Living in the Bay Area, I have convenient and easy access to any food I can think of. It is in my nature to think of food seasonally and locally, but it is also easy to forget that not everyone enjoys the luxury of choosing healthy food, like I do. And even though I benefit from our local and organic food economy, I am a consumer, completely dependent on our food system. With peak oil, wayward national politics, and earthquakes in the forecast, it is becoming increasingly clear that our amazing and abundant food system could be threatened just like it was in Havana, Cuba less than two decades ago.

Before 1991 almost no food was produced in the city of Havana, not unlike most modern metropolises. Up to 57% of Cuban caloric intake was derived from imported food. Domestic food was grown outside the capital city on state run farms that used industrial agricultural methods. Almost all food in Havana was channeled through a state operated distribution system and all residents were insured regular commodities, such as rice, beans, sugar, coffee, and poultry or other meat. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, agricultural inputs such as pesticides, fertilizers, and animal feed, were reduced by 80%, and fuel and tires for tractors and other agricultural machinery were cut by 50%, leaving the country without the means for industrial food production. Cuba was facing a food security crisis.

In response, the Cuban government established a series of urban agriculture programs and resolved to create a link between the people and the land, as a means of promoting self-sufficiency. One of the first steps that was taken to help feed a hungry Havana was the implementation of a community orchard program, in which citizen “cultivators” would participate in the reforestation of their concrete city. Initially 5000 community orchards were approved and established in unconventional spaces within the city, including patios, rooftops, balconies, and plots of undeveloped or abandoned land. Where there was no soil, raised beds were planted. In the words of the former head of the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI), Mario Gonzalez Novo, “the program has the simple objective of reversing the silent disaster of the city’s deforestation by operating on the basic premise that no space should remain where a tree can be planted.” A quantitative goal of the program is to plant 18 million fruit and timber trees in Havana.

The MINAGRI was created to support the urban cultivator in increasing crop health and productivity. Not your typical government agency, the MINAGRI researches and disseminates information and resources for sustainable food production, covering topics such as intensive farming and gardening, integrated pest management, composting, seed saving, and food preservation. The department runs seed banks, and supports locally organized gardening clubs, where people share knowledge, tools, and other resources. The decision to allow any unused space to be officially recognized and utilized for the purpose of food cultivation resulted in over 26,000 community garden plots in Havana. Until 1994, however, most of the food produced in these gardens was still out of reach to most citizens.

Then, the Cuban government legalized farmer’s markets. This eliminated the need for a fruit and veggie black market, equating to more equitable distribution, lower prices, and greater access to more food. Now, with a thriving food economy, over 22% of the city's population works in urban agricultural production or research. In 1998, 30,000 people were employed in over 8000 agricultural production collectives in the city of Havana alone.

Outside of the city, the super-sized national farms were also reorganized into cooperative production units. The state, in effect, gave control of its large, industrialized farms, which comprised 80% of Cuba’s agricultural land, to the people. The land is provided to government approved, micro-managed groups of citizens, including families, or “production units” rent free. The producers typically have contracts with the state, which still runs a national distribution program, but they are allowed to sell their excess produce and to keep the profits.

Within five years Cuba had recovered from their crisis. Today, with a bustling small producer agricultural economy, over 30% of Havana's food is being grown in the city. We learn from Cuba's strategy that it IS possible, in an urban center, to ensure an equitable distribution of food by promoting self sufficient production. And Havana is not alone, there are other examples of abundant urban harvests, some right under our noses.

At Village Homes, in Davis, CA, the community is touched by urban agriculture. The planning of fruit and nut trees, irrigation canals, and communal garden plots in the neighborhood design has provided village homes with a year round food harvest. Other benefits are greater economic stability and higher property values. People's Grocery in West Oakland, has established a network of urban micro-farms that nourish a hungry community. The next time I think about a sustainable harvest I will Imagine, instead of the farmer's market, walking outside and picking seasonal fruit year round on Dolores, Hayes, Polk, and Arguello. On Chestnut, Brannan, Webster, and Market.

The music is loud, but not too loud for conversation between strangers. Often the folks behind the counter are singing along with Bob Marley: "The Babylon system is a vampire!" It's infectious, and soon the customers are singing along as well. Everyone has a plate of beautiful food, lovingly crafted in the slow food way, in front of them, and a steaming mug of homemade chai or fair-trade coffee. Vegan chocolate cake tempts those in the mood for dessert. There is no end to the people streaming in: little old couples, young people with their shining organic babies, neighbors, friends, employees of the nearby grocery co-op Other Avenues, beach combers; in short, everyone.

This is the scene at Feel Real Café, located at 4001 Judah (at 45 th Avenue), near the terminus of the N-Judah train at Ocean Beach. Open for just over one year, the café serves a 100% plant and grain-based, organic menu; everything from the salads and beverages to the main dishes and desserts are vegan, and they are delicious. Often a meal takes upwards of half an hour to make, in fine Slow Food tradition- on my first visit, shortly after the café opened on April 20, 2005, I ordered a salad called "Mystic Journey to the Center," and it showed up on my table 30 minutes later. This is a style choice, according to Feel Real's proprietors, Tim and June: "We talk to the people, find out what they like, what mood they are in, and we make their food especially for that." I came to find out that a Mystic Journey salad varies entirely from person to person, started from scratch and added to based on personal taste. And it was well worth the wait.

June, the chef often singing the loudest and dealing with cooked food- from potato pancakes and steamed greens to hand-made veggie burgers served with homemade mustard- talks about the Feel Real menu being soul food. How did Feel Real's food come to be this way? Slow Food means that time is taken to understand the food needs of the person eating, what they like or dislike, whether they are vegans or omnivores; additionally, the origins of the food are carefully taken into consideration, to ensure optimum health and taste; and of course, the food is prepared with care and attention to detail. As Carlo Petrini says in his book Slow Food: The Case for Taste (Columbia University Press, 2001), the making of slow food is a craft, and this craftsmanship gives pleasure, for the producers, the chefs, and the consumers. This process often means that a relationship is built between the food eater and the food maker, and between the food and people; hence the soulfulness of the Feel Real menu. As June says, "Food represents life."

Feel Real seems to operate largely on this premise. The structure of the business reflects the dedication of June and Tim to an egalitarian way of working with each other and providing nourishing food to their customers. According to Tim, "everybody works together to make it one. There's not an 'owner.' It takes these certain people to make this happen... It's not really a 'business' then, because we don't have ownership. Even calling ourselves a co-op is too structured. We are very loose and flexible; since we are in the early stages of development, we have to have lots of flexibility to work. It's going to be changing in the future- our business is growing, in baking, in this, in that- so we need to be able to change. Maybe in the future we'll settle into a system." Indeed, on my latest visit, to interview the boys, I ended up taking orders and answering the phone. They have had a changing cast of co-workers over the past year, people who have dropped in to help, or who accentuate the high quality of Feel Real's food, including their vegan pastry chef, Phoenix, who makes yummy cakes, cookies, and pies. The food, the atmosphere, and the camaraderie are part of what makes life soulful.

This view also extends to the way Feel Real charges its customers for the food they eat. When the cafe opened, there were no prices listed next to the dishes on the menu. People were asked to pay what they thought it was worth for the food. "After all, price is an arbitrary number," say June and Tim. Initially, this presented a problem for a few customers- they were unsure of how to handle the money situation. So a compromise has been struck: a price range. All dishes are now priced in a range, for example, from $7-$10 for steamed greens, grains, and grilled tempeh or tofu, and people pay what they feel the food is worth within that range. It usually works to an advantage for Feel Real, as people will often pay a good sum for the food, which is another indication of how much people enjoy its taste and preparation.

Most of the food that Feel Real purchases and uses in their cooking is provided by one of two Bay Area organic produce suppliers, Earl's Organics. (The other is Veritable Vegetable.) So why not buy directly from a small local farm? "One small local farm couldn't provide enough for the volume of food that a restaurant needs. So small farms go to distributors and sell. For one single farm to be able to supply restaurants, they go to Earl's in order to make sure they can make a profit." These distributors then do business with many Bay Area restaurants to provide a whole range of produce, fruit, and grains. On the other end of the spectrum, a large farm's costs are too high to provide produce to a small scale restaurant like Feel Real. Tim pointed out that a collaborative of local, organic restaurants could make it worth a large farm's time to provide produce directly, but until that happens, "a middleman is necessary." Feel Real also purchases food items such as herbs and spices from Mountain Peoples, and items that it doesn't need in bulk, such as a single cucumber for a Mystic Journey salad, from the nearby grocery co-op Other Avenues (located at Judah and 44 th Avenue). Often, they will also purchase items from Rainbow Grocery as well.

