Eating with the Seasons

Finding Local Food in San Francisco

My book club just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors. The book is about her family's journey into local foods - either grown by them or grown in their region. They live in Virginia, where they have seasons, so the book is a month by month tour of what happens on a farm. Some sections made me downright homesick. Others were inspirational. The story is peppered with bits about the industrial food system, that in turn evoked anger, sadness, desperation and hope. One major take-a-way for me was how important it is to support local, organic farmers, and eat what the seasons bring. I new this before, and now I understand the theory and practice behind it more concretely. Here's a quick list of reasons to eat local.

Over the course of reading the book, I began exploring more local food options for us, specifically what we can get in grain and meat. Along the way, I found many other wonderful CSAs (community supported agriculture). Here are some of my findings.

Let's toast to protein!
Meat CSAs in the Bay Area This is the best guide that I found for pasture finished meat CSAs.
Frazier lane organics has organic beef and pork that can be ordered.
Places to buy Hertiage Turkeys in San Francisco Bay Area
Mary's Turkeys is actually close to SF, relatively. I'll get one of her turkeys for Thanksgiving this year. She also raises ducks and chickens.
Wise Food Ways has another listing of local meats.

Grains
It was a bit harder to find local grains. Eatwell Farm sells wheat berries at local farmer's markets and you can use their mill to make flour.

Windborne Farm is in far north California, which isn't exactly local (closer than Nebraska though), and they have a CSA that has a delivery in Berkeley. She offers a wide variety of dried beans, legumes and grains. Many of the varieties are not commonly available to the consumer; a majority of them will be grown out from a few seeds saved by grass-roots seed banks. The grain shares are delivered to your drop site monthly, not weekly. To sign up for the grain shares, contact Jennifer Green at: (530) 468-4340, 4932 Scott River Rd, Fort Jones, CA 96032. I've signed up.

Produce
Vegetables and fruit CSAs are definitely the easiest to come by here. In fact, there are so many of them sometimes it's hard to choose. I've been a member of Eating with the Seasons for about five years now. They have the best strawberries ever! Besides the veggies and produce, I can also get eggs, chicken (occasionally), local olive oil, and fair trade coffee. Plus, they deliver to work.

Om Organics has the most comprehensive list of CSAs I've seen.
Live Power Community Farm delivers to the Presidio. They have a lot of partnerships with other farms, and you can also sign up for meat, grain, fruit, and rice.
Eat Well Farm has deliveries in San Francisco and the East Bay, but many drop off locations have a waiting list.
Full Belly Farm has a lot of Berkeley deliveries.
Terra Firma Farm
Farm Fresh to You has home deliveries.
The Berkeley Ecology Center has a pretty good list of CSAs too.
Wise Food Ways has another list of local CSAs.

So, what is permaculture anyway?

I took an urban gardening class today through the Solar Living Institute based on permaculture concepts. It was very interesting and inspiring. After a day of information intake, I'm usually overwhelmed, but today I'm not. I'm excited about all that there is to learn, and thrilled to notice that I have a solid foundation.

So, what is permaculture anyway? It's a holistic approach to working with nature that integrates consideration of the earth, consideration of people and being fair socially, economically and to future generations. This is very similar to the Blue Movement, but is more concrete in how it can be applied. Unlike many other fields, permaculture has a set of guiding principles that helps you think about the project at hand.

One major principle is efficiency, which manifests in many ways, including:
-No til gardening by heavy mulching and composting
-Plant selection for your climate, which for us is drought tolerant for less watering
-Planting edible perennials so that each year your garden feeds you more with less work

Basically, putting a little thought and effort into the planning and creation of your garden so that only a little maintenance is required.

Another concept is creating ecosystems in your garden. This is done by planting many different plants together that get along - tall and short, shade and light, plants that repel each other pest's, plants that pull up nutrients from the deep soil for other plants to use. This ties into efficiency.

There's a lot more to this, and there are lots of resources to learn more. That was one of the great things about the class. The teacher cited many, many books, websites and organizations that are available in the bay area. It makes me really glad to be here now.

Here's a list of the resources from my notes.

BOOKS
Gaia's Garden
Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer
The Soil Food Web
The Earth Moved
Ann LoveJoy's Organic Garden Design School
Food Not Lawns
Guerrilla Gardening
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands
Author Ruth Stout
Cornacopia
Golden Gate Gardening - a great book for gardening in San Francisco (Ynnej, can I have it back now?)

ORGANIZATIONS
Back Yard Orchard Culture
Village Harvest
GreenCollarJobs.com
Alemany Farm is the largest urban farm. It happens to be about a mile from my house.
Ploughshares Nursery in Alameda
StopWaste.org
Urban Permaculture Guild
Solar Living Institute


Other resources I've found:
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Valley of Heart's Delight run by a good friend of ours Susan Stansbury. They focus on reconnecting to local, seasonal, organic food on the Peninsula.
Urban Sprouts is an organization in San Francisco that brings gardens to schools, classrooms and plates.
Hidden Villa is a beautiful organic farm in Los Altos on the peninsula. They have a CSA program and a summer camp for urban youth and a hostel in the winter.
The Global Warming Diet written by a good friend of ours and a fabulous chef!
Ecology Center - does many, many cool projects, including farmers markets, an eco-house and demonstration garden in Berkeley
Slow Food Nation is a week long slow food extravaganza here in SF - all the information, food, and parties you could ever want. It's hosted by the US Chapter of Slow Food International. Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Three Stone Hearth is a worker-owned cooperative, offering
nutrient dense foods to homes and families around the San Francisco Bay Area. You subscribe, they make healthy food, you pick the food you want from the menu for the week, you pick up or they deliver (which costs more of course). Yum!
Food Declaration - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture which will call for healthy food, farms, and communities will be read aloud in a ceremony at Slow Food Nation on August 28th, in the Rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. Roots of Change will be working with Slow Food and other NGOs for the next nine months to collect hundreds of thousands more signatures using face-to-face meetings and the World Wide Web. These signatures will be delivered, along with a set of policy recommendations to policy makers in Washington in the Fall of 2009.
RSF Social Finance provides socially responsible investors, donors, for-benefit organizations, and social enterprises innovative investing, lending, and philanthropic services to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability.
UpStream21 puts financial resources into small, successful, eco-friendly, privately owned companies, such as small farms and timber companies
The American Food System - A Commonwealth Club panel
Local Harvest helps you find farmers markets in your area no matter where you are in the US.

