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Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning of American Planning Association

http://www.planning.org/policyguides/food.htm

The following are a few converging factors that explain the heightened awareness among planners that the food system is indeed significant:

• Recognition that food system activities take up a significant amount of urban and regional land
• Awareness that planners can play a role to help reduce the rising incidence of hunger on the one hand, and obesity on the other
• Understanding that the food system represents an important part of community and regional economies
• Awareness that the food Americans eat takes a considerable amount of fossil fuel energy to produce, process, transport, and dispose of
• Understanding that farmland in metropolitan areas, and therefore the capacity to produce food for local and regional markets, is being lost at a strong pace
• Understanding that pollution of ground and surface water, caused by the overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture adversely affects drinking water supplies
• Awareness that access to healthy foods in low-income areas is an increasing problem for which urban agriculture can offer an important solution
• Recognition that many benefits emerge from stronger community and regional food systems

…two overarching goals are offered for planners:

1. Help build stronger, sustainable, and more self-reliant community and regional food systems, and,
2. Suggest ways the industrial food system may interact with communities and regions to enhance benefits such as economic vitality, public health, ecological sustainability, social equity, and cultural diversity.

This Policy Guide on community and regional food planning presents seven general policies, each divided into several specific policies. For each specific policy, a number of roles planners can play are suggested. The seven general policies are:

1. Support comprehensive food planning process at the community and regional levels;
2. Support strengthening the local and regional economy by promoting local and regional food systems;
3. Support food systems that improve the health of the region’s residents;
4. Support food systems that are ecologically sustainable;
5. Support food systems that are equitable and just;
6. Support food systems that preserve and sustain diverse traditional food cultures of Native American and other ethnic minority communities;
7. Support the development of state and federal legislation to facilitate community and regional food planning discussed in general policies #1 through #6.

Why Outpost Natural Foods Loves Will Allen and Growing Power

This past Saturday Growing Power’s Leana Nakielski, Bob Graf, and Andor Horvath introduced Growing Power organic farming methods and products to the patrons of the Outpost Natural Foods store in Capitol, as part of a celebration of Outpost’s 37th birthday!

Outpost now carries Growing Power’s “Worm Power,” the black gold so rich in nutrients for your soil and plants. Here’s what Outpost says about this new product on its shelves:

Will Allen is an organic farmer 5.1 miles from the Capital Dr. store.

Why we love Will. He runs Milwaukee’s only urban farm. Growing Power not only grows food, but also grows farmers. Growing Power teaches thousands of people every year to create and maintain urban gardens and farms.

One visit to the Growing Power farm on 55th & Silver Spring will change your life forever! Witness passion for farming, learn a thing or two about urban gardening and support the cause of making wholesome food available to the food insecure population.

Bring Growing Power home with you! Boost your house plants and garden soil with Worm Power! Comprised of some of Milwaukee’s favorite waste products—hops from Lakefront Brewery, coffee beans from Alterra coffee roasters and trimmings from Growing Power’s plants.

It’s the magic you need for healthy plants!

From Civic Distrust to Civic Engagement via Thoughtful Public Places

In the words of Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco:

Those of us who have been on the planet for a while know that the instinct for human encounter is under siege… The global citizen… has responded with boundary laws, privacy regulations, and gated communities. A civic distrust has permeated our cities…

If we don’t reverse this civic distrust, then soon our cities and towns will be more populous, but not worth inhabiting. Though closer together by some measures, we are suffering from what sociologist Robert Putnam calls the loss of “social capital.” Our connections to neighbors and fellow citizens, the glue of a democratic society, are being undone by streets that favor cars at the expense of pedestrians, public institutions that detract from the vitality of surrounding districts, and commercial developments that stimulate consumerism but not social interaction. If people can’t come together in public spaces, if streets have no room for neighborly conversation or casual sidewalk contacts (what Jane Jacobs called “the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow”), then what future is there for a shared civic culture amid the rapid demographic changes affecting today’s cities?

The good news is that “the instinct for human encounter” has not left us, it has just been suppressed. We can create a culture of civic engagement, and public spaces are perhaps the best forum in which to do so. People still want to come together as a community in their shared spaces. Our parks, streets, squares, and public buildings can still foster civic ideals like democratic participation and cultural expression. It’s simply a matter of enabling people to use these places as they are naturally inclined. But first, if the desire for human contact is to express itself freely, local governments must adopt a new approach to designing and managing the built environment.

This quote is from an article that originally appeared in the September 2006 issue of Municipal World. It chronicles the Placemaking process in Mississauga, Ontario, where PPS worked with public agencies and community stakeholders to help create great public places in the city’s civic center.

The Emerging Culture of Place
Want to turn your civic center into a great district?
By Fred Kent and Benjamin Fried

Contact Project for Public Spaces to learn how we can help.
In an era when cities and towns are changing rapidly, public spaces are the key to reviving civic engagement. Here’s how one city is making it happen.

(on a neighborhood level community gardens would be one important response—Olde)

Great and Modest Beings, Sons of The Movement

Obama’s campaign,
As he so profoundly expressed it,
Is a citizen’s movement.

Obama is a child of “The Movement,”
Where gathers the 10,000 movements
Now, as we see, rising with the vitality of
The ground in spring.

It will be a great thing
When Obama and his team
Meet Will Allen and his team.

At the Soldiers Home.

With veterans
With civilians
In concert
And commitment.

From the war at home.
It’s peace time.

Long last.

Seek Reviewers of: Eliot Coleman, “Four-Season Harvest”; C.L.R. James, “Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.”; Michael Frome, “Heal the Earth, Heal the Soul.”

Michael Frome is one of the wisest elders I’ve had the privilege of encountering, a child of Brooklyn, discoverer, presenter, and defender of Mother Nature, a great and modest activist in the major movements of our time, and yet offering good things from his home with June Eastvold in Beautiful Port Washington, Wisconsin, of the Great Lakes.

The life of C.L.R. James was introduced to me by Grace Lee Boggs, who was one of his main collaborators back in the 1940s and 1950s. James was a Trinidadian revolutionary gentry who served as mentor from London of a number of the leading African nationalist leaders of the 1950s. His Mariners, Renegades & Castaways offers deep insight into how it could be that a nation like ours could elect men like Bush and Nixon.

Here are some samples of the treasure trove of organic gardening experiences open to readers of Eliot Coleman’s “Four-Season Harvest.”

Getting StarteD

How do you begin a four-season garden? You can start on an area no larger than a tablecloth. Plant one or two short rows of a few salad crops. Then next week, plant a few more short rows of other crops. Now you’re rolling. Less than a month after initiating the process, you will be eating radishes. There are also the early thinnings of spinach, beets, lettuce, and cabbage to add to your salads. Since you will plant many crops in succession, there will be plenty of thinnings. But since you are gardening for the table, there is no chore called “thinning the seedlings.” There is only a sequence whereby you thin enough to add to a salad today, thin more for a stir-fry tomorrow, and thin yet again for soup the next day. The act of thinning not only feeds you but also enables future bounty by providing more room for the remaining plants.”

http://www.fourseasonfarm.com/

I would very much like to present reviews of these works at

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/Main/HomePage

We Need a Citizen Uprising Against Commercial Ag Farm Bill Boondoggles

‘’‘A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a
nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of
obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the
production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of
the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at
cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies
are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort
of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The
school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of
America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus
agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today
the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to
prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A.
inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a
lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the
inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill
essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the
unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American
farmers to overproduce.’‘’

You Are What You Grow
By MICHAEL POLLAN

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington
named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a
mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable
predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most
of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a
shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the
people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones
most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to
purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he
could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the
supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft
drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy,
meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the
imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found
that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but
only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those
chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but
only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods:
they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which
makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular
calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the
marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.”
Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are
organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most
rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the
inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of
carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike
substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of
manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves
elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty
marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of
these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This
resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of
legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about
to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed,
to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other
things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will
not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as
currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the
root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever
arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and
wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports,
to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the
others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as
the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy
has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of
these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by
cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather
than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills
once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived
from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as
dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm
bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A
result of these policy choices is on stark display in your
supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between
1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of
soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the
least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that
those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a
nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of
obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the
production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of
the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at
cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies
are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort
of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The
school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of
America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus
agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today
the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to
prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A.
inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a
lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the
inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill
essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the
unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American
farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does
not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global
poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American
farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs
to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in
Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether
farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to
migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of
immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the
flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized
grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million
Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the
mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn
prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla
prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed
disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully
comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending
what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don’t ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms,
few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American
landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don’t
have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides
what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly
true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the
farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land
in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be
managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals)
or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American
soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of
its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs
and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the
nation’s political passions every five years, but that hasn’t been the
case. If the quintennial antidrama of the “farm bill debate” holds
true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will
thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with
virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much
attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the
farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that
involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake.
This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to
treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of
their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren’t paying attention, they
pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill
votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with
incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the
1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to
understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average
citizen. It’s doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health
community has come to recognize it can’t hope to address obesity and
diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community
recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical
and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The
development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty
can’t be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses
world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World
Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most
observers think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy,
wheat or rice would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly
concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in
America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues
today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are
everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the
schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight
feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in
agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food
and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers,
people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food
system. But as powerful as the food consumer is — it was that
consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and
more than doubled the number of farmer’s markets in the last few years
— voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can’t, for
example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most
unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can
afford. To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as
well — which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy
political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the “farm bill” is a
misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten
with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who
think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no
matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the
real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land,
to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a
bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and
environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly,
sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most
healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least
healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh
food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from
far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on
farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the
people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because
they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food
and doesn’t hurt the world’s farmers by dumping its surplus crops on
their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for
farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted
agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some
imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to
focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on
growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for
food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the
current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater’s
farm bill could not be more straightforward: it’s one that changes the
rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and
farming) over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills,
which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness
interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America
are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the
political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could
prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill,
and the eaters at last had their say.

---

So what should we say to Congress? Here are some ideas from Food &
Water Watch (a site I found linked from the Worldwatch Institute):

The Next Farm Bill should:

• Establish Policies to manage the supply of agricultural commodities.
• Include a Competition Title to restore fairness and transparency

to the livestock sector.

• Provide funding for farm to cafeteria programs, organic

transition and public research on plant and animal breeding.

• Maintain the Conservation Reserve Program and expand the

Conservation Security Program so farmers across the country can
participate.

• Restore the implementation date for Mandatory Country of Origin

labeling for meat and produce.

• Establish a permanent system for disaster payments to farmers in

the event of crop losses from a natural disaster.

For more info, see
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/u-s-farm-bill/farm-bill-faq/farm-bill-101

National Security, Terrorism, and Global Warming

Terror in the Weather Forecast
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Published: April 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/opinion/24homer-dixon.html?th&emc=th

DOES climate change threaten international peace and security? The British government thinks it does. As this month’s head of the United Nations Security Council, Britain convened a debate on the matter last Tuesday. One in four United Nations member countries joined the discussion — a record for this kind of thematic debate.

Countries rich and poor, large and small, and from all continents — Bangladesh, Ghana, Japan, Mexico, much of Europe and, most poignantly, a large number of small island states endangered by rising seas — recognized the security implications of climate change. Some other developing countries — Brazil, Cuba and India and most of the biggest producers of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, including China, Qatar and Russia — either questioned the very idea of such a link or argued that the Security Council is not the right place to talk about it.

But these skeptics are wrong. Evidence is fast accumulating that, within our children’s lifetimes, severe droughts, storms and heat waves caused by climate change could rip apart societies from one side of the planet to the other. Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous — and more intractable — than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.

Congress and senior military leaders are taking heed: Legislation under consideration in both the Senate and the House calls for the director of national intelligence to report on the geopolitical implications of climate change. And last week a panel of 11 retired generals and admirals warned that climate change is already a “threat multiplier” in the world’s fragile regions, “exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states — the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.”

Addressing the question of scientific uncertainty about climate change, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff who is now retired, said: “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”

In the future, that battlefield is likely to be complex and hazardous. Climate change will help produce the kind of military challenges that are difficult for today’s conventional forces to handle: insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism.

In the 1990s, a research team I led at the University of Toronto examined links between various forms of environmental stress in poor countries — cropland degradation, deforestation and scarcity of fresh water, for example — and violent conflict. In places as diverse as Haiti, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, we found that severe environmental stress multiplied the pain caused by such problems as ethnic strife and poverty.

Rural residents who depend on local natural resources for their livelihood become poorer, while powerful elites take control of — and extract exorbitant profits from — increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources in the countryside dwindle, people sometimes join local rebellions against landowners and government officials. In mountainous areas of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have increased poverty and helped drive peasants into the arms of the Communist New People’s Army insurgency.

Other times, people migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with the people already there. Or they migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.

Climate change will have similar effects, if nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions that allow people to cope with a warmer planet.

The recent report of Working Group II of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies several ways warming will hurt poor people in the third world and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes — zones inhabited by billions of people — will experience more drought, more damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease.

The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: in semiarid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. (There is evidence that warming’s effect on crops and pastureland is a cause of the Darfur crisis.) Many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and temperatures even a couple of degrees higher could lead to much lower yields.

By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments — and make challenges from violent groups more likely — by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.

We’ve learned in recent years that such failure can have consequences around the world and that great powers can’t always isolate themselves from these consequences. It’s time to put climate change on the world’s security agenda.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

The Interfaith Earth Network of Milwaukee Launched in 2007

Rev. John Strassburger of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee and Dr. Lisa Calderone-Stewart of the House of Peace recently asked that Urban Ecology’s Ken Leinbach and Beth Fetterly connect the Ecology Center’s environmental message with Milwaukee’s neighborhood faith communities.

Here are the inspiring results!

The Interfaith Earth Network

We would like to invite you to join a collaborative project…the Interfaith Earth Network…this simple way for faith communities to engage in a ‘little act’ for the earth. By agreeing to become a ‘Green Congregation’…you make the important statement to the community that you take the responsibility of stewarding the earth seriously.

• Interfaith Youth Earth Initiative—high school aged youth leaders begin in the Fall, work, celebrate, and reflect through the Spring.

• The Green Congregation Program—faith communities publicly pledge to make care for th earth and environmental stewardship a priority. Commitment criteria can be found at www.interfaithconference.org or via Rev. Strassburger at 414 276 9050.

• Faith and Ecology Education-programs planned through the Faith and Ecology Initiative of hte Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. Four educational conferences starting this Fall.

• Resources and Networking-green congregations can connect with Green Partners.

E-mail Rev. John Strassburger at johns@interfaithconference.org or come to next orientation on June 19th.

Keep up on developments at www.interfaithconference.org

Will Allen’s Growing Power Monthly Tours Would Profit From Early Sign-Up

Will Allen’s April tour at the Growing Power City Farm will have to be put off until, I hope, the latter half of May. Will is intensely engaged helping launch city farms and gardens across the country.

The March tour had more than 50 people. It would very much help if you would send an e-mail to GPTour@MilwaukeeRenaissance.com so we can judge how many wish to attend a May or June tour.

A Powerful Critique of Friedman Article re “Clean Coal” and Nuclear Plants

Published on Thursday, April 19, 2007 by Commondreams.org

Summary

We’ve seen the horrific results of Tom Friedman’s advocacy of utility deregulation. We’ve tasted the bitter fruits of his cheerleading for the war in Iraq.

Why would we now buy his fossil/nukes, which are no more green than the climate crisis itself?

Between the lines of Friedman’s columns there’s a lethal brew of carbon emissions and radioactive crud. Every dime spent on “clean coal” or “safe nukes” will only make things worse.

We’re glad so many corporate moguls finally feel compelled to line up at the media greenwash. But there’s no need to buy in to their proven failures.

The real solution to climate chaos is the Solartopian Trinity of solar, wind and bio-fuels, with increased efficiency and the return of mass transit. Accept no substitutes.

Is “Green” Tom Friedman The New Eco-Orwell of Solartopia?
by Harvey Wasserman

Not long ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was America’s top op ed cheerleader for George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq, portraying it as a “war for democracy.”

Now, in a landmark Times Magazine article, he claims naming rights to a “green” movement for nuke power and “clean coal,” portraying them as part of the answer to global warming.

This is VERY dangerous stuff.

But before we proceed, this Earth Day we can welcome the fact that major media types like Friedman finally do concede that we have a global climate crisis. The din of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” has corporate big-wigs lining up to be washed green. For that much, we can all be grateful.

There is much that’s positive in Friedman’s writings about the need for emission-free energy. Most of it derives from countless concerned citizens seeking a Solartopian system based on solar, wind, bio-fuels, efficiency and a truly Earth-based culture.

Friedman never acknowledges them. But tens of thousands of grassroots activists have contributed decades of loving labor, often including jail time (mostly at reactor sites), to give birth to that vision.

Normally, a social movement would welcome the embrace of a New York Times columnist. For a major establishment mouthpiece to start spouting ideas for which so many have marched should be a deeply gratifying accomplishment.

But Friedman’s sales pitch also sanctifies nukes and coal. In a single horrifying phrase, he writes in the Times Magazine that “to reach the necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal or nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms.”

Thus, in Tom Friedman’s new eco-Orwellian “greenspeak,” atomic energy and “clean coal” have become the equivalents of solar and wind power.

This is a suicidal double deception.

“Clean coal” is the ultimate atmospheric oxymoron. Fossil fuel corporations justify it with “carbon sequestration,” the idea of pumping CO2 emissions into caverns and other underground storage facilities.

In other words: Yucca Mountain for the coal business. The technology is unproven and the gas is certain, sooner or later, to leak out. Continued coal mining—even with a green veneer—will devastate landscapes, kill miners, cause acid rain and prolong the world’s dependence on fossil fuel.

Worse is the proven 50-year failure of nuke power. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Nothing can guarantee their safety from a terror attack.

Fifty years ago the Price-Anderson Act gave federal protection to save reactor owners from paying for a major disaster. No private insurer has stepped into the void, not for the past generation of reactors, nor for the future.

There is also no solution to the waste problem. Yucca Mountain, the multi-billion-dollar alleged storage dump, cannot open for at least two decades. It is capped with perched water, marbled with an earthquake fault and surrounded by (so far) dormant volcanoes like itself. If it opens at all, it will be a casino, in one form or another.

Nukes also spew huge quantities of radioactive radon from the billions of tons of tailings that that sit near uranium mines and mills. That uranium is in increasingly short supply, with prices bound to skyrocket.

The enrichment of reactor fuel creates huge global warming emissions. The nukes themselves pump out direct heat, harming air and water. Radioactive emissions kill billions of fish and other life forms, including humans. Near-misses, as at Ohio’s Davis-Besse, which was a bare shred of thin metal away from a catastrophic melt-down, are all too frequent. Sooner or later, by terror or error, we must expect the worst.

Friedman mourns that the melt-down at Three Mile Island caused huge quantities of carbon-emitting coal to be burned for replacement power. But if the $900 million it took to build TMI had been invested in real green energy and efficiency, all those emissions could have been cheaply and safely avoided, then, now and into the future. Take the additional $2 billion required to deal with the seething radioactive mess and we could have had a countryside layered with safe, clean, cheap solar and wind farms.

