but if that were formalized and especially with organizations that had some actual power it would be very interesting to study it and see how it worked.

I think the Portland neighborhoods have quite a budget actually and they are able to decide on their priorities – are they going to put in parks, are they going to repair streets, are they going to get rid of streets. They have control of what they are actually going to do. But we have lived so long in such a centralizing and authoritarian system that we’re not even to the baby steps stage yet. We are still barely crawling.

But I think history moves by a jerky pendulum motion and I think maybe we’ve gone to the right about as far as we’re going to go unless we slip over into outright fascism. So, I would imagine in the next five years to ten years (whatever the period you want to think in terms of) we will probably become more open to innovation again and I hope some of these innovations concern the actual structures by which we try to govern each other and ourselves.

UAS: Seems to me there is deep irony here when we refer to the history that is brought out in Ecotopia Emerging where we read that America’s founders drew inspiration from the native peoples of this land – in particular the Iroquois Federation – a successful governance mechanism. Is there something to be learned or something you could say about what happened from a beginning that seemed so well intentioned, innovative and integrative?

EC: A lot of it was scale. I don’t know if you’ve been following the Vermont secession movement, but it is pretty active. One of the things that you have in Vermont is genuinely viable village structures still, which we have very rarely in California, if any at all. I don’t really know of any that I would make a very strong defense of.

Governance follows social institutions. I think you could say that countries get the kind of formal institutions that their underlying social institutions make possible and sort of want. The reason Switzerland has a decentralized federalist government in which the cantons (states, or departments or whatever one calls them) have real power and are very jealous in fact to maintain their powers with respect to each other, is that the country was separated into regions by the severe mountainous terrain of the country as well as by some cultural divides – language blocks and so on. And what we have going in North America is on such a vast, vast scale compared to that, that it is almost like another universe.

Revolutionary developments don’t happen, at least if you believe a sociologist named Seymour Lipset, at the worst times in a social cycle. They start when things have been at the worst and they are starting to get a little bit better and people are thinking, “With a little more push we can really go somewhere here.” It may be we will enter such a phase again, as we did in the 60s when a lot of stuff had come unglued and it seemed that maybe it was possible to change a lot of stuff, and some things genuinely did get changed in the aftermath of the 60s.

In terms of what people can do practically, I think in any organization or any civic structure or anything that you are involved with, see whether there are ways to make the structure more democratic, to get new kinds of people elected or at least participating.

Vera Allwen in Ecotopia Emerging once said, “It isn’t important for everybody to do everything, it is just important that everybody does something.” I think this is really the way we need to go. Oh, by the way, another thing about Ecotopia Emerging…after Ecotopia itself came out, people would ask me questions about how Ecotopians do this and that, and one of the things they were curious about was how the Survivalists would run their political meetings. That is why I described, in some detail, that very strange meeting that begins with breathing exercises because, in the Survivalist perspective, politics is about the whole body, not just the head and the pocket book. It is about the whole body, the whole organism, and until you get people into that place they are not going to behave very well when it comes to doing specifically political things.

That is another thing we can do. Whenever I give a lecture I try to get people to breathe beforehand and get people to stand up and stretch in between. It is just very important to help each other be healthy animals. This is what politics is supposed to be all about after all.

UAS: Another theme described in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging is the potential for democracy in labor; it is described a “great unknown and unexplored social force” – the idea that workers would prefer to have ownership of the workplace. What about democracy as it relates to the workplace?

EC: I don’t remember what year this was done exactly, probably in the middle or late 80s, somebody on a poll for some reason or another asked the question, “Do you think people, working people, in a company should control the company?” Or something like that. A huge majority said, “Yeah!”

This is really amazing, because we think of ourselves as a rather sheep-like country where people are glad to have bosses pushing them around, and most people would never have heard of worker ownership. This is a very minority idea right now, let’s face it. It is a tiny, tiny blip on the consciousness of political people much less everybody else and yet here was this huge majority of ordinary Americans saying, “Yeah, I think I would like that.” To my knowledge nobody has quite figured this out. There are some organizations like one in Oakland called the Center for Employee Ownership that is helping people do employee ownership schemes – which are a lot more numerous than most people recognize.

I came at it all from a background as a political radical in my college days. I had been a left-wing anti-communist socialist. So I knew that capitalism had been tried and had a lot to answer for. Socialism had been tried in very, very imperfect deformed ways, and didn’t have too many attractions when it was what we called, as practiced in the Soviet Union, bureaucratic state capitalism. The question was whether there was another way, a third way, in which changes could be made to relationships to the means of production.

Another good thing that Marx said was “The overall nature of a society is determined by relations to the means of production” and we’d have to add means of distribution, in our case. And I took that very seriously and I began to think...well, is there any way in which the deformities of capitalism and the deformities of state capitalism a.k.a. “socialism” could be avoided? Is there any other way to organize relationships to the means of production other than having a capitalist class own them or having a state bureaucracy class own them? And of course there is: you can have the people who do the work own the companies.