And because I could do this all night, here's one last place where you can go to find all kinds of organizations of all varieties - WiserEarth with WISER standing for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, is the first online database of all issues and organizations doing good work and it can be edited by the community.

Some Tips and Ideas from the class:
Duck eat slugs
Call local tree trimmers and ask for their wood chips. They're often happy to give them to you for mulch because otherwise they often have to pay to dispose of them.
Consider turning your swimming pool into a swimming pond. There's a company doing this in LA.
Remineralize your soil with rock dust.
Comfrey and Nettle are nutrient rich plants.
Mushrooms clean water and can act as natural filtration systems and give you yummy food!
Throw seed balls into vacant lots to encourage plants.
Prune the top 1/3 of your fruiting trees in the summer, after the tree is done bearing fruit, for fruit trees that have grown too tall to harvest by hand.
Try nasturium leaf pesto.
Make a potato column.
Mine the group genius.



Whew.
Ok. I'm a little overwhelmed now. Still excited, but maybe just a little tired.
When I feel like there's so much to learn and do that I don't know where to start, I remember that I'll start where I'm at with what I have and who I'm with.
That makes it doable.

Please let me know your favorite gardening and permaculture resources.

I'm going to pick the raw food recipes I'm going to make tomorrow. More on that later...

What's your PSP?

Blue.
Sky.
Water.
Wal-mart...

A few years ago, Adam Werbach (see previous post) began working with Wal-Mart. Some said that Wal-mart had coaxed him over to the dark side of the force. But who better to help one of the largest companies in the world become more sustainable than a die-hard environmentalist? Yes, Wal-mart has made a commitment to sustainability. They set out three goals:
Produce zero waste
Be powered by renewable energy
Sell only green products

This is huge.

HUGE!

When Wal-mart says jump, suppliers JUMP. So, for one of the largest retailers in the world to begin greening its operations has an enormous positive impact. It creates markets for sustainable projects and green businesses that otherwise wouldn't think about it. Did you know that Wal-mart is the largest retailer of regional, organic produce? Think about that.

But making their products more green was only one step. They realized that it was also important to bring sustainability into the awareness and action of their employees and then their customers. To do this they implemented a Personal Sustainability Project.

From Adam's Commonwealth Club speech on April 10, 2008:

At the heart of the project was a simple voluntary commitment that we called a PSP, or a personal sustainability practice.

What are the qualities of a PSP? It:

Sustains the planet,
Makes you happy,
Affects the community,
Repeatable,
Takes visible action

Examples: Bike to work. Park in the spot that's farthest from where you're going. Change your lights bulbs to CFLs. Care for a park....The behavioral idea behind PSP is a simple one we call nano-practices. Nano-practices are the thousands of tiny things you do each day that make up your lifestyle. How you tie your shoes, the type of shoes you wear, your choice of socks, how you fold your socks, and whether you wear your shoes indoors. Instead of trying to change the big things about someone's identity -- whether they're a Democrat or Republican, for example -- we start by finding daily or recurring practices that can express his or her values. A personal sustainability practice, at its most basic level, is something that's a repeated action that's good for you, your community, and the planet.

My first PSP is to eat only fair trade, organic chocolate. I've been doing this pretty well for a few months now, which is great for a recovering candy addict.

My current PSP is to bike or walk one time a week when I would drive. My bike is pumped up and ready to go. I've been to the store once on it. Luckily, this is challenging because I don't drive much to begin with.

What's your PSP?

BLUE

AKA The Evolution of an Environmentalist - Part 3 continued from "The Evolution of an Environmentalist - Part 2"

To understand what the BLUE movement is, we need to understand what it grows out of - dead environmentalism. Environmentalism is dead because it's approach is outdated, uninspiring and not up to scale for the challenge we face today - global climate change. Traditionally, environmentalism has isolated a problem, such as air pollution, created a technical solution, such as emissions standards for vehicles, and worked to get it turned into law. This doesn't work very well when the challenge, climate change, is the result of our entire way of life. Plus, environmentalism has said "No, No, No" and "Don't, Don't, Don't" for everything from shopping to driving to eating, basically living in our culture. This doesn't inspire and, instead, sets up a seemingly unattainable standard, leading us to give up before we start.

Ok. So what is the BLUE movement?

From Adam Werbach's speech "The Birth of Blue" at the Commonwealth Club on 12 April 2008:

As vast and common as the ocean, BLUE is a platform for sustainability that goes beyond the deep, beautiful green of environmentalism. Green puts the planet at the center of the dialogue. BLUE puts people at the center.... Green is the beating heart of the emerging BLUE movement. Green represents the simple and inarguable wisdom of ecology: that all things are connected. BLUE brings together a broader set of human concerns, from practice to price, from nature to society. BLUE integrates all four streams of sustainability: social, cultural, economic and environmental. BLUE puts the way we treat ourselves and each other at the center of our focus....

There are three desired outcomes for the BLUE movement. First, to measurably improve the quality of life of people who join. Second, to engage as many people as possible in the effort, and third, to increase the effectiveness of their activism. The primary tactic is getting one billion people to create their own personal sustainability practices.

Remember, when I wrote that I didn't get into environmentalism for the environment, but for the people? This is what I was talking about.

So, what does "being blue" actually mean? What does some one who's "BLUE" do?
Since, it's my computer curfew, the answer to that question will have to come another night.
Next up, PSP and the big box...

The evolution of an "Environmentalist" - Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

So, as I declared my major in Environmental Economics, I became a Consumer Activist, even though I had no more money than every other starving college student. What this meant was that I started shopping at Wild Oats/Whole Foods Markets, buying organic food, cooking less meat, and thinking long and hard about purchases of new items. The idea is that when we buy products that we believe in, that are good for the environment and society, even though they may be more expensive, we'll create a demand for those products, and eventually the supply will increase, the price will go down and more people will be able to afford the healthier items. AKA voting with my dollars, putting my money where my mouth is. I was out to save the world with shopping.

After college, I moved to California, got a job in fundraising, then as an office manager, then fundraising again and now as an executive assistant. You can read about these experiences in a previous post.

During the 2004 presidential election, I realized, along with many other people, that more than just environmentalists had a problem with communicating their issues in a way that could be heard. All liberals and liberal issues tended to have this trouble. I read Don't think of an Elephant by George Lakoff and went to the Spiritual Activism conference in Berkeley. I began to see that a more integrated, thoughtful and inclusive approach to all of our issues was needed.

Around this time, the controversial essay Death of Environmentalism by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus was released. Shortly thereafter, Adam Werbach gave his speech Is Environmentalism Dead? at the Commonwealth Club. He concluded it was and I agreed, so I didn't pay it much attention.

