Nick Thielker of Egremont sent the following letter to the Berkshire Eagle, which was published by that newspaper on election day – Nov 6, 2012.
It establishes the global and local imperative for change pretty well, I think, as local Greens in the Berkshires mobilize to grow politically larger and stronger.
Continue reading Voting For Green Change in Egremonthttp://techpresident.com/news/…
A group of people from the Occupy Wall Street movement is collaborating with the climate change advocacy group 350.org and a new online toolkit for disaster recovery, recovers.org, to organize a grassroots relief effort in New York City.
Occupy Sandy: http://occupywallst.org/articl…
Boston TEDX talk by Recovers.org http://www.ted.com/talks/caitr…
The combination of the jobs and economic focus of Occupy with the climate change and energy transition ideas of 350.org along with the disaster recovery systems of Recovers.org is a model that can build resilience and preparedness quickly if continued. Add Solar IS Civil Defense, set the Maker Culture loose, and it just might shade over into Solar Swadeshi, Gandhian economics, a non-violent and restorative open source peer-to-peer economic system where we plan for 100% success for all humanity, to paraphrase R Buckminster Fuller.
Continue reading Occupy SandyJohn Robb is a strategist and theorist of modern warfare. His book, Brave New War, is the best introduction I know of to small group warfare, the way technology has enabled ad hoc groups like Al Quaeda and others to wage war against superpowers like the USA.
In the last few years, Robb has changed his focus to the concept of resilience. Looking at the failure of international, national, and regional governmental, economic, and social systems to confront the challenges of climate change and institutionalized as well as ad hoc criminality, he has started an initiative to relocalize our basic systems of survival as we watch the slow decline and collapse of the overarching social machinery that currently exists.
The solution is to build resilience, is to build resilience at the local level… You take control of the things you can have influence over, the things in front of you, the things that are human scale…. and strangely, when you start looking at building resilience, building local viable communities, it solves all the problems at the global level, economically, environmentally, and in terms of quality of life…
Here is his lecture at the recent NYC Maker Faire. The video starts about 8 minutes in and his description of a resilient community ends around 15:40 when he begins to take questions. These seven or eight minutes are a useful introduction to a reasonable way forward.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/g…
Continue reading Building Resilient Communities: John Robb at the NYC Maker FaireYou can now estimate with great detail the solar electric potential of any roof in Cambridge, MA by just typing in an address on a webpage, the Cambridge Solar Tool
(http://cambridgema.gov/solar). For instance, the double triple decker in which I live has six apartments and a total roof area of 2,781 square feet. 1,136 of those sq ft have high PV (photovoltaic) potential. This could support an 18kW solar electric system providing 22,945 kWh per year, enough to power about a third of the electricity used by those six apartments, if each apartment uses the rough US average of around 11,000 kWh per year (my own annual electric use is around 1,600 kWh/yr).
The estimated savings per year for such a PV system are $9,081. The total cost is $101,720. With the Federal tax credit of $30,516 and a MA state tax credit of $1,000, the final cost to the owner would be $70,204. In addition, the Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) of 27¢/kWh could produce $6,212 per year (at least that’s my reading of the MA SREC program, but I could be wrong). Such an investment would pay for itself in about 8 years with a return on investment (ROI) of 12.93%, a better return than gold (10.19%) or the stock market (Dow Jones average: 5.50%). The solar electricity would replace other fuels that now spew 12 tons per year of carbon into the atmosphere.
If the owner did not want to put any money down, they could opt for a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), buying electricity from a third party which owns, installs, maintains, insures, and monitors a PV system on the roof of our double triple decker at a long term, generally 20 years, fixed and lower cost than what is paid now for power.
Continue reading The Cambridge, MA Solar ToolMassDOT (Dept of Transportation) is holding 15 public meetings around the Commonwealth. One of them was held on October 4, 2012 in Pittsfield,which I attended and followed up with written testimony which is presented below.
Andy McKeever of iBerkshires gave a very good report the next day.
While my fellow Berkshire Regional Transit Authority board members were testifying strongly about the unmet needs and the unfair funding mechanisms that create injustice and inequality I couldn’t help but take a brief moment to tweet with my smart phone how proud I was to be serving the community with them.
My own testimony was sent via e-mail on October 5, 2012, after having listened to my fellow board members and public the night before.
There are clear and compelling economic justice, economic development, and environmental reasons to invest our tax dollars into quality public transportation, even in the Berkshires.
My testimony follows. I encourage others from the Berkshires to submit their own testimony on our transportation infrastructure needs and to share it with me.