Coffee and tea are provided by Café Mam and Té Tea, respectively. According to Café Mam's website ( www.cafemam.com ), "Café Mam is grown by fair-trade cooperatives of native Mayan farmers living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The growers, primarily of the Mam, Tzetzal and Mochó peoples, are organized according to egalitarian democratic ideals that stress responsibility to the co-op, hard work and high standards. Their programs provide countless benefits to outlying native communities." Té Tea's website ( www.teteas.com ) states that "Té Teas offer an exclusive selection of unrivaled loose whole-leaf teas from the world's most privileged single tea growing estates." Additionally, chai tea is hand-made all day long at Feel Real.

What about Feel Real's place in the community? They have made their mark as a place to meet and greet; strangers will gather at the large front table, which seats up to ten people, and leave as friends. The beauty of the space, the bright minty-green floor, the murals and sculptures made of salvaged tree branches, the constant music (records only) and occasional spontaneous live shows by customers, make Feel Real as comfortable as your living room. Tim and June have worked out any number of deals that amount to bartering with people for food, time worked in the kitchen, and taking care of the food scraps produced, which end up in a neighbor's compost bin. With a twinkle in his eye, Tim says of the compost Feel Real produces, "It's organic. It's in demand."

On a typical cold, blustery day in San Francisco's Sunset District, I have stopped into Feel Real for some food and company. I have a cold. I have brought some rosemary from home and my droopy state of being. I sit at the front table, surrounded by people I haven't met before. I say to June, "I'm sick... What can you make for me?" and I give him the rosemary. Twenty minutes later, I have a potato pancake, steamed greens, and rosemary in front of me. I've already had several conversations with the people sitting around me, and by the time I'm done eating, I feel quite a bit better. I leave, full, healthy, and satisfied, knowing that I will return, as I have every week, for more of that soulful food and company.

Details:

Feel Real Café, 4001 Judah @ 45 th Avenue
Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 3pm and 5pm - 9pm
Open Sunday 11am - 5pm
Cash only, Catering Available

What do we think about when we turn the shower on? Do we think about the water flowing out of the showerhead, or where it comes from, or where it is going? Or do we think of what it means to be able to take a hot shower at any given time, with clean water? Do we think, “water is part of a cycle,” as we step into the tub and the small part of the hydrologic cycle with which we have daily contact as urban dwellers streams over us and washes us?

“Greywater is water that flows down sink, shower, and washing machine drains, but not the toilet,” according to the Guerrillas’ soon-to-be-released book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Laura is hopeful that the book will be available within the next year. This book is the extension of the popular zine that the Guerrillas published for roughly two years, featuring a history of Bay Area water politics which led to the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite that provides San Francisco with its urban water supply. The loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley is considered by many to be an ecological disaster, reducing a once mighty water system to a concrete conduit which stretches hundred of miles from source to city. A side effect of this type of water transportation mentality is the utterly wasteful sewer systems that many cities have constructed. Greywater is thoughtlessly mixed with black water (water from toilets) and sewage, rendering a potential resource useless. The Guerrillas address this in their zine as well: included are detailed drawings of DIY plumbing alterations and self-build composting toilets, all designed to run greywater independently of the sewer system, and back into the soil.

“Greywater contains nitrates and phosphates from household cleaning products. If released untreated, these compounds pollute rivers and groundwater, but to garden plants, they are valuable nutrients. The easiest way to use greywater is to pipe it right outside and use it to water ornamental plants or fruit trees,” write the Guerrillas in their book. The group has two greywater systems in their own urban backyard in the East Bay. One, connected to the kitchen sink, is indeed a simple system: a long hole was cut in the house’s siding and a large drainpipe and bark-chip filtration box were installed which diverts tap water to a bathtub full of reeds, cattails, and bulrushes. The roots of these plants feed on organic compounds, removing them from the water itself, so that by the time the water flows out of the bathtub, it is clean enough to be reused. “The bathtub is attached to a perforated hose that is buried in this bed over here,” Laura says, indicating a large flower bed where the water from the kitchen sink flows. Grease from the sink is caught in the bark-chip biofilter before it gets to the tub. Grease becomes stuck to the chips as it pours over, while water is allowed to filter through. It is literally as simple as placing bark chips in an open topped box and letting the grease get trapped in the porous material. Every so often, the greasiest chips may be removed and composted, while fresh ones are put in the filter.

Recently, the Guerrillas hosted a workshop around the installation of their newest constructed wetland, in their backyard, which harvests water from their showers and diverts it to another bathtub, and which then flows to their bountiful vegetable crop and herb spiral. “We usually do a workshop at someone’s house whenever they want a greywater system installed,” Laura says, emphasizing the nature of performing several tasks at once for maximum benefit. The Guerrillas have installed around 15 systems around California, Seattle, and Detroit. While greywater may seem to many a natural and preferred method of dealing with waste water, installing wetlands made from salvaged bathtubs and reused pipes isn’t exactly standardized in building codes. The California Greywater building code, according to Laura, is much more expensive to follow, and more regulations apply: “Hence the word ‘guerrilla’ to describe what we are doing.”

Greywater “connects you personally to your own water use and the water cycle. When you use greywater in your house, then your house becomes more of a system too, and it becomes a really water aware place,” says Laura. This means not only being more aware financially about the benefits of reusing your water, but of the processes of cleaning greywater with nature’s own filters (roots and bark chips), and watching it flow from one system (the kitchen sink) to another system (a constructed wetland in a bathtub) to yet another system (a vegetable patch). A greywater system can be as simple as disconnecting your sink drains and placing a bucket under the open pipe. Once the bucket is full, use it to flush your toilets, or perhaps use it on your houseplants. Simple solutions such as this are excellent for apartment dwellers who do not have the space for wetlands. Of course, greywater systems can be as large and biologically complex as the wetlands at Heron’s Head Park. Either way, greywater use is an important and necessary way of preserving and respecting one of Earth’s resources.

For more information about the Greywater Guerrillas and upcoming events, visit their website at www.greywaterguerrillas.com.

The story of permaculture and its founder, Bill Mollison, is profoundly human and profanely inspiring. After spending 28 years studying natural ecosystems in Australia and becoming full fledged in the institution of academia, Mollison had a revelation. What he was observing in nature and studying in books had little practical application in real, human life. In fact, the systemic interactions that he saw occurring in nature were being destroyed, defied, and ignored by human civilization. Massive amounts of energy were (and are) being used to grow and transport food, to transport humans, and to live in modern cities. At the same time global decision makers were proclaiming that the Green Revolution would feed the world, he saw that this industrial agriculture "solution" was actually destroying the soil and perpetuating hunger. From this perspective, Mollison modeled the practice of permaculture -permanent agriculture- an integral design theory for human activity and prolonged existence, that very simply puts nature to work by combining maximum productivity with minimum expenditures of energy and resources.

Based on the intricate relationships in forest eco-systems, Mollison began creating food forests, of nuts and fruits and other perennial plants. His vision was of food production and human settlements that do not expend energy each season, but rather produce surpluses of it. In a forest system, layer upon layer from the canopy to the understory, to shrubs, flowers, and roots are utilized to create a "guild" or symbiosis of plants, each connected to the other and comprising a complex whole. There is no rotating of crops, fallow land, nor plowing of fields. The relationships in a forest regulate and thrive off of each other. This is nature at work. By intensifying land use, rather than trying to conquer nature, permaculture attempts to understand and design natural relationships that maximize energy and resources in order to minimize work and waste. Permaculture design builds a permanent framework that reaps continued harvests.

With the publication of his first book, Permaculture One ( 1978, co-authored by his student David Holmgren), Mollison unleashed an idea, of logic in design and respect for nature, that has become an unstoppable worldwide movement. Permaculture has expanded from its agricultural roots to express "permanent culture", designing and building culture and community that feeds and fuels itself. In Mollison's words, "permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate." From agriculture, aquaculture, and horticulture; to water, energy, and waste; to building, transportation, and community, permaculture is a design philosophy that can be applied to each and every human activity, in any setting.