I'm paying attention now.

Next up...The Birth of Blue...

The evolution of an "Environmentalist" - Part 1

Am I an environmentalist?
Originally, no.

I came to "environmentalism" through a belief in the value and worth of human beings. The logic is thus:

*I like humans. I like living.
*Humans need water, air, food, shelter to live.
*Humans are destroying the very things on which their future existence depends - nature.
*So, protect nature to protect the future existence of humans.

Growing up on a farm, I had a closer relationship with the water, air and dirt that made our food than many people, which is probably why I came to this seriousness as young as I did.

In junior high, I started turning off the water facet anytime it absolutely wasn't necessary, like when brushing my teeth, and seeing how short I could possibly make my shower to conserve as much water as possible. In high school, I joined the environmental club, became president of the club, and helped implement a school wide recycling program and planted a tree in the courtyard, so we wouldn't have to get a cut one every year for christmas.

At the age of 15, I decided that I wanted to save the world. Since I liked the trees and nature and saw their importance to human survival, I adopted the label "environmentalist" and the movement "environmentalism" because it was the closest fit out there.

Since then, my understanding of environmentalism has evolved. It is no longer just the protecting of trees. (Ironically, I work for an organization that does precisely just that.) Early in college, I got tired of being considered the "enemy" by my family, namely grandparents, still on the farm. To them, environmentalism was a dirty word, and I'd succomded to the dark side of the force as a city-slicker who just wanted to take away all of their land from them. Being the enemy upset me, in large part, because I got a large part of my love for nature from them.

So, I set out to build bridges. I recognized that many environmentalists and environmentalism did a very poor job at communicating with and understanding people who weren't already card-carrying tree-huggers. This was not a good strategy for a movement that needed as many supporters as possible to affect the scale of change that was necessary to make the earth a place still inhabitable for current and future generations.

Around that time (I'm still in my first or second year at university) I came across and read The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken. What he wrote made so much sense to me. Basically, that business, consumers, economics and money could be used as a force for positive change for the environment. Because of this I minored in microeconomics, to give me a solid understanding of markets, supply and demand, cost-benefit ratios, and externalities. Combined with my major of Environmental Policy (of course), I called my course of study Environmental Economics, as there was no such major. The idea was that I could translate between environmentalists and businesses so that they could see the benefits to the bottom line and the environment of working together and accounting for the externalities of doing business.

At this time, I was also integrating the idea of the consumer activist...

-end of part 1-

It's now past my computer curfew, so you'll have to wait a few days for the next installment.

Garberville

I just got back from a visit near home yesterday. I got to hear some old-timers stories, eat some home-made baked goods, and gossip with some ladies.

In reality, Mark and I just got back yesterday from a site visit to Southern Humboldt County so that I could figure out logistics for the Annual Meeting in September. Much progress was made there, but that's not what this is about.

Occasionally, I am lucky enough to get to take a trip up North for work. Last year, I made it up to Crescent City, 7 hours north of SF and almost in Oregon, a few times. I love it up there. The big trees have a lot to do with that. But, also, there's the people. Every time I go up there, I hear stories ala Grandpa from some old-timer local, usually an ex-logger, and am usually mistaken for someone's relative, not a city slicker, but someone who used to teach at the school or someone's friend's niece. Really. This happens every time.

I take it as a compliment.

A little about Humboldt and Del Norte counties. Driving, you don't get to Humboldt County until you're about 4 hours north of San Francisco. You don't reach Del Norte County until at least 6.5 hours north of SF. It's country.

In Humboldt County, the Eureka-Arcata area is the major town, the largest urban area between Portland and San Francisco. It has a small airport and a population of about 60,000. Humboldt State University in Arcata has about 7,500 students. For many years, logging was the major industry. Today, the hospital is the biggest employer. The Garberville-Redway towns have a population of about 2,000. The surrounding hills have thousands more people. The area used to be large ranches, which have been divided up into 30, 40, 80 acre parcels with a family on each. The Garberville area has a rich pioneering history, complete with river rats, ridge runners, moonshine stills, logging, farming, ranching and all of the tensions and trials that go with settling an area. This area has also been a beacon for hippies and people who want to live a more "alternative" life. So the locals are an intriguing mix. Just north of Garberville starts Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the first redwoods park, which contains the stand of redwoods that inspired the founding of Save-the-Redwoods League 90 years ago. Today, the redwoods provide a lot of tourism and service industry jobs. There are several very nice restaurants and lots of places to stay and camp. Humboldt County is also home to Pacific Lumber, Headwaters Forest, and all the lands that are contested in the PL bankruptcy.

In Del Norte County, the major town is Crescent City. The town and surrounding area has a population of about 15,000. The major employer used to be the timber industry and is now the prison. My favorite chicken fried steak in California is in a diner here. There are lots of chain restaurants and a few nice restaurants. The "hippie" population isn't as prevalent here, so it's a bit more country. There are lots of gorgeous redwood parks up here.

I'm from the country, a small town of 35,000 in mid-Missouri. Before we moved to town when I was in grade school, we lived on a farm, complete with chickens, goats, cats, sheep and a sheep dog. My dad helped my Grandpa farm soybeans, corn, and feed for cattle. My days were filled with making mud-pies, playing in the creek, reading books in my treehouse, fishing with Grandpa, baking with Grandma, picking corn and watermelons for the farmer's market, and trying to steal the eggs from the rooster. I was a true tomboy. But we moved to town before I learned to hunt. That always has made me a little sad.

I went to university in a big city. I moved to California and have lived the last eight years in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the nation. I'm still more comfortable barefoot up in a tree than I am at a fancy restaurant with three forks for my dinner or in Santa Cruz eating a tofu scramble. I can eat in a fancy restaurant without embarrassing myself (too much=) and I can do hippie handicrafts with the best of them. I've learned to do these things, but what comes naturally and what I feel most comfortable doing is making a pork chop gravy and listening to Dave's stories about the '64 flood.

So, when I go up North, I'm at ease, because it's country. It's the same folks as my family, making a living off the land. They don't set out to rape the land, they just want to use the resources they have to do as well as they can for their family. It's when big corporations got involved, in both farming and timber, that things got nasty. With this perspective, I can hear their stories and they can tell them to me. And it's like being at the kitchen table with Grandpa.

That's why the visit was like being home.

The Business of Being Born

A few Saturdays ago, Mark and I went to see "The Business of Being Born," a film produced by Ricki Lake about birth culture in America. After the birth of her first child, which was in a hospital with unwanted medical interventions, she began doing research about birth because she believed there was another way for birth to be. Her second child was born in her home bath tub with a mid-wife present. This film is the result of her research.

