MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, 
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die. 

And you will have a window in your head. 
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer. 

When they want you to buy something 
they will call you. When they want you 
to die for profit they will let you know. 
So, friends, every day do something 
that won’t compute. Love the Lord. 
Love the world. Work for nothing. 
Take all that you have and be poor. 
Love someone who does not deserve it. 

Denounce the government and embrace 
the flag. Hope to live in that free 
republic for which it stands. 
Give your approval to all you cannot 
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man 
has not encountered he has not destroyed. 

Ask the questions that have no answers. 
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. 
Say that your main crop is the forest 
that you did not plant, 
that you will not live to harvest. 

Say that the leaves are harvested 
when they have rotted into the mold. 
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. 
Put your faith in the two inches of humus 
that will build under the trees 
every thousand years. 

Listen to carrion — put your ear 
close, and hear the faint chattering 
of the songs that are to come. 
Expect the end of the world. Laugh. 
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful 
though you have considered all the facts. 
So long as women do not go cheap 
for power, please women more than men. 

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy 
a woman satisfied to bear a child? 
Will this disturb the sleep 
of a woman near to giving birth? 

Go with your love to the fields. 
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head 
in her lap. Swear allegiance 
to what is nighest your thoughts. 

As soon as the generals and the politicos 
can predict the motions of your mind, 
lose it. Leave it as a sign 
to mark the false trail, the way 
you didn’t go. 

Be like the fox 
who makes more tracks than necessary, 
some in the wrong direction. 
Practice resurrection. 

~Wendell Berry (1991)~

Gotta love this plain-spoken man. A prophet, I believe. 

Have you thought about work today? I went through my day sending honorable thoughts (and real words of thanks when possible) toward every worker that I could think of who crossed my path today. Here is a short list... the makers of the computer on which I type, the cooks and servers in the restaurant where I had lunch, the BP gas station mini-mart workers, the folks volunteering at the East End Food Co-op, the farmers who grow the food that is sold at the co-op, the students that I will see tomorrow who work and study 24/7 (these are not your stereotypical college students), the construction workers filling pot-holes from last winter and the workers who hold the "STOP" and "SLOW" signs who protect the pot-hole fillers, the makers of the big machines used to patch the road... we could go on and on. There is honor in every type of work that is done for good. Who are the workers in your life today?

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. (Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring, 1962)

Being a leader is hard. "Leadership" is different from "management" - good leaders inspire, take risks and make strong stands, listen carefully, and surround themselves with wise people who will argue with them. They do not set out to prove themselves right... they work hard to do right, to do what is in the best interest of all. They do this in an inspirational way, looking deeply into their own vision as well as those of others, and moving creatively toward possibilities.

An effective leader does not do the expedient thing. While she listens carefully and considers others' ideas and hopes, she does not make difficult decisions primarily based upon whom she might please or displease in the moment.  She has to hold the future in her mind and heart at the same time she is firmly rooted in today. There are times when short-term benefits might yield significant long-term costs. 

Considering the future and thinking about the best interests of all - these are not simple perspectives to develop and promote, particularly in a culture driven by immediate gratification of individual needs and in a political system in which decisions rise and fall based on popularity stats and donated dollars.

So, a couple of things have come down the last couple of weeks, midst news of earthquakes, hurricanes, and tropical storms. A couple of important things, nationally and locally, that I hope we all think about.

First, under former Governor Rendell, Pennsylvania's government had been part of five federal environmental lawsuits supporting health protective regulations of greenhouse gas emissions and ground-level ozone, the primary component of smog. Under current Governor Corbett, the PA government has pulled out of these lawsuits. This is, unfortunately, consistent with the current administration's lack of action on another environmental front - there has been a failure to ensure that fracking and gas drilling along the Marcellus Shale area are safe activities, a failure to consider environmental safety issues impartially with the best interests of all in mind. 

Second - and we will see that simple party affiliation seems not to matter - this from the New York Times...                

                    President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying
                    business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who
                    called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

It must be very difficult for Obama to juggle all of the needs presented to him, many of which he has inherited. I have no doubt that job growth is a high priority, that fixing the economy is important. At the same time, the sad -- oh so sad -- reality is that the least of us is hurt the most by a failure to give equal attention to the environment. Pollution of air and water is a social justice issue. Poor people are disproportionately exposed to pollutants that result in acute and chronic health problems. These are people who have the least power to effect change in the system - the least economic clout, the least access to high quality education and health care, the fewest opportunities to reverse trends that have plagued generations before them. 

