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What Happened to the Craftsmanship Spirit? — Essay – NYTimes.com

23 Jul

Yes! Making things with your own hands is the most basic form of building things. All other forms are built on that. Whether you’re building a computer  program, an industrial empire, a philosophical system, or a social club, building takes skills and those skills start with learning how to build things with your body.

It’s all very handy stuff, I guess, a convenient way to be a do-it-yourselfer without being all that good with tools. But at a time when the American factory seems to be a shrinking presence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, there is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship.

This isn’t a lament — or not merely a lament — for bygone times. It’s a social and cultural issue, as well as an economic one. The Home Depot approach to craftsmanship — simplify it, dumb it down, hire a contractor — is one signal that mastering tools and working with one’s hands is receding in America as a hobby, as a valued skill, as a cultural influence that shaped thinking and behavior in vast sections of the country.

via What Happened to the Craftsmanship Spirit? — Essay – NYTimes.com.

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Tech is Over

19 Jul

Google is sitting on 10s of billions in cash and has no idea how to invest it. Microsoft and Apple are the same way. See the discussion at Marginal Revolution.

How about a guaranteed income floor for everyone and a 20 hr/week job for everyone who wants it? The 19th century ended a long time ago, folks.

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Our Gardenbrain Economy – NYTimes.com

11 Jul

YES! The economy’s a garden, not a machine. It must be tended, not cranked. Right now the cranks are ruling the country and they’re making a mess of it!

What we require now is a new framework for thinking and talking about the economy, grounded in modern understandings of how things actually work. Economies, as social scientists now understand, aren’t simple, linear and predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic. An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.

In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it’s every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when we’re all better off.

via Our Gardenbrain Economy – NYTimes.com.

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What’s a Community Garden Community?

9 Jul

Two questions, closely related, but not the same:

What’s a community garden?

What’s a garden community?

So, what IS a community garden? I suppose it’s a garden that, in some sense, belongs to a community rather than belonging to a private individual or organization.

In what sense CAN a garden belong to the community? There is the legal sense. This requires that the community form itself into a legally recognized organization and that that organization, in turn, owns the land on which the garden is created. But, legal ownership of the land is not necessary nor sufficient. The land can be donated, and it need not be donated to anyone or any group in particular. It need only be made available.

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Gardens require labor. This IS necessary. Where does that labor come from? Why, from the community. People donate their labor to the garden, creating the beds, planting, weeding, watering, aerating, and harvesting. Where do the fruits go, the vegetables, flowers, herbs, and, yes, fruits? To the community.

And so it is with the Lafayette Community Learning Garden in Jersey City, NJ. While is has been organized out of the Morris Canal Community Development Corporation, MC CDC doesn’t own the land. The land has been donated, if only for a couple of years, by a local developer. Local businesses provided materials, supplies, food and drink on work days, and plants. The community itself has been providing the labor. Some people knew about the garden before ground-breaking and signed up ahead of time. Others pitched in when they saw things happening. Continue reading →

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Small-Scale Farmers Creating a New Profit Model – NYTimes.com

2 Jul

…beyond the familiar mantras about nutrition or reduced fossil fuel use, the movement toward local food is creating a vibrant new economic laboratory for American agriculture. The result, with its growing army of small-scale local farmers, is as much about dollars as dinner: a reworking of old models about how food gets sold and farms get financed, and who gets dirt under their fingernails doing the work.

“The future is local,” said Narendra Varma, 43, a former manager at Microsoft who invested $2 million of his own money last year in a 58-acre project of small plots and new-farmer training near Portland, Ore. The first four farmers arrived this spring alongside Mr. Varma and his family, aiming to create an economy of scale — tiny players banded in collective organic clout. He had to interrupt a telephone interview to move some goats.

via Small-Scale Farmers Creating a New Profit Model – NYTimes.com.

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Being Green 2

1 Jul

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A Community Garden Builds Itself

28 Jun

Not, mind you, that the rocks just up and cleared themselves out of the way, nor did lumber arrange itself into planter boxes, much less did the dirt leap into the boxes followed in close order by seeds, seedlings, shoots, and sprouts. Nothing like that. But the garden wasn’t planned by spreadsheet and Gant charts, nor was it built by highly organized teams working against the clock, on time and on budget. Fact is, if you’d been on site any Saturday—and a few weekdays here and there—from mid-April through May and into mid-June it’s not clear to me just what you’d have seen. And I was there.

