Okay guys, here is a flow chart with some of the plethora of steps you might encounter when building a licensed cheesemaking facility. Some the steps are highlighted in pink- these you may only encounter as options or mandatory steps in California. The green steps should all be decisions made early in the process, even if the permitting step occurs later. Let me know if you have any input on this chart, I am tweaking it for my EcoFarms Presentation in Pacific Grove February 3rd.

Gianaclis Caldwell is the author of The Farmstead Creamery Advisor.

“Michael Shuman answers a lot of questions I’ve always wondered about, and in the process paints a practical vision of exactly where we need to be headed in this country. Consider this book an excellent investment!”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth and The End of Nature We’re very excited to announce that Local Dollars, Local [...]

Author Mat Stein joins FTMWeekly Radio to discuss his latest book, When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival. Mat shares disaster survival skills and his insights into why emergency planning should be a vital component of your family’s overall gameplan. The show specifically discusses the disaster potential [...]

Physicians who prescribe opioid drugs to patients with neuropathy (nerve pain) ought to consider recommending cannabis as an alternative therapy, according to a peer-reviewed paper published online this week in the Harm Reduction Journal.

“There is sufficient evidence of safety and efficacy for the use of (cannabis/cannabinoids) in the treatment of nerve pain relative to opioids,” the commentary states. “In states where medicinal cannabis is legal, physicians who treat neuropathic pain with opioids should evaluate their patients for a trial of cannabis and prescribe it when appropriate prior to using opioids. … Prescribing cannabis in place of opioids for neuropathic pain may reduce the morbidity and mortality rates associated with prescription pain medications and may be an effective harm reduction strategy.”

The author notes that between the years 1999 and 2006, “approximately 65,000 people died from opioid analgesic overdose.” By contrast, he writes “[N]o one has ever died from an overdose of cannabis.”

In clinical trials, inhaled cannabis has been consistently shown to reduce neuropathic pain of diverse causes in subjects unresponsive to standard pain therapies.

In November, clinical investigators at the University of California, San Francisco reported that vaporized cannabis augments the analgesic effects of opiates in subjects prescribed morphine or oxycodone. Authors of the study surmised that cannabis-specific interventions “may allow for opioid treatment at lower doses with fewer [patient] side effects.”

Neuropathy affects between five percent and 10 percent of the US population. The condition is often unresponsive to conventional analgesic medications such as opiates and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Full text of the paper, “Prescribing cannabis for harm reduction” is available online here.

Paul Armentano is co-author of the book
Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink

Many people want to grow fruit on a small scale but lack the insight to be successful orchardists. Growing tree fruits and berries is something virtually anyone with space and passionate desire can do—given wise guidance and a personal commitment to observe the teachings of the trees. A holistic grower knows that producing fruit is not about manipulating nature but more importantly, fostering nature. Orcharding then becomes a fascinating adventure sure to provide your family with all sorts of mouth-watering fruit.

Using the words “Science” and “Salvation” in the same breath needs some preparation so people in both camps don’t hyperventilate.  “Science” means “knowledge.”  It can’t guarantee that the knowledge is good, or that it will still be considered true in a year.  “Salvation” can mean “to save,” or to make healthy and whole (with its connection to the word “salve”).  Using the word in scientific circles or communities of religious liberals, “salvation” usually means to help people come to their full humanity here and now rather than elsewhere and later.  Some say that, defined this way, we should slough off the religious jargon, and just speak in plain ordinary language: we’re hoping to help ourselves and our society become more integrated and whole around universally admired behaviors like fair play, truthtelling and compassion.  For now, being able to use both jargon and plain talk will open the dialogue to a very wide spectrum of people and beliefs.

The kind of wholeness “Science” can offer is intellectual integrity, in which we don’t have to check our brains at the door.  It’s a kind of salvation/wholeness through understanding – overwhelmingly intellectual.  When we capitalize Science and say things like, “Science says…” or “Science tells us …” we are anthropomorphizing the word, making it a stand-in for a capitalized “God.” In the real world, we don’t have “Science.”  We have sciences and scientists, who often disagree about how to connect what they see as facts.

Some scientists believe they do have a salvation story that can offer us greater intellectual integrity here and now, and some people find that to be adequate – though I’d side with Christopher Hitchens in saying that science is “necessary but not sufficient.”  Some scientists want to offer us the intellectual integrity of thinking about our beliefs with the same rigor scientists use in their “scientific method.” This puts the salvation/wholeness they offer in the same key as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”  It is a powerful kind of wholeness that is impossible when what we know and what we believe contradict each other.

More than being simply defenders of facts, modern cosmologists, for example, are offering persuasive arguments that we live in Deep Time and infinite space that were inconceivable when the world’s religious scriptures were written — and that make the worldview of most traditional religions incoherent today.  Deep Time means putting the evolution of humans, and the four billion year story of life on earth against the background of around 13.8 billion years since the universe began in, they assume, a Big Bang.  Infinite space means just that: for all practical purposes, the distances between the far reaches of the universe are infinite.  The light from all the stars we see has been traveling for thousands, millions or billions of years before reaching us on Earth. We couldn’t reach the stars whose light has come the furthest to reach us – stars that may not even exist any more – in a hundred million lifetimes, traveling at the speed of light.  It is impossible even to imagine a distance of seven or eight billion light years.  Cosmology has been popular since Carl Sagan’s television program Cosmos, thirty years ago.
But the most revolutionary science today isn’t cosmology, but ethology: the study of comparative animal behavior.  Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz was the founder of ethology, and argued that comparative animal behavior offered a much stronger proof of evolution than comparing bits of fossilized skeletons.  Today, ethologists are producing more detailed observations of animal behavior every year – often filmed, many on YouTube — and it’s clear that we share many of those behaviors with dozens, hundreds or thousands of other species.

Primatologist Frans De Waal, the most articulate and prolific of the current ethologists, has compared the way we do politics with the way chimpanzees do – and found a near-perfect match.  His 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics is still in print, and in 1994 Newt Gingrich assigned it to all who were just coming into Congress.  The message seemed clear: if you’re going to play politics at this level, you need to understand how it works.  Ethologists are claiming political, ethical and moral behaviors for their field of study that once belonged to religion and philosophy. Just a few of De Waal’s book titles show some of the scope of behaviors we share with hundreds or thousands of other species:

• Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
• Peacemaking among Primates
• Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
• Our Inner Ape: Why We Are Who We Are
• The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

There is even, understandably, some territorial behavior emerging, as when De Waal wonders how religions could think they have unique insights into the human condition because “They’re just too new.”  When religion loses any special claim to behaviors like empathy, compassion, altruism, trusting and fair play, it has lost much of the foundation that has already been eroded by the passage of time.  But ethologists, new neuroscientists and scientists in new fields like evolutionary psychology are sketching a view of human nature as part of the broader behaviors found in many other kinds of animals.  There is a revolution brewing here.
And whether it’s likely or not, students preparing for the ministry need to begin learning enough about cosmology, ethology, neurosciences and evolutionary psychology to have some idea about the world in which we live – quite different from and infinitely larger than – the world people thought they lived in when the world’s best-known religious teachings originated.  19th Century author Ludwig Feuerbach wrote in 1841 that theology needed to grow into its legitimate heir: anthropology, the study of humans.  Ethology takes the search one step beyond Feuerbach, showing that human behavior, motive, ethics and morality can be best understood by seeing our behaviors on a continuum with many other species: as Darwin would later say.

So, yes: our sciences are weaving an intellectual understanding about human nature, human behavior, including empathy and compassion that have already become at least as important in aspiring preachers’ tool kits as the Bible and religious writings.

