Tribal Paradigm: lifestyle

Hi there!

In the emergence of a new paradigm which works for and elevates the human condition, we can adapt new modes and models to help understand humanity deeper and better. Once established, the model will easily fit most anyone who comes into it, and other methods (such as key-giving) could be used to deeper incorporate the people who show promise. These interface procedures deepen trust at the level of community. Deanne Bednar, of Strawbale Studio, said she likes to think of what did they do at the village and tribe, and how can we get closer to that. We are the generations dissatisfied with this myth of progress. We know the truth of history and the history of money. [link] Let’s come together and make a better system. Straight up.

Work Camp – it’s like, someone gives you a cigarette or a few afterwards.

It’s time to re-form our brain and do things for the other in clear places that are designated for work. Things like quality and time will be accounted for, and that’s righteous. Skilled craftspeople are held pretty highly in society.

http://ubuntuusa.com/about-us

There is no need for money in this society. We are in urban Detroit, where over 40% were unemployed before the revolution. Now, they are being led to freedom. I have been amazed at the spirit of ubuntu generosity I have experienced from everyone here already. If anything is to be made, it is right now made out of recycle stream, and soon when we capture a mine to be added as we can produce from source. Gas money. The steel for example is used to make sheets, for the HHO cells which free farmers for more quantity and variety, and to make secondary products via our bodega institute. Wood is all over the city which we can deconstruct houses for. Opening up houses can be good alternative work, or vocation. The land is free as the mother gave it, if there’s a building on it well, then someone might have just claim to that. For anyone in this labor force, it’s making the things that we want.

Free Camp – pizza recipe: bread, sauce, and oil. Satisfies the craving.

Gardening Camp – go there during the day, do a lot of stuff, gets a bag of weed.

Think about a new institute. This could do as many things as it wants to, as is manageable, and could be added to or removed from as demand goes. They want you to grow things. If you agree to voluntarily grow something for society, then you’ll be gifted the seeds and tools, and people will come help you set up.

Camp Corporate – would like a vodka drink of choice or bar environment

Advanced manufactured things are made in different shops around the city, to order, from the available institutes. As more things are freed across Michigan, we expect that more things will be made. If it’s something that comes from growing, let’s take up growing that thing in our greenhouses. Things that come in from outside are donated, are in-kind. Furthermore, membership includes free everything that anyone else makes. Note: you’ll have a free house with no bills, as well. Then we’ll get to the free store, as in the vision.

Village apprenticeships

Different shops are around to apprentice at, and creativity combines different requests, essential oils, and gets seeds ready. City government would provide all the necessary tools for your trade, in the meantime we use hackerspaces and the makerspace like the George Washington Library in Chicago. Education is passed on from wisdom that elders have learned, and they want something to do well that is take up teaching other kids in the neighborhood. We will have transitioned up to 4 schools in Eastern detroit which were shut down when there was no money, and now with the city’s permission they do not use money nor train people for a society with it.

Space Age Free Future: One in which no currency is used, rather the full spectrum of humanity is known in those that you would deal with or know and love.

Institutes for the Future

Visit Fireweed

Ed Che on Twitter

Alternative Vocation

Transition to a New System: Index

A. Problem: System of industrial agriculture is fatal to consumers, rivers and lakes, genetic diversity, wildlife, community. We must not replace patriotism about our country for greed of large-scale industrial farming.

— The Economics of Low Price

— Scathing letter from an agvocate

— Obama has not helped organic farmers (Tumblr) (we have been penalized/ small farmers have not been helped/ however, these local and organic farmers are the hope for our future)

— What we know about GMO (Tumblr)

— Glyphosate (Roundup)

—  Leafy green problems , “natural” problems, Raw food raids

— Sustainability (lack of)

B. Organic agriculture was fastest growing sector, why? It’s entrepreneurial spirit, optimism, timely, news.

— What I am thinking is, Farm Economy

— Guest blogger Amanda Garant: A Farmer for Always

— Corn Planting around the corner: A Different Option for Farmers

— Organic is Modern

C. But we must go beyond the USDA certification to save small farming, the wilderness, and our wildlife. We must conquer a mechanistic and reductionist worldview, to understand that our food decision creates our children’s future.

Wendell Berry: ‘Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts
of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints.’

— Response to @TheFarmersLife, High Tech Ag is Not Natural

— The need for “99% Sustainability:” John Jeavons and Ecology Action

— Some goals for the food movement to work with (global perspective, morals..)

