Category: Articles

For 20 years, forest defenders on California’s Lost Coast have blockaded logging roads leading into the ancient forests at the headwaters of the wild Mattole river. The forest is once again under threat and the blockaders need hands in the woods, allies in town, funds and gear. Contact us to get involved! efhum@riseup.net @blockade.babes. Stay tuned for an action camp in June! Read about the Mattole in Slingshot 127 and 128 and the Winter 2019 Earth First! Journal.

By Samara

Since September of 2018, a group of University of California (UC) students, grad students, and faculty calling ourselves the Community Economies Collaborative (CEC) has been growing a movement to bring the study of community-based economics to the university, and to likewise leverage the UC’s resources towards supporting community-based economic efforts. Starting with a small group at UC Davis, this movement is rapidly growing and is now represented on six of the UC campuses statewide.

As a point of calibration, we are drawing upon the economic writings of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, two feminist geographers who jointly write under the moniker J.K. Gibson-Graham. This spring we are reading Gibson-Graham’s, A Postcapitalist Politics, in which they queer both capitalism and Marxism, while exploring practical ways that community economics unfold on the ground. Gibson-Graham’s work, however, is only one articulation of alternative economic thinking, and we are excited to explore a number of alternative models as we build a dynamic and engaging understanding of the way community economies are expressed in language and on the ground. Below are some of the key ideas that we have been working with in our discussions.

The Commons – The “commons” typically refers to natural resources owned and managed by a community. Economist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for her work on common pool resource management. Her work stands in contrast to Garret Hardin’s pessimistic formulation of the “tragedy of the commons” and gives hope that communities can, under certain conditions, cooperatively manage their resources for the public good. As such, “commons” or “commoning” is at the root of a wide array of cooperative economic activity right now such as community land trusts, time banks, tool libraries, and certain types of venue organization such as that found at the Omni Commons in Oakland. A key advocacy organization for promoting the commons in the United States is the Schumacher Center for New Economics, named for the economist E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, who since the 1960s has been promoting the idea of Buddhist economics, which relates closely to the vision Gandhi laid out for the economy of postcolonial India.

Localism – “Localism” has many different meanings in the literature, but recently, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) has adopted the term to advocate for economic development rooted in community-based enterprises. Their primary argument is that local ownership and control of economic decision-making allows for more democratic and ecological accountability. The term “local living economy” comes from author David Korten, who wrote the 1994 bestseller When Corporations Rule the World. David’s thinking influenced Judy Wicks, a Philadelphia-based activist who owned one of the first restaurants in the country to intentionally seek out locally-sourced ingredients. Judy joined David and several other likeminded individuals to found BALLE in 2001. Their original framework for the organization described several building blocks for a localized economy: sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, zero-waste manufacturing, green building, independent retail and media.

The Anti-Globalization Movement – The takeover of several towns and villages in the Mexican state of Chiapas by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation on January 1, 1994 was a protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect on that date. The uprising became a rallying cry for civil society groups around the world that protested global trade negotiations that were dominated by multinational corporations and global financial institutions at the expense of local communities. These decades-long trade negotiations resulted in the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has the power to invalidate laws protecting workers and the environment as “trade violations.” Following Chiapas, the wave of anti-globalization protests reached another flashpoint in 1999 during the WTO meeting in Seattle. The violent police response to the protesters captured worldwide attention. Other moments of resistance have included the G8 summit protests and Occupy Wall Street. Beyond protests, this branch of community economies connects to grassroots community development work in the Global South, the rise of the fair trade and the slow food movements, and more recently Buen Vivir, a holistic set of economic and spiritual practices arising from

indigenous communities of South America.

Sustainability – The term “Sustainable Development” came into wide use after the 1987 publication of Our Common Future, a report by a United Nations commission on the rapid deterioration of the planet’s ecology. Sustainability as a framework emphasizes flows of energy, water, food, and waste and treats ecological resources as a form of wealth that should be saved and cultivated with the same conservationist spirit that was once directed towards the saving of money.

The focus on climate change became one of the key concerns within the sustainability framework in the early 2000s after the Bush Administration withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Climate Accords. The concept of “Peak Oil” also gained public attention during this period, an idea that says that after a certain peak, extraction of oil will reach a point of diminishing returns, meaning oil extraction will become increasingly expensive and necessitate a transition to a low-carbon society. This realization sparked the Transition Town Movement in Great Britain and then the United States. More recently, the concept of “resilience” has emerged as new way to think about how to respond to climate change.