Scientists – as well as religious believers – are right to say that the education of ministers is willfully ignorant without them.  Some very basic religious assumptions, teachings and preachings must change for, as William Russell Lowell had already observed 165 years ago, “New occasions teach new duties.  Time makes ancient good uncouth” — not merely wrong, but insulting and uncouth. The kind of salvation/wholeness a scientific perspective can offer is an intellectual salvation by understanding.

All this said, however, there is also an important list of things our sciences can’t offer to us: ways in which mere intellectual correctness falls naively, painfully short of cradling our enduring yearnings.

The list would include music, dance, rituals, a community of mostly like-minded people trying to take their lives more seriously and needing a community where that vulnerable quest can be done with some safety.  Other serious shortcomings of mere knowledge include our love of rituals to magnify the significant moments of our lives: baptisms, wedding ceremonies, memorial services, inspiring sermons calling us to become More, to envision ourselves serving something both true and compassionate — though the role of truth may be seriously over-rated here.
And what about potluck dinners, community parties and social functions – or a place, a building where we can gather within a mood of reverent seriousness – and, hopefully, compassion?

Dishonest or willfully uninformed religion is, if not a sin, at least a moral outrage and an insult to people’s intelligence and seriousness.  But without the warmth of genuine human interaction with each other and our wider world, mere knowledge can become “corpse-cold” – as Ralph Waldo Emerson once described 19th century Unitarians.

With regular church attendance at only 18% and continuing to decline, we’re not only “Bowling Alone” as Robert Putnam put it.  We’re increasingly being alone and growing alone.  E-mails and Tweets can’t take the place of hugs, kisses, or just touching each other.  Since we are, as ethologists are showing us, a profoundly social species, we can’t grow to our full humanity, can’t become whole, can’t find real this-worldly salvation – either through sterile truth or out-of-date religious stories and hollow rituals.

So we live in a transitional time, when neither outdated religious orthodoxy nor empirically constrained sciences can help the majority of our people grow into their full — and most fulfilling — humanity.

Hence the anguish.

Davidson Loehr is author of the book
America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher

In their February/March 2012 issue, Herb Companion magazine is printing an excerpt from Peg Schafer’s new book, The Chinese Medicinal Herb Farm. It’s available to read on their website now. Here’s what some growers and herbalists have to say about this exciting new book: “Peg Schafer is the best artisanal grower I know. For this book, [...]

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.

Here is the January Transition podcast, lovingly spliced together in order to offer a more in depth look at three of the stories from last month’s round-up.  You’ll hear about how Transition Chesham’s local produce market was recently voted the greenest market in Britain, how Transition Town Whitehead are planning to plant 60,000 trees over the next few weeks, and how Transition Town Shrewsbury stepped in when the local council announced that it was stopping collecting cardboard for recycling, and did it themselves.  I hope you enjoy it, and do let us know what you think.

Visit Rob's Transition Culture blog to listen!

Rob Hopkins is the author of The Transition Companion.

You hear it all the time in this free-market worshiping country: vote with your dollars. It’s a paltry excuse for representation, politically speaking, I mean, I’m assuming you’re just a regular person like me, with a rather small amount of “votes” to spend. It’s not exactly in fitting with that old chestnut “one person, one vote”, [...]

Recommendations:
1. Spread the word that the “terminator technology” is not dead – we must join the international campaign to stop it.
2. Sign-on to 2012 as International Year of the Family Farming with the UN and FAO
3. Set up a fund so that a delegation of US farmers can attend  the next IFOAM congress and General Assembly in 2014

On behalf of NOFA, I attended Organic World Congress and the General Assembly (GA) of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) in October, 2011, in Namyangju, near Seoul, South Korea. The congress and GA that take place every 3 years. This year, the brand new Organic Museum on the banks of the Han River made a luxurious venu for the assembly. The GA sets the top priorities for IFOAM and elects the World Board (WB). I have now attended five General Assemblies. Like many organizations, the financial crisis hit IFOAM hard, just at a time when there was a change in leadership.  Members of the board, including President Katherine DiMatteo, and staff filled in for the retiring Executive Director and hired a new ED, Markus Arbenz.  Under his skillful leadership, IFOAM is on the path to financial recovery and has created a unified strategic plan. Urs Niggli, the distinguished Director of FiBL, described IFOAM’s major advocacy campaigns at the United Nations (Food and Agriculture (FAO), UNCTAD (Commission on Trade and Development) and other international meetings, conventions and events: “People before Commodities (on food security), “Powered by Nature” (biodiversity), and “Not Just Carbon” (on the significant role of organic agriculture in mitigating climate change).

Jacqueline Haessig Alleje, (of Swiss origins, married a Phillipine organic dairy farmer and has led the development of organic movement in that country) presented the conclusions of the Good Governance task force for the restructuring of IFOAM. The new IFOAM puts much more emphasis on cooperating with the regional groups – IFOAM Asia, the EU group, GALCI in Latin America, etc. and establishes the farmers group (see INOFO report below) as an independent body.(You can access the full World Board Term Report on the IFOAM website.)

The Organic Guarantee System has undergone revamping, and now consists of five parts:

1. Family of standards – draws the line between what is organic and what is not, includes all standards and regulations that have passed an equivalence assessment.  At the GA, it was announced that the NOFA Organic Landcare standards had been accepted into the Family. IFOAM standards can serve as off-the-shelf standards that a group can adopt, and for IOAS accreditation

2. Best Practice Standards - Among the sets of standards under development are Best Practices standards that are higher and cover all aspects of sustainability including environmental, social, economic and cultural dimensions. These high standards will help renew the continual improvement of organic practices. AJP will suggest social justice/fair trade standards to the group that is working on this.

3. Participatory Guarantee Systems – based on community organizing, a way for small farms that cannot afford certification, to group together to provide a credible organic guarantee for use in local markets.

4. IFOAM’s Global Organic Mark is now available for a fee. A universal logo.

5. International Organic Accredition Service (IOAS) provides Accreditation to organic certification agencies.

IFOAM continues its commitment to GOMA – Global Organic Market Access – a joint project with FAO and UNCTAD -  to make certication affordable so low-income producers can access valuable markets and to harmonize the many varying standards around the world to facilitate international trade.

In 2008 in Italy, for the first time, the majority of the WB members were people committed to support for smallholders (what we would call small farms or family-scale farms).  As a result, since 2008, IFOAM has started to shift its resources from a focus on certification-accreditation and import-export trade to building local markets for smallholders. Support for smallholders has become a central priority. Hivos has provided financial support for the development of a network of Participatory Guarantee Systems.

There were 317 votes present at the GA out of about 700 member organizations. At each GA, the entire WB stands for election and this time there were 20 candidates for the 10 positions. Surprisingly, only two of the five people who had already been on the WB were reelected. The new WB members are:  Andre Leu (fruit farmer from Australia), Matthew John (educator and organizer of hunter-gatherers from India), Matthew Holmes (ED of OTA Canada, and the only N. American who ran), Roberto Ugas (professor, active advisor to smallholder organizations in Peru), James Cole (farmer and marketing organizer from Ghana), Volkert Engelsman (from the Netherlands, founder of Eosta, the largest distributor of organic produce in Europe), Frank Eykorn (environmental scientist from Germany, works on development projects with smallholders in Africe and Latin America), Manjo Smith (farmer and PGS organizer from Namibia), Gabriela Soto (soil scientist and organic inspector, Costa Rica),  Eva Torremacha (agronomist, teacher, PGS researcher, Spain). The WB met and elected Andre Leu as president, Roberto Ugas and Gabi Soto as VPs – the three serve as the Executive Board.

