Understated

by rollie aden

I write as a new convert to The People's Republic of Portland and just now read through the several entries in this blog. WOW! Take some time to read for yourself. This blog has extremely insightful, very honest assessments of issues facing our world. Bloggers analyzed standard accepted answers and dispelled the many totally wrong concepts floating in my consciousness. I take my hat off to you and lay down my pen. Keep it coming fellow writers.

I found it very surprising that this blog says next to nothing about The People's Republic of Portland nor its co-founder and present moving force, Jennifer Forti. I found it surprising until I met Jennifer. Now I understand. Jennifer would never write an article about herself or PROP. I think a force greater than myself drew me to PROP just for this reason. Someone needs to say what everyone thinks and everyone knows.

Recently I spoke at a friend's funeral and found myself summing up his life in one word. Since that day I have secretly done this exercise with people that I know and those I want to know. I choose “understated” as Jen's word. She earned a degree in art and design, plays drums, creates with clay, dances with March Fourth Band, maintains a growing business, involves herself in social causes, collaborates with like-minded businesses, designs clothing, and meets with countless creative types akin to me.

Her websites say little about her. She says little about her. Her websites speak only briefly about The People's Republic of Portland. You see why I chose “understated.” I sat across from a very accomplished woman with an disarming smile, a tremendous background, an entrepreneurial spirit, a boundless energy, and an almost unnerving humility. When I asked about her background, she answered but never showcased. On first impression Jen and PROP seemed mysterious even coy. Upon second look I saw a person who let her work and her actions speak for her.

She has the ability to communicate in words; however, the artist in her chooses her medium. I think Jennifer Forti speaks through her work, and she speaks through other people. Riding home from my meeting with her it dawned on me that Jen has chosen in addition to dance, clay, and cloth yet another medium. She has chosen the medium of people. I can't tell if she made a conscious choice or even if she knows, but she definitely has another medium.

The people medium comes out in words like collaborate, promote, celebrate, and recruit. I knew that Jen had much on her plate the day we met. We sat and talked for a couple hours during our first. awkward time together. She never looked at her watch, fidgeted, or even hinted that she had more pressing matters to which to attend. She never made me feel like she had more important people with which to meet.

I met Jennifer originally at the Mississippi street fair and offered my services as a writer to her. When I followed up with an email, she contacted me with a meeting date. I have few delusions about my ability to help her. What skill could I possible have that she might need? The only gift I have; I give right now. I tell the story that she humbly has withheld. I know that if she will allow me to hang out that I will receive much more than I could ever give.

I felt ashamed of myself. I like to shine the light on my meager accomplishments and the exciting things going on my life. She showed interest but probably thought “what a pompous boob.” Her humility slowly but surely shut my mouth. Society tends to think of artists as isolated, tortured souls. Jen seemed neither isolated nor tortured; although, I suspect that she has experienced enough pain to rend her empathetic to those in process.

I found Jen touchingly empathetic toward and amazingly understanding of the creative side of my personality. Artist once they learn to accept the creative person living inside themselves then need to learn how to live with that person. Gosh, that sounds terrible when I write it. Anyway, she understood me without excessive explanation on my part.

If I had to interview someone to fill the role of director and owner of The People's Republics, I can think of no one better than the person presently in the role. Again riding home another thought hit me. I often feel like a conservative in liberal clothing. I wonder if Jen sometimes feels like a liberal in conservative clothing. I'll have to ask her next time we meet. In any case it didn't really seem to matter between us. We had bigger fish to fry to steal a metaphor.

Jen will display at Alberta Street's last Thursday this Thursday. I suggest you meet the lady behind the shirt. You will walk away saying but one word, “understated.”

Death Factories

On June 23rd, over 400 people attended the Public Utilities Commission hearing in downtown Portland to discuss PGE's plan for the continued operation of the Boardman Coal Plant. The Oregon Beyond Coal Campaign sent a strong message to both PGE and the PUC with the vast majority in attendance supporting the early closure of Boardman and rejecting PGE's 2020 plan. Among the crowd testifying for clean energy and the first to speak in front of the PUC was mayor Sam Adams. Dozens of students came out representing 10 different schools across Oregon that passed resolutions to close Boardman in 2014.

Sierra Club Beyond Coal and Sierra Club Student Coalition together presented nearly 3,000 petitions calling for a 2014 shutdown of the coal plant.

There was some really good press...KGW 8, KOIN 6, KBOO, the Oregonian, and blogger Dennis Newman of Natural Oregon.

All in all is seemed like what could be deemed a successful night for us environmentalists. Now we're just waiting for the verdict.

One of the speakers that night, Lloyd K. Marbet, the Executive Director of the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, knew he wasn't going to be able to cover all his points in the two minute time frame that he had, so he made copies of his testimony. He handed them out to the PUC as well as to anyone in the crowd who wanted one. Within, his testimony was this article written by James Hansen titled Coal-Fired Power Stations Are Death Factories. Close Them.

The Secret Powers Of Time-by Phillip Zimbardo

Adapted from Professor Philip Zimbardo's talk at the RSA, the latest RSA Animate conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Check out this amazing animation!

Forget Shorter Showers-Why personal change does not equal political change - by Derrick Jensen

Some friends and I recently got together to talk about the oil disaster in the gulf and what we can do about creating change and helping rid ourselves of our addiction to oil. In that meeting one of my friends read this article aloud to us about upping the stakes....

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

By Derrick Jensen

BP Slick THE SOURCE

This really hurts to watch, but we have to face this. We have to learn from our mistakes. The government has to learn. Will they? Will we one day be independent of oil? Will we one day not be at war?

Art in the rain

Davinci arts middle school is an art oasis in near ne Portland.
Just recently I was visiting the school to check on the Water Garden when i saw a group of students beneath a large blue tarp. The rain was steady but no one complained. They were too busy firing their latest ceramic creation using the oxygen reduction method of raku .
If you would like to see this action click on this to my blog on Sustainable water gardens.
http://davinciwatergarden.blogspot.com/2010/06/raku-movies.html

Mike Breaks It Down...

If you haven't seen this clip on you tube, take a few minutes and see what Big Mike has to say about the connection between the oil disaster in the gulf and wet t-shirt contests.

This came in from MoveOn.org...

What's the connection between oil company executives, wet t-shirt contests, the Department of Interior and the disaster in the gulf? Scary thing is, there is one. Watch Big Mike break it down and connect the dots. Hey, if you're going to stand in front of a blackboard, you might as well use it to actually explain something!

There's been a lot of finger pointing and a lot of confusion about how we came to face the greatest oil spill in US history. This video lays it out. This problem started in Washington and can end in Washington, but only if President Obama and other elected leaders get real about closing the revolving door between corporate lobbyists and our government.

Lobbyists make up 2% of Washington DC, yet they've been able to run roughshod over our democracy, rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say.

If you think it's time to take our democracy back, we think this is a video you and your friends will want to see.

We need radical transparency now!