Been in one of those zones where I get really preoccupied watching the news come in, but finding it difficult to summarize or work up anything particularly exciting to blog about. Luckily a lot of others are keeping it going in various places (thus, I spend too much time reading other people’s blogs!… but that’s ok too)…

The Greek Uprising, or insurrection, is really inspiring. Here’s a link to a very intelligent summary/account of it from Pavlos Stavropolous who has been on the ground in the midst of it. It’s a fascinating listen, in no small part because as he describes it, it’s still at the earliest stages where thousands of people are just joining, trying to figure out what ELSE they can do than keep reproducing an unsatisfactory life day after day. For the youth of Greece, the sour joke is that they’re all stuck in a $1000-a-month job for life, the window to upward mobility having been shut after the preceding generations crawled through it. But as Stavropolous describes, the reasons for the protests, occupations, riots are as numerous as the people carrying them out. It’s very much a revolutionary situation, though as yet uncertain about where it will all go… maybe a bit like Argentina in 2001, where a huge population suddenly discovers its own power and only wants to throw out all the existing politicians and business leaders… “que se vayan todos!”…

I was very struck by the reports of 11-, 12-, and 13-year olds besieging police stations in various cities in Greece. Amazing! A week ago I joined a SF Art Institute class to evaluate final projects and the prof, Tammy Ko Robinson, started the class by putting a website up that shows images of a mass movement in South Korea this past summer (which I hadn’t known anything about). I forget the details of the demands of the half million protesters occupying Seoul, but it was an anti-privatization mobilization, and the most remarkable part of it, according to Tammy, was that it started with some 13-year-old girls sending text messages to each other and on to their wider circles, and from there it just took off.

Last week my daughter participated in an occupation of the New School for Social Research, an inspiring intervention that has caught the imagination of many people all over the place. They were mentioned yesterday during some public comments made in front of the now-defunct New College here in San Francisco as a small crowd of marchers in solidarity with the Greek Uprising paused there:

Demonstrators in solidarity with the Greek Uprising pause at New College on Valencia Street in San Francisco, Dec. 20, 2008.

Out of our kitchens and into the streets… a rare public march–in solidarity with the Greek Uprising.

I am not super involved in any of this myself, but mighty glad to see it happening. Feels like something pretty big is starting up, maybe another 1968, but different! Just so much energy in so many places. My very trivial contribution lately was to use my Facebook page to launch a one-liner group as an organizing meme, to see if it would have any traction, take on anything of a life of its own… “Cancel All Student Debt Now!” (I’d probably be more enthused myself about a general jubilee, a full debt cancellation across the board, globally, but this was a deliberate Facebook experiment). After a week it has over 400 members and is still growing every day… for what it’s worth! (probably not much) But I think it’s good to spread the idea of debt cancellation, whether student, housing, credit cards, what have you, as a wedge against the blatant looting that’s been going on. In Greece yesterday, the Revolt Against Debt got serious when

masked men broke into the building housing the offices of Tiresias SA, a company that keeps records of delinquent debtors and cardholders, and firebombed the company’s offices. The fire was extinguished but the company’s offices were destroyed, witnesses said.

Here’s the last picture from yesterday’s demo, with a kindred sentiment:

Anarchist Enthusiasm, Dec. 20, 2008, San Francisco.

Weird thing about Facebook is that it’s a place where an awful lot of people are spending an awful lot of time. And it does work at linking people up around various projects and ideas, so that’s been interesting to me. More to the point, the tool itself has enough ease of use and enough users to make it very attractive to use (even though the owners of it could pull the rug out from under it whenever they want to). This ease-of-use has become an issue as we’re moving into the home stretch towards our Jan. 21 release of the Shaping SF wiki, esp. with respect to video and audio embedding. The video tools we’ve been using from the Internet Archive are noticeably lagging behind the ease-of-use of commercial Youtube and its competitors. I’m frustrated because I am very committed to avoiding commercialization as much as possible, but given the difficulty of getting people to write, upload content, etc., to our upcoming public release, I feel we have to provide the easiest tools out there… unfortunately, as Mayo Fuster and I were discussing before she returned to Italy last week, the current crop of commercial web tools are just better than the software created for “movement” purposes several years ago…She organized this conference I attended consisting of people from the World Social Forum and other political groups and a bunch of software developers. I didn’t love the conference, but a lot of useful connections were made.