A major portion of the GA is devoted to discussing and passing motions that direct the activity of the WB for the next three years. Members can send in motions by a certain deadline.  At the GA, a “Motion Bazaar” takes place where members can discuss proposals with the writers and request amendments or changes.  One of my goals in attending this GA was to make fair pricing a higher priority in IFOAM’s advocacy and standards.  The current standards include a section on social standards, but these only cover conditions for workers on farms and organic businesses.  In my view, farmers will not be able to provide good jobs until they get prices that cover their full costs of production. We need to reapportion the food dollar along the organic supply chain, shifting a higher percentage towards the bottom. I submitted a motion on fair pricing, but it arrived a day too late to be accepted. At the meeting of organic farmers, I presented it as a resolution and it was accepted unanimously. The writers of Motion 64.2 Family Agriculture, agreed to add to their motion this language – “The importance of fairness and justice for all who labor in agriculture.” There was a long discussion about requiring fair pricing.  Gunnar Rundgren said it is unrealistic.  Certifiers were upset that we might require it in standards.  After the standards issue was removed and placed in the hands of a social justice task force, the motion was accepted. There was also a motion declaring IFOAM support for next year as the International Year of Family Farming.

Motion 62 Carbon Trading called for excluding agriculture from carbon market schemes. There was lively discussion led by Nicaraguans who have benefited from voluntary payments to them for planting trees from European businesses who are trying to offset their big carbon footprints.  The conclusion was to pass a motion clearly aimed at financial market schemes. The WB “should promote alternative financing systems that provide a real solution to climate change for vulnerable populations and fair compensation to organic farmers for their contribution to mitigation and adaptation strategies.”

At intervals through the GA, inspirational speakers make short presentations to bring new ideas or provide encouragement. At the opening, Kim Sung Hoon, a founder of the organic movement in Korea 45 years ago, talked about a great organic revolution.  The obstacles have been – corrupt governments, pollution. Asia had a great tradition before Jesus Christ. The history of Korea marks 12,000 years of sustainable agriculture.
Katherine DiMatteo noted the difficulty of trying to find balance in organic management of this land. As background drama to the GA, the Korean government was in the midst of evicting the longest standing organic farmers in the country from the Paldung Region. Supposedly to ensure clean water, the government is moving all agriculture away from the Four Rivers Region and making an amusement park instead.  The WB visited the farmers to express support and wrote a declaration in protest, recommending that the park be managed organically. I later got to visit the Paldung farmers too and heard the moving story of their struggles to resist eviction.

Laercio Meireilles, from the Center for Agroecology in Brazil and one of the founders of the Eco-Vida Network, (a PGS), spoke eloquently on the need to scale up our activities if we hope to reduce poverty and global warming.  We need more consumers. We need to do more to democratize organic agriculture.  More movement and less bureaucracy.  Standards are important but should not be the center of our lives.  What kind of movement? Daring and creativity should orient our actions. Meireilles gave as examples two PGS - ANPE, the Peruvian farmer association and Eco-Vida (started in 1991) – producers, consumers and technicians work together in the same the networks. Under the Brazilian organic law – everybody who produces can be included.  Uruguay, Mexico, Ecuador all have PGS networks.  PGS provides credibility in the marketplace. We need to find a way to talk with the next generation – PGS is attractive to them.

At previous GAs, competition among national groups for the site of the next GA has been a big feature.  The Koreans really knocked themselves out to win for 2011.  This year, there was only one contender – Turkey -  Bugday, the Association for Supporting Ecological Living. The theme they propose is “Bridging the Organic World,” highlighting the importance of local, regional and global cooperation. Proposed dates - Oct 4 – 14, 2014.  The Turks won everyone’s support with a fine meal and a dance party. Those Turkish women can really dance!

Closing remarks from Markus Arbenz – Koreans mobilized many people with huge fair to shine light on organic agriculture.  The last three years have been hard – IFOAM was saved by smallholder farmers. Don’t rely on narrow strategy – rely on diversity and people.  We opened up – sought opportunities.  Living change. Teamwork and authenticity.  IFOAM is commited to a strategy dominated by values, but not dogma.

In her farewell address, Katherine DiMatteo spoke with deep emotion - the run away world has not factored in human impact. She rehearsed a long list of problems that make it hard to know how to move forward in a chaotic world.  FAO held meetings on greening the economy with agriculture – Ong Kung presented on role of organic as practical and appropriate.  FAO statement – similar to IFOAM advocacy positions.  Regenerative economy.  Time to move away from discussion of standards and regulations.  Their role has been established, so our role can shift to carbon, biodiversity and energy use. Trade and markets.  We must persevere in our belief that each farm is unique. DiMatteo concluded by citing Margaret Mead -a small group of determined people can bring change.

The closing speaker was the new president, Andre Leu, blessedly a man of few, though well-chosen, words.  He paid tribute to Katherine, who seems genuinely to have gone through a personal transformation in her role as president of an organization that was struggling financially while at the same time undergoing a major shift in emphasis from organic trade to the great value of organic family-scale farming and internal markets.

Social Justice Dialogue

Before the conference began, with some help from Jacqueline Haessig Alleje, IFOAM World Board member, Michael Sligh and I convened a gathering on organic and fair trade, and the relationship among organic certification, participatory guarantee systems (PGS), and CSA/Teikei. We have done this at the past 3 IFOAM conferences in Victoria, Adelaide and Modena. There are several organic certification programs that include standards for fairness in pricing to farmers and conditions for workers in their organic certification.  The leading agencies on this are Naturland in Germany, Biosuisse in Switzerland, and the Soil Association in England.  We have been keeping in touch over the past 5 years on our experience with fair trade certification.  Naturland, a certifier and farmer organization with 2500 farmers in Germany and 380 international certifications, makes fair trade voluntary as an addition to organic standards. Steffen Reese from Naturland said that organic is in a state of “burocrazy,” and believes that organic and fair should be one and united. Jorg Schumacher reported that Biosuisse, an organization with 5800 farmer and 750 processor members, has started with a round table dialogue among farmers, processors and cooperative businesses that buy from farmers which may lead to fair trade standards in the future. They have had social standards on working conditions since 2006. Carlos Escobar, who does organic inspections in Colombia, reported that coops of small farmers in Latin America have recently created a new label (Productores pequenos) that identifies a product as coming from a small farm.  This is in response to the move by Transfair (now renamed Fair Trade USA and separated from FLO) to include products from plantations in fair trade. Koa Tasaka, a board member of the Japanese Organic Agriculture Association, advocated that standards protect the right of farmers to save seed and feed their own families first.  We discussed the resolution we had passed in 2008 calling upon IFOAM to create a task force on fair trade and the need to reaffirm that request.  We were later able to do this at the General Assembly meeting and the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) will follow up with this (Michael and I are on the Management Committee for AJP).

The afternoon session turned to the importance of providing a range of organic guarantees for farms of all sizes. We noted with appreciation that IFOAM has championed Grower Group certification for a decade, enabling thousands of very small farms to afford organic certification, and in the past two years has given support to Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) as well. IFOAM has issued a policy brief to governments on recognizing PGS.  Nature et Progres in France is one of the oldest PGS, joined in recent years by the AMAP network (Associations pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne – the French version of CSA, now numbering over 4000 all over France.) There are active PGS in Basque country in Spain, in India, New Zealand, Peru and Brazil.  Certified Naturally Grown in the US counts as a PGS. In Japan, most Teikei farms are not certified organic and depend on the direct relationship between farmer and consumers. We discussed ways of building bridges among these different organic guarantees.

INOFO (Intercontinental Network of Organic Farming Organizations) - October 2, 2011

The meeting opened with greetings from Korean Federation of Sustainable Agriculture organizations including the Korean Catholic Farmers Movement.  They apologized for staying only a short while, but they were committed to rejoining the sit-in strike by farmers at the Korean Assembly that had been in motion since Sept 28 protesting the eviction of farms by the Four River project. Small farmers have no protection from government encroachment was their message.

Moises Cispes from ANPE in Peru is the president of INOFO. He is a corn breeder and small farmer (He told me they sell a little, but mainly exchange with other farmers up and down the mountains). This meeting is an historic moment for small farmers.