Continue reading Mass DOT TestimonyEver since the selection of 2000, the rudiments of US democracy have been under attack. We still haven’t dealt with the multitudinous problems of electronic voting machines and now we have a concerted attack on registration and voting by the Republican Party and their affiliated organizations. Those who have built the engines for stealing elections, from registration to vote counts, will use them, this year and every Election Day from this time forward, if they can.
Here are some resources to stop them in their tracks and rebuild our ability to vote for every single citizen. It is not an exhaustive list but it is a start.
Protect your own vote and those of all your fellow citizens.
Continue reading Combatting Election Theft: Some ResourcesTodmorden TED Talk:
http://video.ted.com/talk/stre…
A few months ago, some people in Cambridge, MA were inspired by the example of Todmorden in the UK between Leeds and Manchester, a town that decided to grow as much of its food as possible within the town limits.
Since we started meeting, some of us have begun mapping the Cambridge local food system which already exists. It includes farmers’ markets every day of the week from Memorial Day to Thanksgiving, the local growing season, and one winter market on Saturday mornings. There are City Sprouts (http://www.citysprouts.org/) gardens in every one of the 12 public middle schools, 15 community gardens including those at Harvard and Leslie Universities, and at least three restaurants with rooftop or container gardens. Local organizations include Pick a Pocket Garden (http://pickapocketgarden.org/) which is planting and maintaining public plantings of ornamentals, a yogurt-making coop, and the League of Urban Canners who will harvest and process fruit from neighborhood trees and bushes into preserves, with the owners getting 10% of the product.
The Cambridge Todmorden group may have access to three different sites for public gardens but we haven’t turned any soil over yet, although we certainly plan to in the near future.
A few schools, community plots, and restaurants will not grow any appreciable percentage of the food in Cambridge, MA but it is a start. There is a local food system. We are learning how to grow it.
Continue reading Eating the City and Town: Todmorden and BeyondI sent the following message to Berkshire Greens on the occasion of today’s (Sep 6, 2012) state primary election. The write-in votes that I cast were consistent with my June 25 endorsement of Patsy Harris and Bill Shein.
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Continue reading GRP Primary Day 2012Today the Commonwealth runs primary elections for all parties in Massachusetts for a number of offices. Polls opened at 7am and stay open until 8pm.
If you are given the Green-Rainbow Party primary ballot today you will see that only write-in votes are possible with the exception of State Representative in the 4th Berkshire District, where I am a ballot-qualified candidate.
If you reside in the 4th Berkshire District please consider voting for me. The winner will appear on the general election ballot on the Green-Rainbow Party line. In other districts and for other offices please use the write-in spaces available on the ballot to send a message.
MA Citizens for Life sent me its 2012 candidate questionnaire.
Questions are in text blocks.
My answers are in italics.
My campaign responds to all questionnaires and publishes all answers sent.
Continue reading MA Citizens for Life 2012 QuestionnaireMcSweeney’s has been running a first rate series on reasons to vote for Obama.
I was struck by today’s (number 13), especially this:
After that I learned to appreciate Obama in a different way. I appreciated that he inhabited a world in which idealism-and ideology-could never by sheer force of will overcome objective reality, and the hard compromises, uneasy truces, and constant errors that must be made to live in that world. I especially felt better about this position when I learned that John McCain carried an indian feather around FOR LUCK. This was not how I wanted my country run. By myth and superstition and magic tokens.
And, in that real world, I began to appreciate, winning matters. And not just that election. Those who hate how far the legislative Frankenstein’s monster called the Affordable Care Act lurched away from the promethean ideal of what it could have been are not wrong. Those who, for this reason, cheered for its failure were dumb. Whether the fight should have been joined just then is a discussion that countless armchair quarterbacks and alternate history novelists can debate, sterilely, forever. Once it WAS joined, that win was galvanizing…
What I’m missing, in the Stein/Honkala account, is a recognition that half the country adamantly does not share our views on most anything. Like the author of this piece suggests, that doesn’t make ’em bad people; but it does mean that, willy nilly, their voices, too, count (nor are they simply dumb-asses misled by their corporate whoremasters–they have their own traditions and values, and simply identifying those with whom we disagree as simply brainwashed by FOX agitprop (which isn’t suggest that it’s negligible, either, is the highest form of condescension).
And they have representation, and lots of it. And a Green President, like any other, would be forced to compromise at every turn, from the moment she takes the Oath. After a year in office, a Green President will look remarkably unlike a Green candidate and probaby find herself with a back full of arrows aimed by her disgruntled supporters).
That is, if she wants to get anything whatsoever done. But of Greens really wanted to get something done, they’d actually be running for offices that they might win, thereby giving them that opportunity.
Continue reading Ninety Reasons to Vote for Obama