Naomi Klein’s recent book and film This Changes Everything directly links the climate crisis to capitalism and the need for re-localization. Klein argues for paying close attention to the economic frameworks coming from indigenous peoples and argues for self-determined economic futures.

Ecological economics – Herman Daly was once the Senior Economist for the Environmental Department of the World Bank, where he worked to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. He co-founded the journal Ecological Economics and has argued forcefully since the 1970s against the use of gross domestic product to measure economic wellbeing, saying that instead, we should use what he and John Cobb developed called the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) as form of measuring economies. Daly and others have advocated for a steady-state economy, with some calling for degrowth in order to avoid environmental disaster. This is absolute heresy to the economic establishment, and there are still very few ecological economists in university departments. The 1975 book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach is an early work of science fiction imagining a steady-state economy on the US West Coast. A leading advocacy organization is the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Diverse Economies – Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham met as Ph.D. students in geography at Clark University in the 1970s. They began to develop a critique of Marxist analysis, showing the problems of an economic theory that requires the state to be seized before the new economy can be implemented. Instead, they have developed a queer, feminist approach to economics, a practice that “encourages us to make visible the hidden alternative economic activities that everywhere abound, and to connect them through a language of economic difference.” Only by working to collectively see noncapitalistic activities, and treating them as both present and viable, are we able to “actively build on them in the here and now to transform our local economies.” Gibson-Graham’s work moves us past forms of essentialism that dominate traditional Marxist thought. They suggest that the real economy is like an iceberg. What’s most visible is capitalist exchange, but most economic activity happens informally below the surface. Thinking through these “diverse economies” is a way of opening up our imagination to the diverse economic practices and possibilities all around us.

These are just some of many ideas we are exploring as we come together to rethink our roles as academics, community members, and inhabitants of the planet at this moment in time. As climate chaos ravages the planet, the need to course-correct towards more resilient and sustainable community-based economics has never been more urgent. We are eager to continue to develop and grow our understanding of “community economies” within and outside of the academy, while also working to leverage the UC system towards growing more sustainable, just, and democratic economies locally, and around the world. We hope that our work will inspire others to build similar projects within their communities and workplaces, and we hope that others will join us!

In January of 2020, we plan to hold a conference at UC Davis which we hope will be the beginning of this process to develop curriculum and policy changes within the UC and beyond. Currently, we are hoping for more UC graduate students from around the state to join our steering committee, and to join us on our quarterly retreats. We are also looking to connect with community partners who are working to build and advocate for resilient community economies to join us in developing policy and practices. If you would like to be part of the conference, or are interested in this project, please reach out to us at shsteele@ucdavis.edu. If you would like to follow our efforts, you can subscribe to our listserv by sending an email to SYMPA@ucdavis.edu – in the subject line put “subscribe cec-list@ucdavis.edu” followed by your name and leave the body of the email blank.

 

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By Jane Stillwater

I recently toured the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian.  These two museums are both very similar — and also very different.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum is devoted to chronicling the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany — and this museum rightfully reminds us that genocide is a bad thing.  One of the exhibits that moved me to tears was commemorating the heroic Jewish resistance fighters.  They risked their lives fighting fascism.  Many of them were tortured and murdered.

Then I moved on to the American Indian Museum — same story there.  Genocide on a grand scale.  Millions of Native Americans murdered in cold blood.  But there was one big difference between the two museums.  When the Jews fought back against the evil Nazis, they were called resistance fighters and heroes.  But when the Natives fought back against genocidal attacks by Americans, they were given no place of honor in the American Indian Museum.  They were not considered heroes.  In fact, they were barely mentioned at all.

There was only a very small collage-type thingie in a back corner of the fourth floor of the museum that mentioned a few Native “activists” and the 1973 protest at Wounded Knee.  Custer’s last stand was mentioned.  And there was just one mention in passing about the American Indian Movement — but nothing at all about Leonard Peltier, the resistance fighter who defended his people from a deadly FBI attack and who is now serving his 44th year of a life sentence in some lonely Florida prison for a crime that he didn’t commit.

There is another kind of genocide going on in America today — or should I say “femicide”.  It is shamefully easy for a non-Native person to enter a Native reservation and then murder or rape or kidnap a Native woman or child — and get away with it because tribal police on American Indian reservations have no jurisdiction to arrest non-Natives.

While I was at the American Indian Museum, I suddenly found myself in the tragic midst of the REDress Project — dozens of empty red dresses, swaying tragically in the wind and rain, symbolizing the thousands of raped, maimed, murdered and disappeared Native women on reservations across America.  Something like 86% of these crimes have been committed by non-natives.