Introduction around the room : India – Organic Farmers Assoc – TEAM (together everyone isn’t small) (33,000), Seed project of Vanaja Rampasad, Kenya, Brazil (BD), Costa Rica, NOFA, NOC,  Philippines – Masipag (35,000 farmers), Go-Organic, a university, a women’s association, Rural Workers Assoc., 600,000 Natural farmers – indigenous people in Luzon, Ghana,  Indonesia (100,000),  Japan, Thailand (30,000), Namibia,  Oceania - Samoa (2000), Malaysia,  Sri Landa (7230), Nepal,  Nicaragua (Sano I Salvo – 250),  Ukraine,  Peru (Anpe - 2000), Korea (1000, altogether 10,000 households),  Goa (120), Italy (5000), Australia (2000),  France (FNAB – 20,000 organic farmers in France with 15,000 in FNAB), Colombia, Senegal (3000 in org, but 18,000 organic farmers), Nigeria,- focus on inspiring new farmers, Mali, Kenya – E. African Organic standards, policy on organic agriculture in Kenya awaiting approval – Kenyan Organic Ag. Network – certification cost too high for small farmers, national governments subsidize conventional agriculture by paying for fertilizers

Convenors’ reports:

Europe – 30 countries, informal annual meetings since 2009, busy preparing for CAP.
IFOAM has farmer representative in Brussels – discussing organic policy and GMO  policy
S. America – Moises – biodiversity conservation, much better organized than US farmers, emphasis on building local networks and markets
Central America – Elba – 3 farmer organizations
West Africa – James Benjamin Cole – 2 blocks – French and English speaking – little internet access –
Asia – Pablito – Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, - attended various conferences – lobbying in Philippines for subsidies of $20 million, hospitals will start using organic products
Miguel Gomez– S. Asia and India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan – could not get people from Iran and Iraq
Oceania – Steve from Samoa - 22 countries on Pacific islands – Pacific Organic and Ethical Trade Community (POETCOM) – developing standards – last green and clean part of the planet cause of isolation – PGS system using their standards is getting started – climate change very real – islands are going under water
Australia, New Zealand – Andre Leu – massive droughts, then floods – losing 2000 farmers a year, while organic is growing –
E. Europe – Milovanov – organic growing in Ukraine – building local markets, though mainly export previously – small farmers – 90 % local sales, 10,000 hectares of big farms focus on export.  Convening conferences of farmers from all over Eastern Europe and W. Asia.
I reported from N. America – all I have been able to do is assemble a list of likely organic farming organizations and forward to them the various IFOAM publications I receive.

Discussion of motions for World Board

Support for soil in greenhouses, but critical of ban on heat and light
Carbon trading – opposition to it. Sano I Salvo gets payments for its tree planting from a Belgian city that wants to reduce its carbon footprint. Need to differentiate between carbon trading and carbon footprint. Masipag – those who pay are using their capital to continue their carbon emissions – we need to be clear about need to reduce emissions.  Voluntary agreements are different from financial gambling through derivatives.  Danger of land grabbers claiming large payments, while small holders will get very little, especially if not certified.  Costa Rica – develop integrated process for evaluating cycling of carbon on the farm – Cubans have methodology – small mixed farms would be paid more than big ones.  Paperwork for proving carbon sinking will be impossible for small farmers.  AIAB (Italy) – carbon trading market is not the right way.

Discussion on having farmers on WB – 2 INOFO reps

Unanimous support for my motion on fair pricing and contracts.
Statements by WB candidates – Gabriela Soto, Milovanov, Rivera, Cole, Leu not present, Matthew John (Miguel spoke for him) – India PGS network persuaded him to run. People spoke in favor of Sciurano, Ong Kung Wai, Andre Leu, and Roberto Ugas. Andrea spoke in favor of Torremocha and Jacqueline Haessig Alleje.
INOFO Convenors – need to build network – already 21 countries.  Need for 17 or18, theoretically.  How to reach farmers’ organizations?
Officers – 5 VPs (one with responsibility to ensure small farmer content in next OWC), and a woman for balance – Gabriela Soto.  Moises continues as Pres. Andrea, Pablicito (OWC), Andre, Miguel, and Anton continues as Sec.

Important themes:

• Climate change and especially water
• Family farming
• Sharing economic information – price and trader pressures
• Sharing farming information – capacity building program worldwide – Facebook page
• Farmworkers, immigration, the landless, indigenous people
• PGS – global PGS logo – and other forms of organic guarantee – Teikei, CSA
• Threats to small farmers’ rights to land – mining, landgrabbing, conversion.
• Who are we, whom do we represent, what do we want, what are we fighting for?
• Landgrabbing, pesticides, gmos and corporate control over agriculture, dumping GM eggplant in the Philippines, deforestation, seeds (opposition to Terminator technology), access to land and secure tenure on land.
• Food sovereignty
• Issue of group of Korean farmers who were relocated after flooding onto land that belongs to the government which now wants to expel them to build an amusement park.  WB went to visit them and there will be a declaration from the Congress.  Andre has negotiated a doubling of the compensation offer.
• Staff support from IFOAM – for fundraising – 5-6 days a months for INOFO.
• Report from Executive on past 3 years: main effort aimed at establishing INOFO officially with IFOAM and on beginning to develop network.

The Organic World Congress of 2011 – Highlights

The 17th Organic World Congress (OWC), held in Gyeonggi Paldang, South Korea from September 26 to October 1, attracted close to 2000 participants from 76 countries. The various side events, including the organic world fair and festival, drew in some 250.000 visitors, making this conference the most successful OWC in terms of attendance.

Each morning of the Congress begins with a series of four keynote speakers addressing one of the four principles of organic agriculture. There was quite a stellar line up: Sarojeni Rengam from the Pesticide Action Network, Master Dobeop, a Korean Buddhist monk, Dr. Hans Rudolf Herren, a leader in biological controls from Switzerland,  John Reganold, a soil scientist and professor of Agroecology at Washington State U.,  LaRhea Pepper, a Texas pioneer in organic cotton, Mette Melgaard, a farmer and leader of Organic Denmark, Moses Muwanga, one of the founders of NOGAMU in Uganda, Humberto Rios Labrada, one of the organizers of the organic transformation in Cuba, Gunnar Rundgren, from Sweden and former president of IFOAM, Bernd Horneburg, an organic plant breeder from Germany, Gary Zimmer, a farmer and farm advisor from the USA, Wen Tiejun, a professor and rural organizer from China, Yoshinori Kaneko, one of the first Teikei farmers in Japan, Liz Clay, a farmer from Australia, Sophia Twarog, who works at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Ulrich Kopke, founding president of the International Society of Organic Agriculture Research (ISOFAR)from Germany, Suh Chong-hyuk, one of the pioneers of organic agriculture in Korea, Pat Mooney, from ETC Group in Canada, and Katherine DiMatteo, IFOAM president. There were many eloquent, passionate and informative speeches, fortunately captured on video and they will be available from IFOAM.

I loved the Cuban message - a ground-up assault on the usual hierarchy of knowledge:

“Researcher – very intelligent; Extension – less intelligent; Farmer – bruta”

By crumbling this ladder, the Cubans have unleashed the energies that have enabled them to feed the people of their island.

I was encouraged by the speakers who have served on the IFOAM board – Rundgren, Melgaard and DiMatteo. All three challenged the old IFOAM emphasis on certification, harmonization and import-export, announcing a new era.  Rungren declared that it is time to be “unreasonable and unrealistic,” to decouple from the obsession with standards.  The market economy is not the way to manage the planet.  We need a “regenerative” economy guided by the IFOAM principles.

Fast talking Gary Zimmer came straight from the US heartland, a startling contrast with the refined Europeans and Asians.  As usual, he stressed soil nutrients and plant health, but in a brash, direct style that caught many of his audience off guard. I don’t think they got his jokes.