While it deals with complex systems of interaction, permaculture is governed by a set of simple ethics: Care for the Earth, Care for People, Distribute Surplus, and Reduce Consumption (or reinvestment in the first two ethics). In the words of Scott Horton, editor of Permaculture Activist magazine, "Care for the Earth and Care for People have an implicit balance between them". By reducing consumption and distributing surplus we are caring for ourselves and other people, all of us components of the earth system. This set of ethics is what makes permaculture universal to any human activity, land use, or place and why we see it being taught and perpetuated in parts of the world as diverse as remote villages in Africa and South America, where permanent settlements have replaced foraging and hunting cultures, and dense urban centers, that are typically enveloped in energy consumption and dominance of nature.

In addition to ethics, permaculture is guided by a dozen or so design principles that emphasize the importance of the relative location of each element, in a garden, home, or community, and that strive to maximize their functional connections. If every element in a design has multiple functions, and each is related to every other element, then efficiency and productivity are increased, and resource and energy consumption are decreased. Taking the time to think about each component of a design and its cycle of life, and then utilizing every possible connection in that life flow, is what permaculture is about. Claude Genet, of Green Mountain Permaculture, uses the example of a kitchen to describe the logic of permaculture design. In a kitchen your sink, stove, and refrigerator are all located relatively close together, along with countertops, knives, bowls and other tools for preparing food. It would be inefficient and illogical to have these items in different rooms, but in a garden this is often precisely the case.

To apply permaculture to a garden is to recognize the value of every element, whether plants, ponds, greenhouses, or compost piles, and then place them in relation to each other. A keyhole or spiral formation is often used in planting. These are intensive design patterns that both benefit the gardener's expenditure of energy and foster symbiotic relationships among the plants. For example, the Native American combination of corn, beans, and squash provide a natural synergy; the corn forming a pole for the beans to climb, the beans fixing nitrogen in the soil, and the squash forming a ground mulch layer. There are endless similar beneficial relationships between plants, that thousands of years of human survival have uncovered and science has explained. This is permaculture design: ethically applied science that benefits from the logic of nature. The same concept of recognizing the intrinsic value in every thing can be applied to community or city design. Where homes are oriented in relation to the energy of the sun; where people are located in relation to food, transportation, and work; and how water and waste are cycled, are all questions that can be addressed in urban permaculture. Intentional communities that apply this design logic are operating in the Bay Area and all over the world, in urban and rural settings, and in climates from the Arctic to the Sahara.

Our fair city of San Francisco is currently hosting its first ever permaculture design course at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. A guild of seasoned veterans from around the world is teaching the three month series of classes, sowing permaculture concepts and sprouting design ideas in fertile minds. Inevitably, those learning now will in turn propagate what they have learned and teach more teachers. Uncannily, people that learn permaculture are inspired to action and activism. It is in this infectious way the permaculture movement has spread and spanned the globe.

A final important thought on permaculture is that it is a revolution without a center, a paradigm shift from consumption and capitalism to an ethical philosophy void of politics, government, and hierarchy. It is not anarchy either, but rather complete and utter cooperation, between humans and the environment. As Bill Mollison says, "You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things. You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system." Permaculture is building intentional communities, of plants and people, that sustain themselves over time. It is a dismissal of conventions and a reworking of values. As the idea of permaculture spreads among individuals, to their friends and their friend's friends, a collective conscious is being formed and a subtle revolution is underway, right before our eyes.

Most of the systems by which this modern, industrialized society has been organized are hierarchical and linear. They are designed to keep resources separated, and to keep people constantly working harder and harder, and often battling with their neighbors, for fewer returns. This is the case for political systems, as American democracy often takes direct action out of the political process. It is true of social and economic systems as well: families are increasingly living separated from each other in cookie cutter houses, with inequitable distribution of infrastructure development and taxes. A person’s income is intimately tied to their access to resources in every facet of life, although it is often distributed inequitably and is unequally taxed. Models for social and economic growth usually promote monocultures and rarely take into account anything beyond dollar value, especially the environment. Doing this ignores the fact that monoculture and poor environmental health will ultimately make scarce resources even harder to maintain. Meanwhile, hierarchical systems also mean a few people concentrate bigger shares of resources in order to maintain control and power.

Cooperatives are an answer to hierarchical political, social, and economic systems. They are much more democratic in daily activity than prevailing systems of politics and business management. They allow for much more equity in resource distribution, and live up to the adage of getting out of it what you put in. In all of their forms, co-ops are inclusive, empowering, and flexible. Co-ops offer the possibility of ownership to people who are likely shut out of that opportunity in prevailing society. Creativity and collaboration is possible in an environment of open communication and development, and co-ops are often places of incredible diversity, answering the problems of a monoculture. They are as close to a utopian ideal in a non-utopian universe as anything else. Belonging to and supporting collective governance is an amazing opportunity to cooperate for maximum resource benefit, and potentially influence policy development, as is the case with the Landless Worker’s Movement in Brazil. This group has instigated and gained great change in Brazilian agrarian reform.

What are cooperatives?

Cooperatives range from business models to living situations, therefore encompassing most of society’s major structures of political, social, and economic systems. In the case of business models, cooperatives include employee owned worker cooperatives such as Rainbow Grocery and Other Avenues Grocery, credit unions such as the Permaculture Credit Union, and purchasing cooperatives, in which groups of merchants employ economies of scale as large purchasing blocs in order to get discounts and pool marketing. Housing co-ops are one type of intentional community, which encourage cooperation amongst neighbors who have created small-scale living situations. Each member of a housing co-op owns a piece of a legal entity, which in turn owns real estate held in common. As such, each housing member belongs to an association, which usually elects a board of directors to develop and regulate occupancy agreements. This is distinct from condominium situations in which owners purchase real estate directly and therefore have little intimate engagement in communality.

The modern cooperative, the “organization owned by and operated for the benefit of those using its services,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, got its start in the mid 1800’s in Britain. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers created a set of rules and guidelines that are in wide use today, including open membership, democratic control, a lack of religious or political discrimination, sales at market prices, and earmarking earnings for education programs. Development of cooperatives in the United States was mainly a rural enterprise into the early twentieth century, in the forms of agricultural marketing and supply co-ops. Marketing co-ops provide a stage for marketing common commodities, promoting cooperation between farmers and buyers. Supply co-ops provide common access to farming inputs, such as fertilizers and seeds, which once again promotes cooperation for maximum resource distribution. Modern agricultural cooperatives are thriving, including Tillamook Creamery from Tillamook, Oregon. This cooperative of dairy farmers provides cheese, milk, and other dairy products to consumers at very decent prices, and allows each farmer to reap the benefits of collective governance in the dairy farming industry. The second half of the twentieth century in the United States has seen the emergence of cooperatives such as credit unions and housing co-ops in more urban contexts, with increasing influence over reigning political and economic models. That being said, it is a rural cooperative movement from Latin America that is demonstrating this increasing influence most successfully.

A Model for Cooperative-Initiated Reform: The Landless Worker’s Movement

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), known in English as the Landless Worker’s Movement, is the largest social movement in Latin America. It is a highly organized answer to agrarian land reform in the country of Brazil, which has constitutional mandates for land use and yet has deep discrepancies in land ownership. Three percent of the population owns two thirds of Brazil’s arable land, which often goes unused despite a constitutional provision that states abandoned land will be seized by the government and given to those willing to farm it. According to the MST website, “Since 1985, the MST has peacefully occupied unused land where they have established cooperative farms, constructed houses, schools for children and adults and clinics, promoted indigenous cultures and a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality. The MST has won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government recognition. Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a ‘larger social function.’” The MST’s Commitments to the Earth and to Life encourages its collective members to “fight against latifundia for all that possess land, bread, studies and freedom.”

Much of the MST’s success in gaining title to unused land is due to its organizational abilities. Elements of the struggle that land reformers face are identified, and collectives are assigned to work on each element. These include production, cooperation, education, environment, gender, political education, health, culture, communications, human rights, and youth. Each sector works with international groups, the political left in Brazil, and the public sector to ensure maximum safety and success for the MST. While the MST has achieved massive success over its two decade struggle, members also face huge obstacles. Fierce battles in courts and private militias hired by land owners to harass and often brutalize squatters are but two of these, but the group continues. The MST counts many supporters around the world, mostly due to their exceptional organizational abilities, their dedication to equality, and their collaborative process of democracy. This particular movement is centered on agrarian reform; for both rural and urban contexts, there are any number of valuable lessons to be learned from the MST about collective governance influencing the highest levels of a hierarchy in order to ensure a shared living and dignity. If San Francisco’s small-scale cafés and restaurants belonged to buying co-ops and created business partnerships with farmers’ selling co-ops, a movement would be born and eventually influence how food is grown and distributed.