At a symposium entitled “Safety for Our Sisters” held at the museum, we learned that almost half of Native women have been abused or raped or disappeared. “It’s actually closer to 87%” said one speaker. Native women have become an endangered species — and meanwhile many politicians are too busy reveling in a sick and addictive love affair with Walls and Wars to notice.

The grim history of these many centuries of violence and genocide against Native Americans continues today, as White Americans continue to value money and greed and power over any kind of humanity or love of fellow human beings.  The Jewish Holocaust lasted a decade, but the Native American genocide is still going on today.

We can wallow in the sense that America is morally doomed, or we can take a page from the Jewish and Native resistance fighters and resist. Resist injustice. Resist corporate greed. Resist colonialism. Resist bigotry.

For centuries it was mainly American Indians who suffered from genocide by colonialists — but now it is the entire world facing extinction by corporate America’s bottomless greed.

Isn’t it time for all of us to start righting these horrendous wrongs?  Let’s join our Indigenous brothers and sisters in seeking justice!

Jane Stillwater is a child of the 60s living in cooperative housing in Berkeley. She blogs at jpstillwater.blogspot.com.

By Hayley

The UN has warned that we have twelve years to limit the catastrophic impacts of climate change, and climate change isn’t the only threat.  We are also facing massive species die offs, the oceans are becoming too acidic to support life, and ecological harm is being caused by everything from concrete to deforestation to unsustainable farming practices.

Capitalism has us locked in a death march, with our collective labor being steered towards making the planet uninhabitable.  Individual lifestyle changes are important, but they simply aren’t enough to reverse the direction we’re going in, and time is running out. It is time to get brave, get public, and to start working for massive changes in the way we do things. A mere 100 companies are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions. It is time to re-imagine our financial landscape so that it becomes impossible for these mega-polluters to exist.  It’s time for a nationwide divestment movement!

A key factor fueling ecological destruction is that people are getting paid to do it. The equation is simple: Cut the funds, cut the destruction.

A 2018 report by Rain Forest Action Network shows how top banks are dumping obscene amounts of money into planet-killing activities. Wells Fargo, for instance, invested more than $4.6 billion in fossil fuels between 2015 and 2017. In response, cities like Seattle and Davis have pulled all city funds from Wells Fargo, and a number of groups have also been demonstrating in front of Wells Fargo to draw attention to its role in funding ecological destruction.

At this point, all of the major banks are putting money into ecocide, which is why it’s vital to make sure you aren’t banking with any of them. Close your account today! But also, if you have a 401k, that money might be invested without your knowledge in climate-killing funds, and likewise, your city, school, or workplace might have it’s money caught up in ecological destruction.

Recently, an online tool was developed to help you figure out if you have money accidentally invested in fossil fuels. Here’s the link: fossilfreefunds.org  Try it now!  Seriously, check your own funds, your workplace’s, and your city’s.  It’s time to get all funds out of ecological destruction.

Divestment is a huge step in taking away the power of the planet-killing industries. But this needs to go beyond a boycott. We need an alternative system.

That’s why we also need to break up the mega banks, and replace them with publicly-owned banks. In 2018, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would break up any bank with total exposure greater than 3% of the US Economy.  While this bill didn’t pass, it’s a great vision in terms of setting our sights on the next steps. But breaking up mega-banks is just the start. We also need public banks — banks that are owned and controlled by the people rather than corporate shareholders.

In North Dakota, there has been a public bank since 1919, showing us that it’s possible to have a bank owned by the people. The Bank of North Dakota earns a profit for the state, generating public funds that contribute to education, disaster relief, and infrastructure projects. While BND isn’t divested from climate chaos, it at least shows us that it’s possible to create a successful public bank.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, public banking activists have been laying the groundwork to create the East Bay Public Bank, a publicly-owned bank with the explicit mission to never invest in ecocide.  Currently, a new law, AB857, is being drafted in the California Legislature that will set things in place for public banking in California.

Simply having publicly-owned banks isn’t enough: we also have to make sure there is a clear mission to never invest in ecological destruction. Credit Unions can also be a good option to do your banking, as long as they are divested from ecocide.

We have just a few years left to course-correct our society so that the global change in temperature will be 1.5°C instead of much worse, and we’ve already killed off 60% of the planet’s species since 1970. Working to prevent ecological collapse means rethinking our society at every level, and building better ways to bank is a part of the solution. We need to think fast and act smart. Cut off the funds that fuel ecocide and de-pave the way for the planet’s ecological future.