I was surprised and impressed by Professor Wen Tiejun from China. Until I heard him speak, I had taken as a given that organic agriculture in China is a top-down, government-led effort to increase exports.  Wen presented a broad and deep analysis of the history of agricultural industrialization, both West and East, showing the ugly parallels between capitalist and Chinese development.  According to Wen, all the “isms” are following the same path of transferring surplus production from the countryside to industry.  Reform in China is accelerating this industrialization by taking even more from the rural areas, resulting in increased pollution and the food safety crisis.  But a new movement has begun in China – eco-agriculture – that is training young people to go to the countryside to serve the people. To change the present course, Wen said they need to organize the peasants as an interest group to pressure the government. (A version of his talk will appear in the Monthly Review, Feb. 2012)  Wen is one of the leaders of this movement of volunteers, doing work that sounds a lot like what we are up to in the US in the organic and good food movement!   I was able to observe a little of what is going on in China a week later when I visited Little Donkey Farm near Beijing.

Only one of the speakers generated a negative response. I sat with a group of small-scale farmers from several countries when Sophia Twarog spoke.  Her talk infuriated all of us with her insistence that imports are wonderful.  Later, at lunch, several of us confronted her.  She was astonished – she had been trying to drum up enthusiasm for breaking down the barriers that differing organic standards create for the flow of farmers’ products and had not realized that she had failed to acknowledge the bigger picture – the negative effect of the WTO and Free Trade agreements on family-scale farms all over the world. She promised to revise her presentation in the future.

Yoshinori Kaneko shared the remarkable story of his farm and village. When I visited Japan in 2004 as a guest of the Japanese Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA), I had the inspiring chance to tour his farm, one of the first to do Teikei (the Japanese version of CSA). Starting in 1971, Kaneko has been using organic methods, gradually adding more families as the productive capacity of his farm increased. He uses waste vegetable oil to power his tractor, has a solar greenhouse and solar panels for electricity. To replenish the waning supply of farmers, he has trained many interns who have settled near him.  Since 2009, his entire village is organic. He will be a speaker at the Eco-Farm Conference in CA in February 2012.

After recounting the rise to dominance of the seeds of the world by a few seed-chemical companies, Pat Mooney brought the whole assembly to our feet with his upsetting announcement that the “terminator technology,” that we thought had been safely arrested by the UN ban, is rising again.  (This is the GMO technology that renders seed sterile.) Mooney declared that we need a food web, the biodiverse array of seed and breed varieties nurtured by peasants, not a food chain, the commercial system of industrial production that has narrowed our food supply to only 12 crops. He explained that there are two bills that will be presented in Brazil at Rio + 20 that would end the moratorium on suicide seeds.  In October, Brazil will go to the UN meetings in India and ask the UN to end the ban.  Mooney called on us to stop it again – “Suicide seeds are genocide to farmers.” We stopped them before and we can do it again.

Like a NOFA conference on steroids, the Organic World Congress (OWC) offers a tantalizing array of choices of workshops, values tracks and research tracks, panels, posters and special meetings, 17 different simultaneous sessions.  I will share some notes on the ones I managed to attend.  IFOAM distributes a set of proceedings with summary write-ups if you want to see the full list and get an idea of the content.

“Sharing Our Vision of Teikei (CSA) Movement in Japan”

I was anxious to hear what Michio Uozumi, a Teikei farmer whose farm I had visited, would have to say about the earthquake and Fukushima.  Knowing that his farm was only 100 kilometers from the nuke, shortly after the March 12 disaster, I had emailed him to find out how US organic farmers might help. In the workshop,  Michio told about how organic farmers brought food to the victims of the tsunami and helped people dig out from the flooding.  In June, a group of farmers and fishermen did a tree planting in the mountains above the flooded area. By improving the tree cover, they hope to help clean the waters and renew the phytoplankton in the ocean, thus increasing the food supply for fish.  Because of the elevated radiation from the nuke, Michio was faced with the very difficult decision on continuing to grow vegetables at his farm.  There were pressures to remove all the contaminated top soil.  Michio showed photos of a meeting with his Teikei members to discuss what to do.  They decided to have detailed testing of the farm’s soils and crops – only 1/10 of the level of cesium in the soils showed up in the crops.  As a result, they decided to go on eating the farm’s produce.  Michio is convinced that high organic matter soils, like those on his farm, can bind with the cesium and hold it in the ground.  He is doing deep plowing and adding clay to increase the cation exchange capacity to adsorb more cesium. Because of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a lot of information in Japan about the best diet to limit damage from radioactivity.

The other speakers at this workshop talked about the history of Teikei and the significant role Teikei groups have played since 1971 in enabling farms to convert to organic and to connect with supportive consumers.  Of the 800 or so Teikei farms, only one third are certified organic.  Members visit the farms themselves to help with farm work and do not need to rely on third parties for verification of farmers’ practices.

Under the auspices of Urgenci, the international CSA network, I participated in workshops on member involvement in CSAs and ways to include low-income and diverse groups.  Matthieu Roy talked about how Equiterre, the ngo he helps staff, has built a network of 100 farms serving 10,000 families in the Province of Quebec for a total of $4 million in annual sales.  Joy Carey, from Bristol, England, and a member of the Soil Association, talked about that city’s initiative to develop a comprehensive plan to support local agriculture.  There are currently six farmers’ markets, nine box schemes, six organic and whole food shops, four CSAs, four city farms, 40 school gardens and hundreds of community gardens.  The various gardens can produce 15% of the residents’ vegetables.

Shi-Yan Sina gave a fascinating presentation on the recent spurt of CSAs in China.  After IFOAM, I was able to visit her farm, the Little Donkey CSA, and to participate in a CSA conference at Renmin University in Beijing where over 400 participants held non-stop sessions from 8:30 am to 10 pm for two intense days.  A student of Professor Wen, Shi-Yan spent 6 months on a CSA farm in the US in 2007 and then spearheaded the organization of Little Donkey on 38 acres in a village near Beijing.  In its third season, the farm provides space for garden plots for 240 families, and grows shares for 460 CSA members.  The farm crew combines graduate students like Shi-Yan and 20 village farmers.  The challenge, Shi-Yan says, is rebuilding trust and social capital in a society that has been hurtling into industrialization at rocket speed.  In the past few years, organic has become a social movement in China.  Their motto is summed up in two traditional characters - “Moderate desire, Gain Happiness.” Jane Tsao also reported on a Chinese project, the Bio-Farm near Shanghai which combines a CSA based on an urban garden with sales from nearby farms.

I attended several workshops on Participatory Guarantee Systems. The IFOAM PGS Committee has written a policy brief to governments urging the recognition of PGS, as has been done under the organic laws in Brazil and Mexico. Jannet Villanueva, who works as an advisor to ANPE, a small farmers association in Peru, argues that PGS is an important tool of inclusion of the smallest farmers and complements third party certification.  PGS is not an end in itself but a means to farmer empowerment and community organizing.  Eva Torremocha, a Spanish agronomist who was later elected to the IFOAM WB, talked about case studies on PGS in Europe where she found the greatest development in France where Nature et Progres has functioned for many years.  Their process consists of a farm visit, followed by a report, then a group decision on inclusion.  There is an annual assembly that serves as the governing body.  The standards of Nature et Progres combine ecological production and social standards for the treatment of workers on farms. Consumers are very active along with farmers. A report from Brenjonk, a village of 2700 people in Indonesia, highlighted the close relationship between Grower group certification systems and PGS.  This rice and banana growing village has organic standards for these crops, but also requires that each family spend its first energy on feeding the family, selling only the excess.  Konrad Hauptfleisch talked about his work creating a PGS in S. Africa to encourage local markets in a country where most organic production is oriented towards exporting to Europe.  A PGS network is growing in Namibia as well. He stressed that a supportive network is essential to PGS development.