Indeed, there are already organizations working to encourage and promote cooperative business models. The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC) is one such group. According to their website, “NoBAWC (pronounced “no boss”) is dedicated to helping build the worker cooperative movement in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.” To realize this, NoBAWC provides support for members, including “maintaining and sharing information relevant to worker cooperatives, providing technical and organizational assistance, offering joint marketing and promotional services, developing group benefits, improving access to financial resources, strengthening ties between worker cooperatives and developing relationships with other segments of the cooperative/labor community. NoBAWC also helps develop new worker cooperatives by offering some technical assistance and referrals to those developing worker cooperatives and promotes worker cooperatives in our community.” Their member organizations include Arizmendi Bakery, Other Avenues Grocery, Rainbow Grocery, Box Dog Bikes, Woodshanti, New Leaf Paper, and the Lusty Lady, the world’s only worker-owned cooperative peep show. As this list shows, any field of business can be cooperative and governed collectively; as this model demonstrates, it is possible to create umbrella organizations that promote cooperatives in all forms, from agriculture to housing.

A Call to Cooperation

A cooperative can be as simple as a group of friends who pool money for shared rentals at the surf shop. It can be as complex as a credit union, with thousands of members and large sums of money floating around. It can be as evolutionary as the MST in Brazil. The idea is the same in all cases: people sharing resources in an equitable fashion for the greatest mutual benefit. Co-ops operate very well in capitalist and consumerist societies, because they are inclusive and flexible, and they offer the opportunity to create equitable systems that operate within these larger hierarchical systems. The multicultural nature of co-ops is a stand against the tenets of globalization and industrialization. Small scale collective governance, in the form of social, political, and economic cooperatives, is one very effective tool for controlling democratic processes directly and to influence overall social, political, and economic movements. This is true for any country in the world, and increasingly, for global interdependence.

UAS Development Team member, Kevin Bayuk, recently had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Ernest Callenbach the author, probably best known for, perhaps the most visionary novels of a sustainable, thriving future yet imagined, Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging [highly recommended reading for Allies!]. Illuminating the lonely imaginary fields of a truly sustainable food, energy and transportation system, built environment, even the economy, Callenbach shines a bright light on an easily possible future waiting for us to embrace that is neither Luddite nor naïve Viridian. Little acknowledged is Callenbach’s exploration of democracy and its functioning in a sustainable society. Kevin endeavored to probe deeper into Callenbach’s contemporary views on the subject to retrieve some essential insights and inspiration for the Bay Area Sustainability Movement. For without an inspired vision, how can we unite?

UAS: What is the state of our current democracy?

EC: Unfortunately the institutional factors are almost all pointing in negative directions because we have cleverly built up industrial consumerism as a kind of a self -consuming or self-destroying machine. Most of the major institutions in our society, not only the corporate ones and the WTO and international and national governments, but also some of the forces that formerly supported working-class people such as labor unions and so on are now so implicated in carrying on business as usual that society like a pile of rocks – you know how rocks sort of wedge themselves in with each other and you can’t move anything. And you think the only thing that will dislodge this is some kind of a flood that will have enough force to really loosen things up. And the Iraq war has been a very major force, you know clearly it has been loosening up a lot of things – mostly for the worse, but things like that take a long time to be digested by a body politic and we won’t see the end of it for probably a lifetime.

You know, Marx said a lot of good things. I’ll tell you two good things that Marx said. One was that “capital has no country.” In the era before globalization we really did not know what this means, now we face it in all its full horror. What it essentially means is a race to the bottom - which the American working class is now caught up in as well as the working classes of every other country.

The other one is, “The cash nexus (by which he meant the market) is a corrosive that will dissolve all other bonds between human beings except buying and selling.” In a consumer society such as ours you begin to see what this means. This brings us back to your theme of democracy -- almost all the connections between people that form a social polity are under severe attack. Whether we will be able to reverse this thing is in my mind is a very key element of our possible future.

The one political measure I am really paying attention to lately is CA Proposition 89. Because I share the view that without reform of our legislative institutions there is almost nothing worthwhile that can be done. You can do cosmetic things – and the California legislature, for an unusual example, has done some pretty amazing things over this last year, but there is a sharp limit on it, because if you are sitting there as a representative, you know that any bill of real importance is going to hurt some of the people who have given money to you. And you are not free to vote against their interests if you hope to continue your career in politics. So there is a kind of a built in self-limitation on the representative process on how we built it up.

Michael Phillips and I wrote a book a long time ago called A Citizen Legislature, which in that time and now is thought to be a very crazy book. But I think in the long run it may be the one thing that Michael and I are really remembered for. We thought that far ahead, past the paralysis of our democratic institutions that we are now living through, there must be some kind of other side where something fundamentally new and different and not authoritarian might be devised.

UAS: That brings up a question. To further abstract from our current system -- that book [A Citizen Legislature] is an exponent for another kind of representation selection – by lottery – but it proceeds from a more fundamental question, is representation necessary?

EC: I think representation is necessary in any society above the tribal size. In human history, tribelets or hunter-gatherer tribes, or as I would rather call them gatherer-hunter bands (since it was the women did most of the gathering and provided most of the food), these were small enough that they could govern themselves by sort of an automatic interpersonal process that did not require institutions in any formal sense. But once you get beyond village size (and I would guess that this size would be around 200-300 people) you begin to have so many bodies around that they couldn’t possible decide everything all together.

I think that the Athenian populace, allegedly, would gather together once or twice a year in a plaza for deliberation. But a mob of maybe 50,000 people (because they excluded the women, the children and all the slaves) -- is not going to be capable to decide anything sensibly. You have to have some kind of deliberative process. And the same thing goes for people who talk about television democracy, or some kind of electronic system where you everybody would look at the screen and say “yea” or “nay.” Well, what people forget is that there is always a mechanism, always an institution that is presupposing the questions on the screen as well as counting the responses and managing the whole process.

You need deliberation so that people can, first of all, compromise with each other, second so that they can watch each other, and third so that they can prevent the whole system from being taken over by a determined minority. Or at least you hope they do that. This has clearly failed in Washington at present, but that is the idea.

UAS: When we look at the Survivalist Party (from Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging) we see their structure as highly decentralized and democratic - one individual, one vote. You wrote of this as applying to both the workplace and the popular government. When we talk about decentralized in today’s context, what might it look like? How decentralized?

EC: It would probably mean something like what Portland, Oregon has been trying where they have city districts; they call them neighborhoods grouped into coalitions, where you have a couple of thousand people living in a particular spot with, probably, particular problems, particular perspectives, maybe even a sub-culture, who have, to some degree, political power themselves. In Portland’s case this has been devolved onto them by the city council. In my opinion, as far as I know, Portland is probably the best governed city in the country. They do a lot of really incredible things up there.

And this means that a lot of the ordinary business of the city can be carried on in the immediate proximity of the people that are going to be affected by it. And that clearly is one of the underlying principles – that those who are going to be firstly, paying for it and secondly, subject to its effects are the ones who, as far as possible, should be able to decide it.

Now political money is a hydraulic system, it’s like water, it goes for the holes. Campaign reform of the traditional kinds; which Loni Hancock was trying to bring about when she worked for a foundation here in San Francisco before she became mayor of Berkeley and before she was in the state legislature proposing Prop. 89 and so on – these things, historically, never work, like the McCain/Feingold Bill and its predecessors. These measures are inherently flawed because they don’t address the structure; they only address how big the pipes are going to be and the like – that is not the point. The point is to break the link between money and representative power and I think it can be done, maybe not in our lifetime …well we’ll see what the electorate decides in California.

If 89 should go through, it would be the most revolutionary thing in California politics for all the years that I’ve been living here -- it would be sensational. And since Maine and Arizona and now Connecticut is installing it, we already have three very different states elsewhere doing it, adding California to this mix would give a tremendous surge of impetus to it happening all around the country. [Prop. 89 was soundly defeated in the November 2006 election.]

As far as I can tell it works very well in these states, it has not been a panacea for everything wrong with government clearly, but it has made possible some things that would not have been possible under previous systems.

UAS: Can you provide any stand-out examples of these possibilities?

EC: Maine, for example, has a virtually universal health coverage system now.

In Arizona, you have an amazing woman governor, Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who ran clean and won against a very rich and well-backed Republican. I don’t know about Maine, but in Arizona, free elections were installed after a particularly hideous scandal. I believe the previous governor was imprisoned for embezzlement. This created such a wave of revulsion with business as usual in the capital that even citizens that were not notably radical were like, “Hey, we got to clean this up.” It also, in Arizona, withstood some constitutional challenges that were brought against it by moneyed interests.