You can learn more about the Bay Area project to create the nation’s first eco-friendly public bank at publicbankeastbay.org.

By Rachelle Hughes

Am I white? I acknowledge my privilege as a white passing person, but I am still hesitant to classify myself as such. My late mother was British and Caucasian, but my father is Persian, and even though I identify as Middle Eastern, the ‘Ethnicity’ section on every single official document I’ve ever encountered seems to want to pigeonhole me into a white identity I am not fully comfortable with. So what am I? Am I white? And regardless of whether or not I am, why am I so uncomfortable with this label?
I’ve been conflicted about my racial identity ever since I learned of the complexities of racial privilege in the United States and what being a person of color really means. Middle Easterners are often boxed into the “white” category, but the term P.O.C. represents the racial groups that are not dominant in this country and that struggle under its existing systems of racial privilege and hierarchy. Now, faced with this definition, I can do nothing else but conclude that Middle Easterners are undeniably a group that falls into the P.O.C. category.
The fact that some Persians and Mid-Easterners still assert their “whiteness” is evidence enough of how badly we are treated when we are not white. When we cannot pass ourselves off as such. Rampant Islamophobia after the 9/11 attacks has led to an increasingly contagious level of hatred towards Middle Eastern people in the United States (ive seen “MUSLIMS GET OUT” sharpied onto the back of a street sign). When I remember how intense this hatred can be, I remember how privileged I am to be white passing. But recognition of my privilege often comes with guilt as I ask myself: “What makes me more worthy of respect than non white-passing Middle Easterners?” I would gladly renounce this privilege if it meant I could help other people fight its existence in our society, but all things aside, it is a relief and a blessing to be able to slip under the radar of racists, or to have a common, English first name that doesn’t prompt suspicious glances and whispered jokes from my classmates whenever it is called out for roll. I often take these little things for granted, and that is why I am scared of assuming a white identity.
I am scared of assuming a white identity because I am scared of becoming complicit in a system of oppression that is pitted against people just like me and my father. By calling myself white, I would be reinforcing the notion that it is shameful to be anything contrary to the white norm in our society—that it is “better to be white.” I also refuse to call myself something that I am not. I am Persian. My whole life was spent around my Persian father’s Persian acquaintances— I belong to no other ethnic culture. An African-American person who has one white parent and one black parent can still identify as African-American, so why can’t I identify as Middle Eastern? I am fervently proud of my Persian heritage and feel like it represents me strongly. I refuse to back down against society telling me to be anything except what I am. I will not bend to a racist will; I will fight it. I am Persian. I am of mixed Middle Eastern descent. I will fight for my identity. In the words of the Iranian-Americans who stood up against the ethnic misidentification of Middle Easterners in the 2010 U.S. National Census, “Check it right, I ain’t white.”

By Jesse D. Palmer

Let me start by saying that I love to ride my bike. When I think about the climate crisis — that human extinction is now on the line if humans don’t immediately and dramatically decarbonize and otherwise reduce our foot print — one of the first things I think the universe will miss if humans go extinct is the bicycle. Bikes could be the greatest human invention — simple, efficient, powerful and yet still fun, humble and human scale. Our technology may be the thing that destroys our species, but bikes are one of the tools that empower individuals and communities and free us to reach our full potential.

So it is fitting that bikes have a role in the grassroots resistance that is building against sleepwalking off a climate cliff. We have run out of time waiting for governments and corporations to decarbonize. If humans stay on our current unsustainable course — where everything we do day-to-day degrades the earth — we’ll soon cross climate tipping points, and rapid ecological change will be out of our hands. There’s a slim chance that if we quickly reverse ecological damage, we can save ourselves, and what’s lacking is massive political, cultural and social will. We need urgency, speed and collective action. The price of inaction must be constant and overwhelming resistance and disorder in the streets.

The Friday For Future student climate strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg is just the type of disruptive action that can help as it expands and diversifies so that it’s not just students but everyone refusing to sit idly by while our house is on fire.

One small piece of raising the cost of climate inaction could be rush hour mass bike rides — a fun and legal way to tie up traffic and block business as usual with a clear message: if you keep destroying the world, we’ll shut you down. In California and most other places it is legal to ride your bike on the street, but because bikes are slower than cars, just a small group of legally moving bikes function like a mobile freeway accident. Traffic is already stressed at rush hour and a small hiccup can tie up the commute big time.

In the 1990s I was involved in huge Critical Mass bike rides that happened Friday nights during rush hour. They weren’t (and aren’t) protests — CM has no demands, no leaders and no meetings. Because big bike rides are so disruptive and because just daring to ride a bike in a car dominated world puts you so far outside the mainstream and at odds with the powers that be, Critical Mass at its heyday was more effective than any protest bike advocates could have organized.