Friedman never interviews the thousands of central Pennsylvanians who demanded the nuke not be built in the first place. Nor does he mention the 2400 locals who’ve tried for two decades to get a class action trial on the death and disease caused by the 1979 melt-down’s radioactive emissions. To this day, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not know how much fallout escaped from TMI, where it went, who it affected or what harm it did.

Friedman instead talks to TMI’s newly greenwashed corporate biggies. More nukes would be a great solution to global warming, they say. But they complain that a new reactor could not come on line for, perhaps, fifteen years. And private investment won’t do the trick. Government loan guarantees will be required, they moan, because when it comes to energy, the market “doesn’t work.”

That’s an amazing admission for a free market ideologue like Friedman. What he can’t face is that the market DOES work for nuclear power, because nobody in their right mind will invest in it without gargantuan subsidies and insurance protection. Only a Bush-style intervention like the one for “democracy” in Iraq will finance new reactor construction.

The real numbers on both existing and new nukes are disastrous. The current generation only looks profitable because the wave of utility deregulation that swept the US a few years ago forced the public to eat the true capital costs.

Back then Friedman yelled that a free market in energy would yield competition and lower prices. But with fake shortages and market manipulations, Enron and its corporate cohorts gouged California and other states for more than $100 billion. Nowhere in the deregulated US is there meaningful competition in electricity. Nor is there an accurate accounting for the true costs of atomic power.

In the 1990s, California’s REAL green power movement wanted to install some 600 megawatts of solar, wind and efficiency. That was killed by John Bryson, the “green” chair of Southern California Edison. Bryson then used deregulation to write off the multi-billion-dollar capital costs of four reactors. And then came Enron, to gouge and go bankrupt.

Now Friedman and his fossil/nuke cohorts ask that we repeat the experience in the name of global warming.

We can certainly say “thanks” to him for finally waking up to the climate crisis. But we must also say “no thanks” to fossil fuels and nuclear power.

The Solartopian solution embraces wind, solar, bio-fuels and other truly renewable sources, along with increased efficiency. Wall Street is lining up to invest in these technologies, which have high rates of real return, both financial and ecological.

We’ve seen the horrific results of Tom Friedman’s advocacy of utility deregulation. We’ve tasted the bitter fruits of his cheerleading for the war in Iraq.

Why would we now buy his fossil/nukes, which are no more green than the climate crisis itself?

Between the lines of Friedman’s columns there’s a lethal brew of carbon emissions and radioactive crud. Every dime spent on “clean coal” or “safe nukes” will only make things worse.

We’re glad so many corporate moguls finally feel compelled to line up at the media greenwash. But there’s no need to buy in to their proven failures.

The real solution to climate chaos is the Solartopian Trinity of solar, wind and bio-fuels, with increased efficiency and the return of mass transit. Accept no substitutes.

Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at www.solartopia.org.

Response to Critique of Friedman

by Julilly Kohler

I agree that Friedman is off on nukes— but that is so unlikely and far off, that it’s not even being seriously discussed anywhere— even in Europe where a large percentage of their power is nuclear.

However, he was right on on all the rest of his analysis: geopolitical and domestic. Nukes were a small part of his thesis. The breakthrough with Mr. Free Market Friedman’s thinking, and why his article is so important— is that he says nothing will be able to happen without government intervention and leadership. He says gas and oil taxes are needed as well as long term loan guarantees, grants and tax credits. This is not only true, it is astounding coming from him.

When someone says important, good new things--- I find it silly to tar him with his past wrong ideas. He should be welcomed into the light, not derided. What he said is important precisely because it was he who said it.

I think also Harvey Wasserman is off in committing to a Trinity that relies hugely on wind which will require massive new transmission lines— which are always nightmares. What is needed to be developed are local systems that generate and deliver close by--- all adaptable to local conditions. He seems to overlook the most promising for our region— geothermal. That is where I believe Wisconsin tax credits and guaranteed loans from govt should be going. It’s ready here and now, while neither solar nor wind have local technologies to scale that reliably work for our latitude, wind conditions and haze. Remember, the very fact that we in S.E. Wisconsin are in a pollution non-attainment area, means that we do not get great solar energy.

California Lt. Governor, John Garamendi when he was here 2 months ago, said that if 1 of 12 CA citizens would go to their own geothermal systems, 40 coal power plants could be retired!

Earthday Invitation for On-line Brainstorming

Please send an e-mail to Earthday@milwaukeerenaissance.com if you are interested in some on-line brainstorming about:

• Setting up home composting, organic gardens, and possibly city farm experiments in your neighborhood

• Exploring green habitat transformations for your home and business

• Investigating the possibilities of part-time “green collar jobs” in cooperative enterprises

• Becoming a contributing writer to the Milwaukee Renaissance.com On Line Magazine

• Publishing your own modestly costing book through Backpocket Press.

Spectacular Photos and Essays re the Demolition of the Glorious Venetian Theater

Get some popcorn, find a seat, the show is about to begin

To help you experience the theater at it’s finest, let me explain how a movie was shown, as explained to me by several people, including a lady who lived above my parents flat on 39th and Center.

During the “Coming Attractions” as they were called then, and the newsreel – the precursor to Television News, the lights would dim and one section would glow orange, like a beautiful sunset and then the room was dark, lighted only by the aisle lights. As the movie started, small lights that were in the ceiling begin to come on in familiar star formations, and would twinkle. As the movie progressed, more of these came on. Then, when the movie was about to end, the sun rose once again, complete with the colors of sunrise and the theater was again transformed to the outdoor sunlighted garden.

(For More about Movie Palaces, seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_palace or Purchase Silver Screens - A Pictorial History of Milwaukee Movie Theaters by Larry Widen and Judi Anderson)

Hearing this as a child, as I sat on a piano bench with Mrs. Kaborleign, I was memorized by this building, and have been ever since.

At some point, perhaps it can be determined because of the style, the marquee was changed and other modifications were made.
[]

1946 or later Marquee - Jim Rankin collection.
[]

Venetian Building - 1968 - City of Milwaukee Inspectors Photo

Years pass by.

In 1954 the Venetian Theater closed its doors. TV was the new form of enterainment and it was the death of many other Movie Palaces here in Milwaukee and across the country.

The building sat empty and an effort was made to sell it. A four page flyer promoting the building as a possible entertainent venue was published. Other possible uses listed were storage.

In 1963 the building was in deed purchased by a Charles Karabetsos who hung the word “Sales” on the marquee and named his business Venetian Sales. He installed a drop ceiling in the auditorium level with the bottom of the balcony, forever concealing the artful ceiling and projection booth. His nephew Steve, who worked for Charles once wrote on the cite “Cinema Treasures”

He sold a variety of items, almost like a general store, during the Holiday season he had a very large toy department, this was prior to Toy’s R Us. The decline in toy sales and the impact of competition always presented new challenges, he used the stage area for warehousing of Proctor And Gamble soap items for the Coin Op. laundry business, the upper area was rented for several years to a person who sold sewing machines and developed a brush stroke technique to show how the “masters” painted on canvas, he attempted suicide after a partner embellished money from the company, for 20 years time stood still with all his stuff, occasionally we would salvage something to use for a sign or a part. In the 70 s we were able to obtain a liquor license, the seating area was left un-heated and used to warehouse large quantities of soda, beer and soap. The front or lobby became a neighborhood grocery and liquor store. My uncle sold the building and liquor business in either the late 80 s or early 90 s and since then I believe it has been closed entirely.

In the neighborhood, too grown-ups and kids alike the store was simply known as “Charlie’s.”

My experience with the building expanded at this time as my first watch - a Timex with black hands and numbers with a white face - was purchased from a display on what had once been the concession stand. It was my reward for learning how to tell time. My first radio, a red, 7-transistor AM radio was purchased from behind that same counter. At the time, it was state of the art technology. I earned the money for it going door-to-door collecting empty bottles. Signs for Koss headphones were on the display as well as on the exterior of the building. I was aware of the Milwaukee made product as they also ran WFMR, a classical music station I listen then, (And still do).

Every day I would go to Charlies on my way home from what was then St. Anne’s Catholic School and pick up the Milwaukee Journal. On Sundays we stopped there on our way home from church. For over 20 years I entered the building.

On Tuesday demolition begin. First with the west wall near the stage and then pulling down the east wall. This was not met with full success as large portions of the wall fell into the duplex, in one case startling the resident with bricks entering their flat. The roof of the duplex was ripped open and had a 15 foot long gaping hole.

Wednesday the crew took down the roof portion. This closed the last view of the projection booth that was still fully intact with details above it. The famous ceiling of the theater had already fallen as crumbled plaster to the floor, except for portions over the balcony that where protected by the remaining roof, and what could later be seen over the stage.
[]

The proscenium, covered since the drop ceiling was put in during the conversion from theater to retail store. Note the cloud on the sky and great plaster details.

Friday the crew pulled down the remaining portion of the east well while Milwaukee police closed West Center Street for concern that the front wall may collapse into the street. It did not. The sturdy manner in which the building was constructed was evident by the amount of effort it took to destroy it.

Saturday, April 7th, the Venetian facade was pulled down.

In the weeks prior to this, several people interested in preserving this historic building, or at least portions of it and the company doing the razing declined to let them on the property.

On Sunday, April 8th a group of scavengers were tearing at portions near the stage, carting away scrap metal.

The stage remained wall remained standing, complete with surviving portions of the proscenium and parts of the once grand, hand painted ceiling and walls. Sadly, it has taken the destruction of this building to allow us to view the grand details of this building.

For lots more, including great photos of the Venetian before, during, and “after” demolition, go to…

http://milwaukeerenaissance.com/TimStThomas/HomePage

Convening Grace Lee Boggs: The Church Fostering a Self Reliance Living Economy in the Midst of City Ruins

Detroit Churches “Recivilize” the City

In 1990 Siser Cathy DiSantis, who often marched with us, invited me to speak to the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Allliance on how the church can help to “recivilize” Detroit…

The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings…Churches are…in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature.

A Self Reliant Living Economy

All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of a people could come alive.

From Grace lee Boggs, “Living for Change: An Autobiography”

Also…

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/GraceLeeBoggs/HomePage

http://www.boggscenter.org/

Odes to the Greening of Milwaukee, Earth Day, 2007

Our Family’s Destiny

The Marriage of Tiny Homes,
Worms,
Compost, Gardens,
Bikes

Recycled Computers,
Intentional Communities,
Family & Co-op Bakeries and Cafes,
Our children’s theatre at the Avalon,
Our elders’ olympic games and contests.

With all of God’s children,
Planetary humanity,
Urban villagers,
Guild sons and daughters,
Civitas loving wise elders.

Sacred city places,
Forest and river valley moments,
In the city,
Cleansing lake,
Cleansing rivers,
Cleansing air.

Ligthening our burdens,
Awakening our spirit,
To our broader family’s
Unfolding Destinies

With our friends and

The Friend.

Olde

Thank God Plants Eat Sun and Make Bugs High

Autotrophy means plants make their own food.
Heterotrophy finds animals needing other organisms.
Plants eat the sun to make sugars and starch­photosynthesis.
Earth’s most profound chemical reaction.
Animals eat each other or our miraculous sun eating plants!

Plants also release the oxygen we breath.
Deep breathing bliss requires our green benefactors.
And the roots and shoots of plants are…forever young!

Insects and birds get drunk on plants’ nectar.
The wind at play and “high” insects or birds
Spread that pollen for new rounds of glorious plant
Oxygen giving life.

Red White and Blue Are Now Green

Red, White, and Blue are now green,
And Uncle Sam and Colonel Sanders
Must re-invent themselves.

Uncle Sam needs a smart woman.
He’s not nearly subtle enough
For today’s crises.

Colonel Sanders is now an embarrassment.
He’s far too greasy.
As goofy as Joe Camel.

We must raise a green flag quickly.
Red white and blue are now green.
The barbarians are at the gates.

The most dangerous ones
Are us.

All nation’s must raise their own specific
Flags of green.
ASAP!

We must change.
We can change.
We can do it.

Dreaming of Life as an Avant Guard City Worm Farmer

The worms will take us higher!

I have visions of re-creating myself
After three score and two years
As an avant guard city worm farmer.

Worm farmers are at the edge of history,
Transforming, with the worm’s help,
Wastes into treasures…­the world’s most fertile soil!

Radiant waste and worms make black gold!

Worm farmer take our waste products: ­cardboard,
Wood chips, brewers’ yeast, coffee grounds,
Veggie wastes from table, restaurant, and stores­
Home to their ranch, say, a corner of a city backyard.

They layer this great harvest of good waste and
Introduce some worms to this feasting grounds,
Who process it into “worm castings”
Otherwise called “black gold.”

Best and Highest Use

Imagine the kind of city we’ll have created
When the “best and highest use” for vacant lots
Is defined by our own Department of City Development
As city gardens chaordically creating
Community, self-reliance, and
City farms.

The Marriage of Art, Preservation, and Urban Agriculture

Imagine the power and the grace that would ensue
From a marriage of art, preservation, and urban agriculture!

Beauty, meaning, and fine food conjoined,
Locally created by neighbors and friends!

Art that grows from and with the local soil
And sacred places to enliven our minds
And ignite our proper passions.

Imagination and aesthetics as pathways
To daily choices sustaining community and
Public regarding self-reliance.

Why Not?

Milwaukee Awakened and Saved the Soldiers Home

Could it be that the people of Milwaukee
Will Save the Soldiers Home?

Could it be that these sacred buildings,
These sacred grounds,
Will ennoble Milwaukee,
And the world beyond?

Will the good people of the Great Cities of the Great Lakes,
Join with us to save these grounds, sanctified, at the start,
In honor of those who gave the last full measure of devotion,
In a war that ended 10,000 years, at least,
Of state sanctioned slavery.

Do we have what it takes, to introduce the
Veterans and civilians of the Great Cities of the Great Midwest,
To to glory and the beauty of the Soldiers Home?

Can we organize ourselves to Save the Soldiers Home?

Do we have the capacity to reach out
And win partners from the towns and countryside of Wisconsin,

Of Minnesota,
Illinois,
Iowa,
Missouri,

 Indiana, 

Michigan,
And Ohio?

Can we organize work teams
Who would commit to introducing
The Soldiers Home to the history students
Of Great Lakes high schools?

Senior citizen centers?

City Farmers

City farmers are a vital
Source of energy and light.
They have a glow about them,
As if some kind of beings,
Totally and gracefully
Embracing…being!

“City Farmers” mixed with nice pictures at
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/DailyAgoraAnnouncements/HomePage#toc21

My Milwaukee, cont’d

Working class elders
Will read well crafted
Poems in local bookstores

While prodigal teens
Turn in handguns,
And intern at Growing Power
City farms and community gardens.

Reformed rednecks do tai chi class,
Followed by the salad bar
And shots of wheat grass
At local Outpost Natural Foods Co-ops.

At-risk teens learn ceramics at Muneer’s studio,
And sometimes hear Rumi readings
By Israelis and Palestinian poets,
A married couple since about 9/ll.

A Vietnam American grad student in fine arts,
And his Norwegian American architect partner,
Team up with a Yoruba priest and New England baker,
And win a national design contest,
On green adaptations for a whole city block,
Now an eyesore,
Soon a major eco-tourist destination

When Milwaukee Starts Feeling Like Some Kind of Holy City

When Milwaukee starts feeling like some kind of Holy City,
On cold winter days laid off construction workers
And retired young elders will gather veggie wastes
From every neighborhood’s food and cafe co-ops,
Brewers yeast from the finest micro breweries,
Wood chips from the city yard,
Coffee grounds from Alterra roasters all over town.

They’s deliver this precious cargo of potency
To neighborhood gardens, edible school yards,
And emerging at-home city farms and kitchen gardens,
For composting food for a myriad of city worm ranches
And neighborhood year round food growers.

The kids in the hood will gather buckets of compost material
From just about all the neighbors,
And simultaneously deliver their block’s newsletters
Filled with images and information to promote and defend
Their increasingly connected neighbors,
On higher and higher planes.

(to be continued)

When Milwaukee Becomes the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas

When Milwaukee becomes the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas,
Perhaps only a generation or two from now,
Irish German Polish Italian American families
Will bike from the western suburbs to the Juneteenth Day Celebration
On MLK, stopping on the way at the Amaranth Bakery and Cafe.

There they will meet up with Hmong African Arab Indian American families
For a feast of soups from the kitchens of the world,
With ingredients picked that morning in the Growing Power city farm across the street,
Where now stands an empty lot.

As they bike across Lisbon and Walnut
The sidewalks will be filled with families in their Sunday best
Walking a mile or two toward the festival,
Past family businesses and artist/artisan workshops that pay the bills.

At the LGBT Center the west and northwest throng
Will join some south and east side Mexican Cuban Jewish Bohemian American families
For last minute practice to prepare for the folk song, dance, and theatrical offerings
In honor of the day when freedom grew stronger, on Juneteenth Day,
Preparing the way for that great moment, when it dawned upon the people, that Milwaukee had made itself
The Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas.

And I, or my descendants, will not be judged chauvinistic for hoping that the dance choreographed
By the Kho Thi with the Trinity Dancers wins first prize!

Olde
January, 2007

20th ANNIVERSARY EARTH POETS & MUSICIANS PERFORMANCE THIS EARTH DAY WEEKEND!

Jeff Poniewaz, author of “Dolphin Leaping in the Milky Way,” teaches “Literature
of Ecological Vision” via UWM’s off-campus program every spring since 1989. In
1988 he organized Milwaukee’s first annual Earth Day Poetry Celebration out of
concern that not much was being done to observe Earth Day during the
anti-environmental Reagan ‘80s. The Milwaukee-based poet had sojourned in the
San Francisco area from mid-1978 to early 1983 and had been part of the intense
eco-poetry scene out there. Since his return to Milwaukee, Poniewaz was happy
to discover that several then emerging Milwaukee poets were eloquently
articulating environmental concerns in some of their work. He thought: “How
exciting if these poets, with their wonderfully various styles of writing and
performance styles, could be brought together in a kaleidoscopic way, with each
having ten minutes to sound out their most powerful work in that vein. The
interplay of alternating male and female voices is one of the magical aspects.”

Performing at the 20th Annual will be Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, Harvey Taylor,
Suzanne Rosenblatt, and Jeff Poniewaz—with special guests, current Milwaukee
poet laureate Peggy Hong and KT Rusch. Not only are they among Milwaukee’s
finest poets, they are also dynamic performers of the spoken word. During the
late ‘90s the group’s spoken word presentation became enriched by the musical
aura spun around them by Tony Finlayson and Holly Haebig of One Drum. These
two outstanding singer-musicians will conjure their usual magic at the 20th
Annual version in this event.