One effect it undoubtedly has is to bring a lot of new candidates (this is true in New York city too where something similar is done) who would not otherwise be there because even if they have wonderful ideas they have not had the funds to galvanize a significant number of backers.

One problem with our democracy is our lack of the ability to bring new ideas into the political discourse. I think this is a much more important than it may seem at first sight. There are a lot of other things that ought to be done with our electoral system. Instant run-offs is one. Proportional representation is another one. But we won’t see any of these things until we get clean elections.

UAS: What about the functioning of democracy and technology? In Ecotopia we saw people communicating with the TV network with cameras mounted on the televisions. Now, of course, we have the internet (though not as widely distributed as TV). What are your thoughts now with a functional bi-directional democratic communication system of that nature?

EC: Well, I think it was a pretty good idea, but it’s never been really tried unless some of these community channels have tried it and I have not heard about it. The idea is, and this connects with the random selection of A Citizen Legislature, that the process of the input has to be determined, not by some producer’s idea of whether you fit the show or whether you’re photogenic, but simply by whether you are representative, which can only be determined by random processes. We have to learn to love randomness. This is very hard for Americans to do, but if you had a political show in which the callers were in fact selected randomly you would get an accurate picture of what people out there are actually thinking, not just the articulate or the photogenic, but a wide range. And if the number is fairly large you get this good sense for what people care about.

UAS: That brings up a question in terms of what types of rules or structures to effect civil communication might be appropriate. And what models historically have been effective or which ones could we look towards to reinvent and elaborate on?

EC: I would like to see actual groups attempting to use random choice of leaders. There have been some in the past -- feminist groups I heard of and small-scale groups where essentially people are kind of anti-leader and nobody wants to be a leader, but I would like to see some groups a little bigger than that where there would probably people that would like to be leaders and try rotating leadership on some kind of random basis among them and see how it would work.

In our A Citizen Legislature scheme we were thinking of the House of Representatives, renamed the Representative House. One third of its members would be replaced every year. So it would kind of be in principle like the US Senate is now, with overlapping changes of membership, so that you would always have a continuity of people who had been there for a while who would know what was going on and capable of orienting and training new members. And if you had an organization that had a couple of hundred members and wanted to try something like this, I think that’s the way it should be tried.

That’s the way it often it happens informally anyway. There will be some kind of board of directors or council and people will serve on it for a couple of years and other things call to them and they drop off and other people are put on, but if that were formalized and especially with organizations that had some actual power it would be very interesting to study it and see how it worked.

I think the Portland neighborhoods have quite a budget actually and they are able to decide on their priorities – are they going to put in parks, are they going to repair streets, are they going to get rid of streets. They have control of what they are actually going to do. But we have lived so long in such a centralizing and authoritarian system that we’re not even to the baby steps stage yet. We are still barely crawling.

But I think history moves by a jerky pendulum motion and I think maybe we’ve gone to the right about as far as we’re going to go unless we slip over into outright fascism. So, I would imagine in the next five years to ten years (whatever the period you want to think in terms of) we will probably become more open to innovation again and I hope some of these innovations concern the actual structures by which we try to govern each other and ourselves.

UAS: Seems to me there is deep irony here when we refer to the history that is brought out in Ecotopia Emerging where we read that America’s founders drew inspiration from the native peoples of this land – in particular the Iroquois Federation – a successful governance mechanism. Is there something to be learned or something you could say about what happened from a beginning that seemed so well intentioned, innovative and integrative?

EC: A lot of it was scale. I don’t know if you’ve been following the Vermont secession movement, but it is pretty active. One of the things that you have in Vermont is genuinely viable village structures still, which we have very rarely in California, if any at all. I don’t really know of any that I would make a very strong defense of.

Governance follows social institutions. I think you could say that countries get the kind of formal institutions that their underlying social institutions make possible and sort of want. The reason Switzerland has a decentralized federalist government in which the cantons (states, or departments or whatever one calls them) have real power and are very jealous in fact to maintain their powers with respect to each other, is that the country was separated into regions by the severe mountainous terrain of the country as well as by some cultural divides – language blocks and so on. And what we have going in North America is on such a vast, vast scale compared to that, that it is almost like another universe.

Revolutionary developments don’t happen, at least if you believe a sociologist named Seymour Lipset, at the worst times in a social cycle. They start when things have been at the worst and they are starting to get a little bit better and people are thinking, “With a little more push we can really go somewhere here.” It may be we will enter such a phase again, as we did in the 60s when a lot of stuff had come unglued and it seemed that maybe it was possible to change a lot of stuff, and some things genuinely did get changed in the aftermath of the 60s.

In terms of what people can do practically, I think in any organization or any civic structure or anything that you are involved with, see whether there are ways to make the structure more democratic, to get new kinds of people elected or at least participating.

Vera Allwen in Ecotopia Emerging once said, “It isn’t important for everybody to do everything, it is just important that everybody does something.” I think this is really the way we need to go. Oh, by the way, another thing about Ecotopia Emerging…after Ecotopia itself came out, people would ask me questions about how Ecotopians do this and that, and one of the things they were curious about was how the Survivalists would run their political meetings. That is why I described, in some detail, that very strange meeting that begins with breathing exercises because, in the Survivalist perspective, politics is about the whole body, not just the head and the pocket book. It is about the whole body, the whole organism, and until you get people into that place they are not going to behave very well when it comes to doing specifically political things.

That is another thing we can do. Whenever I give a lecture I try to get people to breathe beforehand and get people to stand up and stretch in between. It is just very important to help each other be healthy animals. This is what politics is supposed to be all about after all.

UAS: Another theme described in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging is the potential for democracy in labor; it is described a “great unknown and unexplored social force” – the idea that workers would prefer to have ownership of the workplace. What about democracy as it relates to the workplace?

EC: I don’t remember what year this was done exactly, probably in the middle or late 80s, somebody on a poll for some reason or another asked the question, “Do you think people, working people, in a company should control the company?” Or something like that. A huge majority said, “Yeah!”

This is really amazing, because we think of ourselves as a rather sheep-like country where people are glad to have bosses pushing them around, and most people would never have heard of worker ownership. This is a very minority idea right now, let’s face it. It is a tiny, tiny blip on the consciousness of political people much less everybody else and yet here was this huge majority of ordinary Americans saying, “Yeah, I think I would like that.” To my knowledge nobody has quite figured this out. There are some organizations like one in Oakland called the Center for Employee Ownership that is helping people do employee ownership schemes – which are a lot more numerous than most people recognize.

I came at it all from a background as a political radical in my college days. I had been a left-wing anti-communist socialist. So I knew that capitalism had been tried and had a lot to answer for. Socialism had been tried in very, very imperfect deformed ways, and didn’t have too many attractions when it was what we called, as practiced in the Soviet Union, bureaucratic state capitalism. The question was whether there was another way, a third way, in which changes could be made to relationships to the means of production.

Another good thing that Marx said was “The overall nature of a society is determined by relations to the means of production” and we’d have to add means of distribution, in our case. And I took that very seriously and I began to think...well, is there any way in which the deformities of capitalism and the deformities of state capitalism a.k.a. “socialism” could be avoided? Is there any other way to organize relationships to the means of production other than having a capitalist class own them or having a state bureaucracy class own them? And of course there is: you can have the people who do the work own the companies.

So, I decided to adopt that as the basic Ecotopian system. And it seemed to make a certain kind of ecological sense because things in nature happen very piecemeal and locally. You can have a tree here and a tree there and sooner or later you have a forest that becomes an organism or an ecosystem of its own sort, but things in natural systems are really local, really intimate. And, so the question arises how you can do that in an economy? Well, the only way you can do it is to keep things relatively small. How small exactly is always a problem, because if organizations get too small they don’t have the capacity to do very many interesting things -- or at least not that often.

On the other hand of the scale, if you get beyond a couple of hundred people, things tend to get bureaucratized and they no longer happen on the basis of informal context and you begin to spend all your time having meetings and devising rulings and things get very stiff. But it is in that interesting range between too small to be really competent and too large to be competent that the really innovative and lively and special things about human beings happen.

And these are the things that characteristically happen in cities. They don’t usually happen in small towns where you typically don’t have the critical mass of bright or interesting people, and they don’t happen in huge bureaucracies as in Washington where things are so impossibly ingrown and congested that there is almost nothing new that can be done.

UAS: Is there anything you would want to say about democracy as it relates to the concept of the commons?