Riding your bike with a big leaderless group is fun. Not knowing who is in charge or what is going to happen next is a rare experience in our pre-programmed lives. Humans yearn for excitement, spontaneity, and the sense of community that exists on a CM ride when everyone can talk to anyone and individuals takes responsibility for the whole. Rides have music and costumes and a few simple tips help make it work: the people in front shouldn’t ride so fast that it gets spread out and cars get into the mass. If you’re in front its up to you to select a good route to avoid going in circles.

Some bike advocates hate Critical Mass because it is unruly and can antagonize drivers, cops and city officials. But chaos works — there’s plenty of reason to credit CM in the 1990s and early 2000s with increasing pressure to improve bike infrastructure.

Around the Bay Area, Critical Mass still exists in San Francisco on the last Friday of each month at 6 at Justin Herman Plaza. But it has dwindled in numbers and social weight and no longer exists at all in many other cities. Locally, CM has mostly been replaced with Bike Party: huge, fun and diverse bike rides that happen well after rush hour, on a pre-planned route, with rules of conduct and a division of labor between leaders and participants. I get that Bike Party is organized to avoid disruption and conflict with cars so it can be just a fun bike ride, and that’s fine.

But its really time to reclaim Critical Mass or better yet, something with a new name that uses the basic tactic of a rush hour, mass disruptive ride, but goes beyond CM’s (reasonable) refusal to unify around an articulate political goal other than “we like to ride our bikes” and “bikes are good.”

Bikes are good and it’s great that there are better bike lanes and bike parking some places. In the 1990s, us “critical massholes” were aware of climate change but it wasn’t clear that it was an existential threat. It wasn’t clear that no matter how bike friendly cities might get, there’s no bike commuting on a dead planet.

Do we call it Friday Bike for Future or Climate Mass or is there a better name you can think up? Climate bike rides can be a leaderless movement but with a clear political message: massive action is needed to decarbonize and the status quo is unacceptable.

Protest tactics that are also fun and that build community are win-win-win situations — they help avoid burnout because they add joy as opposed to actions that feel like a grim, boring duty. To really increase political pressure, movements need to grow exponentially and be infectious by self-creating their own energy and having tactics that automatically attract new members.

Right now youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion and others are figuring out how to raise the stakes. Many of these activists weren’t born during CM’s heyday so its useful to share tactics that worked.

During street protests groups often get pushed onto the sidewalk or to a less visible location by police — largely to avoid disrupting traffic. A bike contingent with just a few dozen people can out-flank police lines. Bike groups are mobile, swift and so long as they are moving in traffic they’re usually legal.

It all goes back to bikes being special. When you ride you’re almost flying, you’re in balance. Bikes don’t need a sign. Emissions-free, healthy, and joyful is part of a future worth having, or at least worth struggling for.

By DJ Rubble

I am saddened and shocked to have heard a few weeks ago – word of mouth from Berkeley Liberation Radio (BLR) collective members – that DJ Captain Fred (aka Paul Griffin) died suddenly on February 21 from a heart attack. I’d just exchanged E-mails with him a couple of weeks earlier about donating cheap used equipment to the station to help keep it operating, and had collaborated with him over the past half year to get audio from several Save People’s Park rally/concerts onto the BLR playlists, which still broadcast over the internet. None of us I spoke with had any knowledge that he was dealing with any type of life-threatening health issues.

Media activist insiders knew Captain Fred to have a unique set of skills and abilities vital to this type of ultra-low-budget, anti-corporate, DIY broadcasting. Some station background is important in understanding his unique contributions. Free Radio Berkeley was started in the early 90’s by founder Steven Dunifer, as a voice for the rapidly growing homeless population which had no “voice” in the corporate media. The station went on the airwaves at 104.1 FM without a broadcasting license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – the government agency which oversees the airwaves – as an act of civil disobedience. The station re-launched and continued on as Berkeley Liberation Radio sometime around the turn of the century.

As these types of smaller signal range stations proliferated, they came to be known as “Low Power FM” (LPFM), and “micro-radio” and were embroiled in legalistic battles over who really owns and who has the right to the airwaves. The FCC has considered this broadcasting illegal and has worked to force these stations off the air, including with armed raids and draconian personal “illegal broadcasting” fines to individuals involved. Industry lobbying arm the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has worked hand-in-hand with the FCC on this, to continue to limit airwaves access to multi-million dollar corporations with the express goal of maximizing profit with repetitive “cookie-cutter” content.