— Parks, Ecology, Business

— Elk Migration Routes, and a Permaculture-Ecology Project

— How the Amish React to New Technology

— Government, Scientific, Technology adaptations for development (From the IAASTD)

D. Posit a new system. Method:

— “Anarganic” norms for the twenty-first century

— The #Organic Pages

— Beyond Organic

E. And ask them for seeds. Cook and grow your own food.

(Some of my favorite recipes: butternut squash, egg torta, best cornbread)

#Organic is modern, 3. #Movement post in solidarity with @SlowMoney

“This enterprise that we are a part of, with its new organic farmers and the host of small food enterprises that are emerging to bring their produce to market, is about an economy that does less harm. It’s about rebuilding trust and reconnecting to one another and the places where we live. It’s about healing the social and ecological relationships that have been broken by hundreds of years of linear, extractive pursuit of economic growth, industrialization, globalization, and consumerism. It’s about pulling some of our money out of ever-accelerating financial markets and its myriad abstractions — called, with more than a little irony, securities — and putting it to work near where we live, in things that we understand, starting with food — creating a more immediate and tangible kind of security.

This attention to and, even, celebration of the small, the slow and the local can seem, at times, rather precious against the scale of global economic, political, and environmental challenges. But it was agriculture that gave birth to the modern economy, and, as Paul Ehrlich recognizes, it must be agriculture that we fix if there is to be a postmodern economy.”

Can someone please forward this blog to Barack Obama? The government absolutely needs to stop this foolishness and focus on what we can do to make small industry in plants. @BARACKOBAMA check your twitter replies!!!

Source for this post: The Slow Money Blog, “Will the Real Food Movement Please Stand Up” 

From a “Still Skeptical” post: Founding a Business

Check the date! This post was written over two years ago, in fact almost three. In it I outline accurately plans I still have to this day.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2008
Founding a Business
I have been thinking a lot lately about the plan of what I want to do after college. And things may be coming together quite interestingly. There are big changes happening in agriculture, especially toward sustainable farming. Some ideas I have:

Found a non-loss, non-dividend Social Business.
Goal: Get organic into the lives of all rural families living below the poverty line for self-sufficiency and empowerment.
2. Market and sell organic produce in the US to ensure that small producers always have an outlet for excess production.
3. Research and disseminate best techniques for high-yield organic small farms.

Dealing in: high yield, direct trade, commercial organic fruits, vegetables, commodities, and herbs: banana, pineapple, cotton, corn, coffee, sugar cane, plantain, cocoa, dairy, livestock, name (root), noni (experimental), oregano, basil, etc.

Direct Trade: Microsupply/Microdemand.
Imagine buying a pack of bananas (organic and directly benefitting farmers and the environment, etc), from 4 different farms (individual farmer here could== coop region) in different regions/countries/local varieties. Say that bananas are not a uniform taste, as the clone seeds are—designed to be big and yellow on the outside and distributed by a single company. But organic actually taste better. How much better? You decide. Vote thumbs up or thumbs down on our website to let us know for each one, and look for your favorite in singles next time you go to the supermarket.
–> Some types sell out quicker and are higher rated… stores notice and request more from that farmer. Farmer can produce more funded by higher price. Exceptional examples could hit a “genetic jackpot” and maintain exclusive or sell seed.
–> Range of sticker prices based on ratings, with the best taste costing more and the low-range still a few cents higher than standard quality plantation banana.
–> Would give local farmers incentive to experiment, they may strike it rich! Would lend itself to organic non-gm farming, which already represents a large benefit to family ownership/livelihoods. With many small plots, could even find out what your farm is best at producing by rating against other small farmers.
–> New market for seeds can be grassroots-based in constant evolution and locally variant. Microsupply, microdemand for seed market as well driven by the larger research farms.

How? The internet can manage this quantity of data!

Local Campaign:
-With organic farms can do Community Shared Agriculture shares to benefit from added diversity of production, for any size farm even those that can’t make it international.
-Uncertified organic “gardens” can be grown in backyard for family or market, if seed is made available that doesn’t need fertilizers or pesticides. Reduce dependence on (costly, external) food and boost family income.
-“Preserve your environment and stand up for your livelihood because their economics is not working.” Support local farmers. Support organic. Organize and lobby for fair laws (while using the existing ones)
-Once you’re big enough, join your local coop for shared investments and shipments. Coops can work with us for finding buyers, brokering deals, farmer education, flyers etc.