20TH ANNUAL EARTH POETRY AND MUSIC CELEBRATION
—DEFENDING THE HOMELAND: PLANET EARTH
April 20 and 21, 2007

FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2007
7 P.M. Interactive Poetry and Music for the Whole Family
8 P.M. Earth Poets and Musicians
Jahmes Finlayson, Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, Holly Haebig,
Jeff Poniewaz, Suzanne Rosenblatt, Harvey Taylor,
and SPECIAL GUEST: Milwaukee Poet Laureate Peggy Hong
URBAN ECOLOGY CENTER
1500 E. Park Place
(3 blocks south of Locust, two blocks west of Oakland)
$5.00 Per Person, $10.00 Per Family, UEC Members Free
Benefit for the UEC

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2007, 8 P.M.
Jahmes Finlayson, Louisa Loveridge-Gallas,
Holly Haebig, Suzanne Rosenblatt, Harvey Taylor,
and SPECIAL GUEST: Musician & Poet KT Rusch
THE COFFEE HOUSE
631 N. 19th Street (Just South of Wisconsin Ave)
Donation: $5.00 Benefit for Wellspring

Friedman’s “The Power of Green”

Here is what Julilly Kohler, one of the founders of the Milwaukee Urban Agriculture Network(MUAN) has to say about Thomas Friedman’s “The Power of Green.”

To me, this is possibly the most important foreign and domestic policy article that I know of since George F. Kennan’s “Mr X” article in the ‘60’s. He’s brought together every possible critical strand of both theaters and framed them in “green”.

This is what our city, our region, our state and our region of states­ as well as out country­ could be thinking about as to how to knit us back together and bring us into leadership.

[In the way that I pray, I pray that Friedman quickly learns about Milwaukee’s trailblazing role as the Urban Agriculture Capital of the U.S.A. and presidential candidates visit the Growing Power City Farm in 2008, and Milwaukee’s Green Mile on North Avenue in 2012. Godsil]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

April 15, 2007
The Power of Green

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I.

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us ­ and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order ­ as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents ­ by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states ­ not an America divided between red and blue states.

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil ­ and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

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After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of Communism and the “red menace” with massive spending on an interstate highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway system, though, helped to enshrine America’s car culture (atrophying our railroads) and to lock in suburban sprawl and low-density housing, which all combined to get America addicted to cheap fossil fuels, particularly oil. Many in the world followed our model.

Today, we are paying the accumulated economic, geopolitical and climate prices for that kind of America. I am not proposing that we radically alter our lifestyles. We are who we are ­ including a car culture. But if we want to continue to be who we are, enjoy the benefits and be able to pass them on to our children, we do need to fuel our future in a cleaner, greener way. Eisenhower rallied us with the red menace. The next president will have to rally us with a green patriotism. Hence my motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”

The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street ­ thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about “green” upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more compelling to many more Americans.

But here’s the bad news: While green has hit Main Street ­ more Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call “Geo-Greens” to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green ideology ­ green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we’re fooling ourselves. We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.

II.

A few weeks after American forces invaded Afghanistan, I visited the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. On the way, I stopped at the famous Darul Uloom Haqqania, the biggest madrasa, or Islamic school, in Pakistan, with 2,800 live-in students. The Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar attended this madrasa as a younger man. My Pakistani friend and I were allowed to observe a class of young boys who sat on the floor, practicing their rote learning of the Koran from texts perched on wooden holders. The air in the Koran class was so thick and stale it felt as if you could have cut it into blocks. The teacher asked an 8-year-old boy to chant a Koranic verse for us, which he did with the elegance of an experienced muezzin. I asked another student, an Afghan refugee, Rahim Kunduz, age 12, what his reaction was to the Sept. 11 attacks, and he said: “Most likely the attack came from Americans inside America. I am pleased that America has had to face pain, because the rest of the world has tasted its pain.” A framed sign on the wall said this room was “A gift of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Sometime after 9/11 ­ an unprovoked mass murder perpetrated by 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudis ­ green went geostrategic, as Americans started to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism. We were financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and we were financing a transformation of Islam, in favor of its most intolerant strand, with our gasoline purchases. How stupid is that?

Islam has always been practiced in different forms. Some are more embracing of modernity, reinterpretation of the Koran and tolerance of other faiths, like Sufi Islam or the populist Islam of Egypt, Ottoman Turkey and Indonesia. Some strands, like Salafi Islam ­ followed by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and by Al Qaeda ­ believe Islam should be returned to an austere form practiced in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, a form hostile to modernity, science, “infidels” and women’s rights. By enriching the Saudi and Iranian treasuries via our gasoline purchases, we are financing the export of the Saudi puritanical brand of Sunni Islam and the Iranian fundamentalist brand of Shiite Islam, tilting the Muslim world in a more intolerant direction. At the Muslim fringe, this creates more recruits for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Sunni suicide bomb squads of Iraq; at the Muslim center, it creates a much bigger constituency of people who applaud suicide bombers as martyrs.

The Saudi Islamic export drive first went into high gear after extreme fundamentalists challenged the Muslim credentials of the Saudi ruling family by taking over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 ­ a year that coincided with the Iranian revolution and a huge rise in oil prices. The attack on the Grand Mosque by these Koran-and-rifle-wielding Islamic militants shook the Saudi ruling family to its core. The al-Sauds responded to this challenge to their religious bona fides by becoming outwardly more religious. They gave their official Wahhabi religious establishment even more power to impose Islam on public life. Awash in cash thanks to the spike in oil prices, the Saudi government and charities also spent hundreds of millions of dollars endowing mosques, youth clubs and Muslim schools all over the world, ensuring that Wahhabi imams, teachers and textbooks would preach Saudi-style Islam. Eventually, notes Lawrence Wright in “The Looming Tower,” his history of Al Qaeda, “Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.”

Saudi mosques and wealthy donors have also funneled cash to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. The Associated Press reported from Cairo in December: “Several drivers interviewed by the A.P. in Middle East capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with returning pilgrims. ‘They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq,’ said one driver. … ‘I know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don’t take it with me, they will kill me.’ ”

No wonder more Americans have concluded that conserving oil to put less money in the hands of hostile forces is now a geostrategic imperative. President Bush’s refusal to do anything meaningful after 9/11 to reduce our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of “No Mullah Left Behind.” James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: “We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.”

No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.

That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.

Look what’s happened: We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and for about a decade it did just that. But those years coincided with oil in the $10-to-$30-a-barrel range. As the price of oil surged into the $30-to-$70 range in the early 2000s, it triggered a countertide ­ a tide of petroauthoritarianism ­ manifested in Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Angola, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. The elected or self-appointed elites running these states have used their oil windfalls to ensconce themselves in power, buy off opponents and counter the fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall tide. If we continue to finance them with our oil purchases, they will reshape the world in their image, around Putin-like values.

You can illustrate the First Law of Petropolitics with a simple graph. On one line chart the price of oil from 1979 to the present; on another line chart the Freedom House or Fraser Institute freedom indexes for Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela for the same years. When you put these two lines on the same graph you see something striking: the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated. As oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in these countries ­ as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started and companies privatized. That’s because their petroauthoritarian regimes had to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income. But as oil prices went up around 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs all eroded in these countries.

The motto of the American Revolution was “no taxation without representation.” The motto of the petroauthoritarians is “no representation without taxation”: If I don’t have to tax you, because I can get all the money I need from oil wells, I don’t have to listen to you.

It is no accident that when oil prices were low in the 1990s, Iran elected a reformist Parliament and a president who called for a “dialogue of civilizations.” And when oil prices soared to $70 a barrel, Iran’s conservatives pushed out the reformers and ensconced a president who says the Holocaust is a myth. (I promise you, if oil prices drop to $25 a barrel, the Holocaust won’t be a myth anymore.) And it is no accident that the first Arab Gulf state to start running out of oil, Bahrain, is also the first Arab Gulf state to have held a free and fair election in which women could run and vote, the first Arab Gulf state to overhaul its labor laws to make more of its own people employable and the first Arab Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with America.

People change when they have to ­ not when we tell them to ­ and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq ­ a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East without going to war again ­ there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy among petroauthoritarians, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a neocon or a radical lib. If you’re not also a Geo-Green, you won’t succeed.

The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has also moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals are realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle, the more power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to improve its energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But the Iraq war has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military: the “Green Hawks.”

As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who has been working with the Pentagon, put it to me: The Iraq war forced the U.S. military to think much more seriously about how to “eat its tail” ­ to shorten its energy supply lines by becoming more energy efficient. According to Dan Nolan, who oversees energy projects for the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, it started last year when a Marine major general in Anbar Province told the Pentagon he wanted better-insulated, more energy-efficient tents in the Iraqi desert. Why? His air-conditioners were being run off mobile generators, and the generators ran on diesel, and the diesel had to be trucked in, and the insurgents were blowing up the trucks.

“When we began the analysis of his request, it was really about the fact that his soldiers were being attacked on the roads bringing fuel and water,” Nolan said. So eating their tail meant “taking those things that are brought into the unit and trying to generate them on-site.” To that end Nolan’s team is now experimenting with everything from new kinds of tents that need 40 percent less air-conditioning to new kinds of fuel cells that produce water as a byproduct.

Pay attention: When the U.S. Army desegregated, the country really desegregated; when the Army goes green, the country could really go green.

“Energy independence is a national security issue,” Nolan said. “It’s the right business for us to be in. … We are not trying to change the whole Army. Our job is to focus on that battalion out there and give those commanders the technological innovations they need to deal with today’s mission. But when they start coming home, they are going to bring those things with them.”

III.

The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global warming has. A decade ago, it was mostly experts who worried that climate change was real, largely brought about by humans and likely to lead to species loss and environmental crises. Now Main Street is starting to worry because people are seeing things they’ve never seen before in their own front yards and reading things they’ve never read before in their papers ­ like the recent draft report by the United Nations’s 2,000-expert Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that “changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent.”

I went to Montana in January and Gov. Brian Schweitzer told me: “We don’t get as much snow in the high country as we used to, and the runoff starts sooner in the spring. The river I’ve been fishing over the last 50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years ago, and it is hard on our trout population.” I went to Moscow in February, and my friends told me they just celebrated the first Moscow Christmas in their memory with no snow. I stopped in London on the way home, and I didn’t need an overcoat. In 2006, the average temperature in central England was the highest ever recorded since the Central England Temperature (C.E.T.) series began in 1659.

Yes, no one knows exactly what will happen. But ever fewer people want to do nothing. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the new climate around climate when he said to me recently: “If 98 doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t, he is fine,’ I will go with the 98. It’s common sense ­ the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority. … The key thing now is that since we know this industrial age has created it, let’s get our act together and do everything we can to roll it back.”

But how? Now we arrive at the first big roadblock to green going down Main Street. Most people have no clue ­ no clue ­ how huge an industrial project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two people who do: Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue.

They first argued in a paper published by the journal Science in August 2004 that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the atmosphere before the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaches a level unknown in recent geologic history and the earth’s climate system starts to go “haywire.” The scientific consensus, they note, is that the risk of things going haywire ­ weather patterns getting violently unstable, glaciers melting, prolonged droughts ­ grows rapidly as CO2 levels “approach a doubling” of the concentration of CO2 that was in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.

“Think of the climate change issue as a closet, and behind the door are lurking all kinds of monsters ­ and there’s a long list of them,” Pacala said. “All of our scientific work says the most damaging monsters start to come out from behind that door when you hit the doubling of CO2 levels.” As Bill Collins, who led the development of a model used worldwide for simulating climate change, put it to me: “We’re running an uncontrolled experiment on the only home we have.”

So here is our challenge, according to Pacala: If we basically do nothing, and global CO2 emissions continue to grow at the pace of the last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level ­ an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per million ­ around midcentury. To avoid that ­ and still leave room for developed countries to grow, using less carbon, and for countries like India and China to grow, emitting double or triple their current carbon levels, until they climb out of poverty and are able to become more energy efficient ­ will require a huge global industrial energy project.

To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to deploy any 7 of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase the world economy and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the release of 25 billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons of carbon avoided between now and 2056.

Here are seven wedges we could chose from: “Replace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of two billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today’s nuclear output to displace coal; drive two billion cars on ethanol, using one-sixth of the world’s cropland; increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal; cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by 25 percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800 large coal-fired plants.” And the other eight aren’t any easier. They include halting all cutting and burning of forests, since deforestation causes about 20 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.

“There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as big as this,” Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power technology and conservation, “we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over the next 50 years ­ and still keep growing. It is possible to accomplish this if we start today. But every year that we delay, the job becomes more difficult ­ and if we delay a decade or two, avoiding the doubling or more may well become impossible.”

IV.

In November, I flew from Shanghai to Beijing on Air China. As we landed in Beijing and taxied to the terminal, the Chinese air hostess came on the P.A. and said: “We’ve just landed in Beijing. The temperature is 8 degrees Celsius, 46 degrees Fahrenheit and the sky is clear.”

I almost burst out laughing. Outside my window the smog was so thick you could not see the end of the terminal building. When I got into Beijing, though, friends told me the air was better than usual. Why? China had been host of a summit meeting of 48 African leaders. Time magazine reported that Beijing officials had “ordered half a million official cars off the roads and said another 400,000 drivers had ‘volunteered’ to refrain from using their vehicles” in order to clean up the air for their African guests. As soon as they left, the cars returned, and Beijing’s air went back to “unhealthy.”

Green has also gone Main Street because the end of Communism, the rise of the personal computer and the diffusion of the Internet have opened the global economic playing field to so many more people, all coming with their own versions of the American dream ­ a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so many people growing out of poverty. But when three billion people move from “low-impact” to “high-impact” lifestyles, Jared Diamond wrote in “Collapse,” it makes it urgent that we find cleaner ways to fuel their dreams. According to Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute, if China keeps growing at 8 percent a year, by 2031 the per-capita income of 1.45 billion Chinese will be the same as America’s in 2004. China currently has only one car for every 100 people, but Brown projects that as it reaches American income levels, if it copies American consumption, it will have three cars for every four people, or 1.1 billion vehicles. The total world fleet today is 800 million vehicles!

That’s why McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that developing countries will generate nearly 80 percent of the growth in world energy demand between now and 2020, with China representing 32 percent and the Middle East 10 percent. So if Red China doesn’t become Green China there is no chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the door. On some days, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, almost 25 percent of the polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles comes from China’s coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as fumes from China’s cars and dust kicked up by droughts and deforestation around Asia.

The good news is that China knows it has to grow green ­ or it won’t grow at all. On Sept. 8, 2006, a Chinese newspaper reported that China’s E.P.A. and its National Bureau of Statistics had re-examined China’s 2004 G.D.P. number. They concluded that the health problems, environmental degradation and lost workdays from pollution had actually cost China $64 billion, or 3.05 percent of its total economic output for 2004. Some experts believe the real number is closer to 10 percent.

Thus China has a strong motivation to clean up the worst pollutants in its air. Those are the nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and mercury that produce acid rain, smog and haze ­ much of which come from burning coal. But cleaning up is easier said than done. The Communist Party’s legitimacy and the stability of the whole country depend heavily on Beijing’s ability to provide rising living standards for more and more Chinese.

So, if you’re a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: coughing workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers. That’s a key reason why China’s 10th five-year plan, which began in 2000, called for a 10 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide in China’s air ­ and when that plan concluded in 2005, sulfur dioxide pollution in China had increased by 27 percent.

But if China is having a hard time cleaning up its nitrogen and sulfur oxides ­ which can be done relatively cheaply by adding scrubbers to the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants ­ imagine what will happen when it comes to asking China to curb its CO2, of which China is now the world’s second-largest emitter, after America. To build a coal-fired power plant that captures, separates and safely sequesters the CO2 into the ground before it goes up the smokestack requires either an expensive retrofit or a whole new system. That new system would cost about 40 percent more to build and operate ­ and would produce 20 percent less electricity, according to a recent M.I.T. study, “The Future of Coal.”

China ­ which is constructing the equivalent of two 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants every week ­ is not going to pay that now. Remember: CO2 is an invisible, odorless, tasteless gas. Yes, it causes global warming ­ but it doesn’t hurt anyone in China today, and getting rid of it is costly and has no economic payoff. China’s strategy right now is to say that CO2 is the West’s problem. “It must be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions of developed countries and their high per-capita emissions,” Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, declared in February. “Developed countries bear an unshirkable responsibility.”

So now we come to the nub of the issue: Green will not go down Main Street America unless it also goes down Main Street China, India and Brazil. And for green to go Main Street in these big developing countries, the prices of clean power alternatives ­ wind, biofuels, nuclear, solar or coal sequestration ­ have to fall to the “China price.” The China price is basically the price China pays for coal-fired electricity today because China is not prepared to pay a premium now, and sacrifice growth and stability, just to get rid of the CO2 that comes from burning coal.

“The ‘China price’ is the fundamental benchmark that everyone is looking to satisfy,” said Curtis Carlson, C.E.O. of SRI International, which is developing alternative energy technologies. “Because if the Chinese have to pay 10 percent more for energy, when they have tens of millions of people living under $1,000 a year, it is not going to happen.” Carlson went on to say: “We have an enormous amount of new innovation we must put in place before we can get to a price that China and India will be able to pay. But this is also an opportunity.”

V.

The only way we are going to get innovations that drive energy costs down to the China price ­ innovations in energy-saving appliances, lights and building materials and in non-CO2-emitting power plants and fuels ­ is by mobilizing free-market capitalism. The only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed. To a degree, the market is already at work on this project ­ because some venture capitalists and companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry. Take Wal-Mart. The world’s biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its C.E.O. Lee Scott told me, and realized that with regard to the environment its customers “had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves.” So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor the company. The first lesson Ellison preached was that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive its profits. As Scott recalled it, Ellison said to him, “Lee, the thing you have to think of is all this stuff that people don’t want you to put into the environment is waste ­ and you’re paying for it!”

So Scott initiated a program to work with Wal-Mart’s suppliers to reduce the sizes and materials used for all its packaging by five percent by 2013. The reductions they have made are already paying off in savings to the company. “We created teams to work across the organization,” Scott said. “It was voluntary ­ then you had the first person who eliminated some packaging, and someone else started showing how we could recycle more plastic, and all of a sudden it’s $1 million a quarter.” Wal-Mart operates 7,000 huge Class 8 trucks that get about 6 miles per gallon. It has told its truck makers that by 2015, it wants to double the efficiency of the fleet. Wal-Mart is the China of companies, so, explained Scott, “if we place one order we can create a market” for energy innovation.

For instance, Wal-Mart has used its shelves to create a huge, low-cost market for compact fluorescent bulbs, which use about a quarter of the energy of incandescent bulbs to produce the same light and last 10 times as long. “Just by doing what it does best ­ saving customers money and cutting costs,” said Glenn Prickett of Conservation International, a Wal-Mart adviser, “Wal-Mart can have a revolutionary impact on the market for green technologies. If every one of their 100 million customers in the U.S. bought just one energy-saving compact fluorescent lamp, instead of a traditional incandescent bulb, they could cut CO2 emissions by 45 billion pounds and save more than $3 billion.”

Those savings highlight something that often gets lost: The quickest way to get to the China price for clean power is by becoming more energy efficient. The cheapest, cleanest, nonemitting power plant in the world is the one you don’t build. Helping China adopt some of the breakthrough efficiency programs that California has adopted, for instance ­ like rewarding electrical utilities for how much energy they get their customers to save rather than to use ­ could have a huge impact. Some experts estimate that China could cut its need for new power plants in half with aggressive investments in efficiency.