BLR runs under a broad set of anarchist-oriented values shared by many of us. The fiercely DIY approach resulted in a much longer on-again, off-again tenure on air than other unlicensed stations, many which tried and failed at more conventional radio strategies, such as reforming the FCC process and obtaining institutional funding. BLR’s all-volunteer collective has never had traditional hierarchies, such as station managers, security guards, or administrators on which to dump the continuing set of structural and interpersonal issues that always arise on.

BLR operates on a self-funded shoe-string budget, demonstrating that quality radio can be produced for as little as hundreds of dollars monthly, mostly for rent. Equipment is inexpensive, mostly used and donated. Virtually anyone who applied for a DJ slot was given a chance to broadcast, including those who never have broadcast before, with very little restriction on content beyond guidelines in the mission statement. Political and social content has always been grassroots and a welcome alternative to monolithic corporate-driven perspectives.

Captain Fred moved to the Bay Area from New York in 1979 after finishing college with a goal of being a rock musician. He spent the rest of his life in the East Bay. Along the way, he developed and combined skills as a musician with an array of technical abilities much needed for both music and radio. He played in various bands playing various types of music. His radio shows reflected the always increasing range of musical styles he enjoyed.

He has been active with the station virtually throughout its existence. He became a member in 1993, when he launched his well-regarded Saturday evening radio show, “Captain Fred’s World Cruise”, which he continued broadcasting right up to his untimely death. He was well known in the Bay Area micro-radio community as far back as the turn of the century for the syndicated version of “Captain Fred’s World Cruise”. Before the explosion of MP3’s and other computerized transmittals, he would produce and send out self-produced CD’s with playlists of the independent music played on the show to other local LPFM stations.. These were really valuable to stations not always able to have a live broadcaster or show producer in the studio or buy slickly produced materials.

In this context, Captain Fred’s skills and contributions were immense. He was extremely tech savvy, constantly able to obtain, connect, replace and repair cheap or donated equipment to help keep the broadcasts coming as consistently as possible. He also had a relatively high level of mechanical skills, useful for having to install and move transmitters and equipment in and out of new often temporary broadcast locations, as the station spent several decades evading repressive scrutiny of the FCC and NAB and unaffordable commercial rents.

He worked in Steven Dunifer’s workshop which served as catalyst for LPFM stations worldwide, creating and selling radio start-up kits that cost probably less than $1,000 to people who wanted to create their own small radio stations.

He was great at configuring the internet stream — also donated — and uploading a vast array of music and political talk so that the station could operate 24-hours daily, often without a live DJ.

He always seemed to be available to help people individually and share his knowledge. For years, he used his weekly show time as a training site for new DJs and for others – myself included – who needed updated skills and resources. Recently, he used the time to load free activist audio shows into the shuffler so that listeners can hear much about the political issues and perspectives that need to be heard.

He and several other long-term collective members often took on the thankless tasks of resolving personal/interpersonal problems among members, and working towards important due process-oriented decisions in often contentious staff meetings. He was heavily involved in political strategy-making. He had a lot of skill and patience with people, and could also be refreshingly direct. He had a lively sense of humor and laid back persona, with a seemingly endless stream of comical stories about the often bizarre situations collective members were embroiled in.

His skill and contributions will be sorely missed, and hopefully long remembered and valued by many.

By Jesse D. Palmer

Becoming a dad has been one of life’s great adventures — something I hope other people can share. Yet I’m not surprised that so many people are going on birth strike — deciding not to have kids in response to the climate crisis. There is so much being lost so quickly and so much to grieve. Sometimes my partner and I lie in bed after my daughter has gone to sleep and wonder if we did the right thing bringing a child into the world.

I love my daughter more than anything I can think of. My feelings about her are powerful and magical. Being a dad is complex, intense and meaningful — it can be hard to explain or describe to people who don’t have kids.

Parenting in the middle of our world’s current ecological and social collapse is also a complex and intense feeling, but less pleasant. My main job as a parent is to protect my daughter from harm and it is painfully obvious that I am failing. We know that anything like continuing the status quo — billions of people relying on massive fossil fuel combustion and an array of other unsustainable practices to meet our basic needs — is causing ecological collapse that threatens to cause a near-term, massive human die-off, if not our extinction.

Yet as the floods, storms, fires and crop failures increase, the current political / economic / cultural system is failing to take any meaningful action to change course. To have a chance, the scale of response has to be equal to the scale of the problem, which means global and huge — unprecedented in human history — the way rapid climate change is global, huge and unprecedented.