I would love to hear from folks who have other ideas about this.

The recent furore surrounding biofuels and the food vs. fuel arguments, has highlighted to the world how important industrialised agriculture is to maintaining a steady food supply, and how precious our bio-productive land is. When we start diverting land to producing stuff other than food there are serious issues to be considered in terms of equity and social and environmental sustainability. When looking at the "Energy Return vs. Energy Invested" of biofuels, another serious flaw was highlighted – the carbon intensity of our industrialised agriculture systems.

In short, with ever more dire predictions about how much longer oil is going to last, there are some seriously big elephants in the room, when it comes to working out how long we can continue to feed the world’s growing population for when our agriculture is so dependent on oil to produce food.

Up until now, no one has given any really serious consideration to post-carbon agriculture, we’ve seen a few bits of ag-machinery powered by biofuels – big deal, it doesn’t take a radical leap in technology to make that work; but now we’re seeing something radically different, and really exciting.

New Holland, in partnership with Iveco, look set to debut a Fuel Cell tractor in early 2009. Dubbed the NH2, the fossil fuel dependent Diesel engine, has been replaced by a Fuel Cell, which has the potential to ween farms off their addiction to oil – soon you might be seeing ‘zero-carbon’ foodstuffs, alongside your Organics and Fairtrade.

The idea of producing Fuel Cell tractors has been kicking around for a bit, Allis Chalmers produced a Fuel Cell powered tractor back in 1959, however, after the demo of ploughing a field of Alfalfa, it ended up in the Smithsonian. What’s exciting, is that as a big noise in the tractor business, New Holland has the potential to transform agriculture completely by decarbonising one element of the food supply chain.

Via: Farmers Guardian

The following text on development in the context of climate change, by Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, contains 20 proposals, three of which are an undisguised call for the development of open and shared designs for appropriate technology. This is a great step forward towards peer to peer policy formulation.

Evo Morales on technology transfer to developing countries:

“13) Innovation and technology related to climate changes must be within the public domain, not under any private monopolistic patent regime that obstructs and makes technology transfer more expensive to developing countries.

14) Products that are the fruit of public financing for technology innovation and development of have to be placed within the public domain and not under a private regime of patents, so that they can be freely accessed by developing countries.

15) Encourage and improve the system of voluntary and compulsory licenses so that all countries can access products already patented quickly and free of cost. Developed countries cannot treat patents and intellectual property rights as something “sacred” that has to be preserved at any cost. The regime of flexibilities available for the intellectual property rights in the cases of serious problems for public health has to be adapted and substantially enlarged to heal Mother Earth.

16) Recover and promote indigenous peoples’ practices in harmony with nature which have proven to be sustainable through centuries.”

In America’s earliest days, there were barn-raising parties in which neighbors helped each other build up their farms. Today, in some churches, there are debt liquidation revivals in which parishioners chip in to free each other from growing credit card debts that are driving American families to bankruptcy and desperation. IN DEBT WE TRUST is the latest film from Danny Schechter, “The News Dissector,” director of the internationally distributed and award-winning WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), an expose of the media’s role in the Iraq War. The Emmy-winning former ABC News and CNN producer’s new hard-hitting documentary investigates why so many Americans are being strangled by debt. It is a journalistic confrontation with what former Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips calls “Financialization”–the “powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex.” While many Americans may be “maxing out” on credit cards, there is a deeper story: power is shifting into fewer hands…..with frightening consequences. IN DEBT WE TRUST shows how the mall replaced the factory as America’s dominant economic engine and how big banks and credit card companies buy our Congress and drive us into what a former major bank economist calls modern serfdom. Americans and our government owe trillions in consumer debt and the national debt, a large amount of it to big banks and billions to Communist China.

An examination of the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America’s mass consumerism and Big-Box Culture. From the humble beginnings of preaching at his portable pulpit on New York City subways, to having a congregation of thousands – Bill Talen (aka Rev. Billy) has become the leader of not just a church, but a national movement.

(Photo by Joe Corrigan/Getty Images North America)

On November 3, 2008, 50 Cent, along with New York Restoration Project founder Bette Midler, had the honor of celebrating the opening of the The Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson Community Garden in Queens on 117-19 165th Street. A native of Jamaica, Queens, 50 Cent and his G-Unity Foundation joined forces with NYRP to bring landscape architect Walter Hood’s designs to life in his old neighborhood as part of his personal mission to give back to the community that has supported him over the years. Students from neighborhood schools and members of the community toured this learning garden, which was designed very much with them in mind. Students and residents now have the opportunity to utilize this space for educational purposes, as well as for fun uses such as barbeques and social gatherings.