I've been fortunate enough to have a very good friend who became a doula. A doula is a birthing coach, a mother for the mother, a support system for the new parents. So, I easily know more than the average person about what birth can be like. Even so, this film was very powerful for me. What I learned made me feel awe and anger, and lots of things in between. As Mark and I look at getting pregnant sometime in the next while (being purposefully vague) and as my friends become pregnant, the issues looked at in this film become even more important.

Here's a summary of what I learned:

early 1900s - 95% of births in the US are in the home with a mid-wife; more people go to medical school and get degrees in obstetrics; doctors led a smear campaign against mid-wives, calling them dirty, ignorant and everything bad associated with the "old country" and touted hospitals as clean and gleaming; fact is most doctors had never seen a live birth

1930s - half of births in the US take place in the hospital; xrays were taken of the pelvis which caused cancer in newborns

1940s to 1960s - women were told birth was painful and that there were drugs they could take to take away the pain, because they were "modern, liberated" women, they wanted drugs, not pain; fact is the drug (scopolamine) that was used didn't erase the pain, just the memory of the pain by erasing self-awareness and self-control, which meant women has to be physically restrained (tied down) during birth, all of which resulted in post-traumatic stress type memories

1970s to 1990s/now - drugs whose long-term side effects continue to be administered to women giving birth, thalidomide for morning sickness led to birth defects, cytotec to stimulate contractions caused ruptured uteruses

Now - 99% of births take place in a hospital, 8% of births are attended by mid-wives, 1% of births take place outside a hospital; the US has the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world; in the five coutries with the lowest infant mortaility rates, 70% of births are attended by midwives.

What birth is often like in a hospital
* a woman is laid on her back with her feet up in stirups, which is the most dysfunctional position for birth because it makes the pelvis smaller and makes it difficult to use stomach muscles to push
*a woman is in a room with lots of people she doesn't know and is told to hurry up
*she's given an epidural for the pain of the contractions, the drug retards contractions, so she's given pitocin to stimulate contractions that are longer and and stronger than natural contractions, so she gets another epidural, then more pitocin, by now the baby is stressed, so she "must" get an emergency cesarean section, which is major surgery and puts her at higher risk for uncurable infections (staph) most commonly caught in hospitals


Over 30% of babies in the US are born by c-section.

What a natural birth can be like
*a woman is surrounded by people she loves and trusts in a place where she is comfortable
*she can move around which helps the baby get in the right position to be born
*she's not rushed
*she experiences the pain of the contractions, but is better able to experience them because she has the support of a doula and midwife who remind her that her body was meant for this, her body can handle it, her body is strong
*she can catch her own baby
*she can hold the baby immediately after being born and fully experience the highest rush of oxytocin that she will in her life, oxytocin is the hormone that is released during orgasm and bonds us to another person, after a birth oxytocin bonds the mother to the child and triggers the mothering instinct

Epidurals dampen the oxytocin release. C-sections completely bypass the oxytocin release. Think about it.

For as long as I've been thinking about these things, feminism, body issues, vaginas and the like, natural birth always made sense to me. What really pisses me off is how our culture tells women that we're not strong enough to do the thing that we're built to do, that we have been doing for millenium (very well or we all wouldn't be here) without any "help" AND that we haven't questioned it. Our culture is scared of women who know their power - women who know and love their bodies. Giving birth is the most substantial way we have that we can know our power. A common theme in the film and in other birth stories is how transformative giving birth is. It is a rite of passage that our cultures ignores and devalues.

What makes me feel awe is the capacity we have as women for giving new life, for taking ourselves to a very hard place and transforming ourselves through it. That takes courage.

It's all well and good for me to say "yes, natural birth is a couragous and amazing and women were built to do it," but that still doesn't mean I have an idea what it looks like. Because of our culture, I didn't have a context for natural birth. I didn't know the stories that make it real. I haven't known many women who have given birth naturally, so it's hard to still realize, feel, do something other than intellectualize, what it might be like.

I've been reading "Spiritual Midwifery" by Ina May Gaskin, groundbreaking midwife of The Farm in Tennessee. The first 200 pages are nothing but stories of natural births. It's amazing. It's providing me that context. It's giving me the stories. It's teaching me about birth by sharing with me the stories of other women. This is also what makes the film powerful. Several families allowed their child's birth to be part of the film. It was so beautiful.

So, see this film. It will be available through Netflix by the end of February.

Check this stuff out for yourself. There's a lot of information" out there. Don't take my word for it.

Green Festival

Mark and I went to the Green Festival today. I hadn't been for the two years. It's a pretty intense event - so many people, and things, and information. It can get a bit overwhelming. Plus, the hippie quotient is pretty high. I'm better at co-existing at sometimes than others. If I'm not feeling good about how I'm living, the sight of a long-haired, tie-dyed, vegan hippie, triggers even more self-loathing and guilt. It brings up all of the coulda, shoulda, woulda's. I could've joined a commune. I should be a vegatarian. I would've been a good farmer. You get the idea. But, today, it's ok. I've even been actually looking forward to going to the green festival for several weeks now. Specifically, I was looking forward to being reminded that I have many good choices in the market place (most of the festival space is taken up by "green" vendors) and to seeing two of my favorite authors speak.

Mark dropped me off just in time for me to catch Paul Hawken speak. (He parked the car three blocks away and walked back in the rain.) Paul Hawken wrote The Ecology of Commerce which was a hugely influential book my freshman year of college. His book basically inspired me to create my major in Environmental Economics. The idea is that the marketplace doesn't have to be at odds with the environment. It can be used as a positive force. I can choose to use my money in ways that don't harm the earth - organic, reused, donations - and that if we each do that, it will make a huge difference. And it has. The number of sustainable choices we have has grown tremendously! His talk today was based on his new book Blessed Unrest, about the massive movement of social justice and environmental non-governmental organizations in the world. It's way bigger than the Catholic church. Definetly a source of hope. We're not as well organized as the church, but we're just getting started.

The other speaker I was excited to hear was Lynn Twist, author of The Soul of Money. This was a hugely influential book for me in 2002, when I started fundraising at CGF. It's a little harder to summarize her talk. The idea is that we're trapped by money, something we created. Scarcity is a myth and there's enough to go around. I highly recommend reading her book. I got a lot out of it.