This article isn’t focused on doom and gloom. We’re all numb. Fear isn’t spurring change, it’s just making people withdraw, give up, go into denial, or chase illusory fake solutions rather than do the obvious: massively reduce and change consumption right now on both a systemic and personal level.

I want to offer alternatives that aren’t just about survival and hardship but offer options for more joy, more community with others and a more meaningful existence. This isn’t because I am denying the crisis or trying to change the subject. Rather, my hunch is that the types of changes we so desperately need will require more meaningful, connected and joyful lives — we can’t survive without them.

The climate / ecological crisis is a crisis of concentration of power in too few hands. Those in power use consumerism, mass-media, social isolation and instant techno gratification to maintain control and domination. When we smash short-term disposable fossil fuel dependence, we’ll also end up smashing boredom, loneliness, powerlessness, separation of the mind from the heart and separation of human beings from the rest of nature.

When I heard that my Slingshot comrade Isabel was going to get her tubes tied, I understood and respected what she was going to do, but I also felt a sense of grief about it. I really like Isabel and I want the best for her — a life full of all the experiences she might want to have. I wondered if deciding to get sterilized at 23 years old was closing a door she would regret but I grasp not wanting to bring more kids into this mess. Not only is this a reasonable, ethical and caring thing to do, but if enough people did it, it could possibly help avert the worst forms of ecological breakdown.

It’s politically correct to say that population is unrelated to human ecological overreach, but I’m unconvinced that human population can keep growing infinitely on a finite planet. In any case, people in developed countries use dramatically more resources per capita than most of the world’s people — the richest 10% of the world’s population emits 1/2 of the CO2 according to an Oxfam report. So if people in the US and other developed countries have less children, it makes a difference. While its obvious that individuals can’t address a global crisis with individual consumer choices, it is also a mistake to dismiss individual action as irrelevant to the type of all-hands on deck societal effort necessary to address the scale of the climate crisis.

There are plenty of cultural norms about what constitutes a “good life” that structure individual decisions on a mass scale that can’t be changed by the government or corporations. If billions of people shift cultural expectations, those changes can add up to huge changes in resource consumption.

So I want to promote a cultural shift around children and parenting away from nuclear families raising multiple children and towards larger groups of people raising fewer children. Raising kids is one of life’s key experiences — it connects you with the circle of life, your parents and ancestors, and other people across time and around the world. I have grown and learned a lot from being a dad and from my daughter.

But one shouldn’t have to have their own child to share in these intense experiences. For biological parents, having more people participate in childrearing reduces the overwhelming workload parents face. Parents end up too busy to even ask for or organize help… Non-parents who take on a significant role in childrearing get something meaningful. And raising kids as a group builds community, distributes joy and reduces isolation and loneliness.

This isn’t just theory — this is happening. For the last six years my partner and I have been raising our daughter in a big collective house. Right now there’s one other kid and his single mom, plus three other adults — 6 adults and 2 kids in a house. Sometimes we call the kids “ziblings” which means they aren’t siblings, but at particular moments they relate like siblings, mitigating the concern some parents have about having an only-child. The kids — without us even suggesting this — started calling each other “my sister” and “my brother” and they play together a lot. Living with another kid has been important for socialization — learning how to share and relate to others. I think the kids also have a more complex relationship with adults since they live with 6 adults rather than the more-typical 1 or 2. The kids have more varied role models and can relate to adults on a more equal basis.

Raising kids like this is an on-going experiment for us and like anything, it’s not always perfect. It can be complex to figure out how to resolve different opinions about how things work, and feelings about raising kids can be particularly intense. At our house meetings we have an agenda item where the parents talk about issues they are having with the other parents, the non-parents talk about the parents and the kids, and the parents talk about the non-parents. But most house issues get talked out over dinner since we eat together 5-6 times a week. With 8 or more people at most dinners — we have a lot of guests — the kids invented the idea of saying “dinner announce” so they can have a turn in the conversation. It’s one of my favorite moments of the day.

The non-parents didn’t sign up to be parents, so they aren’t responsible for childcare duties in our house, but that doesn’t mean they don’t relate to or spend time with the kids, pick up a lot of chore slack or deal with plenty of kid chaos. Because we have more people living in the house, there’s more opportunities for fun and flexibility. If a particular person doesn’t want to do something, probably someone else will. If some people go on vacation there’s always someone staying behind who can water the plants. Living like this saves some resources since more people share tools, utensils, etc. And whereas cooking dinner almost every night might not make sense with a nuclear family, cooking-time per meal served is lower the more people sitting around the table.

