Re: The Power-Down Implications Of The Right To Shelter...
What I'm seeing [in progress] at present are...
Three Moons Circling Round Any NEW Plan To Power-Down: 1. Cultivating Reverence (For All That Has Been Used, Abused, And Treated With Contempt), 2. Distributed Generation Of Alternative Energy (Including Human Energy); and 3. Communal Living & Land (The Future In The Present).
*** ...planning our future is a school... in which we "claim the commons" as we reclaim our consciousness...
– a school which calls on all the progressive "thinkers" out there who are willing to play a key role getting us to that future freedom without bosses...to help end all divisions between us...
– and any Plan or school in which we "claim the commons" and redeem human energy...
...will require Wading Into The Muck Of State. * See below.
...And consider The Hidden Malevolence noted in this: ** Correspondence with Sister Joan.
In Waking Up, I wrote that there are those who naturally tend to the various 'claiming-the-commons-tactics' – interfacing with the State being a key piece. Can I say that this is not a piece that I play well (to say the least)? I guess my Activism Aikido needs some tuning....So your suggestions are welcome. The three key principles that I can see at this point:
Cultivating Reverence (For All That Has Been Used, Abused, And Treated With Contempt):
The Ancestors (identifying and honoring those who've gone before .)
...Who lived before on the soil we work, and how honor them?
...What can we learn from the first folks on this land?
The Earth (prioritizing low-impact).
...How to best work with (live lightly on) the earth?
...How best to 'seed' so the earth can best feed?
Each Other (prioritizing youth of color and those with no fixed abodes).
...How best to respond to immediate need...to make life easier now for those burdened with the weight of 'society's' contempt?
...How best to facilitate their planning process?
Distributed Generation Of Alternative Energy (Including Human Energy):
..."Identify which cities in the Transition Movement have set up Energy Services Companies (ESCOs) 'owned by the community, to provide locally generated electricity,'” (from Waking Up, The Plan, Pt. 12)
...Identify Multiple "Test-Sites" on which the low / no-income interested in learning how to build, and live in, Earthships, could begin to build (free of irrelevant code hindrances).
...Promote a "re-valuation of human beings" – and life in general – by assessing local ordinances for their compliance with "life-first" values.
Communal Living & Land (The Future In The Present)
(Everything we grow now harmonizes with our future freedom....If "good fellowship" is to be our future it will need communal land in which to grow – fueled by human energy...and public funds. We have to build the demand for communal land.)
...Land Grants To "The People"...set aside for communal living...in perpetuity.
...Code Suspensions...including building codes, business codes for the low / no-income, and inducements for small businesses that provide public toilet access.
...Free "Earthship-Building" Workshops for the Low / No-Income.
*** ...planning our future is a school...
...He looked at me with a strange look and said, "make?"...I am serious. And at the right moment this memory can be such a sad realization of the state of things that it nearly brings tears to my eyes. He literally believed that noodles grew....
Is that his fault? I don't think wholly. The government caused him to be lazy – caused the society to become lazy and dependent upon commercial agriculture and commodities. (D. Michael Salerno)
[From "Our Responsibility" (Eighteen)]
...I see "planning our future" as a school...
...the ideas that emerge from it as tools...
– planting seeds...
...feeding...fertilizing...germinating...care-taking....
Saturday, 05.15.10
As I visit and listen to folks' longing for freedom...
...the over-pulsing reaction that comes to me is...
...why does it seem...
...that no one is taking...
...the "Mr. Smith Virus" more seriously?...
...What all of us have to get clearer about...
...is that vampires think...
...in terms of centuries...
...not decades...
...they traverse many lifetimes...
...they span millennia...
...their strategy has always been...
...identify the ones vulnerable to flattery...
...apply strokes...carrots...sticks...
...feign defeat at times...
...whatever it takes...
...then sit on the dollars...
...and wait....
...The land truly reclaimed...
...must be made...
..."the people's" in perpetuity....
...The chief thing they're afraid of is...
...communal living....
...Once you see that...
...once you know...
– once it's obvious what they fear –
– our strategy as well as our future's made clear....
...The question we must never allow to be trumped...