Other things from the festival:
Shelter Books - cool books on building sustainable housing
Presidio MBA - a master's degree in sustainable business
Honest Kids - yummy beverages, disposable containers, but organic
Seeds of Change - certified, organic chocolate - and they gave me two bars!
San Francisco Green Map - a map of school gardens, green schools, special trees, and labyrinths, among other things
Living Crafts - great new magazine that features craft projects that I actually want to make, many are kid-friendly
Renegade Lunch Lady - from the Organic Valley vendors, who make excellent chocolate milk, I got a little booklet about Chef Ann and her work in school cafeterias
The Pachamama Alliance - a group that Lynn Twist helped start, that works to protect the Amazonian Rain Forest by partnering with the local peoples. I really like their idea of the new moon program. I'll probably incorporate something like that into my goddess gatherings. (and I have a problem with hippies?)
Green Clean - they don't have a website, but they're our cleaners (Yes, we have cleaners. It's worth it. Trust me.) and they do an excellent job without all of the chemicals
And the best for last...
Save a Snowman - I LOVE THIS!

The punchline - After a day being green, nothing sounded better for dinner than some good Soul Food. So, I took Mark to Hard Knox Cafe where I had some of the best EVAH fried chicken. So good.

Hope

Some mornings, I wake up to the news and don't handle it well. That's a really hard way to start the day. Darfur. Iraq. Suicide bombs. Refugee camps. Guantanamo. Torture. Miramar. Dictators. Military governments. Riots. Deaths. Trials. Secret memos. Election. Street violance. Identity theft. Indictments. War. Villages destroyed. Kids with no toys. Kids eating processed foods. Kids without insurance. Kids without parents. Kids without homes. One man's hope is to take a second wife, so that he can make more boys to fight the terrorists.

All of that was in the morning news - the 30 minutes I spend cuddling with Mark in our warm bed as we gain consciousness. Usually, I think, "That sucks. I'm going to go help save some trees today," and get on with my day. I get the day off today, so I have time to sit with the news.

And it SUCKS! I'm sitting here crying because I don't know what to do. I don't think I can do anything. I don't know where to start. There's so much that's wrong with the world. I feel guilty - for my prosperity. for my warmth. for our food, especially the non-organic, junk food. for my general complacence. for not wanting to know what's going on in the world because it hurts too much.

Two days ago, I finished the book Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. It's going to be with me for a while. Someone in that book dies while working to do good in the world. I haven't experienced death much. It has a big effect on me. The death of this character and her story in the book makes all of the news so much more real to me. so much more human. That's probably why I'm so affected by it this morning. I can practically see the faces.

The character in the book writes in a letter, "Here's what I've decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the detroyers nor the destroyed."

That last sentence has been stuck in my head.

As an american, I'm one of the destroyers, by paying taxes that subsidize wars. by buying food produced with poisons and wrapped in oil. by filling my gas tank. It's depressing.

The character also writes, "Wars and elections are both too big and too small in the long run. The daily work -- that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost."

So, now, I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to visit a neighbor and see her sunflowers. I'm going to go get a few items for tomorrow's picnic. I'm going to let the word hope rest in my brain and see what comes up. There's got to be something in there.

Viva la Moutholucion!

Tonight for dinner, I made butternut squash coconut curry soup, lentil and rice pilaf with leeks, and organic spinach salad. All of the veggies were from Eating with the Seasons.

By working directly with local farmers and producers, Eating With The Seasons offers a convenient way to get fresh, local and organic produce at a reasonable price. They deliver to our office and, after their taking a winter break, today was the first delivery since mid-December.

I can't believe how much I missed it! I've gotten so spoiled by it. Even when I did go grocery shopping this last month, I couldn't bring myself to buy veggies or fruit -- too many choices, what's in season?, not enough time to cook (traveling), it wasn't local, not organic, just not as good. I think I bought four bananas. So, I'm glad it's on again. I was getting really frustrated with the lack of fresh foods in my diet. Eating out is good, but eating with the seasons is better.

Then, tonight in my email was a note from our friend Morgan. He shot a new short for Freerange Studios, producers of the Store Wars. It is awesome!

Please take four minutes to watch The Mouth Revolution. It's related to this post, I swear. And it's funny.

Thankfully I'm marrying a grup!

At the core of being a Grup is "rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise."

Mark just posted about an article in the New York Metro - Up With Grups - which, except for the emphasis on materialism, I mostly agree with. It's a long article, but worth the read.

Mark and I definitely aren't as trendy as those described in the article. (Though he is hipper than me.) We don't have earbuds implanted or spend a lot of money on clothes. We put very little emphasis on material things. I'm woefully unsavvy about the latest anything - always have been. But, when I do catch on (thanks to Mark and Jesser on the music front), I love it! And I'm probably not going to take up skateboarding, though I'll try snowboarding probably next season and eventually get as good as Mark.

But, doing something I love and being passionate about and enjoying my life is core to who I am. And this is one fundamental differences between the boomers and the grups. I've had many conversations with my father who has trouble understanding that money is not my motivating factor. A larger paycheck is not worth my sanity or my happiness.

Grups are parents, too. The article starts talking about that on page five. We're not parents yet, but when we are, you can be sure that our offspring will know The Beatles, Beck, Franz Ferdinand and Grandaddy. And, of course, we'll do our best to model passionate lives for them - for better or worse.

Worth a 1,000 words

This picture tells about a million stories. I hardly know where to begin. I'll just try and tell part of one.

I guess I'll start with the dead bobcat. Grandpa shot it last week with his cross-bow. It's properly tagged. It's frozen and hanging by the screen door on the back porch, which considering that the average high temperature in the last week has been 31 degrees, is just as effective as the freezer.

There are bobcats around because there are rabbits around. There are rabbits around because the river bottoms that my Grandpa used to farm were bought by the MO Dept. of Conservation for, well, conservation after the 1993 flood. The 1993 flood was a five hundred-year flood, because it only happens about that often. It was big. It broke huge holes in the levees and damaged a lot of good farmland. It brought in the "asian" carp, aka the jumping fish, and "Conservation".

Conservation let the Marion Bottoms grow up into woods, an area that the river can go into anytime it needs to. With the growth of woods, there has been a proliferation of mushrooms, rabbits, bobcats, mountain lions, otters, deer, coyote and, finally, bears. The wealth of game has brought hunters, who go into the bottoms, and get frustrated by the thick undergrowth of the young forest. They're out in the country and they see all of the surrounding area, which is great for hunting, but it's on private land, so they trespass. They shoot from the road. They're not safe or polite.