Our economy may be protected - may be - in the short-term by decreasing regulation of industry-related air pollution, but the long-term costs of ignoring environmental issues are huge - in terms of damage to physical and mental health, stunted education and job preparation, and economic instability. The costs to the viability and sustainability of our ecosystem are enormous.

Maybe Obama has a plan - I am hoping that his decision to back off air pollution regulations is truly just a delay, that he will get back to this very soon. I am hoping that he keeps environmental issues in a prominent place on his desktop.

I don't have easy answers obviously. But I do think about what makes good leadership and have a few thoughts gleaned from conversations with Michael and Julie this weekend...

• This semester, at Washington University, Julie is taking a Praxis course focusing on leadership. She related a class discussion about "energy" in leadership - and talked about how a leader must be aware of her own energy, up or down, positive or negative, and learn to manage it and to understand its sources. A leader must also be sensitive to the energy of her co-leaders and those she is leading -- must learn to "read" this energy accurately and to use this information in the leading and decision-making process.

I have thought about Julie's comments -- where is Obama's energy? what is its quality, its sources? what is the energy of those around him and the larger citizenry like right now? how might that affect his leadership?
 
When I try to put myself in Obama's shoes, I have a hard time imagining what it might feel like to carry as much responsibility as he does, what the nature of his work energy might be. Were I in his shoes, I suspect that, along with determination and hope, fear and uncertainty would be frequent visitors.  Who among us doesn't often feel afraid and uncertain in these times? Our lack of ultimate control over weather and natural events has been evident in recent weeks -- and the same goes for our economic system. And yet... and yet. There are ways of living long-term -- most of which will admittedly require change and unfamiliar perspectives and experiences -- that can begin to shift these things a bit into a better direction. 

Can a leader recognize fear and uncertainty when these feelings arise, in herself or in those around her? Can she understand how these feelings might affect her and her decision-making? A leader might fear making the wrong decision, letting people down, or not having enough information to really know the best decision. A strong leader must dig deep down into such uncertainty, then come back up to lead with clear-eyed strength and courage, avoiding compromises that are too, well, too compromising, avoiding paralysis. It must be hard - it must feel like Whack-A-Mole at Chuck E Cheese - you bop one problem down, and another two pop up - faster and faster.

I sense a different kind of fear among some industry leaders - a fear of a different future, in which power might be more equitably distributed. If this fear exists, one response is to do what is necessary to protect one's own power base. I might be wrong. I wish that I were wrong, that the vision of our leaders in government and industry extended well beyond themselves. Please tell me and show me that I am wrong.

• Michael has recently started his job at BCG, which, according to its web-site and Michael's comments, is a global management consulting firm and the world's leading advisor on business strategy. Michael does not give me any details about the projects he is working on - this information is confidential (and I secretly think he loves telling me that he can't tell me stuff). But he has talked with me about the processes involved in the projects. He describes working on a team of really really bright people from all over the world who are not afraid to ask difficult questions - indeed, asking as many challenging questions as you can before drawing conclusions or making any recommendations or decisions is required. According to Michael, the team goes into a project without assumptions, or at least aware of assumptions which they will then question. The team does not work in order to support or prove a particular hypothesis or to buttress a pre-existing vision of how someone wants things to work out. The goal is to think it through from all angles - first just deciding how the questioning process should itself be framed - and then to draw some initial conclusions. I can see that this process might need to be repeated many times as new information emerges.
  

So I wonder what it would be like if the people leading us worked in this way? I guess I cannot assume they are not, but I am not seeing the evidence that they are.

Think again, think deeply, about what Rachel Carson said almost 50 years ago - The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. 

The other fork of the road does involve uncertainty and risk - it is, after all, less traveled and less familiar - but it also offers possibility. Possibility! What if? Can we? What if we were actually to step  off that too easy, smooth superhighway? I dream of each of us driving, leading into a future of possibility in our own small but significant ways, in our own corner of the world. 

Always remember that your own path, your own voice, matter. On the Resources page is information about how and where to communicate your ideas about what needs to be done.

From March on Blair Mountain:

We march to preserve Blair Mountain, abolish mountaintop removal, strengthen labor rights, and an investment in sustainable job creation for all Appalachian communities.The March on Blair Mountain is a peaceful, unifying rally involving environmental justice organizations, workers, scholars, artists, and other citizens and groups. The march commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when 10,000 coal miners rose against the rule of the coal operators and fought for the basic right to live and work in decent conditions. Currently, Blair Mountain is threatened with obliteration by mountaintop removal (MTR) mining, and it is here that a new generation of Appalachians takes a stand.