I was sad that I only got to attend part of a full day of reports on their farms from the delegates to INOFO. I did catch a farmer from Indonesia who showed photos of beautiful terrace farming, unbelievably strenuous work.  Most of the farms are tiny by US standards – from two acres to 20. A retired Philippino rice researcher turned farmer told how he spends most of his time organizing a marketing coop while four hired people grow vegetables on his two acres. Similarly, Manjo Smith, a woman farmer in Namibia, hires and provides homes for 17 households on a mere 7 hectare farm. Manjo is the organizer and marketer, and won election to the WB. Andre Leu, from Australia, told how he created a fruit farm over 20 years, producing organic rambutans and apples.

As an upsetting contrast to the wholehearted and energetic support for the IFOAM conference from the Korean government, I went on a tour of the Paldung Farmers cooperative, located on fertile low lands along the Han River.   100 organic farmers have used this land since 1973 when the government built a dam that flooded their former lands. The Korean central government is evicting them, ostensibly to eliminate sources of contamination from the Four River watershed by substituting recreation for farming.  Why a park would be less polluting than organic farms seems murky to me. The Paldung farmers showed us videos of the police arresting them and carrying them away.  The farmers returned and intend to hang on as long as possible.  They have walked to Seoul three times, been arrested twice, fasted, petitioned.  On their land we saw many, many hoop houses.  During the summer months, violent rains pour down for weeks at a time, so growing under plastic provides protection from the water.  The farmers have a cooperative packing house from which they ship to a group of cooperative stores. They are Catholics and invited us to the mass they hold daily at 3 pm. The government has offered them new land, but of inferior quality at a distance from their markets.

Attending an IFOAM conference is a stimulating and enlightening experience.  I have not even touched on the many people I met over these 10 days, people of every age and color, from every continent, who are devoting their lives to organic agriculture.  This brief acquaintance with Korea leaves me with a profusion of mixed emotions – I am stunned at the beauty of their land, the persistence of ancient traditions despite the headlong modernization.  Rice paddies encircle the high speed rail stations. Hundreds of multistory apartment buildings crowd against the 8 – 10 – 12-lane highways, packed bumper to bumper with cars and trucks.  A remarkable new organic museum opened to greet us just a few miles from the land of the soon to be displaced organic farmers. I hope in the future that more North American farmers, gardeners, homesteaders and agtivists of all stripes will have the chance to share this rich experience.

President Obama is exceptionally lucky when it comes to the weaknesses of the Republican field and its stunning penchant for mutually assured destruction. Who would have expected, for instance, that Newt Gingrich's billionaire-backed super-PAC, aiming to destroy front-runner Mitt Romney, would produce a documentary advertisement on private equity slightly to the left of what we might have expected of Michael Moore? Or that Gingrich, reprimanded by leading free-market ideologues, would then request that the ad be pulled? In this hilariously bungled caper, Marx meets the Marx Brothers.

But it remains to be seen whether Obama will be as lucky when it comes to the shape of the economy as the election year unfolds. Some of what will occur this year is partly within the president's control; much is not.

Consider the several vulnerabilities of the still fragile recovery:

The Jobs Mirage. Democrats were cheered and Republicans caught off guard when the Labor Department's December jobs numbers showed a net increase of 200,000 jobs — a nice improvement over previous months. However, a closer look showed that some 42,000 of these were seasonal courier jobs — all the people hired to deliver holiday gifts purchased via Amazon and other online vendors.

Jared Bernstein, the former senior Administration economic advisor now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, calculates that the 200,000 jobs number should be deflated by about 30,000. This brings it closer in line with other recent months, and suggests that the economy is still a ways from a strong recovery.

The biggest problem retarding a strong recovery is that wages are lagging far behind the economy's productivity growth. Recent Federal Reserve statistics show that consumers increased their borrowing to finance their holiday spending, but that can't last unless wages begin following.

Stronger economic stimulus is beyond the control of the administration, given the Republican strategy of wall-to-wall legislative roadblocks. The one thing that Obama could do that he isn't doing is a more aggressive stance on relief for underwater homeowners. With housing prices still falling in nearly every metropolitan area, the housing sector is still depressing the overall economy.

Euro-Drag. From the perspective of Obama's re-election, probably the best case for the Euro this year is that the leaders of the EU keep kicking the can down the road and keep the currency from collapsing. But that may not be good enough. (As the Financial Times' Martin Wolf puts it, the can is filled with gasoline.)

Even if the Euro holds together, the price Europe's financial elites have extracted for keeping weaker European economies afloat is prolonged austerity. That not only depresses Europe's prosperity but weakens U.S. export markets.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's European diplomacy has been directed at one goal: The European Central Bank should behave more like the U.S. Federal Reserve and flood European credit markets with cheap money. But the ECB, responsible to austerity-minded political leaders, is only going part of the way. The S&P's downgrading of the sovereign debt of nine nations that use the Euro only pours oil on the flames.

For the most part, Europe's self-inflicted financial folly is beyond the reach of the Obama Administration. But it could sink the U.S. recovery and Obama's prospects.

The Oil Slick. Iran's continued nuclear program is among the most vexing of foreign policy challenges. The West has had some success in keeping Iranian oil off world markets. The Iranians, in turn, have threatened to block the shipping lanes of the crucial Straits of Hormuz, a 19-mile-wide shipping lane through which about one-fifth of the world's oil supply passes. Reportedly, the Obama administration has told the Iranians that this could be considered crossing a red line, close to an act of war, and that closure of the strait would be met by military force.

But this game of geo-political chicken also has grave consequences for the price of oil. Even if shipping lanes stay open, oil supply could come under pressure. The price of oil has stayed well-behaved, ironically enough, because the weak recovery has depressed demand. But a spike in the price of oil could be a spike in the heart of economic growth.

According to standard political-science analysis of presidential re-election chances, the most important single factor is the state of the economy in the presidential year. This means not just the absolute unemployment and economic growth numbers, but whether voters feel things are improving.

Yale's Ray Fair, whose economic model has been uncannily accurate in predicting presidential winners, surprised many observers last November, when he projected a narrow Obama win based largely on improved economic growth in 2012. But Fair's economic projections now look quite optimistic.

Bottom line: It is hard to recall a presidential year when there were so many economic wild cards, any one of which could tip the election's outcome. On the other hand, it is hard to recall a weaker or more bizarre Republican presidential field. Which will prove decisive?

Despite what is likely to be a mediocre economic picture at best, and the demonizing of Obama by his opponents, and the disappointment in this president on the part of many of his most fervent 2008 supporters, by next November Obama may yet strike a plurality of voters as the safer and saner of the candidates. But any number of imponderables could upset that calculus.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a Senior Fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.

DENVER — Proponents of marijuana have argued for years that the drug is safer than alcohol, both to individuals and society. But a ballot proposal to legalize possession of marijuana in small amounts in Colorado, likely to be on the November ballot, is putting the two intoxicants back into the same sentence, [...]

We know that a baby’s birth and early life story shape behavioral styles that are often carried through adulthood.  We express it through aphorisms: “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”; “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Others link childhood trauma or abuse with adult behavior. The Greeks said, “Character is destiny,” and saw society’s responsibility to form people of good character as paramount. The same is true for the birth stories we write for our gods.

It’s easiest to see this among the Greek gods, since their gods were such obvious projections of both psychological dynamics and natural forces. Hermes, the Greek Trickster god, stole Apollo’s cattle in the evening of the first day he was born, later inventing the lyre, and trading it to Apollo in return for all the cattle.  It doesn’t take long before we realize that this is the story of a Trickster god, and neither gods nor humans will ever be able to trust him.   He’s charming and seductive, but with Hermes, you can never be quite sure.