So, back to the bobcat on the back porch. Well, bobcats aren't endangered anymore, so they're fair game. Grandpa was out in his blind last week with his cross-bow hunting wild turkeys. He shot twice and missed, which is unusual. He's been hunting all of his life and has deadly accuracy. But he's old. His shoulders don't really work anymore. He can't lift them high, so maybe aiming isn't as easy as it once was. One arrow, though, when he went to retrieve it, had leg feathers from the turkey on it. So, he was close.

He may not have gotten a turkey, but the bobcat came right across his path. He wasn't sure he'd gotten it, but the trail of blood led him and his loyal dog, Lady, to where it had been killed. This, at first thought, can easily seem revolting. I always have a gut jerk reaction when I see a beautiful creature that has died. But I know that my Grandfather does not kill indiscriminately. I know he values the health and life on and of land much more than I can realize in my own life. If he kills something, he has a reason. I have to trust that and listen to his stories to see what that might be. For most game, it's easy. We eat it. But bobcats we don't eat, so I'm still learning about this.

I know enough to not ask directly what that reason might be. When I ask, I'm interpreted as attacking because I'm a city-dwelling environmentalist, which can be a dirty word out here. I'm in with the city-slickers who think they know better than someone who's been living from the land for 70 years. It doesn't work well when we go in and tell them what to do, even if we may have a better way, or at least something that may improve the situation. And oftentimes our understanding, from the desks in town, is a simplified or partial understanding of nature's fragile balance, and can genuinely, if unintentionally, mess things up. We have to close our text books, shut our mouths, and listen to the people who are stewards.

This lesson has been a long time in learning for me. I just hope that I can be around enough to earn their trust and learn their stories. I often have to swallow a big humility pill and bite my tongue hard, but I'm sure it will be worth it. People who love the land as much as my Grandparents do have a lot to teach, if I'm willing and present to learn. Maybe then, I can make my contribution to it.

Trees

I love trees. This has been a beautiful trip for trees. I've seen fall colors on them for the first time in five years. Yesterday, though, was a less beautiful day for trees. Driving to Olympia from Portland via Mount St. Helen's, I saw numerous clear cuts and many logging trucks. These things always make me sad. And yesterday I sobbed.


Just as I started up the road to the volcano, my ipod (on album shuffle) choose to play "Who bombed Judi Bari?" It is a cd that tells the story of Earth First organizer Judi Bari through her own speeches and songs. This was a very powerful, inspiring, raging, depressing, moving, draining thing to be listening to as I passed the trucks and cuts. I listened to it twice in a row.




Here's the basic story...

The corporate logging companies of Northern California have an agenda to clear cut as many old growth trees as possible in the summer of 1990 before the vote that fall on an initiative to protect those old growth trees. The goal of the logging companies was to make the vote and initiative pointless by making there be no trees left to protect.

A note about old growth trees. They're over 2000 years old, over 30 feet around, and several hundred feet tall. It takes about a dozen people stretched hand to hand to go around one. They are the most magnificant creatures I have ever seen in some of the most sacred habitat on the planet. When they're cut down, the rainforest turns to desert. The runoff clogs the rivers, kills the fish and creates mudslides that jeopardize the lives and homes of communities at the bottom of the hills.

Many people felt that logging the trees at that pace and that clearcutting as a practice are unacceptable. (Selection logging is good and can even be used to improve the health of the forest.) So, Judi Bari, a mother and long-time rural resident of Norther CA, called for Redwood Summer, a summer of non-violent, direct action to slow down the cutting of the trees. In May 1990, on a tour to promote the actions, she and Darryl (co-leader) were pipe-bombed in their car. After being framed and arrested for being terrorists and transporting the bomb that blew them up, they filed a civil lawsuit against the FBI and police in charge of their investigation. After over a decade in the courts, the jury passed down this verdict:

Jury's message to feds in $4.4 million verdict for Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney

On June 11, a federal jury returned a stunning verdict in favor of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in their landmark civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers.

The jury clearly found that six of the seven FBI and OPD defendants framed Judi and Darryl in an effort to crush Earth First! and chill participation in Redwood Summer. That was evident in the fact that 80% of the $4.4 million total damage award was for violation of their First Amendment rights to speak out and organize politically in defense of the forests.

For more information about this, please visit www.judibari.org

If you would like a copy of the cd, just let me know. I'd be happy to get one for you. There is so much more to the story and I can't begin to convey how inspiring, dynamic, and vibrant Judi Bari is.

"There are some wackos out there."

We just watched Bowling for Columbine. This was my first Michael Moore experience. Overall, it had the intended affect - shock and appall. He's very good at presenting stories and facts in a way that evokes emotions, and maybe could even get one to think.

But, as a Lakoffite, I wonder if his documentary could be more persuading if he did a little more with the framing. I guess I would like to see him draw a few more conclusions, not for me, but for the people who probably didn't even see the film.

I guess this is a great example of my cynacism coming out.
(1) A lot of people are too sheltered to be exposed to a documentary critiquing American culture and life.
(2) Even if they did, they wouldn't be smart enough to think for themselves and figure out that TV is bad, we don't have as much to fear as we think we do, and corporate culture doesn't care.

*Hypocrisy Alert*
Of course, his documentary fits my frame, so I understand it. And how many years has it taken for me to see it?

At least it's reminding me of my political interests.

Next up, Roger and Me.

When Religion and/or Spirituality Meet Politics

George Lakoff drew this connection most directly, albeit simply.

In Lakoff's linguistic study politics, he noticed two family models that correlated roughly to progressive and conservatives. (This is very simplified. For a more detailed version, read at least the first essay in Don't Think of an Elephant.)

The conservative family model is one based on an evil, scary world that needs a strict father to protect the children and teach them morality and right from wrong via punishment, so that they can succeed in the world by making a lot of money.

In some denominations of Christianity, god takes the form of the strict father who will punish you with hell if you do not obey his rules about right and wrong. If you do obey, you are rewarded with success, which is heaven. This is the kind of god that I do not believe in and that contributed to my leaving the Christian faith.

What happens when this meets politics is a lot of what we've seen the last five years. The successful (i.e. wealthy and therefore moral) are rewarded by paying less taxes. With less tax revenue, this justifies cutting aid programs for the under-privaleged, which would only keep them from developing the discipline they need to succeed. The rights and choices of women being downgraded because they did not obey their father and had sex anyway. The list goes on...

The progressive family model is one where nuturant parents believe the world can be made a better place through empathy, cooperation, fairness, freedom, opportunity and open, honest, two-way communication.

In some denominations of Christianity and other religions, god takes the form of the nurturant parent (male, female and/or both) who gives unconditional love and support.