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It all depends on just when you showed up. You might have seen people building things, planting things, watering the plants, and painting the wall. But you might have seen some women and girls tossing rocks over a wall, or a young boy burying himself to his neck in a mound of dirt, or a middle-aged man taking photographs of a plush-toy frog lounging in the lettuce, or men women boys girls and dogs chillin’ around the barbecue listening to hip-hop and Rnb on the radio.

Not a high-energy task-oriented workforce at all. But they built the garden. We, we built the garden—I’m the guy who photographed the toy frog. Also shoveled some dirt. And ate some barbecue.

This and more happened on Pacific Avenue near Commnipaw in the Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City in the Spring and early Summer of 2012. Come to think of it, not far from where Henry Hudson first set foot in the New World in 1609. The Lafayette Community Learning Garden.

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Continue reading →

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Dance to a Different Drummer: Groovology and Politics

14 May

Groovology, about the groove, the human groove, the dancing and music-making at the heart of human community and togetherness. A line of thinkers going back through Darwin and Rousseau argued that it’s music that made clever apes into human beings – and, wouldn’t you know? that connects to the apes, the rabbits, fish, bees, flowers and the earth as well. Because we sing and dance we are human. Groovology is lightness and joy, but also sorrow and healing. It binds us together in common action and feeling, in community.

What has that to do with politics?

Politics too is about community, about negotiating among that various needs and desires of people living in a group. When the group is small, the negotiations are face-to-face, as is grooving. When the group is small, groovology and politics are commensurate, their connection is obvious.

It is when the group gets large, very large, that the connection is obscured. The USofA is very large, our political leaders distant from the local places where we politic and negotiate. And yet there are obvious connections, still.

Politics is not all backrooms and stolen votes. Politics is also ceremony, and ceremony has music: Hail to the Chief, The Star Spangled Banner, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Washington Post March, Taps, and much else. Continue reading →

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Open Source Permaculture — Indiegogo

15 Apr

To suppor the development of a FREE permaculture resource, click the link at the bottom of this post, read all about the project, and make a contrabution.

Open Source Permaculture

What will this comprehensive resource contain? This project will fund the creation of an Urban Permaculture Guide eBook and the Open Source Permaculture Q&A Website + Wiki:

Urban Permaculture Guide – FREE eBook (circa 400 pages)

This will be the first freely available, comprehensive ebook teaching the use of permaculture in urban spaces! You will find easy to understand DIY tips that can be applied in your flat, tiny backyard, rooftop or community garden, including topics like:

* Indoor and Balcony Gardening – Permaculture Style

* Vertical Gardens

* Tree Crops and Edible Forests

* Guerilla Gardening

* School gardens

* Community Supported Agriculture

* Mushroom log cultivation

* Spiral Herb Gardens & Medicinal Herbs

* Composting and Vermi-composting

* Rainwater collection

* Micro-livestock

* Wind and Solar Energy

* Transportation

* …and much More!

This FREE eBook will also include interviews with founders of successful Urban Permaculture projects and a comprehensive list of FREE online educational resources.

The eBook will be released under a CC BY-SA license.

Open Source Permaculture Q&A Website + Wiki

With the website and wiki, you will have access to an expansive database of trusted resources and permaculture experts at your fingertips, to help resolve all of your gardening and landscaping problems. The Open Source Permaculture Website and Wiki will be cultivated by a community of experienced permaculture practitioners, allowing for a deeper understanding of permaculture and sustainability to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re just growing a tiny container garden or if you’re running a full-fledge urban farm business. Whatever your project is, Open Source Permaculture aims to provide a real, working solution.

via Open Source Permaculture — Indiegogo.

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Worker Ownership For the 21st Century? | The Nation

28 Mar

It may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest industrial labor union [United Steel Workers] teamed up with the world’s largest worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and communities, too.

Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,” the organizational proposal released at a press conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives. To quote the document:

“In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the idea that both the ends and means are equally important, meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and sustaining communities are just as important as business growth and profitability.”

There’s ‘boots on the ground’ history behind the project:

It’s been a few years since the USW first became curious about the Mondragon cooperatives after they had a good experience working with GAMESA, a co-op friendly Spanish wind turbine outfit that opened up three plants in Pennsylvania. In 2009, with their Spanish colleagues’ help, Gerard sent a delegation to the Basque region of Spain to investigate Mondragon, now a $24 billion global operation. Since then, the USW has worked slowly with Mondragon and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) a university based coop-outreach center founded by one of the organizers of the Youngstown initiative, to fine tune the US version presented Monday.

For the details of the proposal, check out the model for yourself. The full text of the union co-op model is available at www.usw.coop or www.union.coop.

via Worker Ownership For the 21st Century? | The Nation.

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