When it comes to Yahweh, the God of the Bible and of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the birth story is not part of the religious stories, but part of the real-world history of the ancient Hebrews studied by historians and biblical scholars.  Since these facts weren’t incorporated into the myth as they were for many Greek deities, it is important to understand how Yahweh’s early historical evolution still hounds believers, and is the dimension of Yahweh that Christopher Hitchens described as “not good.”

The earliest Hebrew traditions show that Yahweh was a Bedouin war god from the deserts of Edom and the surrounding regions. His warlike characteristics are shown in his name: "Yahweh" is an abbreviation of his official, longer name, "Yahweh Sabaoth," which means, "he assembles armies." Yahweh's name identifies this god as primarily the military commander of his people.  When he became identified with the tribe of ancient Hebrews, he kept his war god attributes, and added a “tribal chief” character.

The covenant he made with “his” people was modeled on an ancient Hittite sovereignty treaty, and was what we would expect from a war god or tribal chief. He would be their god, and they would be his people.  If they obeyed him, he would protect them; if they disobeyed, he could destroy them (or let them be taken into captivity, as by the Babylonians).  That deep character of war god and tribal chief has been in the forefront of Western religions, to varying degrees, ever since.  How many priests and ministers have made a living pretending to fix things for you with God – when they’re really not doing much more than playing Hermes’ role: persuasive but not necessarily true?

Yahweh was an odd god, narrowly conceived.  Compared to Zeus, Yahweh was a celibate.  He had no sex life at all, no significant interactions with women, no children (except in the poetic sense of claiming the Hebrews as his “children”).  The earliest Christians, soaked in Greco-Roman culture, tried to construct a Jesus who was Yahweh’s son, then tried to define Jesus as both fully divine and fully human, a hybrid no theologian has ever been able to make much sense of.

Some of the poets whose writings appear in the Bible tried to soften God, sometimes gave him feminine characteristics.  But the Yahweh identified with laws for stoning disobedient teen-agers and women to death remained a god of war, with a warrior’s lack of sensitivity or concern for women, and capital punishment for disobedience.  He was and remained a Man’s Man.  Worshiping him could be done only through male rabbis – women weren’t even allowed in the same space as men – and later male Popes and Imams.  The sexual abuse of children by priests has been known about and covered up by the Catholic Church throughout its history.  Only in a narrowly conceived men’s club could pedophilia be seen as what has amounted to an entitlement of male priests: accusations Pope Benedict XVI even tried to dismiss as “petty gossip.”

Women are property in patriarchal societies growing from a war god and tribal chief.  The practice, still part of many weddings where the officiant asks, “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” was a literal transfer of property.  Shiite Islam also has its misogynistic and murderous attitudes toward women, from narrowly read lines in their own tradition.  But all these brutal traits spring from and reflect the story of Yahweh’s birth as a war god and early life as a tribal chief.  Western Biblical religions are a men’s club, sanctioned by a man’s God.  Pope Benedict even put the ordination of women at the same level of moral disgust as the sexual abuse of children by priests.  Many suspect he will still try to hide pedophile priests, as he will oppose the ordination of women or married priests – unless they are already married when they transfer in.  Don’t try tracing the logic of that one or your tongue could get stuck in a nasal passage.

Conservative Jews, Christians and Muslims still find their home as members of the tribe of God’s people.  The Catholic Church’s insistence that “there is no salvation outside of the Church” and conservative Christians’ proclamation that “Jesus is the (only) Way” both maintain the strong connection to the anciently and narrowly conceived tribal and war god.

Religious liberals are trying to replace the ancient bipolar god of conditional love/hate with the more universal perspective that many roads lead to “salvation” (in the non-supernatural sense of wholeness and authenticity). This converts Jesus from “Son of God” to an avatar: an embodiment of our highest calling and capacity, a guide to living more wisely and compassionately here and now, rather than elsewhere and later.

Can Western religions with their war god baggage be transformed into religions content to be one of many useful paths where even their God is just one option among many, but no longer The Way?  Can liberal religions, offering all carrot and no stick, both empower and challenge?  Church attendance in the U.S. has been declining for over a century, and Christian churches are now losing over two million people a year, so the answer isn’t yet clear, though the trajectory seems to be.  In the meantime, the growing number of atheists (now numbered at about thirty million) and many millions of other “church alumni” no longer speak in God-talk, and find their inspiration — as do many “believers” — through literature, movies and television.  We’re in the middle of a slow, huge, spiritual revolution.  Stay tuned.

Davidson Loehr is author of the book
America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher

One of the great things about a northeastern winter is the strong sense of community the harsh weather inspires. A great way to feel that sense of community is to check out your local organic farming organizations. Hang out with small farmers, sample delicious local foods, attend [...]

Governor Peter Shumlin's efforts to challenge the safety of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant does not mark the first time that a Vermont governor went toe to toe with the plant. In 1985, when I was Governor, I learned that the plant had falsified inspection reports for years and that thousands of unchecked parts may have been installed.

The plant had an unplanned shut down for eight months to replace the entire recirculation piping unit. Both plant officials and the Nuclear Regulatory commission had kept me in the dark. The state's nuclear engineer concluded that probably violations had occurred in the "storage and handling program for safety related materials." Plant officials issued denials. Who was right? How could I assure Vermonters that the plant was safe? That is the same question that is being asked today.

Governors have the responsibility to protect the safety of their citizens. If the plant accidentally releases radiation, the Governor takes immediate action, ordering an evacuation, issuing iodine pills. But the Governor had no power to prevent an accident in the first place.

My first step was to obtain an impartial evaluation of the plant. It was not so easy to get the safety question answered because "experts" were divided into two camps, either anti nuclear or pro nuclear scientists. After many insistent phone calls to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I reached the New England regional director. We toured the plant together and as a result, he ordered a complete inspection of Vermont Yankee. He was as concerned as I was, and recommended major safety changes in the plant which were implemented. I established a new position–an on site nuclear inspector to act as liaison between the NRC and the state.

I went a step further. I brought a resolution to the National Governor's Association, which stated that Governors should have more authority over the safety of their nuclear power plants. Governor John Sununu was not pleased. He saw this as a direct attract on the approval of New Hampshire 's Seabrook plant, which had been beset by demonstrations. In one outburst, he told my staff person, "I'm going to raise a million dollars to defeat your governor."

When Chernobyl occurred in 1986, calls for a shutdown of Vermont Yankee began. The question remains: how can the public know whether a nuclear power plant is safe to operate? What was underscored in the recent Vermont court case is that safety questions are decided by the federal government. The state, can, however, make an economic argument–a more difficult task.
The best solution would be for a more safety oriented Nuclear

Regulatory Commission to work with Vermont and decide whether Vermont Yankee's lifespan is safe to extend.

To succeed, the NRC would have to change course from being a nuclear energy salesman to being a nuclear cop.

This was originally published on The Huffington Post.

Madeleine M. Kunin is the author of Pearls, Politics and Power.

CSA in the People’s Republic of China

Little as I know about Taiwan, I know even less about China and it is so vast and, like the US, so full of contradictions. I offer here what I observed during an intensive 4-day visit.

Little Donkey Farm is located in Ho Sha Tien Village, on 6th outmost ring road of Beijing. After over an hour’s nerve wracking ride in a speeding taxi, when I arrived at Little Donkey Farm my most urgent need was a toilet. The outhouse turned out to be a composting toilet with room for two. As we squatted together, I had a chat with a lady who introduced herself in English as a school teacher and a working member of the Little Donkey CSA. She offered to show me her garden plot. Sadly, the Farmers Market I had hoped to witness had ended. Over 1000 people had just departed.