...is "what...future...do...we...want?"...
...Is it a future of folks competing individually?...
...for a miniscule portion of the earth made a commodity?...
...Is this what is good for the earth and her children?...
...Or is it a different arrangement of things...
...that is needed?...
...We have the right and, moreover, the responsibility...
...to not settle...
...for anything less...than the full kettle....
...Which means reclaiming bodies...
...wholly...
...in their entirety...and in perpetuity....
...Because so long as "the system" breathes...
...each body will represent "the state" in hiding...
...but in the future that we birth...
...each body will represent the earth.
Saturday, 05.15.10
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
Saturday, 05.15.10
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
Saturday, 05.15.10
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
Saturday, 05.15.10
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
...elaborating...:and expanding...
...with your ideas...
Determination 17:
00.00.00:
See: Wading Into The Muck Of State.
* On Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 I went to a meeting of Berkeley's Homeless Commission and shared with them and the audience a...Proposal To Allocate $331,200 Of Berkeley's $1.3 Million In Stimulus Dollars Designated For The Homeless To Fund An Earthship Construction "Test-Site" Built By And For The City's Chronic Homeless.
I share it with you below. I learned that that $1.3 million is already divvied up and gone...
...but they let me blurt out my piece and invited me to come back.
Dt: October 14, 2009
To: Homeless Commission, City of Berkeley
Fm: Pamela Satterwhite
Re: Proposal to Allocate $331,200 of Berkeley’s $1.3 Million in Stimulus Dollars Designated For the Homeless to Fund an Earthship Construction “Test-Site” Built By And For the City’s Chronic Homeless
Dear Commissioners:
Globally, a local community-based movement is building known as the ‘Transition Movement.’ Its goal is to “support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change.” It began in Kinsale, Ireland and Totnes, England a few years ago. Its centerpiece is the design of what its practitioners call an “Energy Descent Action Plan” – and what I think of as a “Power-Down Plan” – based on the use, reclamation, and promotion of “alternative energy.”
Its key precepts are: ‘sustainable living,’ ‘wise energy-use,’ ‘reduced-consumption,’ ‘self-reliance-building,’ and ‘waste-reduction.’
In the spirit of “radical redefinition,” which I believe the times call for, I would like to propose to you that Berkeley design a “Power-Down Plan” that takes as its starting point and base the reclamation of discarded and unappreciated human energy. Such a plan could establish an important precedent for the justice and rationality of addressing homelessness from an environmental standpoint and become the urban standard for this model.
I believe the most effective such model would include three key elements:
-
Setting aside communal land and onerous irrelevant codes for a “test site”;
-
Building Earthships;
-
Teaching Earthship-Construction to those interested among the homeless.
** What Is An Earthship?:
An Earthship is a house built into the earth, in balance with the earth, facing south, maintaining a constant seventy-degree temperature simply by its design, completely self-sustaining: it fries its’ human feces, the resulting ashes fertilize the plants growing within the house itself; it grows its own food, generates its own energy, and collects its own water.
As to why this remarkable structure has not been more widely utilized, its creator, Michael Reynolds, replies as follows:
We have corralled ourselves with laws and codes that, while written to protect us, are also keeping us from evolving at the pace necessary to keep up with global change and population explosion. This is much like a barn built to protect horses from the cold. By an act of fate it catches on fire and traps them inside to burn to death. Due to global change and increasing population, our barn is burning. Our laws and codes have become barriers that won’t let us escape the burning barn fast enough to survive. The future will bring humanity extreme hardship unless we can bypass certain laws and codes in designated areas in order to experiment with new and more logical ways of living in our physical environment.
In the 1940s, New Mexico designated several thousand acres of land for testing weapons of nuclear destruction. There, scientists dropped an atomic bomb. Many codes and environmental standards were put aside for this endeavor in the name of defense from our enemies. Can’t we now take this same bold step to designate both acreage and legislation in every state to explore methods of sustainable life on this planet? The evolution of sustainable living methods must be allowed a “test site,” free from the crippling restraints of laws, codes and basic human encumbrances, in the name of defense…
…from our own failing methods of living.