In the spirit of the original march–which consisted of mountain peoples, African-Americans, and immigrants from all over Europe–we reach out to a diversity of groups to march in solidarity for the workers, communities and mountains of Appalachia. If you stand with us, you are one of us — a true mountaineer.

Friday morning, I was sitting at my regular table at the Square Cafe, eating my lemon ricotta pancake and drinking iced tea, helping Jim with his crossword puzzle, and enjoying the easy start to the day. Spring was finally here. Graduation was scheduled for the weekend. A fresh semester would start Monday - with me teaching some great students who would be new to me. Life was (is!) good! 

I picked up the Post-Gazette and noticed two front page articles - front and center - and began reading.... and lost my appetite. I felt tears coming to my eyes, and an ache in my heart, and, yes, I admit it, anger and fury - all over my body where those feelings reside, I felt their heat and intensity.

The articles that fired me up? (1) A story about the newly published independent review of the Upper Big Branch coal mining explosion that took the lives of 29 coal miners on April 5, 2010. The finding - gross neglect - primarily on the part of Massey Energy's shoddy oversight of mine safety, and the federal and state regulatory officials who had counted and cited several hundreds of safety violations and yet never closed the mines. AND (2) the first person accounts of the men who survived the mining disaster. 

As noted in the first story, the independent review does not read like a dry technical report written by sterile bureaucrats. It reads like a thriller - a record of a historical event that rivals stories of war, natural disasters, plagues. Its main characters are humans - archetypes that have existed for centuries. An extra-big villain - Don Blankenship, a West Virginia native with an uncanny facial resemblance, though with a little more flesh, to another despot with a tiny black mustache - Mr. B is known as the dark lord of West Virginia coal country. 

Rolling Stone magazine published an expose of Mr. B's work and his response to the mining explosion. Shortly after the article appeared, he resigned as CEO of Massey Energy - with a mighty big golden parachute, I might add. His salary had spiked in the months before the disaster. And even though he saw a drop in salary of 48% by the end of 2010, he still walked off with millions and will sit pretty for the rest of his life. The people most directly affected by his actions and non-actions related both to the explosion and the mining-related environmental devastation could most certainly use some of that money - for health costs, for pain and suffering, for de-valued homes, for educational funds for spouses and children left without a husband and father. Yes, they sure could use - and most certainly deserve - such help.

Don Blankenship may be one of the big villains. There are lesser bad guys galore - many of whom look the other way in order to keep their jobs and salaries and, sometimes, their political seats - or maybe, because they are human, to avoid conflict and confrontation. 

Those in the middle - the ones who know that the jobs they work both keep food on the table and poison the creek out back - these people often just feel stuck. These are the folks who don't see or understand alternatives, or fear change, or don't trust that things could be better, so they stick with the familiar.

The heroes and/or victims - they are the coal miners, and their families, and future families who will face the vast destruction associated with the mountain top removal typical of Massey Energy and similar companies, and with the dark underground mining in dank and dusty caves. Many of these heroes and victims come from a long line of miners and have deep roots in the mountains of Appalachia. The drivers of the plot - greed, neglect, inaction and passivity, ignorance, acts of God (according to Mr.  B), bogged down bureaucracy, and many others.

Not so much talked about though? The chorus of this drama - the reporters and observers who do not necessarily act in big parts. You and me. Watching television reports about the explosion, reading newspapers, talking to friends, maybe signing petitions to voice our disgust with big coal operations, and.... flipping on light switches, recharging our multiple devices, typing away on our keyboards, TiVo-ing our favorite shows, and generally living our day to day lives without really seeing the men and the families of men whose labors feed the energy that travels the wires to our homes.

To really understand the fix we are in, we need to recognize that fossil fuels have supplied cheap, abundant and effective energy of all kinds for over a century - much cheaper than in most other parts of the world, much cheaper than the price of alternative energies that aren't yet built to scale, cheaper today than the long-term costs associated with the use of fossil-fuel driven energy. We review our electric bills, maybe shop around for a lower rate, turn off lights when not in use, perhaps even unplug the coffee-maker and other LED-lit appliances. We do that, most of us, without really understanding or even actually thinking about the fact that most electricity in our country is powered by coal burning plants... which are fueled by coal.... that is dug from deep underground by men in hazardous conditions (even in the 21st century) or sheared off the surface by giant machines doing mountain top removal that destroys the natural environment and the health of the people who live nearby. 