EC: Well, commons, as I understand them at least, mostly existed in small societies. Their fundamental locus was the village and the associated lands around the village, some of which were forested, some of which were grasslands, pasturage. And the allocations of these resources was done on some kind of democratic basis that I don’t think is very well understood. Certainly there was not a lord who did it. There was probably some kind of village council, probably of elder males, as usually has happened in human history, who sat around and, in a way, defensively prevented anyone from monopolizing this resource.

I do know one example of modern day times, in Bali. I was lucky enough to get to Bali one time for a couple weeks and I discovered that the way the irrigation districts are managed in Bali is as a commons. The water runs down off of a mountain onto this agricultural area and there is a council of water managers – and there is one individual, in the southwest they call him the “major domo” -- the manager. The interesting thing is that the individuals that are chosen for this always have their land at the bottom of the hill. So their interest is to make sure that the water gets through everybody else’s property and down to them. And other people can count on them to do that because if they don’t get the water, they starve. This system has worked for at least 3,000-4,000 years now and it gives you some kind of inkling of what the commons must have been like elsewhere.

It probably was not quite equalitarian. There were likely influential people in the village the way there usually are. On the other hand the degree to which these people could run roughshod over each other was probably very limited.

Another commons that is alive and well is the lobster fishery in Maine. If you happen to be a lobster fisherman you probably inherited from your father or uncle a certain amount of lobster pots that you have the right to put out there. Now, if some new person comes along and buys a boat, sets some traps and lays them out there, lo and behold, his traps disappear and his boat might be stove in and he is driven out of the business. You might say in a way this is a tyranny of local established interests. On the other hand you might also be forced to say that this lobster fishery has endured for about 300 years without overcatching lobsters, so it can’t be all bad.

I suspect that something like that is at the heart of all commons: that there is a shared, and you would have to call it democracy, there is a shared feeling that we are all in this boat together and we had better figure out ways to take care of each other and not endanger anybody, so that people have sort of an equal stake. Not a precisely equal stake but an equal enough stake.

In a way this may have been a model for how democracy first came to be -- in Scandinavian societies for example. My colleague Michael Phillips argues that our kind of democracy is really a Nordic tradition. It came from Nordic country and went to England and from there to here, and so forth. And it may have originated in small fishing communities where people had to defend everybody’s right to a livelihood so that it was easy to imagine that people had rights…that they had inalienable rights to exist and have a fair share and out of this grew the formal structures that we now think of as democratic.

The enclosure of the commons that used to be merely a matter a sheep and forest land has now encroached on human bodies and genes and possibly organs and time and so on -- a very sinister development. And you have to ask yourself if all these machinations of international corporations have reached such a pitch of sophistication in exploitative-ness and controlling-ness and so on, that at some point people will rise up and say, “Screw you, we’re not going to take this anymore,” and throw the whole thing out -- as Indian peasants, threatened with the loss of their seeds, in fact did. You get a few hundred-thousand Indian peasants amassing in the streets saying they are not going to allow them to take their seeds…well, it moves political obstacles. The Indian governmen had to renege on a seed-patenting treaty which they had gone along with.

UAS: How do we get to Ecotopia from here?

EC: As they say, every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We need to identify those single steps. What I would say, politically, Prop. 89 is a good step. It might pass. It will be a miracle if it does because a lot of money will be spent against it. That would be good and of course community building.

My wife and I spend a lot of time in our neighborhood. Neighborhoods create opportunities for a special form of organizing. You can think about preparedness for natural disasters as a way to connect with neighbors and find out who would need help, who probably has food stored up, how you might get water and so forth. It’s a way of people helping each other – a way that builds up camaraderie. People don’t give it enough priority to get to know their neighbors.

UAS: What about the visioning piece? How do we continue where Ecotopia left off?

EC: People need vision. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” When people begin to get the inkling that there are other ways to think about the future they get curious, they almost can’t believe it. They begin to look into it some more…

Effective leaders in the growing movement for social and environmental change recognize the need for both experience and humility. Further, without personal resolve to ground professional commitment, even the best ideas and actions can ring all too hollow. Aaron Lehmer of Bay Area Relocalize exemplifies these disparate qualities and has used them to craft an impressive and inspiring record.

By resume alone, Aaron's experience speaks volumes of his dedication to the sustainability movement. His tireless commitment has improved the operations of 5 organizations over the past decade, including: ReThink Paper, Earth Island Institute, Circle of Life, Post Carbon Institute and, most recently, Bay Area Relocalize, which he co-founded with peak oil and energy preparedness expert David Room. Given this latest project, Aaron chooses to frame his personal and professional life in terms of "relocalization" - the process through which a community reverts from ever-increasing dependence upon the global economic system back to local and regional networks of economic interdependency. And so it is not surprising that his personal life mirrors that of his professional life. In his words, he strives to "leave a light footprint low on food chain, drive only when absolutely necessary and cut down on daily consumption as much as possible". He derives his inspiration for these efforts from both positive and negative sources: increasingly precarious dependence on fossil fuel resources on the dark side and historic opportunity to become a more cooperative, community-based society on the light.

Aaron is the consummate professional, bringing clarity and precision to his speech, his relationships and to his work, especially Bay Area Relocalize. BAR embraces "a vision of sustainable communities living within their means, provisioning themselves in close proximity to the natural environment upon which they depend." The current alternative to this model is one of "extraction, market importation and the need to take control over other lands and people to sustain itself." Aaron notes that this unfortunate situation has led to approximately 1/3 of the Bay Area being "food insecure." In the next breath he points to the Alemany farm in San Francisco as a wonderful, shining example of efforts to change this model. And that is exactly the kind of work BAR is doing, "helping people develop their own skill-sets, ability, and power to create what we need locally." This mission has manifested as three of their current projects: the Rooftop Resources Project, the Relocalization Asset Map, and the Localization Strategy Campaign in alliance with Redefining Progress, the International Forum on Globalization, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and the Center for Sustainable Economy.

These efforts do not come without their challenges. Aaron feels that one of BAR's biggest hurdles is portraying sustainability so that it does not seem like "drudgery, but instead as something to enter into with sense of joy and creativity." He feels that is often difficult to really communicate the positive advantages of adopting a new, more sustainable lifestyle. Another challenge for BAR has been getting volunteers "engaged in ways that they feel invested." As a solution, Aaron points to their welcoming, open door policy as being a huge part of their success and momentum. He also says that providing lots of food and drink also helps to make meetings feel like more of a social occasion.

These challenges fade in significance when Aaron thoughtfully cites a list of positive trends that he sees in the sustainability movement. Primary among them is the mainstreaming of the movement: "A growing number of both young and older people are getting engaged with the issue (local food and energy) and are coming at it from different angles." The growing response of local politicians such as Nancy Nadel and Supervisors Mirkarimi, Daly and Maxwell in SF also seems to indicate an institutional shift towards a greener perspective. From what he sees, "some policy makers are starting to wake up." Aaron also cites the connections being made between grassroots organizations and projects as being an "extremely positive trend." In particular, he is excited about "newfound collaborations between social justice and traditionally environmentally focused 'name it and save it' organizations and campaigns." He points to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights as a local example of this integration of environmental and social justice communities.

When asked if there is one thing readers of this article could do tomorrow to embrace a more sustainable society, Aaron's answer was short and sweet, yet formidable: "Get rid of your car." Challenging though this advice may be, such a change can bring about great benefits both personally and globally. It is this connection of part to whole that makes Aaron's work so poignant, professional and vital as we enact our visions for a better world.

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For more information or to contact Bay Area Relocalize, visit their website: www.bayarearelocalize.org. You can also download "Building a Resilient and Equitable Bay Area," their recent policy report co-authored with the Localization Strategy Campaign: http://www.regionalprogress.org/BuildingBayArea.pdf.

Since the "green revolution" of the 1970's our food system has shifted from one of local production around and for cities, to a massive business of industrial agriculture which uses chemical and mechanical inputs to produce high yield crops of a single variety. Due to an ever expanding global economy, foods are often transported across countries, continents, and oceans before arriving at our table. Based on the marvels of science and engineering, the dominant food system, inaccurately labeled "conventional agriculture," has put small scale, local farmers out of work in the face of insurmountable competition and artificially low prices. Other side effects of industrial agriculture and agribusiness are environmental problems such as increased usage of pesticides and fossil fuels, loss of biodiversity, water pollution, and depleted topsoil. Then there are social consequences, such as exploitation of farm workers, social disconnect from food, endemic obesity, diabetes, and other health risks and diseases. For every problem, however, there are solutions: People in the Bay Area, and across the globe, are awakening their senses, minds, and mouths to the alternatives to large scale agriculture. This article highlights just some of the ways growing masses of people are getting involved in creating local food systems that counter the ills of industrial agriculture.