In his Earthships, Vol. 1 he writes:
The only real major piece of equipment needed to build a tire building is a backhoe…Other typical tools needed are a chain saw, skill saw, and a cement mixer…The secondary materials are those which make up the fill in walls, ceilings, floors, glazing, and miscellaneous carpentry…Floors can be made from any local indigenous material from concrete to flagstone to tile or wood. Some Earthships in New Mexico have used adobe mud floors which are traditional in the area. They are very beautiful and will work anywhere. Floors should take advantage of local materials that are of a low energy impact nature, however they are quite conventional in the application to the Earthship structure. (p. 78-9)
The largest expense in Earthship construction is labor – the strictly voluntary labor of those interested in participating. The cost of earth removal and collecting the automobile tires and recycled aluminum cans (the primary building materials of the earthship) is relatively modest.
The advantages of using Stimulus funds to address homelessness in this manner are multifold: granting land to those without homes for the purpose of designing and building their own earthships offers the potential of a permanent solution for the people involved, requiring a modest initial outlay rather than on-going funding; it imparts real knowledge and skills that are broadly useful, and needed to address the climate crisis; it will re-claim, beautify and cultivate abandoned land; and it will empower all involved in the project.
The seemingly intractable problem of homelessness needs a fresh approach and vision, which I believe this model reflects. I hope you will agree to explore it further.
Pamela Satterwhite, P.O. Box 3952, Berkeley, CA 94703, 510.506.0080
Addendum:
One of the Commissioners asked me to give them, when I come back, "a specific model of what's been done elsewhere"....
...This is the usual screen to preclude the possibility of anything even mildly suggestive of 'freedom'...
...As it doesn't exist anywhere it mustn't exist anywhere.
[From: OnTheRoadLog 49, Friday, 10.16.09 ]
To: Housing Advisory Commission, City of Berkeley, November 5, 2009
Fm: Pamela Satterwhite
Re: Comment to “November 5th Public Hearing On Housing and Community Needs”:
The Need To Set Aside Communal Land For Housing Arrangements and Gardens – To Be Held In Common In Perpetuity – e.g. an Earthship Village Built By And For The Low / No-Income
Dear Commissioners:
The current crisis facing the planet and the nation calls for new thinking in approaching seemingly intractable problems. In the case of ever-widening income disparities stemming from increased financial speculation in the banking industry (leading to our current foreclosure crisis) – and resultant increased displacement of low- and working-class people from their communities – the most promising new way of thinking merges environmental concerns with the demand for universal human dignity.
More and more people in the U.S. are thinking along these same lines (see Addendum 1.)
Globally, a local community-based movement is building to “support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change.” Inherent in the growing environmental concern is an understanding that gross income disparities, tied to an unsustainable disconnection of human beings from our earth, is the root of the problem.
It is estimated that we are perhaps mid-way into the current foreclosure crisis and that millions more among us will find ourselves without a roof over our heads at night. New housing and community land-use projects – serving low-income and working-class communities in the City of Berkeley – should, given the joint environmental and foreclosure crises, take as their starting point and base the reclamation of discarded and unappreciated human energy, tied to a redefined relationship to the earth.
As a South Berkeley resident I can speak to the destabilizing effect of financial speculation in real estate on our community. People are losing their homes all around me, and beyond even this, there is a growing sense that we low-income residents are considered ‘expendable’ and irrelevant to the design of our own communities. If allowed to design and build our own “Earthship Village” it would establish an important precedent for the justice and rationality of addressing the housing shortage from an environmental standpoint, and become the urban standard for this perspective.
I believe the most effective such model would include three key elements:
-
Setting aside communal land and onerous irrelevant codes for a “test site”;
-
Teaching Earthship-Construction to those interested within the community;
-
Building Earthships.
(see above description: What Is An Earthship?**)
The largest expense in Earthship construction is labor – the strictly voluntary labor of those interested in participating. The cost of earth removal and collecting the automobile tires and recycled aluminum cans (the primary building materials of the Earthship) is relatively modest.