Our house has been going for over 20 years and very close connections have grown up between us. I cannot imagine living with just a partner and children. It is easy to see how group childrearing could be the normal way things are done, rather than something unusual the way it is now, because this is a lower-resource adaption that adds to our lives rather than something we have to give up.

I’m aware of several other groups helping to raise kids up and down the West Coast. There are other group houses like mine that host one or two kids. My friend’s son who was raised at a notorious punk house is now 17 years old and a teenaged friend has moved in. I recently ran across a compound with 2 houses, 4 living units, 9 adults raising a whole lot of kids who share expenses equally even though different members occupy different amounts of space. It’s a form of income-sharing.

A few friends are raising kids in cohousing communities in which the parents and kids have their own apartment, but there is a lot of sharing and interaction with neighbors like a village. Adults pick up kids who aren’t theirs from school. My friends’ kid plays with the neighbor’s dog and gardens with an older childless couple. Common spaces are inhabited by unrelated kids.

Another community I’m close to involved 4 couples living in 4 cottages on a big old farm raising 6 kids. They have a main house where they share some meals and when the kids were little, they all ran around in a pack. Sean, who is an adult now, reflected “It certainly worked for me, and for the kids I grew up with. We benefited from a healthy example of co-operative living that we can now model in a productive way having moved on from that community. Having grown up in a dynamic community, we have a stronger intuition for how to nurture healthy community. I’ve come across many young adults who had less positive experiences in similar circumstances and this emphasizes that no matter what the situation, the health of the relationships matters most.”

In addition to shifting norms about how kids are raised, norms can shift about how many kids parents have — moving towards a voluntary “one child” expectation. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the middle-American “ideal” / “normal” family size was 2 or more kids. These cultural norms structure the way the world looks and can all be changed, just as coal-fire power plants can be replaced with solar panels and windmills. Often I speak with parents who have one kid who feel they should have another so their first kid doesn’t get lonely — isn’t an only child. This is tied into the suburban ideal for raising children — a nuclear family made up of a mom and dad (or two moms or two dads) and kids living in a house. How quaint. And how potentially lonely and limiting and isolating!

In calling for new values around kids as a way of discussing human population, we need to acknowledge the ugly history of racist and colonial population policies imposed on non-whites — particularly involuntary sterilization and immigration restrictions. Increasingly white supremacists are pushing “replacement theory” and urging whites to have more children.

Changing social norms is a voluntary process and the best population control measure is education, equal rights for women and widespread access to contraception and abortion. My hope is that changing norms about raising kids go along with a decline in the patriarchy, hetero-normativity, monogamy and other oppressive standards — because the dominance of the nuclear family ideal carries with it a lot of outdated baggage. As the idea of the family is re-defined and made more collective, my hope is that each of us can be free to take on the roles that suit us so each of us can reach our full potential, rather than being forced into a limited number of socially pre-defined boxes.

Some people are going to keep having kids and the reason I started this article by saying how much I enjoy being a parent is to clarify that I want a world that supports kids and parents better than the world we’re in now. Some people are also not going to want kids for a variety of reasons and the world should support and honor that decision, too. Concluding that you can’t have kids because the world is doomed and your kids would face a hopeless future isn’t the way it should work.

Spread over millions of people, cultural changes can meaningfully reduce ecological impact — bending trend-lines from increasing population using more resources, to lower populations using less resources.

The status quo, on the other hand, isn’t an option. Once natural feedback loops are triggered — perhaps in the next few years — ecological collapse will be self-sustaining and out of our hands. By then, it will be too late to reduce emissions — it won’t matter anymore.

I take my daughter to elementary school a few days a week and I can’t help standing in the playground looking at all the energetic, beautiful children and wondering if they are already the doomed walking dead. Will they reach adulthood, or will they be cut down by famine and wars over migration and water? Are oil company profits really worth it? Do we really need to continue living just like we’ve been living up until now — with so many clothes, so much plastic, such powerful corporations, so many flights, so many cars — so much?

But really, the way we live now is not normal for human beings — we’ve only been burning fossil fuels for a few generations and before that, humans lived just fine for thousands of years without all the stuff we currently see as necessary. The nuclear family is also a very recent development tied to the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. For most of human history and still to this day in many world cultures, children are raised by larger groups — extended family or villages. Let’s not maintain oppressive family structures but rather build new norms around collective childrearing.

Parents spend loads of time trying to keep kids safe. It’s time we face up to the overwhelming dangers we’re facing and come together to try to survive and even thrive in community on this lovely world.