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[John Rensenbrink Speech to MA Green-Rainbow Party Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, November 15, 2014]



Thank you Roni.

Greetings, very excited to be here with you. One piece of excitement: last Sunday the Maine Green Independent Party’s Steering Committee unanimously endorsed the Green Alliance to Stop the Pipeline. GASP! Indeed! That’s good news: “As Maine Goes ….!”

When Roni asked me to give the keynote, I was delighted to be invited and asked her what she and the Planning Committee had in mind for my speech. She said the Committee suggested the theme of  “The Big Tent.”

My speech, accordingly, centers on the rainbow as a Big Tent model for the vision and accompanying strategy of the Green Party.

For contrast and critical comparison to the rainbow model, I begin by commenting on a Big Tent strategy promoted by Ralph Nader and others.

I will then go on to describe how and why the rainbow is the model of choice. Thereafter, I will finish by outlining two strategies that fit in with the rainbow model: a versatile strategy and a jolt strategy.

Continue reading The Big Tent: Rainbow as Model
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We are going into our fifth month of demonstrations and actions all over the USA about police violence and sanctioned summary judgment. Hearing, reading, seeing the news, it seems as if brutality, terror, and torture are breaking out worldwide, with beheadings and mass killings happening at, perhaps, a quickening rate. Violence meeting violence to make more violence, intertribal problems stuck on stupid, here and abroad.

Recently, I saw a DVD of “The Interrupters,”

( http://interrupters.kartemquin… ) on an open cart in the library and I took it home. It’s a documentary about a group called Ceasefire which “interrupts” street violence between gangs and violent individuals in Chicago. CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist who believes that violence spreads like an infectious disease and uses a “medical” treatment: “go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source,” to stop it. One part of that treatment is the “Violence Interrupters” program, created by Tio Hardiman, a group of street-credible, mostly former offenders who defuse conflict before it becomes violence. They can speak from experience about consequences and how “no matter what the additional violence is not going to be helpful.”

About the same time, a friend wrote me about a radio interview

( http://www.ttbook.org/book/ref… ) with Constance Rice, a civil rights attorney and cousin to the former Secretary of State, who has trained 50 LA police officers over the last five years in “public trust policing” at Nickerson Gardens, an LA public housing project.

I picked up “The Interrupters” because I was wondering why we didn’t hear about this group in relation to what has been happening with the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamar Rice and others. I listened to the interview with Constance Rice for the same reason. Why haven’t I seen Ms Rice, Gary Slutkin, or Tio Hardiman on my TV screen and all over “social media”? They are doing some things which have proven to work in their own communities. How much of what they’ve done in Chicago and LA can apply to NYC and Boston and other places all around the world? Can they teach us all how to interrupt our own violence and to build a system of public trust policing? As Tio Hardiman says in the DVD: “We’ve been taught violence. Violence is learned behavior.” Can these people and the others like them teach us how to unlearn our violent behavior?

We’ll never know unless their voices are part of the conversation.

Continue reading Intertribal Problems Stuck on Stupid
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Solar Microgrids in Tanzania:

Maasai Stoves & Solar Project

International Collaborative

81 Kirkland Street, Unit 2, Cambridge, MA 02138

https://www.facebook.com/maasa…

http://internationalcollaborat…

Water biomonitoring in Costa Rica:

ANAI, Inc.,

1120 Meadows Road, Franklin, North Carolina 28734

http://www.anaicr.org

More about these programs below.

Continue reading Solar Microgrids and Water Biomonitoring for Christmas
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On Friday 11/14/14, Ranganayakulu Bodavula Ph D, Chairman and Managing Director of Thrive® Solar Energy Pvt Ltd (http://www.thriveenergy.co.in), spoke at Harvard’s Center for Population Studies (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/population-development/).  On Monday 11/17/14, he spoke to the MIT student group, e4Dev [Energy for Development] (http://e4dev.tumblr.com).  