Can those (we) in the chorus be villains or heroes, or are we limited to the passive roles of observer and reporter? When we see disaster coming, can we intervene and prevent chaos and destruction? Can we warn the heroes and victims-to-be? I think the authors of these dramas can have the chorus do whatever they want. I think we can even become authors of the dramas, or at least co-screen-writers.

We don't have to do it alone. We have options - one coming soon is the March on Blair Mountain in West Virginia - from the web-site:

We march to preserve Blair Mountain, abolish mountaintop removal, strengthen labor rights, and an investment in sustainable job creation for all Appalachian communities.The March on Blair Mountain is a peaceful, unifying rally involving environmental justice organizations, workers, scholars, artists, and other citizens and groups. The march commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when 10,000 coal miners rose against the rule of the coal operators and fought for the basic right to live and work in decent conditions. Currently, Blair Mountain is threatened with obliteration by mountaintop removal (MTR) mining, and it is here that a new generation of Appalachians takes a stand.

In the spirit of the original march–which consisted of mountain peoples, African-Americans, and immigrants from all over Europe–we reach out to a diversity of groups to march in solidarity for the workers, communities and mountains of Appalachia. If you stand with us, you are one of us — a true mountaineer.

It snowed today in Pittsburgh - big white slushy snowflakes - but the good thing was that it still smelled like spring. The snow didn't stick, and couldn't hide the smell of wet soil and new green things. I'm thinking spring is right around the corner - one more week max of this cold weather.... puhleeze?

I got a little feedback about my first post that maybe my words about nature were just a little too Kumbaya-ish - that I failed to recognize all the bad things that arise from the natural world, like earthquakes, cancer, wildfires, hurricanes, plagues. 

Exactly my point. We each have our own beliefs or perceptions about nature - from Kumbaya-butterflies-fluffy clouds nature (cue humming and bonfire smoke) to the mighty-powerful-unpredictable-and-often-cruel force (cue lightning bolts and thunder claps). And maybe we are all correct. The natural world (including us humans) is complex and chaotic and capable of destruction. And it is beautiful and mysterious and capable of healing. Both views can be true.

What determines our views? Our experiences with the natural world itself? Our experiences with other humans? Maybe a little of both? I once read a study in which adults were asked to describe their feelings and perceptions about their parents, and then were later asked about their picture of God. The researcher found that the individuals who had positive relationships with their parents, characterized by nurturing and trust, described a loving and forgiving God, and those who had painful relationships with their parents, involving loss or abuse or neglect, described an angry, judgmental, and punitive God. I don't know if this makes any sense in terms of our perceptions of nature, but we do know that the quality of early relationships has an impact on how we see the world in general as we mature. Our early relationships lay the foundation for cognitive schemata that shape our world-view, our first go-to interpretation of what is in front of us.

Or maybe our perceptions of the natural world are more simply informed by our direct experience, or lack of experience, with it. A counselor I know worked with urban youth who were frequently exposed to and involved in violent life-threatening events. She took the youth on a night-time hike through woods into a large star-lit meadow - maybe hoping to inspire feelings of awe and wonder, thoughts of one's place in the universe. What was inspired was terror! These cocky 16 and 17 year old almost-men were frightened by the open spaces and the dark, and by the unfamiliarity of their surroundings. Mission aborted. I think we are often frightened by what we don't know, what we don't understand, and what we cannot control. And nature can certainly fall in this category.

Something influences our views of nature - something or some things unique to each of us. What has shaped your views?

Mine have changed over the years - keep in mind that I have never experienced a flood or hurricane or earthquake or another tragic natural disaster. My views have ranged from curiosity during childhood, when the outdoors was our world and mysteries abounded.... to occasional indifference during high school alternating with some Kumbaya times at church retreats (okay, I admit it!).... to respect and awe and curiosity again, and even shyness, as an adult. I feel shyness as I learn to plant my first kind of big garden - like I am finally getting to know someone well who has been around for a long time, and I don't exactly know what to say or do, and I am wondering if that someone will find me worthy! (You might understand my doubts when you hear that my first garden yielded one - yes ONE (1) - zucchini! I have never ever met anyone who got only one zucchini! I was truly humbled.)


For some reason, a constant through my life has been a love of thunderstorms - the louder the better. I think they remind me that there is something much bigger and more powerful than I am out there, and that feels reassuring and safe to me.


And now that I am thinking about it, these changes kind of parallel my spiritual development and political growth through life. Does that make sense? I know I cannot separate my feelings and thoughts about sustainable living and the natural world from my values, politics, imagination, and spiritual life. I suspect this might be true of others as well. What do you think?