Yet another force driving us to the China price is Chinese entrepreneurs, who understand that while Beijing may not be ready to impose CO2 restraints, developed countries are, so this is going to be a global business ­ and they want a slice. Let me introduce the man identified last year by Forbes Magazine as the seventh-richest man in China, with a fortune now estimated at $2.2 billion. His name is Shi Zhengrong and he is China’s leading manufacturer of silicon solar panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.

“People at all levels in China have become more aware of this environment issue and alternative energy,” said Shi, whose company, Suntech Power Holdings, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. “Five years ago, when I started the company, people said: ‘Why do we need solar? We have a surplus of coal-powered electricity.’ Now it is different; now people realize that solar has a bright future. But it is still too expensive. … We have to reduce the cost as quickly as possible ­ our real competitors are coal and nuclear power.”

Shi does most of his manufacturing in China, but sells roughly 90 percent of his products outside China, because today they are too expensive for his domestic market. But the more he can get the price down, and start to grow his business inside China, the more he can use that to become a dominant global player. Thanks to Suntech’s success, in China “there is a rush of business people entering this sector, even though we still don’t have a market here,” Shi added. “Many government people now say, ‘This is an industry!’ ” And if it takes off, China could do for solar panels what it did for tennis shoes ­ bring the price down so far that everyone can afford a pair.

VI.

All that sounds great ­ but remember those seven wedges? To reach the necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal or nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms, all connected to a national transmission grid, not to mention clean fuels for our cars and trucks. And the market alone, as presently constructed in the U.S., will not get us those alternatives at the scale we need ­ at the China price ­ fast enough.

Prof. Nate Lewis, Caltech’s noted chemist and energy expert, explained why with an analogy. “Let’s say you invented the first cellphone,” he said. “You could charge people $1,000 for each one because lots of people would be ready to pay lots of money to have a phone they could carry in their pocket.” With those profits, you, the inventor, could pay back your shareholders and plow more into research, so you keep selling better and cheaper cellphones.

But energy is different, Lewis explained: “If I come to you and say, ‘Today your house lights are being powered by dirty coal, but tomorrow, if you pay me $100 more a month, I will power your house lights with solar,’ you are most likely to say: ‘Sorry, Nate, but I don’t really care how my lights go on, I just care that they go on. I won’t pay an extra $100 a month for sun power. A new cellphone improves my life. A different way to power my lights does nothing.’

“So building an emissions-free energy infrastructure is not like sending a man to the moon,” Lewis went on. “With the moon shot, money was no object ­ and all we had to do was get there. But today, we already have cheap energy from coal, gas and oil. So getting people to pay more to shift to clean fuels is like trying to get funding for NASA to build a spaceship to the moon ­ when Southwest Airlines already flies there and gives away free peanuts! I already have a cheap ride to the moon, and a ride is a ride. For most people, electricity is electricity, no matter how it is generated.”

If we were running out of coal or oil, the market would steadily push the prices up, which would stimulate innovation in alternatives. Eventually there would be a crossover, and the alternatives would kick in, start to scale and come down in price. But what has happened in energy over the last 35 years is that the oil price goes up, stimulating government subsidies and some investments in alternatives, and then the price goes down, the government loses interest, the subsidies expire and the investors in alternatives get wiped out.

The only way to stimulate the scale of sustained investment in research and development of non-CO2 emitting power at the China price is if the developed countries, who can afford to do so, force their people to pay the full climate, economic and geopolitical costs of using gasoline and dirty coal. Those countries that have signed the Kyoto Protocol are starting to do that. But America is not.

Up to now, said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, we as a society “have been behaving just like Enron the company at the height of its folly.” We rack up stunning profits and G.D.P. numbers every year, and they look great on paper “because we’ve been hiding some of the costs off the books.” If we don’t put a price on the CO2 we’re building up or on our addiction to oil, we’ll never nurture the innovation we need.

Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, has worked for G.E. for 25 years. In that time, he told me, he has seen seven generations of innovation in G.E.’s medical equipment business ­ in devices like M.R.I.s or CT scans ­ because health care market incentives drove the innovation. In power, it’s just the opposite. “Today, on the power side,” he said, “we’re still selling the same basic coal-fired power plants we had when I arrived. They’re a little cleaner and more efficient now, but basically the same.”

The one clean power area where G.E. is now into a third generation is wind turbines, “thanks to the European Union,” Immelt said. Countries like Denmark, Spain and Germany imposed standards for wind power on their utilities and offered sustained subsidies, creating a big market for wind-turbine manufacturers in Europe in the 1980s, when America abandoned wind because the price of oil fell. “We grew our wind business in Europe,” Immelt said.

As things stand now in America, Immelt said, “the market does not work in energy.” The multibillion-dollar scale of investment that a company like G.E. is being asked to make in order to develop new clean-power technologies or that a utility is being asked to make in order to build coal sequestration facilities or nuclear plants is not going to happen at scale ­ unless they know that coal and oil are going to be priced high enough for long enough that new investments will not be undercut in a few years by falling fossil fuel prices. “Carbon has to have a value,” Immelt emphasized. “Today in the U.S. and China it has no value.”

I recently visited the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant with Christopher Crane, president of Exelon Nuclear, which owns the facility. He said that if Exelon wanted to start a nuclear plant today, the licensing, design, planning and building requirements are so extensive it would not open until 2015 at the earliest. But even if Exelon got all the approvals, it could not start building “because the cost of capital for a nuclear plant today is prohibitive.”

That’s because the interest rate that any commercial bank would charge on a loan for a nuclear facility would be so high ­ because of all the risks of lawsuits or cost overruns ­ that it would be impossible for Exelon to proceed. A standard nuclear plant today costs about $3 billion per unit. The only way to stimulate more nuclear power innovation, Crane said, would be federal loan guarantees that would lower the cost of capital for anyone willing to build a new nuclear plant.

The 2005 energy bill created such loan guarantees, but the details still have not been worked out. “We would need a robust loan guarantee program to jump-start the nuclear industry,” Crane said ­ an industry that has basically been frozen since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. With cheaper money, added Crane, CO2-free nuclear power could be “very competitive” with CO2-emitting pulverized coal.

Think about the implications. Three Mile Island had two reactors, TMI-2, which shut down because of the 1979 accident, and TMI-1, which is still operating today, providing clean electricity with virtually no CO2 emissions for 800,000 homes. Had the TMI-2 accident not happened, it too would have been providing clean electricity for 800,000 homes for the last 28 years. Instead, that energy came from CO2-emitting coal, which, by the way, still generates 50 percent of America’s electricity.

Similar calculations apply to ethanol production. “We have about 100 scientists working on cellulosic ethanol,” Chad Holliday, the C.E.O. of DuPont, told me. “My guess is that we could double the number and add another 50 to start working on how to commercialize it. It would probably cost us less than $100 million to scale up. But I am not ready to do that. I can guess what it will cost me to make it and what the price will be, but is the market going to be there? What are the regulations going to be? Is the ethanol subsidy going to be reduced? Will we put a tax on oil to keep ethanol competitive? If I know that, it gives me a price target to go after. Without that, I don’t know what the market is and my shareholders don’t know how to value what I am doing. … You need some certainty on the incentives side and on the market side, because we are talking about multiyear investments, billions of dollars, that will take a long time to take off, and we won’t hit on everything.”

Summing up the problem, Immelt of G.E. said the big energy players are being asked “to take a 15-minute market signal and make a 40-year decision and that just doesn’t work. … The U.S. government should decide: What do we want to have happen? How much clean coal, how much nuclear and what is the most efficient way to incentivize people to get there?”

He’s dead right. The market alone won’t work. Government’s job is to set high standards, let the market reach them and then raise the standards more. That’s how you get scale innovation at the China price. Government can do this by imposing steadily rising efficiency standards for buildings and appliances and by stipulating that utilities generate a certain amount of electricity from renewables ­ like wind or solar. Or it can impose steadily rising mileage standards for cars or a steadily tightening cap-and-trade system for the amount of CO2 any factory or power plant can emit. Or it can offer loan guarantees and fast-track licensing for anyone who wants to build a nuclear plant. Or ­ my preference and the simplest option ­ it can impose a carbon tax that will stimulate the market to move away from fuels that emit high levels of CO2 and invest in those that don’t. Ideally, it will do all of these things. But whichever options we choose, they will only work if they are transparent, simple and long-term ­ with zero fudging allowed and with regulatory oversight and stiff financial penalties for violators.

The politician who actually proved just how effective this can be was a guy named George W. Bush, when he was governor of Texas. He pushed for and signed a renewable energy portfolio mandate in 1999. The mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009. What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines to meet the mandate, so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015, and everyone knows they will beat that too because of how quickly wind in Texas is becoming competitive with coal. Today, thanks to Governor Bush’s market intervention, Texas is the biggest wind state in America.

President Bush, though, is no Governor Bush. (The Dick Cheney effect?) President Bush claims he’s protecting American companies by not imposing tough mileage, conservation or clean power standards, but he’s actually helping them lose the race for the next great global industry. Japan has some of the world’s highest gasoline taxes and stringent energy efficiency standards for vehicles ­ and it has the world’s most profitable and innovative car company, Toyota. That’s no accident.

The politicians who best understand this are America’s governors, some of whom have started to just ignore Washington, set their own energy standards and reap the benefits for their states. As Schwarzenegger told me, “We have seen in California so many companies that have been created that work just on things that have do with clean environment.” California’s state-imposed efficiency standards have resulted in per-capita energy consumption in California remaining almost flat for the last 30 years, while in the rest of the country it has gone up 50 percent. “There are a lot of industries that are exploding right now because of setting these new standards,” he said.

VII.

John Dineen runs G.E. Transportation, which makes locomotives. His factory is in Erie, Pa., and employs 4,500 people. When it comes to the challenges from cheap labor markets, Dineen likes to say, “Our little town has trade surpluses with China and Mexico.”

Now how could that be? China makes locomotives that are 30 percent cheaper than G.E.’s, but it turns out that G.E.’s are the most energy efficient in the world, with the lowest emissions and best mileage per ton pulled ­ “and they don’t stop on the tracks,” Dineen added. So China is also buying from Erie ­ and so are Brazil, Mexico and Kazakhstan. What’s the secret? The China price.

“We made it very easy for them,” said Dineen. “By producing engines with lower emissions in the classic sense (NOx [nitrogen oxides]) and lower emissions in the future sense (CO2) and then coupling it with better fuel efficiency and reliability, we lowered the total life-cycle cost.”

The West can’t impose its climate or pollution standards on China, Dineen explained, but when a company like G.E. makes an engine that gets great mileage, cuts pollution and, by the way, emits less CO2, China will be a buyer. “If we were just trying to export lower-emission units, and they did not have the fuel benefits, we would lose,” Dineen said. “But when green is made green ­ improved fuel economies coupled with emissions reductions ­ we see very quick adoption rates.”

One reason G.E. Transportation got so efficient was the old U.S. standard it had to meet on NOx pollution, Dineen said. It did that through technological innovation. And as oil prices went up, it leveraged more technology to get better mileage. The result was a cleaner, more efficient, more exportable locomotive. Dineen describes his factory as a “technology campus” because, he explains, “it looks like a 100-year-old industrial site, but inside those 100-year-old buildings are world-class engineers working on the next generation’s technologies.” He also notes that workers in his factory make nearly twice the average in Erie ­ by selling to China!

The bottom line is this: Clean-tech plays to America’s strength because making things like locomotives lighter and smarter takes a lot of knowledge ­ not cheap labor. That’s why embedding clean-tech into everything we design and manufacture is a way to revive America as a manufacturing power.

“Whatever you are making, if you can add a green dimension to it ­ making it more efficient, healthier and more sustainable for future generations ­ you have a product that can’t just be made cheaper in India or China,” said Andrew Shapiro, founder of GreenOrder, an environmental business-strategy group. “If you just create a green ghetto in your company, you miss it. You have to figure out how to integrate green into the DNA of your whole business.”

Ditto for our country, which is why we need a Green New Deal ­ one in which government’s role is not funding projects, as in the original New Deal, but seeding basic research, providing loan guarantees where needed and setting standards, taxes and incentives that will spawn 1,000 G.E. Transportations for all kinds of clean power.

Bush won’t lead a Green New Deal, but his successor must if America is going to maintain its leadership and living standard. Unfortunately, today’s presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you’re a fool or a fraud.

Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue ­ helping Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, “that we’re not ‘post-Cold War’ anymore ­ we’re pre-something totally new.” I’d say we’re in the “pre-climate war era.” Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children’s opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.

Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it’s about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard, which as Schwarzenegger argues would “create a very powerful side product.” Those who dislike America because of Iraq, he explained, would at least be able to say, “Well, I don’t like them for the war, but I do like them because they show such unbelievable leadership ­ not just with their blue jeans and hamburgers but with the environment. People will love us for that. That’s not existing right now.”

In sum, as John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, taught me: Confronting this climate-energy issue is the epitome of what John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, once described as “a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”

Am I optimistic? I want to be. But I am also old-fashioned. I don’t believe the world will effectively address the climate-energy challenge without America, its president, its government, its industry, its markets and its people all leading the parade. Green has to become part of America’s DNA. We’re getting there. Green has hit Main Street ­ it’s now more than a hobby ­ but it’s still less than a new way of life.

Why? Because big transformations ­ women’s suffrage, for instance ­ usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the politicians react and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate is more muted and slow-moving. Why? Because the people who will be most harmed by the climate-energy crisis haven’t been born yet.

“This issue doesn’t pit haves versus have-nots,” notes the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, “but the present versus the future ­ today’s generation versus its kids and unborn grandchildren.” Once the Geo-Green interest group comes of age, especially if it is after another 9/11 or Katrina, Mandelbaum said, “it will be the biggest interest group in history ­ but by then it could be too late.”

An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship. Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long term, so they can have a better future. It is much easier to get families to do that than whole societies, but that is our challenge. In many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II ­ when an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That is why they were called the Greatest Generation. Our kids will only call us the Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become the Greenest Generation.

Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times specializing in foreign affairs.

Urban Ecology Center’s Ken Leinbach Essay: “Central Park in Milwaukee?”

Central Park in Milwaukee?
by Ken Leinbach, Executive Director

I don’t want to jinx us, but we might actually pull this small miracle off … creating a 795 acre central park in Milwaukee! For the past eight years, a small group of dedicated volunteers representing a diverse array of folk from the community (business people, land owners, non profit leaders, government officials, teachers and neighbors) have been quietly working together toward the common goal of forever preserving and protecting the 5.5 mile natural corridor that borders the Milwaukee River. That this wild green space exists at all is a miracle in its own right considering that for much of the corridor there are no legal protections on the land, no conservation easements, no zoning restrictions nor special designations. Ironically this relatively pristine land exists largely because the Milwaukee River was so abused and polluted that no one wanted to do anything along its banks. One of the best kept secrets in the city is, however, that the river is coming back, thanks largely to the removal of the North Avenue dam in 1997. Where just 15 years ago there were only two or three species of fish which could survive the toxic water, now over 33 different species thrive. For the first time in 50 years beavers have been sighted. Black crowned night herons nest on the banks. Migratory birds abound.

As people discover this natural oasis, a decision needs to be made. Do we preserve this “urban wilderness” for the public trust and develop it as park land for all to enjoy? Or does it get turned over to private interests and become a corridor of condominiums like Commerce Street downtown? We, who are doing this work, believe in the former; however we are far from being anti-development. We know that property located next to park land tends to increase in value. Cities retain businesses and a strong employee base when they have high quality public green space. In this case, what is good for nature is good for business and good for living. It’s a win, win, win.

Want to know more? Come to the Center for Preserve the Milwaukee River Corridor on Thursday, April 26, 7 - 8:30 p.m. Also, a detailed publication on this exciting project is being produced this spring and will be distributed in communities near the Milwaukee River.

The Milwaukee River Work Group is a collaborative made up of volunteers from the urban Milwaukee river neighborhood. The core non profits within the group are Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers, The River Revitalization Foundation, and the Urban Ecology Center … however, all participants are volunteering their time. The group consists of local businessmen, government workers, land experts, designers, teachers, and more. Everyone involved shares a love for the river and a passion for Milwaukee.

20TH ANNUAL EARTH POETS AND MUSICIANS PERFORMANCES

April 20 and 21

FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 7 P.M. Interactive Poetry and Music for the Whole Family
8 PM Earth Poets and Musicians
Jahmes Finlayson, Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, Holly Haebig, Jeff Poniewaz, Suzanne Rosenblatt,
Harvey Taylor, and SPECIAL GUEST: Milwaukee Poet Laureate Peggy Hong
URBAN ECOLOGY CENTER, 1500 E. Park Place
$5.00 Per Person, $10.00 Per Family, UEC Members Free

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2007, 8 P.M.
Jahmes Finlayson, Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, Holly Haebig, Suzanne Rosenblatt, Harvey Taylor, and SPECIAL GUEST: Musician & Poet KT Rusch
THE COFFEE HOUSE, 631 N. 19th Street (Just South of Wisconsin Ave)
Donation: $5.00 Benefit for Wellspring

GLOW BALL WORMING

Suzanne Rosenblatt’s New Poem for Earth Poet Event
(Glow Little Glow Worm, Glimmer, Simmer)
http://www.rosenblattgallery.com

Let’s cool down the glow of global
Rev up the war on warming
Cool down the glow, rev up the war
Lower the heat, live with less, not more
Lower the heat, lower the heat
Wear a sweater, double socks on the feet
Throw out incandescent
Use bulbs that are fluorescent
Minimize, minimize, don’t be a user
Love Mother Earth, do not abuse her
Is this something we can do
It’s up to you, and you and you, andyouandyouandyouandyou
We can’t start anew anew, anewanewanewanew
What’s done is done, we can’t undo
Done is done, can’t undo, cannot start anew anew

Let’s cool down the glow of global
Rev up the war on warming
We’re all in this together
Don’t want to die of weather
Each of us has the weapon
Better not to weep but to step in
Try not to take a plane
If there’s a bus or train
Try not to use a car
If you can bike that far
Walk walk walk wherever you can
Live your life close to the land
Wash small items in a wash bowl
Use a clothesline when it’s not too cold
Make dandelion wine, love your purple clover
Whatever kills them, will also kill Rover
Don’t poison the soil, eat organically
Don’t grow grass, instead plant a tree,
Cosmos, coreopsis, zucchini
Lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli
Eat local, be vocal
Get active, proactive, politically involved
In the hope the problem can be solved

Is this something we can do
It’s up to you, and you and you, andyouandyouandyouandyou
We can’t start anew, anew, anewanewanewanew
What’s done is done, we can’t undo
Done is done, can’t undo, cannot start anew anew

Ego or eco, ego or eco
All of us can choose
But if we pick ego over eco
Life on Earth will lose
Ego or eco, ego or eco, the difference is a G or a C
Ego or eco, a G or a C
The difference that determines
Life’s viability

Imagine…Milwaukee’s Central Park

A vision paper brought to you by: Milwaukee River Work Group

• Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers

http://www.mkeriverkeeper.org

• River Revitalization Foundation

http://www.riverrevitalizationfoundation.org

• Urban Ecology Center

http://www.urbanecologycenter.org

Vision

Create a central park along the Milwaukee River upstream of the North Avenue footbridge to Silver Spring Drive. Preserve the wild aspect of the natural area while improving the habitat. Improve water quality. Restore native plant species while removing non-natiuve invasive plants. Improve public access to this urban natural resource.