Scattered, and still some things to work out, but well on the way to becoming the material and flesh of venture capital. Just need a team of impassioned individuals– consider this an invitation to ask more.

-Eddie
Posted by HP at 9:40 PM
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How to start Sheep

From the Rural Living Handbook, Published by Mother Earth News. 115-116

It hardly pays to buy young lambs and feed them to adulthood for strong-flavored mutton. The trick, instead, is to raise your first lambs into adult breeders, then slaughter their offspring as fat, tender lambs. With an acre or two of pasture, a shade tree, a third of a ton of hay for winter and a handful of grain a day, a ewe lamb will mature in a year and, if bred, produce a lamb or two of her own, plus five to eight pounds of wool. After maturing on its mother’s milk and a little grain and graze, each of your new lambs will provide you with a wonderful fleece hide and around 50 pounds of delicious meat.

An Open letter to Wendell Berry, US Government

Dear Wendell,
I have a dream; and, at its center, you stand– tall, humble, simply magnificent. Despite all my reservations about writing to you, here I am, hours before dawn, doing something that I could not even have dared to imagine only last evening.

I awoke with a dream long before the sun is scheduled to shine. In this dream, I join millions reading your open letter to the White House, courteously requesting $5 billion– a tiny pittance compared to the going rate for government bailouts– to regenerate 50 million family farms; $5 billion, in other words, that could support young people who have the gumption and a sense of adventure necessary to grow food and sequester carbon in the soil; $5 billion that would allow American women, men, and their families a chance to eat and grow clean, uncontaminated, uncancerous food.

Your moral stature and vision are such that all you would have to do is write such an open letter to the president to more fully awaken millions; to start a groundswell.

My dream declared itself loud and clear as soon as I rolled out of bed– perhaps the time is right. It’s been a long time coming, Wendell. Your half-century-old patience, my dream declares, may finally be paying off. Your time, the Wendell Berry Era, has finally dawned. Hopefully.

People might now be ready to embrace your vision, holding it close to their hearts while abandoning the illusions foisted upon us by recent elections and by corporate admen and those in cahoots with them. My dream declares boldly that not only your grassroots fans in the millions are ready to savor your wisdom, but that others, who may not have heard of you nor studied your writings, are world-weary of hokey hope and industrial illusions, and are ready as well. We find ourselves genuinely scared of the triple crises of climate collapse, resource depletion, and inequality, which we have all colluded in creating, and, at long last, are able to hear your words with an openness to surprise.

Your long patience with all of us during the past half-century reminds me of the 50-year-old patience of Gandhi. Gandhi had a dream of walking unarmed towards Ahimsa freedom, symbolize by taking back from the Empire India’s salt– the original birthright of its people. Gandhi’s tiny coterie of conspirators marching to the ocean to harvest their salt was the most powerful 20th-century gesture of the powerless spurning brute force.

If Hindus in the heyday of the British global economy could exercise the audacity of harvesting salt by the side of their beloved Gandhi, then what stops us from shaking off the shackles with which Monsanto, ADM, Cargill, and their governmental gang bind us? What stops us from harvesting our own food, nourishing our communities, audaciously enjoying the pleasures of eating?

Wendell, it is clearly outrageous of me to ask anything of you over and above the many gifts you have brought into my life. Following in your footsteps, learning lessons given to us by many of your loving fans– including the likes of Ivan Illich, Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver– I find myself still very compelled to write to you from my small world.

The time has come to listen to you and your kindred spirits.

Your era is our era.
We are ready.
Affectionately,
Madhu

Copywright information:
Madhu Suri Prakash, contributing editor of Yes Magazine. Wendell Berry is farmer, activist, novelist, essayist, poet. This is transposed from the Summer issue of Yes! Magazine. Other stories and an overview of the issue of Yes! can be found on their website: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/beyond-prisons or twitter.com/

From the IAASTD, Scientific and Policy Vocabulary of What I Want to Do

Findings: IAASTD Summary for Decision Makers of the Global Report

16. Innovative institutional arrangements are essential to the successful design and adoption of ecologically and socially sustainable agricultural systems.
Sustainable agricultural production is more likely when legal frameworks and forms of association provide secure access to credit, markets, land and water for individuals and communities with modest resources. Creating market-based opportunities for processing and commercializing agricultural products that ensure a fair share of value addition for smallscale producers and rural laborers is critical to meeting development and sustainability goals.