So, I decided to adopt that as the basic Ecotopian system. And it seemed to make a certain kind of ecological sense because things in nature happen very piecemeal and locally. You can have a tree here and a tree there and sooner or later you have a forest that becomes an organism or an ecosystem of its own sort, but things in natural systems are really local, really intimate. And, so the question arises how you can do that in an economy? Well, the only way you can do it is to keep things relatively small. How small exactly is always a problem, because if organizations get too small they don’t have the capacity to do very many interesting things -- or at least not that often.

On the other hand of the scale, if you get beyond a couple of hundred people, things tend to get bureaucratized and they no longer happen on the basis of informal context and you begin to spend all your time having meetings and devising rulings and things get very stiff. But it is in that interesting range between too small to be really competent and too large to be competent that the really innovative and lively and special things about human beings happen.

And these are the things that characteristically happen in cities. They don’t usually happen in small towns where you typically don’t have the critical mass of bright or interesting people, and they don’t happen in huge bureaucracies as in Washington where things are so impossibly ingrown and congested that there is almost nothing new that can be done.

UAS: Is there anything you would want to say about democracy as it relates to the concept of the commons?

EC: Well, commons, as I understand them at least, mostly existed in small societies. Their fundamental locus was the village and the associated lands around the village, some of which were forested, some of which were grasslands, pasturage. And the allocations of these resources was done on some kind of democratic basis that I don’t think is very well understood. Certainly there was not a lord who did it. There was probably some kind of village council, probably of elder males, as usually has happened in human history, who sat around and, in a way, defensively prevented anyone from monopolizing this resource.

I do know one example of modern day times, in Bali. I was lucky enough to get to Bali one time for a couple weeks and I discovered that the way the irrigation districts are managed in Bali is as a commons. The water runs down off of a mountain onto this agricultural area and there is a council of water managers – and there is one individual, in the southwest they call him the “major domo” -- the manager. The interesting thing is that the individuals that are chosen for this always have their land at the bottom of the hill. So their interest is to make sure that the water gets through everybody else’s property and down to them. And other people can count on them to do that because if they don’t get the water, they starve. This system has worked for at least 3,000-4,000 years now and it gives you some kind of inkling of what the commons must have been like elsewhere.

It probably was not quite equalitarian. There were likely influential people in the village the way there usually are. On the other hand the degree to which these people could run roughshod over each other was probably very limited.

Another commons that is alive and well is the lobster fishery in Maine. If you happen to be a lobster fisherman you probably inherited from your father or uncle a certain amount of lobster pots that you have the right to put out there. Now, if some new person comes along and buys a boat, sets some traps and lays them out there, lo and behold, his traps disappear and his boat might be stove in and he is driven out of the business. You might say in a way this is a tyranny of local established interests. On the other hand you might also be forced to say that this lobster fishery has endured for about 300 years without overcatching lobsters, so it can’t be all bad.

I suspect that something like that is at the heart of all commons: that there is a shared, and you would have to call it democracy, there is a shared feeling that we are all in this boat together and we had better figure out ways to take care of each other and not endanger anybody, so that people have sort of an equal stake. Not a precisely equal stake but an equal enough stake.

In a way this may have been a model for how democracy first came to be -- in Scandinavian societies for example. My colleague Michael Phillips argues that our kind of democracy is really a Nordic tradition. It came from Nordic country and went to England and from there to here, and so forth. And it may have originated in small fishing communities where people had to defend everybody’s right to a livelihood so that it was easy to imagine that people had rights…that they had inalienable rights to exist and have a fair share and out of this grew the formal structures that we now think of as democratic.

The enclosure of the commons that used to be merely a matter a sheep and forest land has now encroached on human bodies and genes and possibly organs and time and so on -- a very sinister development. And you have to ask yourself if all these machinations of international corporations have reached such a pitch of sophistication in exploitative-ness and controlling-ness and so on, that at some point people will rise up and say, “Screw you, we’re not going to take this anymore,” and throw the whole thing out -- as Indian peasants, threatened with the loss of their seeds, in fact did. You get a few hundred-thousand Indian peasants amassing in the streets saying they are not going to allow them to take their seeds…well, it moves political obstacles. The Indian governmen had to renege on a seed-patenting treaty which they had gone along with.

UAS: How do we get to Ecotopia from here?

EC: As they say, every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We need to identify those single steps. What I would say, politically, Prop. 89 is a good step. It might pass. It will be a miracle if it does because a lot of money will be spent against it. That would be good and of course community building.

My wife and I spend a lot of time in our neighborhood. Neighborhoods create opportunities for a special form of organizing. You can think about preparedness for natural disasters as a way to connect with neighbors and find out who would need help, who probably has food stored up, how you might get water and so forth. It’s a way of people helping each other – a way that builds up camaraderie. People don’t give it enough priority to get to know their neighbors.

UAS: What about the visioning piece? How do we continue where Ecotopia left off?

EC: People need vision. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” When people begin to get the inkling that there are other ways to think about the future they get curious, they almost can’t believe it. They begin to look into it some more…