The resulting politics is one where individuals and communities contribute resources for the common good which enables individuals to succeed, i.e. make the world a better place. Those resources are taxes. The common good benefits from the FDIC, SEC, our highways, cleaner air and water, among other things government created. Basically spreading the wealth around a little bit, because not everyone had an even playing field from the start.

Lakoff points out that most, if not all of us, have some combination of both of these models in our personalities. This definitely rings true for me. Even while typing this, I feel the tension between a strong Darwin streak and compassionate empathy. While I've been generally trending towards the more progressive side for a while (ok, maybe that's an understatement), that I recognize the strictness within myself, I hope is a tool for futher understanding and communicating with the conservative, partial progressives that are our there.

Religion

At the Spiritual Activism conference, there were a lot of religious types, as attendees and at the podium. At times this was challenging for me, because I have long ago left religion and not looked back. I was confirmed in the UCC Christian Protestant denomination. (They aired commercials last year openly welcoming gays and lesbians. Note: not all congregations are that open.) After I was confirmed, I stopped going to church. The only real reason I had been going was the youth group. I soon found that the ties there were pretty shallow.

After UCC, I attended a tiny Unity church for a couple of years. I was the only high-schooler in the congregation. I appreciated that the adults treated me with respect. I learned a lot of important principles there. Unity is a lot like the Unitarian Universalists - both take a more pan-religious approach to being a good person. It was here I first learned about other major world religions. Then, for various teenager related reasons, I stopped going. The only people this really concerned was my grandparents, devout Missouri Synod Lutherns.

So, the conference was definitely the most exposure to religious stuff I'd had in over a decade.

And, ya know, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't realize that there were so many progressive, open religious types out there. Part of this conference's purpose, was to give structure, strength and courage to the religious progressives, so that their voice can become as strong as the voice of the religious conservatives. I hope it works.

Quotes from the conference

Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics (which is now on my reading list), was one of the keynote speakers.
"Religions' job is to pull out our best stuff."
"Seperation of church and state does not equal segregation of values from the political discourse."
"Faith is about changing the big things."
"We have a choice between hope and cynacism. Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and seeing the evidence change. Cynacism is a place for people who once believed the world could change and is a buffer against committment."
"Vocation is where your gift meets the crushing needs of the world."
"All major progressive movements [abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights...] were fueld by spirit."
"We are the ones we've been waiting for."

Quotes from the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millinnium
"Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual, prayer, and so on....While ritual and prayer, along with the questions of nirvana and salvation, are directly connected to religious faith, these inner qualities [love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony] need not be, however. There is thus no reason why the individual should not develop them, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. This is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do without. What we cannot do without are these basic spritual qualities."

In my opinion, the Dalai Lama rocks.

Disclaimer

For the next little bit, I'm going to be processing (and posting) my thoughts and feelings from the Tikkun Spiritual Activism conference I attended last week. I didn't really want to go to the conference. But I was drawn there by the possibility that I might learn to better talk about my politics in terms of values (think Lakoff), which, I have to admit, some religious and spiritual types do better at than us secular progressives.

I was also drawn to the conference because I'm at a place in my inner journey where I could grow from being around others on a similar journey. Religion and spiritual stuff, especially in groups, has long gotten great resistance from me. It's easier for me to talk about sex and vaginas, than it is to talk about a higher power (see? i can't even say god!) and spirit. (This is because I've done A LOT more work around sex, my body and femininity.)

Many of you have expressed curiosity about the conference. Many more of you also recognize the need to talk about politics in terms of our highest values. That's where this is, hopefully, going.

So, in the mean time, bear with me as this gets pieced together. AND!!! let me know your thoughts, feelings and experiences with this stuff. At the bottom of each post is "comment," which when clicked will take you to a place to leave some words to share.

THANK YOU!!!

What is Spirit?

This was a big question that many people addressed the first day of the Tikkun Spiritual Actvism Conference, which I attended last week.

Because spirit/spirituality can mean many different things to different people, I'm beginning the discussion here so that we can have a common understanding when talking about this in the future.

For me, spirit is caring. That's the simplest, least new agey way I can put it.

At the conference...
- Berkeley Prof. Michael Nagler said, "Spirituality is an attempt to grow in sensitivity to ourselves, other humans, non-human creatures, and to God beyond totality."

- Einstein said (quoted by Nagler), "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

- Thandeka, Unitarian-Universalist minister, theologian and author, said, "Spirit is not I, it is between I and thou."

But, I feel the Dalai Lama (not at the conference) says it best so far, in the book Ethics for a New Millinneum.

"Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit -- such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony -- which bring happiness to both self and others."

I like that he connects the "qualities of spirit" with the reason we care - happiness. What happiness is is a whole other can of worms. My working definition is a feeling of satisfaction. Different things may satisfy different people, but the basics we all mostly agree on - shelter, food, a feeling of being loved and loving, and generally not suffering.

It's also important, I feel, that he brings in "and others," which is what ties this to activism and politics. A desire to bring increase the likelihood of happiness for others (thereby improving our happiness, if we're particulariy empathetic to the woes of the world) is the often underlying reason for why activists are activists. I most often hear it communicated as wanting to "make the world a better place" or "save the world" (which is what I've always said). But what's "better" and "saved" can be as diverse as the people doing the "bettering" and "saving." So, I'm going to start talking in terms of happiness (if I can handle the new-agey quotient;-)

That's about all of this I can handle right now...

Next up, Religion!

Lessons from the Mid-west

So, I've been back in CA a week. The first drive into SF was a little shocking - so fast, loud and bright (at night). But then I headed to Berkeley for a Spiritual Politics conference (more on that later) and now SF seems normal...

- People are good at justifying any decision.
- Each person's perspective is absolutely true to that person.
- There are some awesome people in Missouri and surrounds.
- If you knew a person early enough in your life, enjoying their company later comes with ease.
- I don't quite understand the family bond. We don't all agree or understand, but we all love and tolerate (for the most part) each other.
- Some Missouri wines are good, but most are uber-sweet. I especially liked the Norton, a dry red, from St. James Winery.
- It matters less where you are, and more who you are - at least in raising a family. I've seen progressive people from the country and conservatives from the city.
- There's a lot of work, especially for women, to be done in MO. It's the only state where it is a felony to have a home-birth under the supervision of a mid-wife.
- Sprawl is a problem everywhere. It's even reaching my little Sandy Hook.
- It takes four Buds (as opposed to my usual three beers) to get drunk, but with practice, one can drink up to a dozen in an evening. It helps to be in construction.
- Central Dairy's Butter Brickle ice cream is still the best.
- Tofu is even available in Jefferson City.
- I'm beginning to understand "Never put off until tomorrow, what you can put off until the day after tomorrow." (Mark Twain)
- I could live in Missouri again. It was harder leaving this time, than any time before. I deeply miss the company of my family and friends on a daily and weekly basis.