17. Opening national agricultural markets to international competition can offer economic benefits, but can lead to long term negative effects on poverty alleviation, food security and the environment without
basic national institutions and infrastructure being in place.

20. Both public and private sectors can help advance development and sustainability goals.
Increased investments in AKST, particularly if complemented by supporting investments in rural development (for example, infrastructure, telecommunications and processing facilities) can have high economic rates of return and reduce poverty. AKST investments also generate environmental, social, health, and cultural impacts.

22. Achieving sustainability and development goals will involve creating space for diverse voices and perspectives and a multiplicity of scientifically well-founded options, through, for example, the inclusion of social scientists in policy and practice of AKST helps direct and focus public and private research, extension and education on such goals.
Some interpretations have been privileged over others and have helped push formal AKST along certain pathways, to the neglect of other scientifically sound options. Some of the by-passed options originate in traditional knowledge or civil society experience and may be better able to contribute to poverty reduction, social inclusion, equity and generate multifunctional outcomes.

The Future of Food Conference, DC

“… Today, if you are looking for the most immediate cause of farmworkers’ increasing poverty — and the most correctable — your search is best directed to the marketplace. Farmworkers toil at the very bottom of a food supply chain that is every day more and more top-heavy, and this unprecedented consolidation of market power at the top of the retail food industry has created an unrelenting downward pressure on prices — and therefore wages and working conditions — at the bottom. And the bottom of the ‘bottom’ in the food supply chain is the person picking fruit in the fields…”

I found this interesting that the top guys are looking for ways to fix our food system. It doesn’t work to just be laborers, especially in development. Very inequitable growth. My suggestions: start small, market on-farm products, reduce costs and waste of farming.

-Eddie

Feed the Future, launched by President Barack Obama?s administration in 2009, attempts to leverage a $3.5 billion government pledge to lure investment from the private sector. The effort focuses on agricultural technologies of all kinds, including biotechnology.

The Future of Food Conference: http://washingtonpostlive.com/conferences/food/agenda

An important tool we have are former conferences of international stakeholders. These are how laws, treaties, and policies get made; It’s important to link and share them. Here’s one which is the most valuable (ever) for agriculture in the last 8 years.
http://www.afcconference.com/final-roadmap-for-action
http://www.afcconference.com/conference-papers

-Eddie

Coalition of Imokalee Farmworkers: http://www.ciw-online.org/CIW_at_future_of_food.html

Butternut Squash recipe via http://oberlinfood.wordpress.com/

Recipe: Butternut Squash Spread April 29, 2011
Posted by oberlinfood in Uncategorized.
Thanks to San Maday Travis for sharing this delicious recipe at the potluck with Gary Nabhan last week!

Butternut Squash Spread
from Yoga Journal Nov-Dec 1994
Yields 3 cups.
2 cups butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cubed
1/2 cup onion, minced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 tablespoons almond butter
3 tablespoons white miso
1 teaspoon salt
Steam squash over boiling water for 25-30 minutes until soft. Drain well.
Saute onion and garlic in olive oil until translucent and slightly browned.
Blend squash, onion mixture, almond butter, miso, and salt in a food processor until creamy smooth. Adjust seasoning to taste.

via the Oberlin Food Blog: http://oberlinfood.wordpress.com/
My blog: https://eddiemill.wordpress.com/
Follow on twitter? http://twitter.com/eddiemill

#Foodchat 419, comments and a link to the archives.

Topic: Food price #Foodchat:
Free trade drives agri-culture out of business.
Policy imperative should not only encourage low food price — it should ensure resilience.
Farmers, we can still feed everyone, can’t we? See @Cityfresh.
Industrial food price regimen has no place on my farm.
Export competition cannot keep up. We are one of the only countries that still subsidizes, violating trade laws.
In local foods, we try to make it affordable even for low-income families to eat well.
It’s tough to compete when McDonald’s is subsidized.
We can’t undercut other farmer’s prices and call it moral.
Let’s not do it to our own local farmers and young farmers and organic farmers who want to start out.
Now, we’ve become one of Mexico’s biggest corn exporters. Which puts them out of business unless they’re buying our corn.
Costa Rica didn’t want CAFTA because it would hurt their small producers. Neither did France.
Ron Paul: not that he would be good for America in short term, but it would all make sense.

My work in agriculture has officially invaded inbox, twitter, facebook and everything!
Link to the archives: Agchat and Foodchat Archives