Organic and Sustainable

A truly sustainable food system promotes biodiversity, uses no chemical and few mechanical inputs, and does not incur long distance transport. The underlying assumption of sustainable food production is that it is healthy for the farmer, worker, consumer, economy, animals, and the environment. It is important to realize that sustainable and organic are not necessarily interchangeable terms: crops grown without chemicals are organic, but can only be part of a sustainable system if they are produced locally. Increased energy efficiency and minimal processing are the additional elements required of a sustainable system, but not of organics. While commercial food production focuses on single crops and controlling higher yields, sustainable food production operates in a system of natural interaction and is inextricably linked to other issues such as environmental protection, human health, and social justice.

In his new book the Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Books, 2006), author Michael Pollan discusses the problem with what he terms "industrial organic", that is, the co-opting of the label organic by large scale agriculture. Many of the mega-marketers of agribusiness have picked up on our growing concern for eating healthy food and have gone into the organic business, while their products remain part of the industrial system, producing foods that are heavy in mechanical inputs and often highly processed. Pollan takes this idea further, exploring industrial, sustainable, and native food chains in detail. By tracing the lineage of four meals he lays out what our food choices really mean, to our society, our health and the environment.

Community Supported Agriculture and Farmer's Markets

According to Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org), a national group that supports local food economies, "Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of (farm fresh) produce." By making a financial commitment in advance to a local, sustainable farmer, consumers can invest their food dollar in healthy produce and become members or shareholders of the farm. This community support allows farmers to raise the capital needed to produce more food, and lowers their risk by guaranteeing purchasers will pay a fair price for what is grown. In community supported agriculture there are no middle-men, i.e. produce wholesalers, whose goal is to get the lowest price for the farmer's goods, and grocery stores, which pass their operating costs to the consumer. Produce is delivered fresh to the subscriber's door, or to a drop off site, and transportation costs are drastically reduced. The community's investment ensures the success of the farm and the health of the community. Some CSA farms have programs where members work a small number of hours on the farm during the growing season, fostering a connection between the consumer and producer, between you and the food you eat. A CSA season typically runs from late spring through early fall. An ever expanding movement, the number of CSA farms in the United States was estimated at 50 in 1990, and has since grown to over 1000.

Another direct connection between consumers and farmers are Farmer's Markets, of which there are at least a dozen in the Bay Area. Cultures around the globe employ these markets, to sell anything from produce and meat to handicrafts, flowers, jewelry, and textiles. Several recent experiments with Farmer's Markets allow formerly marginalized groups to grow and sell food directly to the public, with profits going immediately back to the seller- a social justice innovation. Programs are underway in such diverse places as Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project and Curitiba, Brazil. Locally, San Francisco Food Systems, an agency that works with the Department of Public Health, has advocated for food stamps and WIC to be accepted at all Farmer's Markets including the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market, which showcases the city's best selection of sustainable produce and meat, and the Bayview Farmer's Market, which brings farm fresh produce to a neighborhood with a proliferation of liquor stores and few grocery stores, benefiting both the community and the farmer. Supporting local Farmer's Markets means tipping the scales of social and economic justice in your favor.

Eating Seasonally, the Locavore Challenge, and the Hunger for Connection

Of course, eating directly from a farm or Farmer's Market means that many of the products we are accustomed to having, at any time of the year, are not always available to us. Eating farm fresh, while connecting you to the farmer, also connects you to the earth and the seasonality of fresh foods. No tomatoes in the winter, and no pumpkins in the summer. Eating with the farmer means taking risks and giving up dependencies on certain food luxuries, but the trade off is healthy, sustainable food and connection to that food.

A group of concerned Bay Area citizens have presented consumers with the ultimate challenge: to eat locally, exclusively, for the month of May 2006. The Locavores Challenge (www.locavores.com) is another grassroots effort to support local food economies by eating food grown within 100 miles of home. In comparison, the average distance food travels to your table in our industrial system is 1500 miles, contributing both to our society's dependence on oil and taking accountability out of the food production process. Being a Locavore means no bananas, mangos, coffee, chocolate, coconut milk, nor many of the other products that we are accustomed to finding year round on our grocery shelves. While this might be a difficult challenge or what seems like a mission impossible, at the very least it encourages us to think about where the food we eat comes from, what it takes to bring it to us, and how we can affect change through our choices.

Locavores co-founder, chef, and food activist Jessica Prenctice recently published a book, Full Moon Feast and the Hunger for Connection (Chelsea Green, 2006), in which she explores our innate desire for connectedness to the land and to the food we eat. She ingeniously describes the cycle of food in relation to the thirteen month lunar calendar, traditionally used by agrarian societies, drawing on native nutrition and Farmer's Almanacs as resources. The result is an excellent and informative read which describes her personal history with food, and details which foods correspond with each month or moon, according to age old wisdom. This amazing knowledge base is linked back to the industrial food system, explaining both our disconnection and our desire for re-connection, and is interspersed with healthful, seasonal recipes.

The Slow Food Movement

Slow Food is an organization which has attracted people the world over who eschew not only "fast food" but a fast-paced existence. The emphasis with this group is three-fold: first, a return to locally produced, seasonal food; doing so preserves local economies. Slow Food also puts great emphasis on the ability of people to actually enjoy the food they are eating; pleasure, tradition, and artisanal foods are valued more than efficiency in production. Finally, the group strives to educate food eaters in an "ecologically aware consumerism," so that people know where their food comes from, what it took to produce and deliver it, and how much healthier their food choices can be, for themselves, local farmers, animals, economies, and the environment. While this initially seems rooted solely in food, the Slow Food movement is really about a return to sustainable systems of living in a world obsessed with industry and efficiency. What better and more pressing place to start than in food systems, without which humanity cannot survive?

Vote with your forks!

People who are interested in supporting and becoming involved in sustainable food systems will have many alternatives to consider; first and foremost, what feels most comfortable for them. This often means convenience and price are primary concerns. More and more people are discovering, however, that CSA programs and locally produced foods are often less expensive and just as convenient as large food retailers. Being connected to our food means we care to investigate all of the associated concerns, such as how and where the food was raised, how much it has been processed, how it impacts human and environmental health, and whom it benefits economically. The value of shopping, producing, and eating locally, in terms of social, economic, and environmental health, is evident. Many people opt for labeled organics, but what should be emphasized and made clear is whether the organic products we buy are truly sustainable. What we choose to eat and consume is a highly political decision. So vote with your forks for the kind of food systems you want, and for the equitable allocation of resources to accommodate those systems.

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This article was co-authored by Hillary Strobel

Ever wonder why humans chose to settle in San Francisco? Perhaps it was the views of the Pacific and the Bay, the temperate climate, or the gold in them thar hills. Another not so obvious answer is that San Francisco is sitting on a wealth of water, from underground aquifers, to rivers, lakes, and creeks. While our local watershed has long since been paved over, this priceless resource still flows, trapped beneath the concrete that supports our steps.

Through time immemorial human animals have settled near water. Traditionally, out of necessity, we have followed the water that cycles the earth; evaporating from the oceans, captured in the clouds and rained onto land, settling in reservoirs, rivers, lakes, soil, and below-ground artesian streams. Where water falls life springs forth, soil becomes fertile, plants grow and animals gather to eat and drink. Where water falls is the watershed, and like all things sustainable, watersheds are local. Brock Dolman, local water expert, explains that a watershed is a “basin of relationships” between the earth, plants, and animals --a bio-region. Perhaps humans settled in San Francisco because of its water resources.

But if watersheds are local, then why does 95% of our water come piped in from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, 165 miles away in Yosemite National Park? It seems logical enough, knowing that San Francisco is surrounded by salt water and has a short rainy season. Is it not necessary to get our water from the dammed Tuolumne River, whose water fills what once was the Hetch Hetchy Valley, described by John Muir as equal in beauty to the Yosemite Valley? If we consider that humans have lived here far longer than Hetch Hetchy has been a reservoir, the mystery of our local watershed becomes more poignant.