View

Restore the municipal zoning a “viewshed” in the river valley that regulates new development on the river’s edge to control development on the slopes or valley perimeter that would visually intrude in this natural landscape.

Valley

Your valley. The land along the Milwaukee River in this area is mostly in public ownership. Milwaukee is now developing a North East Side plan to guide future development. Now is hte time for residents to express their desires for the future of the valley.

Green Power Bloc in Wisconsin Presidential Primaries

Growing a Green Democrat Tendency in the Obama Campaign
(If you are not an Obama backer, the concept applies to your candidate of choice!)

There is an emergent bloc of voters of potentially intense resolve
Organized around the greening of old cities movement.

The Greening of Old Cities Movement

The greening of old cities movements is multidimensional.
Some of the major participants are active around the…

• Health Food Stores and Co-ops
• City farms and community gardens
• Green building and green habitat conversions
• Old City artists and culture creators
• Renewable energy sources
• River and Lake Keepers
• Bicycling and walking in old cities
• Mass transit
• New urbanism
• Historic preservation
• Old neighborhood civil society development

Internet Organizing and Green Power

Each city has a number of people who have blazed trails
In the internet organizing and empowerment
Of each of these tendencies within the Green Power Bloc.

In Milwaukee I hope to spark an on-line conversation among such persons
In hopes of aggregating their networks into the Obama Campaign.

But I also hope to spark on-line conversations among such persons
Who are not at present Obama backers around the notion of
Working to become an identifiable interest within the Democratic umbrella
To advance the marriage of self-reliance, community, and sustainable development, or…
Green Power!

My own specific hope is to win a place on the national agenda for urban farming.

Red white and blue are now green!

Godsil

P.S. Please let me know if you are interested in $25 tickets($10 students/seniors) to this Monday’s Obama event at Milwaukee Theatre, doors open at 6 p.m.

Harvey Taylor’s poem/song on Growing Power now available at free video link

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsZPdv33bM

Harvey wrote a marvelous song tribute to the magic of Will Allen’s Growing Power city farm the evening he returned from his first Will Allen tour. Through the miracle of the internet, we can now enjoy “Growing Power” being performed by Harvey, Holly Haebig, Dena Aronson, Jahmes Tony Finlayson, KT Rusch, & Emily Mimer at a benefit for a Haitian clinic last Nov 18 at the Coffeehouse.

Here are the lyrics:

Growing Power

Will Allen is a down-home visionary,
working with soil, sunshine, water, and seeds
to grow quality food for the community:
remember, we are what we eat!

Growing Power, growing by the hour…
uh-huh, growing vegetables and flowers…
I say, Hooray! for Growing Power:
www growingpower dot org

Will used to play pro basketball…
now he keeps busy feeding us all,
organic vegetables free from pesticides,
food you can serve your family with pride!

Growing Power, growing by the hour…
uh-huh, growing vegetables and flowers…
I say, Hooray! for Growing Power:
www growingpower dot org

Area restaurants donate kitchen waste,
and likewise, so do some breweries…
it’s all fed to worms in compost bins,
who turn it into the best soil you’ve ever seen!

You can spread that compost on vacant lots,
‘til it’s a foot and a half deep, then stop,
and put the plants directly in:
presto! instant Garden of Eden!

There’s much more to say about various things,
for example, aquaculture is amazing,
so come on out to 55th and Silver Spring,
on the Northwest side of beautiful Milwaukee.

Growing Power, growing by the hour…
uh-huh, growing vegetables and flowers…
I say, Hooray! for Growing Power:
www growingpower dot org

Copyright © Harvey Taylor 2005. All rights reserved.

A Veterans Vision for the Soldiers Home: A Learning Campus on Sustainable Urban Agriculture

I recently visited one of Milwaukee’s best kept secrets, a sprawling campus near the Brewer’s Stadium known in a previous time as Wood, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Soldiers Home is part of the Veterans Administration Complex which still provides services to area veterans, including myself. Much of the complex is a well tended cemetery, where tens of thousands of veterans are buried with tombstones in neat rows covering acres. Driving and walking through the wooded campus reveals magnificent Civil War era buildings silently crying for restoration. The plight of these buildings needs to be brought into the light, out of their secret decay, and remedied so that life can return to this forgotten treasure. The finest tribute we the living can pay to the brave men and women here in eternal rest is to restore the grounds and add new life.

The new life this veteran envisions is a learning campus, embraced by veterans, focusing on sustainable urban agriculture. Life needs to be brought back into the Center to maintain the inspiring beauty found here without diminishing it. Life in the form of people, edible plants, and fish could bring education to the community and funding for a project the veterans themselves can embrace. Restored unused buildings could become learning centers, reflecting our proud heritage through their architecture.

Whether we like it or not, we are at the threshold of a more sustainable way of living. To secure our food supply, we need to bring the production of food nearer to home. The Veterans Home could become a site of learning to produce food. Not by turning the Home into a farm, rather a site for education and demonstration of the principles of permaculture, of urban aquaculture, polyculture and aquaponics. We will then be able to see how tomatoes and lettuce can be grown with fish water in a healthy cycle mimicking nature with minimal waste. We will see worms feeding fish and turning organic compost into fertile soil. Adults and children alike are eager to learn the techniques of Will Allen’s Growing Power, eager to learn about the fish producing research coming out of the Great Lakes WATER Institute, eager to be shown how to reduce their carbon footprint in this era of dwindling resources.

The new Urban Aquaculture Center is looking for a pleasant campus-like setting. Other organizations involved with education in green building and living will certainly welcome a new venue. With careful planning, the tranquility now a part of the Soldiers Home could remain so, even as it becomes a destination attraction for the people of Milwaukee. One thing is certain. It will only be through bold thinking and action that this vision can become a life giving reality with those stately old buildings given a new lease on life.

Jon Bales Urban Aquaculture Center joncbales@yahoo.com
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/UrbanAquacultureCenter/HomePage

Mother America

Let us now focus on
Mother America.

In whom
Shall we find her?

How will she be?

What will she look like?

What will she say?

How will she dress?

Will she embrace us?

Will she be proud?

Olde
Rainy Night and Morning
Bay View, Milwaukee
Wiscconsin of the Great Lakes
U.S.A.
North America
Planet Earth

Response to Homeland Security, Obesity, Oil Dependency, Youth Violence: “Urban Farming”

Urban Farming: Coming to a City Near You
By Jason Mark, E Magazine. Posted March 26, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/story/49000

Propelled by the obesity epidemic and the drive for more sustainable economies, an urban agriculture movement is flowering across the U.S.

It’s a chilly December day in Oakland, California — overcast and gray — and most folks are staying indoors. But outside a modest bungalow on the city’s impoverished West Side, three young women volunteers are busy building a backyard garden for a local resident. They dump loads of dark, rich soil into a three-foot by eight-foot planter bed. Fruit and vegetable shoots sitting on the ground offer a glimpse of harvests to come — strawberries and chard, lettuce, herbs and shelling peas.

The backyard garden construction is a project of City Slicker Farms, a local nonprofit that provides fresh food to a neighborhood better known for its railyards and warehouses than for its green spaces. In just seven years, City Slicker has become a vital part of the West Oakland landscape. Its six market gardens grow a range of organic fruit and vegetables, eggs and honey for sale at a neighborhood produce stand. Judging by the reception from neighborhood residents, the program is a success. “I buy all my vegetables here, and so does my wife,” says Tony Lejones, a local truck driver, as he perused the offerings at the City Slicker stand. “The whole neighborhood comes here — black, white and brown,” he says. “They do a fine job.”

City Slicker Farms is not alone. Across the U.S., an urban agriculture movement is flowering. In Birmingham, Alabama, Jones Valley Urban Farm is reclaiming abandoned lots and using them to grow organic produce and flowers. Chicago’s Ken Dunn takes over unused parking lots and uses the sites to grow heirloom tomatoes. In St. Louis, a housing developer, Whittaker Homes, is setting up an organic farm within a new subdivision.

Veteran environmental activists and community organizers say the recent increase in urban food production marks a real change. “Whether it’s the Food Project or Redhook Farm or countless other projects, urban agriculture is definitely increasing,” says Betsy Johnson, executive director of the American Community Gardeners Assocation (ACGA). “I think the trend is very positive.” There are several concerns propelling the renaissance in city agriculture: the country’s obesity epidemic, the drive for more sustainable economies and the fact that horticulture — with its regular, seasonal rewards — is an ideal vehicle for community organizing, especially when it comes to youth.

“The drivers come from the public health community and the urban planning community that wants to green cities,” says Tom Forster, policy director of the Community Food Security Coalition. “And I think the other big driver is homeland security, which now embraces food production at the local level.”

Such worries are motivating more urban food production in Houston, according to Bob Randall, who directs an organization there called Urban Harvest. The group sponsors a series of vegetable growing classes, as well as a permaculture design course. Urban Harvest also launched Houston’s first farmers’ market, and organizes a yearly fruit tree sale that brings in nearly $50,000 in revenue over a weekend. Randall says increased interest in their programs is in part due to the promise of fossil-free local food production.

“With Houston being the oil capital, people here are more aware than most that oil prices are going to rise faster than inflation,” Randall says. “As the cheap fuels dry up, metro areas are at huge risk.”

The obesity epidemic, too, has hit low-income communities hardest, since the foods that have the most starch and fat are also the cheapest. Many urban food projects are driven by a desire to provide poor communities with healthier options. That’s the idea behind Mill Creek Farm in Philadelphia. Started two years ago by a pair of twenty-something nutrition educators-turned farmers, Mill Creek has turned a vacant lot into a 1.5-acre garden full of carrots, squash, tomatoes and okra. At the height of summer, the farm’s produce stand regularly sells out of goods.

“People don’t have the option to get fresh, affordable, good quality, organic food in their neighborhood,” says Johanna Rosen, one of the farm’s co-founders. Community involvement and the promise of economic benefit are vital for urban agriculture projects to succeed. That’s what Redhook Farm in Brooklyn is all about. A three-acre farm built on an abandoned baseball field, Redhook Farm uses organic farming and marketing as a way to grow economic opportunities for disadvantaged youth. “We want to have a 21st century park that is training teens for 21st century citizenship,” says Ian Marvey, a co-founder of Redhook Farm. “That means hands-on training to build a sustainable economy, whether learning how to grow food [or] how to build a greenhouse.”

At the core of urban farming is the desire to put the culture back into agriculture. It’s an effort that seeks to place communities at the center of our food system. Back at the City Slicker garden, a cold rain has started to fall, but Liz Monk and the other volunteers keep working. As she shovels compost out of an old pickup truck, Monk tells a visitor that she spent a summer working on a country farm, but says that urban farming is more rewarding. “Just having face-to-face contact — that’s something that’s very positive,” says Monk. “It’s the kind of thing that feeds your soul.”

Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of “Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power.”

Oakland’s City Slicker Farms: http://www.cityslickerfarms.org/
cityslickerfarms@riseup.net

Jones Valley Urban Farm: http://www.jvuf.org/index.shtml
Edwin Marty, Director, director@jvuf.org

Chicago’s Resource Center: http://resourcecenterchicago.org/
Ken Dunn, Founder, info@resourcecenterchicago.org

American Community Garden Association: http://www.communitygarden.org/index.php
Betsy Johnson, Director, betsyjohnson@communitygarden.org

Community Food Security Coalition: http://www.foodsecurity.org/committees.html
Stephanie Larson, steph@foodsecurity.org

Urban Harvest: http://www.urbanharvest.org/index.html
Bob Randall, []

Mill Creek Farm: http://chrishillmedia.com/millcreekfarm/about.html
Johanna Rosen, millcreekfarm@resist.ca

Redhook Farm: http://www.added-value.org/links.php

”Publish Your Own Book”

by James Godsil

Benjamin Franklin said that freedom of the press is a very good thing, especially when you own your own press! The reason behind the significance of the folk truth “Don’t always believe what you read” lies in the power of the written word, especially when embodied in a book.

Publishing one’s own book, i.e. vanity publishing, is now not just something for rich people. I am a Milwaukee roofer and writer/activist, who has recently published “My Milwaukee,” with the help of Bay View publisher Chris Ward.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/OldeGodsil/HomePage

Chris told me she could produce a first run of 50 books with a budget of $200. I sent her some e-mails of some poems I wrote this year. She did her magic, which involves selecting the right font, paper, and cover photos, with my participation, and within a couple of weeks…I was published!

Chris and I have formed Backpocket Press to publish those of my works and my writer associates she approves of. We are hoping other writers might wish to publish some of their works with Backpocket Press(if we both approve), or some other local publishing house if we don’t both approve. Send an e-mail to Backpocketpress@Milwaukeerenaissance.com if this interests you.

Transcending Our Selves

Resistance lacking transcendance
Brings not community.

Community lacking transcendance
Brings not an evolving way.

We must overcome
Not just oppressors.

But our selves.

Olde
March 20, 2007

Milwaukee Urged to Adopt Zoning to Promote/Protect Neighborhood Gardens

Garden idea grows

Plan would protect land

By Ken Prendergast
Staff Writer

Feb. 8, 2007

CLEVELAND ­ When a real estate development was proposed to be built on a community garden on West 45th Street near Franklin Boulevard, the only recourse the community had was to band together and fight it.

But it, and hundreds of other urban gardens scattered throughout Cleveland, can be protected from development if a new zoning classification is approved by City Council. An ordinance to make the Urban Gardening District law was introduced to council this week. If passed, it may be the first such zoning classification in the country.

“If the city is a church, its sacraments are zoning,” said Ward 13 Councilman Joe Cimperman, who chairs council’s Planning Committee. “If we want to declare something as sacred, you zone it to preserve it. They (urban gardens) really have a community cohesion that’s extraordinary. Communities that have them get along better, are safer and have less racial tension.”

Crime rates in communities with urban gardens are reduced by up to 48 percent, with 56 percent less violent crime as a result of the attention neighbors give to ensuring the garden is clean, safe and cared for, he said.

The community garden on West 45th is maintained by members of St. Paul’s Community Church. Food produced by the garden is used to feed the homeless and other disadvantaged people. Other sites are called Urban Market Gardens, which are used to produce flowers or produce for sale to markets and restaurants.

Many gardens are located on city-owned land-bank lots, most of which once had neglected homes on them. City Planning Commission Director Bob Brown said there are thousands of land-bank lots, and roughly a third of them have gardens on them.

“There are sites that have been community gardens for decades and have become integral parts of the community,” Brown said.

For the rest of the story, see your local Sun newspaper.

© 2007 Sun Newspapers
Go to The Sun News www.sunnews.com home page

If you think this a good concept for Milwaukee to adopt, please send an e-mail to these leaders of our fair city:

“Brennan, Joel” <jbrenn@milwaukee.gov>, rocky marcoux <rocky.marcoux@mkedcd.org>, Mike D’Amato <Damato <rdamato@wi.rr.com>, Bob Greenstreet <bobg@uwm.edu>, Ann Beier <abeier@milwaukee.gov>

Invite to Compost Demonstration at Would Be Bay View City Farm Demonstration Project

Bob is scheduled to visit my house at 325 E. Euclid, either this coming Tuesday or Wednesday, at 5 p.m., to share his hard-won knowledge about “Growing Power Home Gardening.”

Chris Chiu, of People’s Books, has created very simple composting bins from wire that are on site, along with buckets of coffee grounds, veggie wastes, wood chips, brewer’s yeast, and cardboard.

I am hoping Bob will get me started with the first stages of a Growing Power Home Garden at this event.

Bob Graf has been studying and applying Growing Power vermicomposting methods for close to a couple of years now. He has kept a wonderful journal of this project, mixing it in with reflections rooted in a lifetime of spiritual practice and meditation.

GrowingPowerHomeGarden

Bob has recently been working with Andor Horvath to develop pleasing “houses” for indoor city farms and gardens.

He hopes to bring a demonstration model.

Bob’s web site is being read across the world, in some measure due to his friendships across the world, in considerable part through his days as a Jesuit seminarian, at St. Louis University, participation in the Milwaukee 14 movement, his work with spiritual communities for over 30 years, and his life as a Milwaukee husband, father, and community activists, of late, in the anti-stigma campaign and city farm movement.

I will be providing Growing Power veggies I will buy for the occasion, along with some juice and Lakefront Brewery Beer.

Please let me know if you would like to attend. We would welcome people bringing their favorite salad dressing, crackers, bread, or other offerings of food or drink.

Clear sailing,

Godsil

Jerry Kaufman, President of Growing Power’s Board, Essay: “Farming Inside Cities: the Growing Power Story”

Published in “Landscapes” magazine of the environmental group 1000 Friends of Wisconsin

								February 12, 2007

Farming Inside Cities: The Growing Power Story

In 1993, Will Allen, a 6-foot, 7-inch African American, who grew up on a farm, became a professional basketball player in Europe, and after returning to the States farmed 100 acres in a Milwaukee suburb, decided to purchase a two acre site on Milwaukee’s north side. The land housed six connected, dilapidated greenhouses, the last remnant of Milwaukee’s flower-growing district.

Guided by an initial vision to help inner-city youngsters gain life skills by uncovering the secrets of turning seeds into food, Allen created a non-profit organization first called Farm-City Link which later became Growing Power, to turn that vision into reality. Over the years, with the help of countless volunteers and dedicated staff, Allen converted this tired-looking site into a unique place-a lively and energetic Community Food Center, an idea factory for youth, urban and rural farmers, community activists and educators to learn how to grow, process, market, and distribute food on small sites in a low-cost sustainable manner. From its inauspicious beginning 13 years ago, Growing Power has become one of the country’s most innovative, imaginative and successful urban agriculture programs.

Its nerve center is its small farm/greenhouse site wedged on Silver Spring Drive among apartment complexes, modest ranch homes, public housing projects, and an Army reserve training base. In a space no larger than a small-sized supermarket live some 20,000 plants and vegetables, thousands of fish and worms, and a livestock inventory of chickens, goats, ducks, rabbits, and honey-making bees. This impressive panoply of diverse food-growing projects are carefully nurtured and harvested. These also serve as the learning hubs for workshop participants who come to Milwaukee to be trained in sustainable and inexpensive ways to create and maintain urban agriculture. In 2006 Growing Power hosted 10 hands-on 2- and 3-day trainings at its Milwaukee site with over 800 people from around the country attending these trainings. In addition, another 3,000 people came to the Growing Power community food center during the year for tours. In the same year 150 varieties of greens were grown in Growing Power’s greenhouses and in its 4 outdoor unheated hoop-houses; 10,000 tilapia fish were raised in an aquaculture closed-loop plant and fish growing system; tens of thousands of red wiggler worms ate their way through over a thousand tons of food scraps to produce one million pounds of high quality compost; and a high solids anaerobic digester using food waste to increase its use of renewable energies was installed with the help of a Wisconsin DNR grant.