Thrive Solar Energy Pvt Ltd is a leading solar powered LED lighting solutions provider from India, offering

“14 types of solar powered LED lights that cater to the lighting needs of children, women, households and villages. Its lights are used by tea estate workers, farmers, weavers, vendors, dairy and any other village level vocation that is in need of a clean, safe and reliable light. Thrive Solar partners with NGOs, women Self Help Groups (SHGs), Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs), funding agencies, banks, donors, educational institutions and businesses to promote and distribute its lighting products to bottom of the pyramid (BOP) communities, located in off-grid and intermittently grid connected geographies.”

Thrive is making 2 million lights per year at a price as low as $2 per lamp and are projecting 4 million per year production soon.  They do not sell directly to consumers but through the different agencies with which they work.  Nearly half of India still uses 12 lumen candles and 40 lumen kerosene lamps which can be replaced with 60 lumen solar lights.  Currently, the Indian government subsidizes kerosene and paraffin prices by $6 billion per year.  Thrive says it can provide solar lights to every Indian family now for about $1 billion.  

Continue reading Thrive Solar®
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Nice write up of yesterday’s Green-Rainbow Party state convention in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette:

WORCESTER – At their state convention at the First Unitarian Church Saturday, Green-Rainbow Party leaders expressed hope that national discontent with the major parties could lead to their long-sought breakthrough.

“The Democrats and Republicans really have a circling firing squad here, and are continuing to take each other down,” said Dr. Jill E. Stein, party co-chairman and 2012 presidential candidate. “It’s really created the opening we have known about for quite some time.”

The Green-Rainbow Party of Massachusetts is part of the larger national Green Party, and Saturday’s event drew party members from all over New England.

“I think the Green Party is on the way,” said Linda Thompson, co-chairwoman of the Connecticut Green Party. “We have to think big.”

Read the whole thing here.

Continue reading Green-Rainbow Party optimistic about future
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Nationally, the Green Party won some important victories and took some small steps forward. Most importantly, the Green mayor of Richmond, CA, Gayle McLaughlin, won her bid for City Council despite Chevron’s massive campaign against her. And New York gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins received nearly 5% of the statewide vote, making the Green Party THE third party in New York. Other highlights across the country have been posted by Green Party Watch.

In Massachusetts, the Green-Rainbow Party regained major party status on November 4th when each of its three statewide candidates surpassed the 3% threshold, each gaining more votes and higher percentages than the well- and self-financed Evan Falchuk campaign, which also received more media coverage. Since Falchuk’s campaign also surpassed the 3% threshold, his United Independent Party will join the official party ranks along with the Green-Rainbow Party.

Discrepancies between federal and state recognition of political parties along with Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin’s apparent contempt for the Green-Rainbow Party have made it difficult to consistently organize a progressive political alternative to the Democrat/Republican national duopoly, or one-party rule in Massachusetts. The latest example was Galvin’s dismissal of Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jason Lowenthal’s nomination papers to challenge incumbent Democratic Congressman Michael Capuano, who went on to run unopposed on the November ballot. Galvin, with a proud history of ducking debates despite being the state’s elected overseer of elections, took a cheap shot at the Green-Rainbow Party for the party’s stubborn refusal to continue on in electoral politics:

From The Republican (Springfield):

Secretary of State William Galvin said the state will be required to print primary ballots for all the parties, even if there are no competitive races. In the past, the state has used paper, rather than the more expensive cardstock, to print ballots for the Green-Rainbow Party or other third parties. “We’ll have to kill many trees,” Galvin told reporters on Monday. “We do this all the time with the Greens, which is ironic.”

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? Coming from the man who mailed all registered Green-Rainbow Party voters, twice now — at taxpayers’ expense — postcards that made it sound like the Green-Rainbow Party no longer existed (it did, both as a political designation and as the state affiliate of a federally recognized political party) and that if they wanted to vote in a primary they would have to change their registration?  Or the man with so much contempt for the democratic process that he oversees that “scheduling difficulties” and various other phony excuses have prevented him from agreeing to debates against his opponents, other than last-minute sham debates. Spare us the sermonizing, Bill.