The advantages of using public housing funds to address the housing shortage and the devastating lack of ‘community’ in this manner are multifold: granting land to those in need of homes for the purpose of designing and building their own Earthships offers the potential of a permanent solution for the people involved, requiring a modest initial outlay rather than on-going funding; it imparts real knowledge and skills that are broadly useful, and needed to address the climate crisis; it will re-claim, beautify and cultivate abandoned land; and it will empower all involved in the project.
On the issue of ‘cost’:
What is exciting about an Earthship Village project in “bottom-line” terms is that, much like the Earthship itself, the project is self-replicating. The up-front outlay is (with the exception of earth removal) a one-time-only cost that leads to a permanent, and healthy, solution to the problem of human displacement. I think we will find that working communally with one’s hands, designing and creating a shared dream, provides therapeutic as well as material results.
The seemingly intractable problem of homelessness and housing shortage needs a fresh approach and vision, which I believe this model reflects. I hope you will agree to explore it further.
Pamela Satterwhite, P.O. Box 3952, Berkeley, CA 94703, 510.506.0080
** Communication With Sister Joan:
Sister Joan helped co-found a straw-bale home construction project for the low-income in New Mexico called Tierra Madre. She recently responded (November 10, 2009 email) to a query from me asking whether the land used in the project was owned by the people. Here's an excerpt from her letter:
The project I worked with and helped co-found with new immigrants in Sunland Park, NM on the border is called Tierra Madre. It is a self-help straw-bale home construction that incorporates water harvesting and passive solar and solar water heaters. The situation there is much different than Berkeley...but here are a few details and learnings.
The people are impoverished and exploited by land developers, there is little access to land and the company that has land charges immense interest and can take the land at any time, since the interest is so high they could not qualify for loans for houses so the company also sold very energy inefficient trailer homes.
Tierra Madre is a non-profit and we found land to lease long term in a land trust from the state of NM land office. A very creative and workable solution. The homes are financed with a combination of various programs like Rural Housing Development a few banks, etc. Families go through classes and qualifications and must assist all the homeowners in a group to build the homes and no one moves in until all homes are complete. There is a requirement of certain hours. In addition, there is a community organization that they are part of and is more and more led by the families themselves. The whole community is also looking at economic development as the last of 47 straw-bale homes are completed. We had the support of the city government for the project, but they did not give us money. We sought grants, etc to do this project.
My reply:
** Dear Sister Joan: Thank you for responding to my query. I traveled recently to Taos, New Mexico to try – unsuccessfully as it turned out – to meet with Michael Reynolds, the creator of the Earthship. The drive there and back (revealing certain patterns) proved illustrative and troubling – specifically the fact that "the banks" are financing the beautification of urban areas – urban gardens, libraries, landscaping – while simultaneously finessing the removal of low-income people from those areas – through debt. I asked you about land ownership because I'm convinced that developing and extending communal (in perpetuity) land ownership is critical if we are to achieve our broad social justice goals, insuring that no one is left "on their own, alone." I personally am convinced that we need a mass movement to unseat 'Power' (my website is ) and I've written a book on this subject which I'd love to mail to you if you're interested (it's posted on the website so you can check it out there to decide if you are.)
Thanks for getting in touch. I'd love to remain in touch and help to further a process of shared problem-solving. Thanks so much for all you do.
..."Identify which cities in the Transition Movement have set up Energy Services Companies (ESCOs) 'owned by the community, to provide locally generated electricity,'” (from Waking Up, The Plan, Pt. 12)
...Identify Multiple "Test-Sites" on which the low / no-income interested in learning how to build, and live in, Earthships, could begin to build (free of irrelevant code hindrances).
...Promote a "re-valuation of human beings" -- and life in general -- by assessing local ordinances for their compliance with "life-first" values.
Communal Living & Land (The Future In The Present)
(Everything we grow now harmonizes with our future freedom....If "good fellowship" is to be our future it will need communal land in which to grow -- fueled by human energy...and public funds. We have to build the demand for communal land.)
...Land Grants To "The People"...set aside for communal living...in perpetuity.
...Code Suspensions...including building codes, business codes for the low / no-income, and inducements for small businesses that provide public toilet access.
...Free "Earthship-Building" Workshops for the Low / No-Income.