“I am thrilled that 50 Cent and the G-Unity Foundation have become such a vital part of the NYRP family,” said Midler. “We are a perfect match! They are dedicated to helping underserved communities just as we are, and there is nothing more important to me than providing open green spaces for families to use for gardening, education, relaxing, and having fun. I salute 50 Cent for using his celebrity to bring a healthier lifestyle to his childhood community, and I thank him from the bottom of my heart.”

The newly renovated garden will give members of the community access to much needed green space. According to Queens Community Board 12, the area currently has only 5% of the recommended amount of outdoor/open space to serve the neighborhoods 52,000 children. Community garden members will be able to host numerous activities in the space with the help of NYRP’s garden coordinator, including: movie nights, garden workshops, family days and more.

“It is an honor and a privilege for me to partner with Bette Midler and New York Restoration Project to bring this garden to Jamaica, Queens, my childhood neighborhood,” said G-Unity Foundation founder, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. “Every child should have access to open, green space where they can learn, play and be active in their community.”

Incorporating a children’s learning garden, community vegetable plots, a patio area and sustainable technology for maintaining the space into the landscape, Hood’s designs offer something for everyone in the neighborhood to enjoy. A rainwater harvesting system with six 10 ft tall funnels to collect and store rainwater offers regular irrigation to the garden and will also double as the patio providing a shaded section for rest and relaxation.

“Public spaces should be the places where culture literally articulates its view about how it wants to live. And that means artists who are involved in making these places are responsible for elevating those communities, those environments, to a place of artistic beauty that connects people to the world around them.” said Walter Hood.

More on this story at the G-unity web site here.

23 more photos here.

See more about the garden here – ‘Healthy Spaces, for People and the Earth’ – New York Times.

Demolition of structures and urban agriculture lots on road reserves and harassment to smallholder farmers in road strips areas are common: Photos, January 2006 at Ubungo Darajani.

Improving urban land governance with emphasis on integrating agriculture based livelihoods in spatial land use planning practise in Tanzania

By Wakuru Magigi
From Moshi (Tanzania) (2008)
200 pages (6MB)

Abstract

This study examines spatial land use planning and urban agriculture practises in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, one of the rapidly urbanising cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. It demonstrates how urban agriculture livelihood can be integrated in spatial land use planning and improve urban land governance by taking Goba, Chango’mbe ‘A’ and Ubungo Darajani as case study settlements. Location and periurban typology are theoretical premises used in this study. These help in understanding the policy and practical premises that constrain urban agriculture livelihood integration in urban land use planning processes and land management principles.

Methodological aspects deployed are documentary search, interviews, mapping, observations, and historical trends analysis. In addition, context, evidence based and institutional links are analytical frameworks used.

The study shows that the urbanisation processes, urban poverty, food insecurity and inadequate community involvement in land use planning are the factors underpinning and catalysing changes in land use, land transactions, immigration and overall urban agriculture proliferation in the city. The implications generated by these factors suggest that poor urban land governance is not only the cause, but it is caused by the weakness of planning institutions to realise and adapt to the new challenges that urban agriculture presents to urban land development process. Correspondingly, the rise of urban agricultural land use by and large, indicates a disparity between the widely cherished planning norms and standards underpinning formal land use planning processes and structures in urban development. These include land use zoning, location, land use change conditions, density distribution, accessibility to resources, land tenure modalities, and equitable provision of basic services in ensuring sustainable use of urban land. Equally, the study indicates the existence of supportive city land development policies and country legislature for urban agriculture, which are in practise faced with health, sanitation and economic return constraints. These constraints increase urban agriculture’s negative perceptions to consumers and decrease acceptance in spatial land use planning processes and output implementation. However, urban agriculture has been observed to make productive use of undeveloped land, green the city, provide income and nutrition, and is often a safety-net function for the poorest sectors of society. As such, it is an important vehicle for poverty alleviation, capital mobilisation, and sustainable use of land.