On a more positive note, GRP State Auditor candidate MK Merelice’s letter to the Brookline Tab, does a nice job of summarizing the highlights for the Green-Rainbow Party slate and the pockets of strong, local support they received, so I’ll leave you with that:

Continue reading Green-Rainbow Party and Green Party highlights from Election Day 2014
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Just wanted to make sure people know about this upcoming conference which may be the start of something really exciting.  I know from my monitoring of Harvard, MIT, and other universities that ecosystem solutions to climate change are not only not on their radar but met with antagonism when brought up.  The conference organizers can use your help (and mine) in getting the word out.

Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming

We have solutions!

More of our man-made carbon emissions to date have come from land mismanagement and the resulting loss of soil carbon than from burning fossil fuels. The good news is that we know how to remove that atmospheric carbon and store it back into the soils where it belongs, by harnessing the power of nature.

The Conference

Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming is a 3-day conference with the goal to bring the power of biology front and center in the climate conversation. We are bringing together a stellar roster of speakers-scientists, land managers and activists-and participants from around the world to learn from one another and to devise strategies to expand vast natural soil carbon sinks around the world. To learn more about the speakers: http://bio4climate.org/confere…

Register here:

http://bit.ly/1qOBfAo

Help us support the conference!

http://www.razoo.com/story/Con…

Donations will keep tickets affordable, provide scholarships, pay for materials, assist with major outreach efforts before and after the conference, and help support our hard-working and dedicated staff. Any contribution is greatly appreciated!

Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming is hosted by the Tufts Institute of the Environment and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Continue reading Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming
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Something is happening in the organic farming community. This year the Northeast Organic Farming Association has been exploring carbon farming, “regenerative organic agricultural techniques for sequestering atmospheric carbon in stable soil aggregates.” The NOFA Summer Conference at the beginning of August (http://www.nofasummerconference.org) had a Soil Carbon and Climate Track with eight presenters, including the keynoter, Dr. Elaine Ingham, who gave workshops about farming methods that take carbon from the air and add it to the soil while improving fertility and tilth.

The sessions are available at

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9j2…

In September, the MA chapter of NOFA (NOFAMASS) (http://www.nofamass.org) held two seminars in Amherst and Newton with the Australian soil scientist, Christine Jones explaining the science of soil systems and talking about practical ways to sequester carbon in soil:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lvp…

My notes from the Newton workshop

http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot…

On Monday, November 3, 2014, NOFAMASS will have an all-day workshop on Succeeding with Grass-Fed Beef: Human Health, Carbon Sequestration, and Farm Viability at Heifer International, 216 Wachusett Street, Rutland, MA led by Ridge Shinn, an expert in grass-fed and grass-finished beef with experience in all parts of the industry.

http://www.nofamass.org/events…

Registration questions: Christine Rainville, 508-572-0816, registrationma@nofamass.org

Event information: Ben Grosscup, 413-658-5374, ben.grosscup@nofamass.org

“What we are learning from the presenters recorded above is that not only is the world in enormous danger from climate disruption, but also the regenerative organic agricultural practices that NOFA promotes offer genuine promise for a livable future on this planet.”

Organic farming saves the world. Rebuild soils while producing more and more nutritious food all while taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Sounds to me like ecological systems design or geotherapy.

Continue reading Carbon Farming: Organic Agriculture Saves the World [Geotherapy]
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The lead article on Bluemassgroup, the Democratic Party blog, is telling everyone to get behind Martha Coakley for Governor.  It is entitled “Coakley for Governor: The Small Differences That Matter.”

It starts with this telling comment:

“I understand the frustration with the candidates. The differences between Coakley and Baker don’t seem to be the yawning chasm that we’d like. But in the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the army you have.”

In other words:  “The Democratic Party candidate is only marginally better than the Republican.  She doesn’t really provide leadership on the things important to us.  But she’s the only choice for those of us with a two-party mentality.  So shut up and vote to endorse business-as-usual.”

Thank goodness the Green-Rainbow Party doesn’t engage in such shameful attempts to talk people into abandoning their values.

If you want to see three candidates who are really different from Charlie Baker, go to

http://www.green-rainbow.org/c…

Continue reading Voting for Republican Lite?