At any rate, I'm back in California. What is next for me, I don't know. I'm going to see how long I can do this non-employment thing. Today, though, I'm going to finish unpacking and finally get around to reading a book, maybe even in the park.

What is Death?

From an editorial by Bishop John Shelby Spong on Tikkun.org.

"Is death a natural and normal part of the life process that needs to be embraced? Is it the ultimate enemy that needs to be defeated as St. Paul suggests or the ultimate punishment for sin as the creation story implies?

"Is there a point where science and medical technology cease expanding life and begin only to postpone death? Can that point be identified and accepted? Is it not true that this debate would never have arisen a century ago because the choices we can make today were not options for our grandparents? Patients, now kept alive by extraordinary means, would have simply died in the past. When the evangelical minister on CNN said that we should not interfere with 'the natural course of life,' he did not recognize that modern medicine is designed to do just that. If we let nature take its course, the average life expectancy would still be 30 or so years. One cannot have it both ways with any rational consistency. I rejoice in expanded life. I grieve when medicine is used only to postpone death. I do not believe that a breathing cadaver is a living self.

"

Thank you, Bishop.

What is Life?

Is life...
playing with children?
sleeping with your lover?
enjoying a decadent dessert?
laughing with old friends?
appreciating a sunset?

Is life...
slaving away at a job?
keeping up with the Joneses?
surfing the net?
watching TV?
being in a vegatative state?

What is your life like?
What do you want your life to be like?
Would you be sustained by a feeding tube for the rest of your life, with no brain function?
Or would you die?

The Schiavo Case

Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
-Death (By Neil Gaiman, The Sandman #20, Facade)

Shout!

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Jail to Victory

Page 49-50 – On January 10, 1917, the [National] Women’s Party arranged around-the-clock pickets at the White House. [After three months,] Police began arresting picketers for blocking traffic. Other women quickly replaced them. Over the next six months more than two hundred women faced trials. Alice Paul [the organizer of the Women’s Party] and ninety-six other who refused to pay their fines were thrown into filthy jails and work houses for up to six months. Guards beat and isolated troublemakers in cells. When women refused to eat, they were force-fed. Lucy Burns wrote:

[We] were dragged through halls by force, our clothing partly removed by force, and we were examined…. Dr. Gannon told me then I must be force fed. I was held down by five people at legs, arms and head. Gannon pushed tube up left nostril…. It hurts nose and throat very much….Food dumped directly into stomach feels like a ball of lead.

Reports of cruel treatment outraged the nation. On November 28, [1917], President Wilson ordered the women set free. The White House pickets remained. Member of the National American [Women Suffrage Association], with [Carrie Chapman] Catt as their president since 1915, disliked Paul’s tactics and kept their distance. [National American favored a state-by-state voting rights approach as opposed to the direct action of the Women’s Party.] Still, the Party’s daring moves opened many doors that strengthened Catt’s state groups. Paul’s antics forced the president and Congress to take action.

Let Women Vote!

Gathering with women has been an invaluable source of strength in my life. Hearing their stories and sharing my struggles has given me the courage to conceive and realize a vision of myself as an independent, loving, loved and fulfilled woman. It is because of these conversations and connections that I see the beauty and power of being a woman. It was a winding struggle before I understood how lucky I was to have femininity as a resource – as a way to be a force for positive change in this world.

By Marlene Targ Brill
Page 15 – “Most early American could not own property or sign contracts. Their husbands owned their clothes, household goods, and anything they brought to the marriage. If a woman earned wages, they belonged to her husband.”

Page 16 – “Divorce between husband and wife was almost impossible. And if a divorce was granted, the woman lost all rights to her children, no matter how badly the father behaved.
After visiting the United State, French author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, ‘No people, with the exception of slaves, had less rights over themselves in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth century America than married women.’”

Page 23 – “After abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimke toured New England, Massachusetts clergy issued a strong letter attacking their speeches. Churches throughout the state read the letters condemning the women. The clergy claimed that ‘when a woman assumes the place and tone of man as public reformer…her character becomes unnatural.’
Sarah Grimke answered the clergy in a series of letters. She argued that they misquoted the Bible to keep women down. She wanted equal rights for women.
‘All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy,’ she wrote.”

Page 26 – “On July 13, 1848, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Wright and Jane Hunt met for tea. “At the July 13 tea, Stanton admitted to the women how truly miserable she was.
I poured out, that day, the torrent of my…long discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything.
…The following day, Stanton announced the Women’s Rights Convention in the Seneca County Courier. The notice read:
A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July.
The next morning the women met to plan the meeting and prepare a statement of basic women’s rights. At first, Stanton searched through papers from antislavery meetings for ideas. Then she read the United States Declaration of Independence….
Stanton rewrote the Declaration to include the work women: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal….” Then the women agreed on a list of demands for true equality with men. They include the right to earn wages, go to college, own property, pursue a career, have equal say about children after divorce, and be heard in court. Stanton added one more demand – the right to vote….Some women feared that wanting the vote went too far…”

Peace, love and understanding

Page 114, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten severely when returning from citizenship training school, said during training of young Freedom Summer volunteers, “The white man is the scardest person on earth. Out in daylight he don’t do nothin’. But at night he’ll toss a bomb or pay someone to kill. The white man’s afraid he’ll be treated like he’ been treating the Negroes, but I couldn’t carry that much hate. It wouldn’t solve any problem for me to hate white because they hate me. Oh, there’s so much hate! Only God has kept the Negro sane.

Help us communicate with white people. Regardless of what they act like, there some good there. How can we say we love God and hate our brothers and sisters? We got to reach them.”

Got Vote?

Page 113, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

The Freedom Summer of 1964 was a “demand for political empowerment” for the blacks of the south. Volunteer activists launched a massive campaign to register blacks in the south to vote. This was to trigger the most confrontational and dangerous of all civil rights direct action.

“…three young Freedom Summer volunteers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, after being arrested by local police on trumped-up traffic charges. The bullet-riddled bodies of James Chaney, and eighteen-year-old SNCC staffer from Meridian, Michael Schwerner, a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn-born CORE orangizer in Meridian, and Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old Queens College student