Beyond its Milwaukee Silver Springs site, Growing Power has spread its wings to reach other places. Chicago is a particular focal point of Growing Power’s expanded activities with several projects underway including a 20,000 square foot urban farm with 150 varieties of heirloom vegetables, herbs, and flowers on the city’s lakefront adjacent to the Buckingham Fountain, a partnership with the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago to create and maintain a large-scale community garden adjacent to the Cabrini Green public housing project, and the start of installation and management of an urban farm at one of the nation’s premier culinary schools, Kendall College. In 2006 Growing Power also provided outreach trainings to community groups in 12 states and 2 Native American nations including the Blackfoot nation in Montana and the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin. An expanding Market Basket program, which operates weekly, year-round at over 25 sites in Milwaukee and Chicago, provided healthy, low cost vegetables and fruits to an average of 250 households per week last year. A network of small family farmers who belong to the Rainbow Farmers Cooperative, which Growing Power helped create, grow and market food using sustainable techniques, thus keeping more of the profits for themselves.

Growing Power continues to extend its reach to new program areas and to new places. As Will Allen puts it, he has been driven by a desire to challenge a commonly held perception. “Most people think that rural areas are there to produce the food while urban areas are there to consume it…We’re trying to demonstrate that on an urban level you can control the production, marketing, and distribution of food while also strengthening your community”. Growing Power is clearly having success in challenging this perception.

Jerry Kaufman

Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
University of Wisconsin-Madison
President, Growing Power Board of Directors

St. Patrick’s Celebration of Milwaukee’s Popular Movements

There is lots of information about this 5th Annual All City Gathering of Artists, Activists, and Cultural Creators at StPatsAtTimbuktu, including many higher quality pictures. The pictures here are my “folk art” with a cell phone camera, lacking the power for clear inside pictures, but enough to capture some of the beauty of the moment.

At Timbuktu on Center and Booth in Riverwest about 150 gathered for an all-city celebration of the many movements giving rise to some kind of renaissance in the historic city of Milwaukee. These are “folk art” grainy cell phone photos until the higher quality pictures arrive for a photo essay that will appear at Pictures from St Pats at Timbuktu 2007. Neither all of the speakers, dancers, or performers are captured here. My apologies to those temporarily left out! Attach:eleven.jpg Δ

Attach:nwine.jpg Δ Attach:ninwe.jpg Δ Attach:ninle.jpg Δ

Milwaukee Awakened and Saved the Soldiers Home

Could it be that the people of Milwaukee
Will Save the Soldiers Home?

Could it be that these sacred buildings,
These sacred grounds,
Will ennoble Milwaukee,
And the world beyond?

Will the good people of the Great Cities of the Great Lakes,
Join with us to save these grounds, sanctified, at the start,
In honor of those who gave the last full measure of devotion,
In a war that ended 10,000 years, at least,
Of state sanctioned slavery.

Do we have what it takes, to introduce the
Veterans and civilians of the Great Cities of the Great Midwest…

To to glory and the beauty of the Soldiers Home?

Can we organize ourselves to Save the Soldiers Home?

Do we have the organizational capacity to reach out
And win partners from the towns and countryside of Wisconsin,

Of Minnesota,
Illinois,
Iowa,
Missouri,
Indiana,
Michigan,
And Ohio?

Can we organize work teams
Who would commit to introducing
The Soldiers Home to the history students
Of Great Lakes high schools?

Senior citizen centers?

Green Sales, Marketing, Project Development Consultant Margee Foulke-Evans Visits Growing Power City Farm, March 10, 2007

City Farmers

City farmers are a vital

Source of

energy

and

light.

They have a glow about them,

As if some kind of beings

Totally

and gracefully

Embracing…

being!

Backpocket Press Launched for New Milwaukee and Great Lakes Writers

I am partnering with Chris Ward to create paperback books modestly priced

that express the new spirit carrying, God willing, Milwaukee and the cities and countrysides of the Great Lakes into some new kind of civilization. Here is our first offering, “My Milwaukee,” by Olde Godsil.

“My Milwaukee” will hopefully be available at the Schwartz stores on KK in Bay View and on Downer on the Eastside, at People’s Bookstore, the Riverwest Co-op, and Hoodmomma’s Salon and Gallery.

Please e-mail Backpocketpress@Milwaukeerenaissance.com to order copies($5 each). If you would like to consider publishing your works with Backpocket Press…just say so!

“My Milwaukee” at Schwartz Bookshop
On KK & Lincoln

Cover Portrait Painting for “My Milwaukee”
the “Soldier’s Home” by Shelby Keefe

Olde Godsil With Grandchildren

The poems in “My Milwaukee” can also be viewed on line at
Poetry, where they originally appeared. Included are…

• “The Harlem Renaissance Is Moving to Milwaukee”
• “Zen Peddlers in the Noosphere”
• “When Milwaukee Becomes the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas”
• “You’re Delicious!”
• “Good Food and Beauty”
• “You’re Golden”
• “Poison Arrows”
• “Athenians Contra Spartans”
• “Out of the Closet”
• “My Milwaukee”
• “This Is How It Looks!”
• “Let Us Gentrify Milwaukee”
• “Let’s Fix Our Eyes”
• “The Sweet Politics of Savannah Baboons and Forest Bonobo”

Victory Gardens, the War on Terror and Global Warming. “Dig for Victory, Plant for Peace”

From
http://www.earthlypursuits.com/WarGarV/WarGard1.htm

WWII VICTORY GARDENS: As certain food products became scarcer, Americans turned their attention to growing their own. Government campaigns encouraged all citizens to plant and grow home “Victory Gardens,” and posters proclaimed “Dig for Victory, Plant for Peace.”

There were competitions for the best Victory Gardens, and published recipes to make use of home-grown items. At one point during the war years, America’s Victory Gardens produced nearly half of all U.S. vegetables.

WAR GARDENS WERE TURNED INTO PEACE GARDENS!

Victory Gardens Feed the Hungry After the war (WWI), Americans were called upon by the government to supply food to war-ravaged areas of Europe. During the war, War Gardens had struck a patriotic chord as Americans began producing food in their backyards to help save some of the wheat, meat, and other foods that were needed by the army. The call to garden continued after the war when food was needed to help Europeans rebuild. Charles Lathrop Pack, President of the National War Garden Commission, produced this booklet to urge Americans to keep gardening and to support the peace process.

Growing Power is located on the original site of Milwaukee’s WWII Victory Gardens!

Says John Gurda:

“And of course, Victory Gardens sprouted up everywhere. The legend of these home gardens is well-deserved. By 1945, fully 40% of this country’s vegetables were produced in backyard plots, freeing up vast amounts of produce for troops overseas. Gurda recalls that if you drove past 47th and Capitol Drive, you’d see acres of peas, beans and potatoes being grown by patriotic Milwaukeeans.”

Developing an Information and Knowlege Base Around Issue of Condos in Milwaukee

Dear All,

I have been contacted by a reporter for a major local publication seeking the thoughts of preservation theorists and activists around the issue of condos in Milwaukee.

I would very much appreciate some help in crafting an intelligent response, something that is surely beyond my abilities.

But, with a little help from preservationists, greens, and sustainable development thinkers and activists, we can pull together some concepts that will prove worthy food for thought regarding this very important land use and urban design issue.

Please e-mail me if you would be up for some brainstorming around this issue.

Sincerely,

Godsil

Environmental Heresies by Founder of Whole Earth Catalog

Part One of Brand NYT Article

(Part Two)

Two years later, when Earth’s portrait from space was finally released, he used it on the cover of his new project, the Whole Earth Catalog. The catalog became the bible for the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, but Mr. Brand was not into the simple self-sufficient life on the farm. He was into new tools and new ways of sharing information. As he famously explained in the introduction to the catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Along with the potter’s wheels and organic-farming tips, the catalog featured a state-of-the-art offering from Hewlett Packard: a desktop calculator that cost $4,900. In 1968, which was 16 years before the Apple Macintosh, Mr. Brand helped arrange the first demonstration of a computer mouse.

In a 1972 article, he contrasted “hackers” (a novel term then) with old-fashioned “planners,” hailing the experimental, collaborative culture that was taking shape in cyberspace. At the first Hackers Conference, he uttered another of his enduring aphorisms, “Information wants to be free.”

Mr. Brand’s latest project, undertaken with fellow digerati, is to build the world’s slowest computer, a giant clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, powered by changes in temperature. The clock is an effort to promote long-term thinking — what Mr. Brand calls the Long Now, a term he borrowed from the musician Brian Eno.

Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn’t always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.

The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich’s theories of the coming “age of scarcity” were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Sinon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon’s cornucopian theories.

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

Old-fashioned rural simplicity still has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom plants and livestock, they’re benefiting from technological advances made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they just ruin the romance?

Mr. Brand would rather take a few risks.

“I get bored easily — on purpose,” he said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix. “Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things.”

That’s a good strategy, whether you’re trying to build a sustainable career or a sustainable civilization. Ultimately, there’s no safety in clinging to a romanticized past or trying to plan a risk-free future. You have to keep looking for better tools and learning from mistakes. You have to keep on hacking.

New Summer Adventure Camp for Young and Old: Farming in the Big Cities of the Great Lakes

Dear All,

Would anyone wish to be part of an on-line conversation aimed at creating some summer gardening and city farming camps for young and old? The people and the infrastructure is surely in place in Milwaukee for this project, starting with Will Allen’s Growing Power Team, but also including scores of experienced city farm and garden mentors.

Summer Great Lakes City Farming Camps from Deluth to Toronto

Many are telling me that a city farming movement is germinating like the ground in springtime in every single city of the Great Lakes bio-region.

This movement can translate into people from each city visiting the farmers and gardeners of the emerging city farming movement
in each of our Great Lake cities.

If you would like to talk about this on-line, please send an e-mail to

Cityfarmcampsforyoungandold@Milwaukeerenaissance.com

Clear sailing,

Godsil
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/DailyAgoraAnnouncements/HomePage#toc2

Introducing John Reiss MATC Legendary Chef

A few weeks back Tess Reiss introduced me to her award winning brother and MATC culinary instructor, John, along with his very, very fine dining room at MATC. John is very likely to become to Milwaukee’s culinary reputation across the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest what Will Allen is becoming to the urban farm movement. I imagine John and his students will grow inspiring relationships with our existing and yet to be created restaurants of our expanding Milwaukee worlds.

MATC’s Reiss chosen for Chef of the Year honor
By KAREN HERZOG
kherzog@journalsentinel.com
Last Updated: Nov. 4, 2003
John Reiss, culinary instructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College, has been named Chef of the Year by the American Culinary Federation Chefs of Milwaukee.

John Reiss, named Chef of the Year by the American Culinary Federation Chefs of Milwaukee, takes pride in the culinary arts program and Gourmet 6 restaurant at Milwaukee Area Technical College, where he teaches.

The honor for Reiss, 47, was announced earlier this month during a chapter dinner at the Merrill Hills Country Club.

Federation members cast votes for three nominees, who, in addition to Reiss, were Lou Henschel, executive chef at the Milwaukee Yacht Club, and Ryan “R.C.” Schroeder, executive chef at The Pines in Hartland.

The nominees were selected by the nine chefs who previously earned the honor.

“It’s a big honor, the highest honor from our chapter,” said chef Mic Pietrykowski, chapter president and 2002 Chef of the Year award winner - the first woman to be so honored.

Pietrykowski, an educational assistant at Waukesha County Technical College, said the award speaks well not only for Reiss, but also for the Culinary Arts program at MATC.

“The students realize the instructor is respected by his peers,” she said. “When you look at a program, you look at its commendations in addition to its credentials.”

Reiss taught catering and garde-manger at MATC until this year, when he began teaching specialty food at MATC’s student-run gourmet restaurant, Gourmet 6, at 1015 N. 6th St. The restaurant is open to the public for lunch on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. For reservations, call (414) 297–6697.

“We’ve been changing the menu and adding variety,” Reiss said of the restaurant. Students rotate through various jobs at the restaurant as part of their work toward a culinary arts degree - a two-year program that has a record 130 students enrolled, according to Reiss.

“We stress classical cooking techniques, and within that we do contemporary American food and a smattering of ethnic” with a menu that changes weekly, Reiss said.

Being a chef and teaching combine two of Reiss’ passions, he said.

Reiss “fell into” being a chef because he loved working with his hands and preparing food, he said. His first restaurant experience was in Arizona, where he worked his way through pot sink, dishwasher and line cook positions before returning to Milwaukee to attend the MATC culinary arts program. He graduated from the MATC program in 1980.

Restaurant jobs in Milwaukee included Pandl’s in Bayside, Shorewood Inn and Jean Paul’s.

Reiss said he had begun thinking about food service management when the job at Milwaukee Area Technical College opened up. Reiss has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cardinal Stritch University.

“I fell in love with teaching, and I’ve been enjoying it,” Reiss said. “You pass knowledge along and it’s very rewarding when you eat at a restaurant where one of your students or a former student works.”

The Chef of the Year award is “a real incentive to keep doing what I’ve been doing, because I must be doing something that makes a difference,” Reiss said. “It’s a recognition we’ve got a great culinary arts program here at the college.”

The best part of his job is that’s he’s doing something he enjoys, he said.

“There’s a certain amount of instant gratification, being able to prepare a meal and have people enjoy it,” said Reiss, who grew up in Milwaukee. “My mom says I was in the kitchen with her a lot.”

His mother cooked “down-to-earth” foods, but by the time Reiss was a teenager, both his parents had converted to vegetarianism, he said.

Reiss didn’t want to restrict his options when it came to food. “Sometimes I eat meat, sometimes I don’t. I like trying all different foods.”

His favorite cuisines now include Asian, Latin American, Indian and classic French.

From the Nov. 5, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Green Habitat Transformations: From Milwaukee Duplex a City Farm Guild House

There are many single people rattling around in houses far too large for their comfortable use and budget. They are paying heating bills and upkeep costs far beyond what use they derive from too much space! Imagine if an artisan or co-op of artisans were to partner with a duplex owner to provide $20,000 of restoration work on the roof system, e.g. roof, chimney, gutters, fascia, soffit, venting system, for starters, in return for ownership of a portion of the property. Let’s imagine that $20,000 buys complete ownership of the unused attic space. The $20,000 worth of restoration labor occurs during the warmer months. And during the off-season the artisan works to turn the attic into living space.

An even more intense “harvesting” of unused space for our homeowner, who now has a partner in the maintenance and upgrading of the property, would find the homeowner or the artisan committing to learn more about renewable energy possibilities, e.g. geo-thermal, solar, and wind, and credits available for such innovations. They could also experiment with the art and science of city farming. Growing Power and other intensive growing methodologies can turn a small back room, a portion of an attic, some of the back, front, or side yard into a source of tasty, fresh food for the inhabitants use or to be sold to local restaurants or grocers.

A 3 star transformation project would find a “second career” boomer helping the homeowner and the artisan become city farmers, and even setting up a mentoring work station to teach bicycle repair, linex, wiki, or other internet empowerment skills, slow cooking, and other adaptive bodies of information and manual skills.

The once atomized, tax/heat/repair bill beleaguered owner of more space than they need now has not transient tenants but skilled and accomplished partners, the embryo of some kind of intentional living community. This is not to say that joint projects among humans proceed without challenge. We are coming to know that part of successful living is not taking the inescapable imbecilities and provocations of our closest family, friends, and partners personally. We’re just human! But we are also social animals who do better when structured in projects of mutual aid and reciprocal altruism. I scratch your back. You scratch mine. I fix your roof system. You provide me some equity in a real property. I create a city farm yielding food and profit. You give me a bit of your land.

(to be continued)

Bob GRAF(Growing Renewable Affordable Food) Seeks Project-team Members to Do for Growing Power Food Movement What Ray Kroc Did for McDonalds: “…taking the idea and bringing it in an affordable way to every house.”

Maybe we need a movement to bring Growing Power to each home in gardens and/or Growing Power boxes.

Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s was a middle-aged salesperson of shake and malt machines. He went out to L.A. to find out why these two brothers, McDonald brothers, were ordering so many shake mixers. When he saw why, the fast food concept, he bought the rights to the name and the concept and the rest is history.

Many of us have gone on a tour of Growing Power (The next GP tour is Monday, Feb. 26th at 3:30pm), and some of us have tried to bring the Growing Power way of growing to our houses and gardens. Maybe one of us will be the Ray Kroc of Growing Power, taking the idea and bringing it in an affordable way to every house. My entrepreneurial spirit tells me to be the person, my independent status says let others take the lead, and be supportive. Do we have any takers? Maybe, like McDonald’s, we can focus our appeal to children and thus bring in the parents! Maybe we could call it GRAF (Growing Renewable Affordable Food)?

See more images, visions, and reports on a Growing Power Home Garden at

 Growing Power Home Garden 

Ken Leinbach of Urban Ecology Center Seeks Most Advanced Concepts About “Green Burials” We Can Discover

Dear All,

Ken Leinbach of the Urban Ecololgy Center(UEC) has a request for information about “green burials.”

http://www.urbanecologycenter.org

Here is Ken’s note:

Do you know anyone who is planning a green funeral/burial? I got a call from someone from the press who wants to do an educational story on alternative funerals that are better for the environment and asked if I knew anyone he could interview. Not something I know much about, nor do I know anyone for him to interview. Sounds like a good idea. Let me know if anyone comes to mind.

If anyone has any thoughts on this subject, or knows someone who can help, please send information to

Greenburials@MIlwaukeerenaissance.com.

Thanks!

Godsil
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/OldeGodsil/Poetry

Will Allen Personal Growing Power Tour, This Coming Monday!

It would be methinks a lovely thing
To find us all internet empowered
In sending group e-mails to
Our family and friends
To let them know good news like this!

Anyone who would like a tiny workshop
On sending group e-mails
Or setting up their own Growing Power
Or Personal/Social Enterprise wiki web site,
Let me know! (Olde)

Here is one group taking advantage
Of wiki web sites for their good cause.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/Main/CurrentContributors

Please spread the word!

Will Allen is an urban farmer with great gifts for those of us
Looking for ways to create jobs and community,
Healthy food and beautiful gardens.

http://growingpower.org/

http://milwaukeerenaissance.com/GrowingPower/HomePage

Treat yourself & yours friends
To a Will Allen Growing Power tour,
At the Growing Power City Farm,
55th & Silver Spring,

This coming Monday, Feb. 26th,
3:30 p.m.

The city will never look the same
When you discover what
Our garbage, the worms,
Our gardeners and
Emerging city farmers
Can do in combination!

Growing Power!

Sincerely,

Godsil
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/OldeGodsil/Poetry

Renaissance House.

For Obama and Oprah
To enjoy.

Small house.
Graceful house.
Light house.
Organic house.

Natural house.
Natural people.

Start with an eye to
Beauty.

Start with an eye to
Energy.

Renaissance House,
Of Beauty, of Energy,
For renaissance mon,

For Oboma and Oprah
To enjoy.

In Milwaukee,
The people are creating
Hope inspiring

Small houses
Lots of light.
Lightest of footprints.
Lovely to see.
Natural to live in.

Kitchen gardens.
Solar and bio energy.
Energy from Mother Earth.
Energy from Father Sun.

City Houses with City Farms.
Growing Power methodologies.
Milwaukee Renaissance connections.

For Obama and Oprah to
Show the people.