The study argues that for an unforeseeable future, the growth of the urban agriculture sector is likely to remain an indispensable reality depicting urban land development in rapidly urbanising cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Inclusion of urban agriculture based livelihoods in spatial land use planning processes and structures, including decision making, preparation, implementation and monitoring are observed rationale for improving the livelihoods of the urban poor-smallholder farmers and space use. This can be achieved through, but not limited to, adopting participatory urban planning approaches, settlement upgrading, institutional collaborations, decentralising roles to the local level and strengthening smallholder organization through institutionalisation and giving them a voice platform in the political dialogue. These options can be effective if the government is able to enforce and review policy and legislatures in place and if different actors are involved in the decision making processes, and if information and communication awareness is established. Other improvement include the use of treated wastewater technology for farming, granting long term tenure security, improving accessibility to resources, and adopting flexible planning standards. The study concludes that urban planners and policy makers have little choice but to ensconce and consolidate emerging forms of urban agriculture based livelihoods within land use planning practises and within a guided planning framework. If urban agriculture forms are not guided, then the negative effects, in the long run can undermine the livelihood of the urban poor and degrade the environment. Thus, there is an urgent need to guide the processes, strengthen institutional structures and linkages in land use planning practises, and consider local communities priorities when working to improve urban land governance in Tanzania.

Complete thesis can be read here.

By Adam Brock
September, 2008

A research paper I (Adam Brock) wrote under supervision from NYU professor Natalie Jeremijenko in Summer 2008. The conclusion? It’s not lack of land that’s preventing us from growing food on campus – it’s the politics of centrally-controlled space.

Abstract

Urban Agriculture presents a promising means of addressing at least three critical issues facing cities: food security, ecological health, and community development. As an urban research university with an increasing commitment to sustainable practices, NYU is in an ideal position to contribute to this emerging discipline. Although the neighborhood around NYU’s core is uncommonly dense, the University owns several acres of under-utilized outdoor space within this core that could potentially be suitable for cultivation.

Techniques such as edible landscaping and distributed gardening further add to the physical potential for urban agriculture on campus. The greatest challenge to cultivation at NYU comes not from the landscape itself, but rather from social forces such as centralized ownership structures and historic preservation. Several options are suggested for conducting further research in addressing these issues.

Conclusion

Urban agriculture has the potential to provide many mutually enhancing benefits – not just for the goals of urban sustainability, but for public health and community development as well. Yet the adoption of urban agricultural techniques in Greenwich Village is hindered by significant social pressures to maximize the economic value of public space and preserve existing functions. With further evaluation, techniques such as edible landscaping and distributed gardening may prove to be viable footholds for introducing urban agricultural techniques into this dynamic cultural ecosystem.

Yet even if successful, these techniques would exist at the margins of a landscape that is fundamentally heterotrophic and inequitable. In the long term, developing a more ecologically and socially robust built environment will require reconceptualizing the way public space is managed, and producing more than a token amount of food within city limts. New models are needed that combine the financial resources and design expertise of centralized planning offices with the community agency of participatory landscapes. Meanwhile, the development of a sustainable food system entails much more than merely growing it (Barrs, DeLind); further research is needed into techniques for processing and distributing the yield of urban agricultural projects in ways that are ecologically restorative and socially just.

See complete paper ‘Room to Grow: Participatory Landscapes and Urban Agriculture at New York University’ here.

Also see ‘Why Cityfarming? Because It’s Fair – Where urban agriculture meets social justice.’ By Adam Brock, January 16, 2008

These are my links for December 1st to December 8th:

• Increasing the sustainability of existing homes by sharing information, developing local action networks and facilitating co-operative buys. – The Eco-Renovation Network is a new and voluntary initiative. We want to encourage individuals to take action to increase the sustainability of their own homes. Our aim is to make it easier for people to find out and share information on eco-renovation and to reduce the costs to people through co-operative buying.
• ECIS (Ethical Consumption Information System) conference – Details of first ECIS (Ethical Consumption Information System) conference. One to keep an eye on
• YouTube – Uckfield Eco Team Present: ‘THE ECO-MAFIA’ – Check out this amazing group of talented, eco-conscious young people from Uckfield, Sussex, UK. Enjoy the lyrics and see what sustainable projects they are setting up at Uckfield Community Technology College.
• Complementary Currency Software – P2P Foundation – A nice page with details of software for community/ complementary currency software options.
• SmartSoil – the Clever Way to Compost – A Composting Revolution from Sweden!
  Introducing the JK 125 & 270 Domestic and the JK 5100 Community Composters