In 2004, Joel Pomerantz documented the politics and the history of the San Francisco watershed in an article entitled “A Clean Little Secret”. Pomerantz cites numerous creeks, multiple lakes, and even a river that run through our city. The following description is a hint of just one of the many water resources that we walk upon today, but know little about:

On April 5, 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza's party rowed up Mission Creek from the bay to establish a mission. April 5 is the feast day of Our Lady of Sorrows (Nuestra Señora de los Dolores)—thus the name Mission Dolores. The creek they entered wound through marshes to a tidal lagoon and then into a flowing freshwater lake, called Laguna de Manantial. The creek probably spanned a width of forty feet or more and, at 100 to 200 cubic feet per second, offered enough current to require real effort in the arms of the rowers. The water was sweet and excellent for drinking (as it still is today).

For hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years, the humans that lived in the geographic location we call San Francisco drank from the flowing creeks of Mission, Islais, San Souci, and Lobos; from Lake Merced and Lake Manantial; and from the Hayes River. There was no need for Hetch Hetchy because, in fact, there was a natural system of navigable, fresh water that flowed down the slopes of the Presidio and Twin Peaks and settled in basins throughout the city.

We now live in an era of globalization and under a prevailing mentality that large scale solutions will solve local problems. It could be this attitude that allowed a project like Hetch Hetchy to reallocate local watersheds. As a society, we are frightfully disconnected from nature. Whether we are talking about food, energy, or water, we have been programmed to believe things are the way they are for a good reason, period. Resources appear to be available to us without limits, so why should we be concerned to preserve them?

To add more clarity to the picture, we should think not only of the long distance that water travels to our taps, but also what happens to it once it goes down the drain. Our city is for the most part impermeable, covered in asphalt and concrete. Almost all of the rain that falls locally goes directly to the “storm drain”, a.k.a. the sewer, the same place that our showers, sinks and toilets drain. According to Pomerantz, over 2.5 million gallons of potable water flow weekly from the Hayes River into the Powell Street Bart station, where it is pumped by the transit authority, also into the sewer, to prevent the subway from flooding.

It isn’t feasible to unearth our watershed by tearing up the city, but looking outside of our reality, it is easy to see why as individuals we should do something to correct the problem and lead more sustainable urban lives, especially where our seemingly limitless water is concerned. If we take for example the fact that for the last 3 months much of the North American continent has been suffering from a severe water shortage, our perception of water abundance is changed. If we consider that women in Africa and other parts of the world walk miles to a water source and carry the heavy burden home, we can imagine another water reality. Yet another water reality surfaces, in Yemen, where families are obliged to spend up to half of their daily income on water sold at markets.

To really understand what we are doing wrong, though, it helps to know how water works and why our current patterns of water consumption are unsustainable. First, we should know that the natural flow of water is to take the path of least resistance, winding in sinuous, meandering patterns, with the flow of gravity. Water, much like tree branches, or plant roots, or our own nervous and digestive systems, flows in circuitous paths. Realizing this, we understand that to pump water up from underground pipes or in straight lines is unnatural and inefficient. Why not capture rainwater from roofs and let it flow downward?

Next, we should understand that water is the fundamental compound necessary to life. Our bodies are composed of 60% water. The earth is 70% water, but of that only 3% is fresh water and another one percent is locked under the earth’s surface and in glacial bodies. Most of the fresh water streams, lakes, and rivers that wind through our planet are polluted by the industrial processes that facilitate our modern lifestyles. The reality is that water is a scarce resource and not the limitless elixir we often take it to be.

If we still don’t get it, we might consider that water is responsible for 70% of the world’s illness. Scholar and engineer Luna Leopold said that, “the health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land.” To prevent waterborne disease, our tap water is treated with toxic chemicals, in our case chloramines, to kill pathogens before they can harm us. Chloramine kills pathogens, fish, and birds, but decision making authorities have decided that it will protect us. Go on, have a drink of some of your clean, clear San Francisco water, but remember Leopold was right.

Now when we consider the under-use of our local watershed and the miles and miles and miles of pipes that bring us water, it becomes evident that our water resources have been disrupted and redirected in an over-engineered system that not only can’t sustain itself, but is also bafflingly wasteful. From this understanding, we can take action to re-localize our watershed. For examples, we can look to communities like Village Homes in Davis, CA, a community designed to produce zero net runoff, that is no storm drain. Instead, greenways, gardens, and food producing trees absorb runoff. Contoured swales form creeks that flow below pedestrian bridges. Water cools the community and is cycled back into nature. Or we can turn to groups like the Oakland based Greywater Guerrillas, that believe we should all disconnect from the sewer and stop throwing our water away. Or the Surfrider Foundation that sponsors projects supporting the removal of impervious surfaces, such as parking lots, and replacing them with planted driveways that can absorb runoff and pollutants. This is the mental shift that will lead to sustainable water usage.

Erin's Permaculture Garden and Its Chickens 

Erin Bullock is a permaculture consultant based in San Francisco. Living adjacent to the University of San Francisco campus, her backyard is literally spilling over with verdant growth. She embraces numerous varieties of plants.

Touring the garden, chickens enthusiastically greet her at the fence. In a major urban environment, they seem a bit out of place. They demonstrate a unique side of permaculture to urban neighbors.

It is perfectly legal for residents in the city to own up to four chickens without a permit. It’s a refreshing surprise to learn our feathered friends can thrive in a city known for its lack of yard-space.

“Our two Plymouth Rock hens lay eggs everyday,” Erin says, as her cat, approaching her, stops by the fence--eye to eye with gentle curiosity.

"They eat all our snails and slugs, as well as our food scraps." Chickens are great at returning nitrogen to the soil and keeping it cultivated. In addition, they have become conversation pieces with neighbors; a young boy next door peers into the coop from a ladder placed on his side of the fence.

A landscape architect by training, she is establishing her own niche as a permaculture consultant in San Francisco. Erin began her career designing landscapes for corporate campuses. Soon disillusioned about the conventional methods used to serve its clients, she learned about alternative and sustainable practices by living on an organic blueberry farm where she grew to appreciate the agricultural community.

Erin took a permaculture immersion training at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, in Occidental, CA. It was there that she became mindful of the fundamental importance of permaculture to all people and how it connects all aspects of healthy communities.

She applied her training--with organics in mind--by working for a landscaper in Marin. Recently she struck out on her own with Urban Earth, a design/build landscaping business focusing specifically on permaculture designs for clients. She currently lives in a vegetarian cooperative house.

The richness of plant diversity comes into full bloom in the yard itself. Loquat and fig trees, ground cherry, raspberry, and flowers—perennials mainly—and lots of vegetables. Examples include artichokes, fava beans, Jerusalem artichokes, scarlet runner beans, oca, yacon, mashua (from the Andes in South America), Red Russian kale; a number of herbs have medicinal properties, too. Walking through the back door, she is greeted with seedlings spilling over eagerly, waiting to be transplanted.

Erin explains that permaculture is a philosophy of life that focuses on living in concert with natural systems. New to most people, it is actually firmly rooted in the ancient traditions of native peoples around the world. Though the idea of planting various species in seeming disarray goes against the grain of our sense of neatly planted rows, it can be graceful.

One can begin living this life quite simply. For example, by composting vegetable scraps, one is helping “close ecological loops” by preventing the unnecessary expenditure of fossil fuels in transporting garbage. "Composting in any form, whether you have a worm bin, chicken manure, or you're sheet-mulching with cardboard and newspaper, builds healthy soil, which is what everything green depends on," she says. By so organizing one’s garden, a natural synergy emerges; pests and disease tend to decline, and a surprising abundance of food can be grown.

Erin emphasizes that one should focus on what resources are available. In SF, plenty of these are there for the asking. For instance, businesses of all sizes offer residents free compost materials. “You can get used coffee grounds from cafes—even Starbucks.” she adds. These are great for producing rich humus.

Although the art and science of the practice requires some study, it can be easily learned by experimenting in a small plot in a community garden.

Erin is one of the few with the opportunity to witness the abundant growth of luscious avocados here in the City. Her neighbor’s established tree is chock full of them, and is happy to share. "Every San Franciscan with a backyard should have an avocado, lemon, or apple tree. Fresh-picked fruit grown locally just tastes better than stuff that has to be shipped in from Mexico or New Zealand," Erin points out.

She recently offered a workshop on urban foraging at her community garden on 7th Avenue. To her surprise, thirty people showed up at 9:00 am to participate. She plans to conduct more in the future. Harvesting seaweed along the Sonoma coast and acorns as the Native Americans once did are some ideas.

She is clearly excited about the prospects of permaculture in our urban environment. It points towards a future solution in a land challenged by the full spectrum of environmental issues we hear about in news and in movies such as An Inconvenient Truth.

Contact Erin Bullock at urbanearthgardens@yahoo.com.