Want some help
Creating your renaissance house?

In time for Oprah and Obama
To enjoy,
And show the people.

Before it’s too late.
The barbarians are at the gate.

Please, focus your mind and your heart,
Build that house.
With Mother Nature.
With Father Sky.

Let us arm ourself
With wisdom
And build ourselves
A renaissance house.

For ourselves,
For our children,
For the generations.

Thoughtful enough.

For our friends
To enjoy.

Olde
Toward the End of Winter
2007

Tiny Houses for the Highest Status Habitats

Think Small
By BETHANY LYTTLE
Published: February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/realestate/greathomes/16tiny

Matthew Adams outside his 120-square-foot house by Modern Cabana on his 160 acres near Red Bluff, Calif. He wanted a well-designed dwelling that would have the least effect on his land.

WHEN John Friedman and Kristin Shepherd of Berkeley, Calif., purchased 160 acres in the mountains near Telluride, Colo., it was with the intent to build ­ just not right away. Before designing a small, ecologically sensitive second home they wanted to spend a year or two visiting the land to determine the most suitable building site. But at an elevation of 9,600 feet, living in tents was out.
Skip to next paragraph

So, early last summer, Mr. Friedman, 69, an industrial photographer, rented a truck and trailered a pre-built 65-square-foot Tumbleweed Tiny House up mountain roads, into a meadow and parked. To compensate for the lack of interior space, the couple cook, entertain and, for the most part, live outdoors. “We live in our view rather than look at it,” said Ms. Shepherd, 58, a retired youth counselor and an avid hiker. At night the two nestle in a sleeping loft with three feet of clearance, gazing at stars through a skylight. “It’s shelter, pure and simple,” Ms. Shepherd said.

A wave of interest in such small dwellings ­ some to serve, like the Shepherds’ home, as temporary housing, others to become space-saving dwellings of a more permanent nature ­ has prompted designers and manufacturers to offer building plans, kits and factory-built houses to the growing number of small-thinking second-home shoppers. Seldom measuring much more than 500 square feet, the buildings offer sharp contrasts to the rambling houses that are commonplace as second homes.

This reduction of scale makes sense for a lot of people. Second homes are often geared toward outdoor activities, so for several months of the year interior space is superfluous. Minimal square footage means reduced maintenance costs, less upkeep and reduced energy consumption. Prefabricated and pre-built models can require little or no site preparation, which means no anxious weekend drives to the country to make sure construction is moving along. Add to this an element of instant gratification (once the planning stage is over, most houses go up in days, even hours, and many are delivered, turn-key, to the site).

Choosing a house starts to resemble buying a car.

Hardly the slapped-together hunting camp that belonged to your uncle, these buildings even offer instant curb appeal. They are often equipped with airplane-size bathrooms and tiny kitchenettes. Styles include romantic, rustic and designer modern. Jeanette Andersen, an agent at Sotheby’s International Realty/Santa Monica, said that in theory this could contribute to an increase in sales of undeveloped land. “When the design is appealing,” she said, “buyers are more willing to buy one and spend the money they saved on land.”

This is the case for two retirees, Gail Conti and her husband, Tom, of Rockledge, Fla. Attracted to a charming porch, pastel hues and compact size, they hope to buy a 308-square-foot Katrina Cottage, originally designed for hurricane relief by Cusato Cottages, when Lowe’s stores begin selling them this year. “To me, they’re reminiscent of the bungalows I used to see in the 1940s,” Ms. Conti said.

With a 3,000-square-foot primary residence on the Intracoastal Waterway ­ with sailing just outside their door ­ the Contis don’t need a vacation house. Instead, they plan to put their Katrina on land they will buy in Virginia or Maryland, near Washington and close to their daughter, son-in-law and young grandson. “It would allow us to visit for stretches of time without intruding and without incurring great cost,” Ms. Conti said.

PRICES for tiny houses vary by region, but in general reflect degrees of finishing, who does the building, types of materials and design options. In general, count on spending anywhere from $35 a square foot for a very basic structure to more than $200 a square foot for designer models built with specialized or luxury materials.

Manufacturers’ prices do not always include delivery fees, and there can be other costs, including site preparation, foundation work and installation of electric, water and sewer services. “You have to go into this with open eyes,” said Jay Shafer, owner of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. “Zoning laws, land covenants, building permits, restrictions and codes vary within states and across the country, and these impact what has to be done at the site, and how.”

For $90,000 in 2004, Scott McGlasson, 40, owner of Woodsport, a custom furniture design studio in Minneapolis, and his wife, Lisa, a human resources coordinator, bought a 700-square-foot weeHouse by Alchemy Architects. It has plumbing, tall glass doors, Andersen windows, laminate flooring, recessed lighting and Ikea cabinets. It is comfortable and attractive. “But people confuse prefab with inexpensive,” Mr. McGlasson said. “On a middle-class budget, this was doable, but not easy.” They bought the land ­ a small lot on Lake Pequaywan in northern Minnesota ­ in 2002 for $80,000. It already had a septic system, a well and access to utilities.

One rectangular module serves as the main floor; above it is an additional square module that serves as a second bedroom, which must be entered from outdoors via a ship’s ladder. Guests love it because it’s separate from the rest of the house. “And because they can lock out our three kids,” Mr. McGlasson said.

Still, it’s hard to resist doing the math. Five people sharing about 700 square feet has to present challenges ­ especially when three of those people are still growing. To make the most efficient use of the space, Mr. McGlasson designed and built much of the furniture, some with birch from the surrounding forest. He also added a free-standing sauna and a deck for outdoor living. “But when friends come, we’re pretty packed in,” he said. The trade-off is that when the time comes to leave, they just sweep it out and go. “We’re here to swim, fish, hike and cook,” Mr. McGlasson said. “If we wanted all the conveniences of home, we’d be there.”

Living tiny, however, does not require deprivation, thanks to modern technology. Gregory Johnson, president of the Small House Society, who lives in a 140-square-foot house in Iowa, noted that people once needed “a stereo system, countless LPs or CDs, photo albums and a small library of books.” Now, everything can take up no more space than a laptop or an iPod.

Stephanie Arado, a Minnesota Orchestra violinist, said that it took living in a tiny house to learn how little space she really needed. For about $45,000, she bought a 392-square-foot weeHouse with no electricity and no bathroom as the solution to a siting problem on her 32 acres in western Wisconsin. Ms. Arado, who has two children, planned to use the tiny house as a springboard to building something bigger.

But four years have passed, and she now has no intention of supersizing. “Something happened,” Ms. Arado said. “I started to see the beauty in how it works.” There is a queen-size bed for her and a bunk for her two children. When friends visit, sleeping pads and cots are pulled out. “The glass walls make the house feel much bigger than it is,” she said. “People are surprised to hear it’s only 14 feet wide.”

The tiny-house movement complements another vacation-home trend: buying land with an eye to conservation. John Friedman and Kristin Shepherd will return to their Tumbleweed Tiny House in Telluride this spring, not only to hike, but also to observe wildlife patterns and work to ensure that the land, which they purchased with the express purpose of conservation, remains protected.

MATTHEW ADAMS, 30, a San Francisco lawyer, shares this approach. On Feb. 2, he watched as the four walls of his $24,000, very modern 120-square-foot house went up on a very small portion of his 160 acres near Red Bluff, Calif. From the beginning, Mr. Adams said, he had an ecological agenda and intended to serve as a steward of the former ranch property. “I was committed to finding a tiny house that would have no lasting impact on the land,” he said. “But truthfully, I wanted something with design value, too.”

Modern Cabana offered both. The structure rides on concrete piers, so there’s no need to pour a foundation. To minimize waste, the builder, Nick Damner, works exclusively with eight-foot units of plywood, glass and wallboard. Recycled denim is used as insulation.

“It feels acutely more sheltering to be in a tiny house rather than a big one,” Mr. Adams said of the glass-and-wood structure, which sits like a jewel box on the land. “Looking out at the vastness of the environment heightens your sense of containment.”

From a set of design options, Mr. Adams selected operable windows on four sides and sliding glass doors. “You won’t find any quilts or knickknacks here,” Mr. Adams said. There’s no kitchen or bathroom, either. He plans to put in a well, he says, then order a second cabana to use as a bath house. Cooking will continue to be outdoors.

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Milwaukee Composting Barter Networks Crystallized

Milwaukee may be home to the first composting barter networks in a major U.S. city. There are probably lots already in parts of Europe. The project involves people with pick-up trucks or larger cars establishing recyling relations with local restaurants, cafes, breweries, grocery stores, and city yards, paving the way for “compost pick-ups” of veggie wastes, coffee grounds, brewers’ yeast, and wood chips. The “compost drivers” then deliver this potency to edible school grounds, neighborhood gardens, commercial city kitchen farms, and home gardens. The recipients of this “treasure trove” offer some kind of good or service in return, sometimes cooked food, garden/farm produce, rummage sale items, whatever.
If anyone would like to be a compost driver or a compost grower please send an e-mail to Compostbarternetwork@Milwaukeerenaissance.com.

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Presenting Support Given by Milwaukee Renaissance On Line Magazine and Movement Resource to Worthy Enterprises and Movements

An experiment has been underway that seeks to harness the power of the internet to foster self reliant citizens and community building in our older cities.

The connectivity afforded by the internet has allowed for much concerted social action that resulted in these social creations, or the enhanced promotions of these enterprises, roughly in the order they occured(web links pertaining to each of these projects on the Milwaukeerenaissance.com site are available upon request):

• Ted Seaver Street, honoring first major anti-freeway activist of Milwaukee

• Guild Development Project for Restoration Artist/Artisans

• The formation of the Milwaukee Preservation Alliance(MPA) and the projects it advanced, involving the saving of perhaps 25 historic buildings in Milwaukee, some, like the Soldiers Home and Pabst Brewery, of major historic significance

• NABVETS and NAACP “Rebirth of Freedom Project” to honor black vets at the Soldiers Home

• The Bay View Neighborhood Association and the projects if advanced, including saving the Avalon Theatre

• Club Timbuktu, an African Culture and Music Venue

• Annual St. Patrick’s Day All City Gathering, bringing together community organizations from throughout the city

• Advancing Bucketworks as a multi-cultural and multi-generational Health Club for the Mind

• Defeat of Conceal and Carry Gun Legislation

• Introducing Growing Power and Urban Farming to Milwaukee General Public

• Promotions support for avant guard small businesses and enterprises like Timbuktu, Lula’s East African Cafe, the Amaranth Bakery, the Acanthus Bed and Breakfast, Riverwest Co-op, Urban Ecology Center, Outpost Natural Foods, and more

• Introducing spiritual traditions that foster non-violence and the elevation of the spirit in us all, e.g. Rumi and Hafiz readings at Timbuktu

• Introducing an Anti-Stigma Campaign for Mental Health Movement

• Offers a platform for a growing number of writers addressing controversial and taboo topics, especially those pertaining to the color line, gender, ecology, mental health, and “official violence.”

• Internet Empowerment Project, including wiki web training and web sites for community organizations

• Recycled Computer Project

• Sparking Edible Schoolyards and City Farming Project

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A Call for a Grand Alliance for MPS Eco Schools with Edible Playgrounds

Imagine a mighty collaboration among these organizations around the vision of edible playgrounds at every MPS school!

• Growing Power
• Outpost
• Urban Ecology Center
• Reclamation Society
• Domes
• Other Possible Partners
  • Milwaukee Urban Ag Council
  • Michael Fields
  • Environmental Consortium Member Organizations

We might even consider coupling this with the recycled computer and internet empowerment projects, teaching the kids how to use a wiki web site to plan, present, track, and promote their gardens.

And Milwaukee became known as
The Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas,
Because some people taught the children
How to grow food in the playground.

Living according to the way comes natural
For children taught to create
Good food and beauty.

What say to a mighty collaboration to accelerate
The transformation of MPS asphalt school grounds
Into gardens the children help design, create, nurture,
Harvest and eat!

Here is news of an international movement around this theme!

www.ecoschools.com/KeyOrgs/KeyOrgs_wSidebar.html

Many organizations around the world are working to make schoolyards greener. Some of them have national and international programs that address this issue on a large scale, while others are focused on their own local city, state, or region. Many of these organizations produce written materials and guidebooks that are designed to help schools start their own greening processes.

The list of “schoolyard greening organizations” below, arranged by country, includes some of the organizations that I have found most useful in my own research. The second list, “environmental education organizations,” presents additional groups that are working toward a broader environmental education mission.

Schoolyard Greening Organizations

• The School Learnscapes Trust

“A non-profit organization dedicated to helping schools develop their grounds for learning.”
Australia

• Evergreen

Canadian national non-profit organization with “a mandate to bring nature to our cities through naturalization projects.” Evergreen’s Learning Grounds program applies this idea to school grounds. They have written a number of excellent publications that are available through this website.
Canada

• Green Teacher Magazine

“Green Teacher is a magazine by and for educators to enhance environmental and global education across the curriculum at all grade levels.” The magazine is produced four times per year and some back issues are archived on their website. Many articles focus on school grounds.
Canada

• Greening Canada’s School Grounds, Tree Canada Foundation This program that seeks to improve school grounds by planting trees and other greening methods. Canada

Greening Schoolgrounds, Wild Bird Trust of British Columbia
A program of the Wild Bird Trust of British Columbia, working to make BC’s school grounds greener.
British Columbia, Canada

• Nova Scotia Model Schools Project, Ecology Action Centre “The Model Schools Project aims to restore habitats; to develop local communities; and to enhance the health of school children within the province of Nova Scotia by naturalizing school grounds through a collaborative and multi-sectoral approach.” Nova Scotia, Canada

• School Grounds Transformation, Canadian Biodiversity Institute “The Canadian Biodiversity Institute helps schools transform their grounds into stimulating, biologically-diverse outdoor classrooms and healthy enjoyable play and social spaces…by developing demonstration school sites, providing comprehensive how-to materials, offering expert advice and training, and facilitating networking.” Canada

• Eco-Schools

Eco-Schools is a green school grounds program run by the Foundation for Environmental Education, a European organization with branches in 21 countries.
Europe

• Children’s Landscape

Website with excellent content, links and photographs from projects around the world.
Norway

• Living School

A green school demonstration project sponsored by the Agricultural Univ. of Norway and the National Gardening Society.
Norway

• The Association of Nature Schools in Sweden

An organization that coordinates the work of the 70 nature schools in Sweden, focused on outdoor education
Sweden

• Naturskolan in Lund

“Naturskolan encourages schools in and around Lund, Sweden to study the natural world in the classroom, the school grounds, the local community and on the county and international levels.”
Lund, Sweden

• Skapande Uterum

Organization devoted to greening school grounds in Sweden. (Website is in Swedish)
Sweden

• Eco-Schools, UK

Branch of the larger European Eco-School organization
United Kingdom
Learning through Landscapes
LTL is a large, nonprofit membership organization that is working to improve school grounds in the UK. They encourage schools to develop multifaceted outdoor teaching resources, and have written many excellent publications that are available through the website.
United Kingdom

• Center for Environmental Education of Antioch New England Institute

CEE’s mission is to create greener K-12 schools and communities through its online resource center and programs with individual schools in New England (north eastern USA).
USA

• Kidsgardening, National Gardening Association

Promotes green schoolyards while concentrating mainly on school gardens and composting
USA

• National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities

NCEF’s website lists resource “links, books, and journal articles on the design, construction, and maintenance of school grounds.”
USA

• Natural Learning Initiative, North Carolina State University, College of Design Organization helps communities to create exciting places for children to play and learn. Emphasis on environmental education and outdoor learning environments. Program director: Prof. Robin Moore. USA

Schoolyard Wildlife Habitats, National Wildlife Federation
Promotes green schoolyards while concentrating mainly on schoolyard wildlife habitats
USA

• Boston Schoolyard Initiative

Promotes green schoolyards in Boston, Massachusetts, using a participatory planning process
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

• San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance

Coalition of organizations in San Francisco, California working to make the city’s schoolyards greener. Related websites: 1, 2
San Francisco, California, USA

• D.C. Schoolyard Greening Consortium

“The D.C. Schoolyard Greening Consortium (SGC) is a group of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, teachers, and concerned individuals interested in green spaces at schools and expanding the outdoor educational opportunities for Washington, D.C. students. The mission of the D.C. Schoolyard Greening Consortium is to increase and improve schoolyard green spaces to promote ecological literacy and environmental stewardship among students, teachers, parents and the surrounding community.”
Washington, DC, USA

Environmental Education Organizations

• Environment and School Initiatives A network of environmental education organizations in Europe Europe

• North American Association for Environmental Education A network of professionals and students in North America; hosts annual conferences, publishes related works, etc. North America

• EE-Link EE-Link is a collection of environmental education-related resources on the internet, and is a project of the North American Association for Environmental Education. North America

Oui Sprouts: Milwaukee’s First Home Based Organic Commercial City Farm

Stephanie launched Oui Sprouts from her home farm at 621 E. Locust, in Riverwest, Milwaukee, in mid-December, 2006, when Leslie Peterson, Prepared Food Manager of Outpost Natural Foods, called asking for a better wheat grass product for the 3 Outpost Co-ops. Nicole Penick, Stephanie’s partner in the Food Reclamation Society had told Leslie about Stephanie’s 20 years of organic farming experience, and of her readiness to provide locally grown, organic wheat grass for juicing for the Outpost Cafes.

This was the call that launched Oui Sprouts! Stephanie drew up a contract and a schedule for planting wheat “berries” to insure a steady supply for all three co-ops. Over the next few weeks, Stephanie built the trays to grow the wheat grass, converted a spare room into a grow-room, gathered about 20 gallons of “black gold” from Growing Power, and ordered the seeds from the Outpost Bulk Foods Department.

continued at Oui Sprouts

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Marquette University Students Spark Recycled Computers for Homeless Project

Matt, who is involved with a street newspaper on the West Side of Milwaukee, would be willing to team up with other Marquette University students already monitoring the Guest House computer lab to provide training, delivery and easy setup of computers in homeless shelters or agencies. The Guest House is a homeless shelter. Matt is already working with Midnight Run, a Marquette University homeless advocacy group, and more help could come from that partnership as well.

We could install quite a bit of software as well, and some of us know linux and certainly how to install some freeware applications.

I think most of us would like to see computers go to Repairers of the Breach since homeless folks could use computers during their stay in the day to apply for jobs, research things and generally empower themselves. We could easily set these computers up.

A preference would be to install these computers in West Side shelters to show what collaboration with the free wi-fi system can do…

A great illustration of how this program would help, for the rest of the city, is to get some typed material from the homeless who would able to put their thoughts into digital form with a computer like this, and publish it in the city’s new street newspaper: the Milwaukee Street Beacon, or through a blog started through the Milwaukee Street Beacon.

To contact one of us who would be willing to help out, give a call to: 206–203–4161.

Look for more info regarding computer recycling as we dig into the issue a little more in the next few weeks.

Recycling Old Computer Project

Swap-O-Rama-Rama at Future Greens in Bay View Will Help You Turn Old Clothes into New Clothes

For Immediate Release Event date: March 24th, 2007
Contact: Swee Sim (414) 294–4300
http://www.futuregreen.net/swap.htm swee@futuregreen.net

Swap-O-Rama-Rama
Deconstructing the Consumer Through Creativity

Milwaukee - Swap-O-Rama-Rama is a DIY (do-it-yourself) event and massive clothing swap that offers people a fresh an alternative to consumerism. Through a series of do-it-yourself workshops, artist-run DIY areas, and recycled fashion shows Swap-O-Rama-Rama gathers communities in over 13 cities in the US and abroad for the purpose of exploring reuse through the transformation of used clothing and the celebration of creativity. The first Swap-O-Rama-Rama was held in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in October 2005. Since, 13 cities began producing sister events. They include: Los Angeles, Durham NC, Washington DC, Atlanta GA, Baltimore MD, Boston MA, Fairfield CT, and VT and the latest additions, Honolulu and Jerusalem.

Swap-O-Rama-Rama joins Future Green at Milwaukee on March 24th from 10:00am to 5:00pm with a recycled fashion show on the eve of March 24th. Admission to the swap is $5.00 (with a donation of a bag of unwanted clothing/ $10 without) and requires registration to the Future Green.

Swap-O-Rama-Rama beings with each attendee and their contribution of one bag of unwanted clothing. Collectively this produces a 5,000 to 10,000 pile of free clothing that is saved from landfill and made new as it is redistributed to attendees at the event and then transformed by each participant through artist taught how-to workshops, thematic workstations such as silk screening, stenciling, and hand & machine sewing, and through a gathering of skilled local re-use designers, artists and do-it-yourselfers who are there to share their knowledge. Each swap also hosts a fashion show that features the recycled designs of local designers who are exploring re-use as well as a fashion show for attendees of the event in which they are invited to show off the modified wearables that they made earlier in the day.

Swap-O-Rama-Rama workshops are taught by local artists of all calibers and cover wide range of skill sets and material uses. Swaps of past have featured technology based workshops such as Mike Sklars how-to in which he demonstrates replacing ordinary clothing pockets with metallic fiber pockets for the purpose of creating a wearable faraday cage to block RFID tag readers. Other workshops have explored new textiles such as playable sonic fabric created from recycled cassette tape and Kate Sweaters recycled plastics used for wallets and bags created from ironed plastic grocery bags. Traditional crafts such as embroidery, knitting, beading and appliqué can also be found. If guests want to be hands-on they can slide over to any number of do-it-yourself workstations and get started. These include sewing stations with sewing machines run by knowledgeable clothing and costume designers; an iron-on station for downloading images off the web and transferring them directly onto clothing; silk screening, and decoration stations for working with beads, buttons, and a variety of accoutrements. All of the materials for creativity are free once inside the event. All left over clothing is donated to local charities. The Future Green swap is donating remaining clothing to St Ann’s.

Swap-O-Rama-Rama was created by artist Wendy Tremayne as a response to her feelings about consumerism and waste in our culture. The event hopes to create awareness about textile waste while exposing how the marketing efforts of industry and fashion are contributing factors that are deteriorating a way of life. The swap is an effort to turn consumers into creators by uniting individuals with DIY (do-it-yourself) skills and by taking creativity back from industry. Attendees are encouraged to resist the marketing efforts of the fashion industry and the marketing that perpetuates a need for new amongst a giant textile surplus in the US during a critical time in which recycling is necessary for the health of the planet. Future goals include the distribution of labels reading “Modified by Me” to cover existing branding on recycled clothing so that clothing will no longer reflect social divisions created by broadcasting the spending power of the individual rather than the expanse of ones creativity. Swap-O-Rama-Rama offers a way to obtain new/used clothing, learn and create without the use of resources.

Swap-O-Rama-Rama is licensed under a Creative Commons deed that allows others to copy and perform the work with exclusion to corporate entities. Grants are being sought to help Swap-O-Rama-Rama develop and grow.

Swap-O-Rama-Rama has received funding support from Black Rock Arts (blackrockarts.org ). Swap-O-Rama-Rama is fiscally sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Swap-O-Rama-Rama: http://www.swaporamarama.org
Future Green Milwaukee Swap - Workshops and Artists Bios: http://www.futuregreen.net/swap.htm

Photos:

 http://gaiatreehouse.com/morewinter06/morewinter06.html

http://gaiatreehouse.com/swappressphotos/swappressphotos.html

Video by Missing Pieces for Treehugger:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=w3LJICqN9dE&search=treehugger

Location
Future Green, 2352 S Kinnickinnic Ave,
Milwaukee, WI 53207
(414) 294–4300
www.futuregreen.net

When : March 24th 10am till 5pm

First Ever Fund Raiser for MilwaukeeRenaissance.com by Embedded Reporter Acoustic Folk Band at the Coffee House on 19th & Wisconsin, Saturday Evening, April 14, 2007!

From Howard Lewis Hinterthuer
The Embedded Reporter

The Embedded Reporter is slated to do a concert at The Coffee House (19th and Wisconsin) on Saturday evening, April 14, 2007. On the recommendation of the lovely and talented Holly Haebig we would like to do it as a benefit for Milwaukee Renaissance.

Embedded Reporter does lowbrow music for smart people. It is all over the map stylistically including folk, country rock, blues, Tin Pan Alley, roots, TV & Movie tunes, Broadway, Latin and more. “We’re a singer’s band,” says Howard Lewis, Band Grand Poobah By Default.

Expect rich lyrical content. Instrumentation is “acoustic” except the band plays through a PA and juices the sound on occasion. About half of the songs are inventions in the sense that Lewis wrote them. “Darrell has added the class,” he says, referring to Darrell Smith (violin, hand percussion). “Stylistically the original material is also all over the map. We are called Embedded Reporter because we sing about what we see wherever we go. It’s fair to say we have traveled far and wide.”

Howard Lewis has been performing for forty years, playing acoustic guitar primarily, and piano when pressed. His first band, Alberta Blue, toured the East Coast from 1971 to 1976 successfully avoiding incarceration. Subsequently Lewis performed solo or with others on an ad hoc basis until meeting Darrell Smith at Riveredge Nature Center four years ago. Lewis and Smith have been gigging together ever since in venues ranging from posh to pernicious.

“It’s all good,” says Lewis. “We’ll sing anywhere. Our music is egalitarian and approachable for everyone.”

Opening for Embedded Reporter on April 14th will be singer/songwriter Mark Le Febvre, who has performed with Embedded Reporter numerous times and will join the band for this concert. Other musicians are also likely to sit-in.

Howard Hinterthuer
GROTH DESIGN GROUP
hhinterthuer@gdg-architects.com
Ph: 262.377.8001
Fx: 262–377–8003
www.gdg-architects.com

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To Save A Worthy Old Building Is Itself an Act of Green, With Possible Tax and Other Subsidies Available

David Ciepluch of WE Energies regarding project to Venetian Theater Project

I would consider restoration of a historical building “green” in itself since many of the existing materials are salvaged. That is why LEED provides a number of credits in this area and there are federal tax credits available. Past projects may not have considered themselves green or even gone after other improvements like energy efficiency and renewable energy but should be encouraged to do so as well as using local labor and materials where possible.

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Raw Material for Coffee Table Book on the Internet Empowerment of Old Milwaukee Neighborhoods

I would be very interested to offer a story at the MilwaukeeRenaissance.com about the origins, theory behind, history of, and prospects for the West Side, the Bay View Matters, the Murray Hill, Milwaukee Peace, Milwaukee Preservation Alliance, and other yahoo groups(or more gated on-line communities like the Riverwest E-Mail Network) supporting our citizenship efforts.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/InternetAsDoorway/HomePage

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Partnering for Sustainable City Homesteads

Homes equipped with worm farms, kitchen gardens, and internet power for self reliance and community building

I find myself surrounded by “bright ones” passionate and increasingly knowledgeable about intensive city farms and gardens, including Will Allen and very large team, Ken Leinbach and very large team, Nicole Pennick, Stephanie Phillips, and Ginger Lee’s quickly expanding team, Julilly Kohler’s explosive “North Ave Green Mile Team,” Sharon and Larry Adams’ blossoming Walnut Way projects, Jan Christensen’‘s embryonic Riverwest Reservoir Garden, Dennis Lukaszewski’s UWM countless Urban Ag Extension projects, Mary Ann Ihm’s Wellspring team, Jan Salinas’ and Donna Neuwirth’s Worm Farm Institute, and lots more!

Would you like to help design some prototype hoop houses and worm condos as a spin-off of these?

I am working with embryonic “worker owned collectives” to explore making a living or at least part of a living creating indoor and outdoor worm farms and kitchen gardens, for use and profit. You would be a great partner for one of these!

Or, more broadly put,
I am working with embryonic “worker owned collectives” to explore making a living or at least part of a living creating sustainable city homesteads.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/EuclidHouse/HomePage

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Computer Wizard Who’ll Make House and Work Calls Needed

It is beginning to look like the Recycling Old Computer Project fills a great need. But it won’t work unless we find someone who can “parent” the computers. I’m almost positive I can get Philo lots of computers to renew this year. I’m almost positive he can fix from 20 to 40 per year!

But they are worthless if they are not properly set up in people’s work places or homes, if the people are not given help learning about how to use and care for them, and if someone is not available to “tend” to the computers’ needs.

So…we need a Computer Wizard House Call Angel to truly launch this project.

There are all kinds of volunteer mentoring organizations and spiritual community resources. Any thoughts how to recruit someone for this indispensable position?

Here’s an update:

Here are some people ready to give a good home to a Philo computer:

• Tanya Cromartie Twaddle—a great poet/singer/activist/youth educator, needs a computer for her work

• Julilly Kohler—for Nia Imani Family, a homeless women’s organization

• Nancy Gentz—tireless elder activist in Riverwest

• Josephine Hill-African American Women’s Center

• Billy Murtaugh-poet

House/Workplace Visits from Computer wizards Necessary for Project to Work

It seems to me the computers, like Will Allen’s worms, will die unless we have someone lined up to “parent” them at the homes and workplaces of those who we give them to. You and I can “give birth,” i.e. I’ll get you computers, you fix them. But we need at least one more person willing and able to set them up in people’s homes, help them keep get e-mail accounts, set up anti-virus programs, etc.

Any ideas about where to find such an angel?

“Coffee Makes You Black” Internet Empowerment Project

Bradley Thurman is up for exploring an experiment that would find one of Philo’s computers placed at Coffee Makes You Black for internet empowerment lessons, with a Philo Computer going to people demonstrating commitment and need.

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Story Corps Milwaukee Trailblazing People’s History

Dear All,

Who would like to compile interviews of the Bay View Renaissance’s “heavy lifters,” for the Library of Congress? I’m hoping to get our Young Elder Bill Sell into the Story Corps Booth!

Here’s from UWM’s Professor of Film, Brad Lichtenstein, who embodies my best vision of town/gown collaborations.

Story Corps is in Milwaukee!! The first booth outside of NY!!

Story Corps is simple. A soundproof booth with a trained facilitator where you share stories with someone you love or want to know more about. Grandma or the person who has poured your coffee for 12 years at your local diner. You walk away with a broadcast quality CD recording of the interview. Another copy becomes part of an oral history collection at the Library of Congress. And some of the stories will be edited for broadcast on WUWM’s Lake Effect.

Here’s how it works:

• Choose an interview partner, like a parent, grandparent, sibling, or friend. (All participants must be ten years or older.)
• Make a reservation on our reservations and locations page or call our reservation line at (800) 850–4406 (it’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week).
• The suggested donation is only $10.
• Conduct your interview or tell your story. You’ll have forty minutes for the interview. Our facilitator will sit with you in the booth, making a digital recording with broadcast-quality equipment.
• Take home a copy of your interview on CD. With your permission, a copy of your interview will go to the StoryCorps Archive, housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

For more information about Story Corps, please visit : http://www.storycorps.net/, or call local coordinator Steve Bernfeld, at 414–229–2734.

Story Corps Milwaukee Hours of Operation
Wednesday: 2:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Saturday: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Story Corps Milwaukee Location
The StoryCorps booth is located on the 1st floor of the library in the Oriental Room. Participants should go to the Media Room and walk through it to the Oriental Room. Both areas are wheelchair accessible. The Milwaukee Public Library is located at 814 W. Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. StoryCorps participants may enter the building on Wisconsin Avenue (south side of the building), or they may use the N. 8th Street entrance (east side), or the W. Wells St. entrance (north side).

Please visit http://blog.myspace.com/iblich
to follow the creation of our next movie
about The Commons

Please visit http://almosthomedoc.org
to order DVDs of Almost Home, see Free
Movies, and get informed about Aging and
Long Term Care

Brad Lichtenstein
371 Productions and doc
UWM Peck School of the Arts
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Department of Film
PO Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201.0413
414.229.2890 w
414.229.5901 f
917.721.3131 m
http://371productions.org/

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Worker Owned Collective to Spark/Support City Farm Gardens

Hey Bob,

Would you be interested in becoming part of a “collective” to spark and support the development of city home farms?

I would really appreciate your visiting Euclid House to help me prepare to set up a hoop house garden.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/EuclidHouse/HomePage

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The Internet As Doorway to Great Things

Some of my life’s most recent pleasures
Have grown from connections and introductions made
Through the magic of the internet.

Here is a place I would like to use for
Internet As Doorway.

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Letter to Chicago for Help Inspiring Obama to Learn About City Farms and Edible Playgrounds

Dear All,

There has been and will be a glorious “Urban Farm” at Grant Park, next to the Buckingham Fountain. The vegetables are so beautiful to behold that many assume they are viewing a lovely garden, rather than rich and tasty veggies. At Kendall College’s parking lot there will be this summer another small city farm, similar to that created over asphalt at Cabrini Green.

These urban farm demonstration projects are a partnership between the City of Chicago and Milwaukee’s Growing Power, founded and led by Will Allen, whose pioneering vermiculture and aquaponics methods are being reproduced across the nation and in Canada. Will will be addressing the Royal Society this May 11th in London, because the State Department wants to show Europe that there are innovative sustainable development experiments in our nation that will find the US slowly but surely breaking away from our wasteful, commercial agriculture business as usual.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/GrowingPower/HomePage

Might anyone have any thoughts as to how to win a place on the Democratic National Platform in 2008 or 2012 for

Urban Farming for self relilance and sustainable community building?

Toward more local and organic farming,

Godsil
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/Godsil/JamesGodsil

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Eco Capitalist and Worm Story

Dear All,

Here is news about the power of worms from a source other than Will Allen and his Growing Power team, pertaining to $8,500,000,000 U.S. fertilizer and insecticide industry, with only about 5% “organic,” and Milwaukee in good position to capture increasing shares of this earth and family friendly income stream.
Worms + Garbage = Green Success

From http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/organic.fertilizer/index.html

(CNN) — Add heaps of red worms to mountains of raw, rotting garbage. Then collect the worms’ feces, brew it into a liquid, and squeeze it into a used soda bottle…Worms’ ground-grubbing, waste-eating ways are legendary in both horticultural and waste-management circles. California’s Integrated Waste Management Board ranked “Keep worms in your office,” No. 2 on last fall’s top 10 list of ways to recycle on the job.

Eco-capitalist Upstart

Paced by its enthusiastic leader, Terra Cycle has emerged as an eco-capitalist success story. Placing 30,000 gallons of worm fertilizing brew into 50,000 bottles a week, its products can be found in 7,000 locations, including CVS, Home Depot and Wal-Mart stores. Having grossed around $500,000 in 2005 (five times its inaugural year’s sales), Szaky estimates 2007 revenues — fueled by expansion into Target and elsewhere — may jump from more than $1.5 million in 2006 to $5 million.

Sales of organic products, especially food, have surged of late. But the National Gardening Association estimates just 5 percent of the $8.5 billion U.S. fertilizer and insecticide industry is all-natural, with uncertainty about what “organic” means muddying the picture, according to experts.

“Everybody and his cousin wants to go green these days, and in my view, it’s about time,” said gardening association research director Bruce Butterfield, citing a national survey conducted by Harris Interactive for his group. The study found surging interest in organic gardening out of sync with actual use of all-natural fertilizers. “If I had to grade homeowners on how environmentally responsible they are [gardening and landscaping], they failed.”

“We’re not doing this to save the environment,” said co-founder and CEO Tom Szaky, 25, a Hungarian-born, Canadian-bred Princeton drop-out whose company was recently recognized as having a “net zero” negative impact by the nonprofit environmental group, Zerofootprint. “We’re doing this to show you can make a lot of money while helping save the environment.”

In hopes that organic city farming is on the national party platforms for the election of

2008 or at least by 2012,

Godsil

http://milwaukeerenaissance.com/GrowingPower/HomePage

Monthly Series on the Great Issues of the Greening of Milwaukee at the Bay View Schwartz Bookshop on KK & Lincoln

This is a note I sent to Dan Roubik, assistant manager of Schwartz Bookshop on KK, in thanks for his work with Denise Dee’s “Touched in the Head” Irish poet events, and in response to his offer to Nicole Penick and myself to open his bookshop for evening events on urban farming.

Dear Dan,

Thank you for hosting the “Touched in the Head” readings of Irish American poets at your Bay View Schwartz bookshop!

What a lovely store!

Your offer to open your warm and welcoming space to urban agriculture and renewable energy gatherings is of great importance!

I propose a Great Issues of the Greening of Milwaukee Series at the Bay View Schwartz Store.

I would help enroll sponsors of this series, speakers and workshop leaders, organizers, and promoters.

The first two sponsoring groups I think I can enlist are the Milwaukeerenaissance.com On Line Magazine and Movement Resource, and Backpocket Press. Other sponsoring groups might be our major weekly, “The Shepherd Express,” major monthly, “Milwuakee Magazine,” major daily, “Milwuakee Journal,” and our various community media from the African American, Latino, Hmong, neighborhood, and other relevant institutions and enterprises working to accelerate the greening of Milwaukee.

I propose an on-line brainstorming around this concept. Here are my suggestions for the next 12 months. I would defintely work on all of these topics. But I would be happy to welcome others’ organizing themes bumping these 12, such that it might be a year or even more before these specific topics in the broader greening theme are highlighted.

Hope to Spark a Great Issues on the Greening of Milwaukee Series at the Bay View Schwartz Store

This monthly gathering at the Schwartz Bookshop on KK and Lincoln might be a nice early Saturday or Sunday evening event, anywhere from 4 to 7 p.m. Might we open the event to neighborhood caterers?

I would help organize such gatherings on the theme of the Greening of Milwaukee around the following topics:

• Renewable Energy—April Gathering

• Urban Farming—May Gathering

• Green Habitat Restoration—June Gathering

• Neighborhood Sustainable Development Projects—July Gathering

• Community Building in Polyglot Neighborhoods—August Gathering

• Harnessing the Power of the Internet to the Greening of Milwaukee—September Gathering

• Green Technologies as Export Industry for Milwaukee—October Gathering

• Eco Tourism as Major Growth Industry for Milwaukee—November Gathering

• Green Transporation Transformations for Milwaukee—December Gathering

• The Role of Spiritual Communities in the Greening of Milwaukee—January Gathering

• The Artists Role in the Greening of Milwaukee—February Gathering
  • The Potential of Co-ops and Worker Owned Companies for the Greening of Milwaukee—March Gathering