Two of the Little Donkey organizers, Shi-Yan Sina and Cunwang Cheng, met me in the section of the farm devoted to individual plots. Shi-Yan initiated Little Donkey after a 6-month stay at a CSA farm in Minnesota in 2007. Cheng did a tour of CSAs in the US the next year and spent a few days as my guest at Peacework Farm. Cheng is a little taller than I, a solidly built young man with a very round and innocent face. Yan is taller, very thin and graceful in her movements. They were sorry I was so late. They showed me around the 38 acre farm. The land is almost perfectly flat. There are now 240 individual plots, 10 x 20, repetitions of similar crops – daikon radishes, stately Chinese cabbages, garlic chives, eggplant, peppers, lettuces, a bushy variety of basil, medicinal herbs I cannot name. They led me to the lone little donkey who lives in an open-air pen. Next to the donkey are the chicken pens, roofed open areas enclosed with netting on which squash or gourds had been growing, and the pig house, a well designed concrete bunker with good air drainage. The piglets were hungry, so Cheng tossed some ground up corn in their feeder. The composting area stretched from the pigs to the chickens. We examined a shed with shelves lined with glass jars of liquid concoctions – herbal brews in the style of Cho Han Kyu, a South Korean practitioner of “Nature Farming” – ginger, garlic, beneficial microorganisms – used for fertilizer and pest control.

They introduced me to Lijiang Cheng, one of the 20 villagers, skilled farmers who work on the farm with the university graduate managers and interns. He told me he is 62 and had been farming all his life. Looking at me, he exclaimed, “She still has a braid!” The farm staff includes 5 managers, 20 villagers and ten interns. In its third year of production, in 2011 Little Donkey includes the 240 families who have garden plots and 430 who receive farm crew produced shares that include vegetables, eggs and pork. The farm is much more than a CSA – it is a training center, serves as a model for cooperative work between village peasants and university educated organizers, the site of a farmers market, and hosts literally thousands of visitors.

Nearby we came to a larger building where the crew eats lunch and where they cook for visitors. A group of 7 or 8 young people, college age, was sorting the waste from the Farmers Market into compost and recyclables. One young man complained that the people who came to shop were not very aware.

We walked through the fields – the ground is flat with trenches for water and ridged paths for walking and driving, like a series of rice paddies but devoted to vegetables – impressive Chinese cabbages, a small area of corn, handsome lettuces, perfectly weeded carrots, an entire block of garlic chives, with hardly a weed, eggplant, trellised beans and cucumbers, the long slightly spiney kind – Yan offered me one to eat. It was sweet and crunchy. (Later I worried at having eaten a raw vegetable in China, but I did not get sick). A few of the paddy areas were empty – where transplants had been grown and then distributed to the working shares. Clusters of working shareholders were busy on their plots – one woman proudly offered me a large daikon radish. The light was failing so our tour came to an end. A local taxi (not official, a regular village service) took us a mile or so to the village where Yan and Cheng live in an apartment in the new block of 5-story apartment buildings.

The New Village

Although they had major responsibilities for the CSA conference the next two days and were getting married the day after that, Yan and Cheng welcomed me to stay in their home. The apartment is a fourth floor walk-up, a comfortable amount of space for a young couple with a living-dining room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. They had wi-fi that appeared to function and Yan talked endlessly on a cell phone handling conference details. From the living room window, you could see the next row of apartments and beyond them the cranes that were lifting materials into place for yet another row. A school buddy of Cheng’s ate dinner with us. He told me he is doing his three years of service by working in the village administration so that he can earn a card that will allow him to live in Beijing, make money, buy a house, attract a wife and send his children to good schools. When I pointed out that Cheng found Yan without all that, he said Cheng and Yan were an exception.

They took me to visit the old village – one-story buildings with crowded, narrow streets. We stopped at a bakery, a disorderly and crowded workspace with piles of blackened metal molds for breakfast rolls. By contrast, I was surprised at the spaciousness of the one home we entered. There was a huge living room, a TV room, 3 bedrooms, a modern kitchen, and 2 smaller rooms, all with white tile floors. The couple who lived there had built and rebuilt this home over 15 years. Their entryway looked more like a farmyard with drying red peppers, a big pile of newly harvested leeks, barrels, buckets and tools.

I do not claim to understand the transition that is going on in this village and, according to my hosts, in many others as well. From what I grasped, the village controls the old village and the land it is on. A developer is building the new apartments and offering each village family 1 million yuan (about $62,000) and 3 apartments in exchange for their old house. The families can live in one apartment and rent out the others. This would seem to mean that the village is giving up control of its land to a private company.

"New Farmer, New Countryside"

By good luck or Yan’s strategic planning, the few days between the end of the IFOAM General Assembly and the date for my Taiwan tour coincided with “New Farmer, New Countryside: the Third National Conference of Community Supported Agriculture” at Renmin University in Beijing. I had the honor of being the keynote speaker: I presented a newly updated version of my ever evolving illustrated talk on “CSA Around the World”. Hot off the presses was Yan and Cheng’s translation of Sharing the Harvest in time for us to celebrate the release of the book.

Over 400 attended the conference – farmers, organizers, undergraduate, graduate students and faculty. Many were delegates from over 150 ecological farming projects. At the plenary sessions, I was seated in the front row with the dignitaries, university professors and government officials. Most of the participants were 20 – 30 somethings, both men and women, with only a sprinkling of gray hairs. They showed an amazing level of commitment, sitting through workshops from 9 am till 10 pm! At breaks, a roar of networking erupted. If I can judge from the discussions at the end of each session, Chinese organic people are long-winded – and impressively long on the ability to listen to one another. They greeted me with overwhelming warmth. There was a lot of friendly laughter, though my volunteer interpreters were rarely up to translating the jokes and wisecracks. Outdoing even the Japanese, the Chinese delight in photo opportunities. I must have had my photo taken 200 times with different conference participants. Yan had told me that organic in China is no longer just a top-down, export-oriented program, but a grassroots movement. The palpable energy at this conference is evidence of this exciting development.

The farm manager at Little Donkey, Yan Xiaohui, opened the conference by outlining the kinds of problems to be solved: food quality and security, pollution from agriculture and the urban-rural gap. He evaluated Little Donkey’s success so far in addressing these challenges. Zhang Zhimin and Yan told about the growth of the Beijing CSA Union and the development of a national CSA network. According to Yan, middle class people, who are keeping city jobs, are returning to villages to manage organic farms. While CSAs like Little Donkey and Big Buffalo have government and university support, farmers are establishing others on their own by connecting with citizens who care about food quality and sourcing food from people they trust. You can read a version of Yan’s paper in the proceedings for the IFOAM Organic World Congress.

Thanks to a series of interpreters, I was able to make some sense of the workshops I attended. With two tracks at each time slot, the best I could do was to cover half of what went on. The content was surprisingly familiar, like a Chinese version of CSA conferences I have attended in the US and England. I heard detailed reports on CSAs – university supported projects, farmer and ngo initiated ventures, a variety of other direct marketing enterprises, some farmer cooperatives, and basic topics in organic methods, farm management, composting, seed saving, ecological architecture, certification and participatory guarantee systems. A farmer with many years of experience with organic practices talked about discovering CSA and appreciating the improvement in marketing and community support. Two new farmers from non-rural backgrounds talked about their paths to organic farming. A Bejing restauranteur from The Veggie Table listed his catchy 6 “m”s – meal, menu, music, manner, mood, meeting, and described how he purchases 60% of the ingredients for his menu from local organic farms. A professor of health analyzed the relationship between unhealthy life styles and disease.

A dramatic confrontation between a father, who had become a migrant worker in the city, sacrificing to give his son an education, and the son, who had decided to return to their village to be an ecological farmer, set off a highly emotional discussion that echoed through the two days. Another recurrent theme was the communication and marketing difficulties experienced by farmers who live in isolated areas, too far from cities. Li Zhao reported on the Green Ground Union, a project started by Professor Wen as a company in 2000. After meetings with farmers to learn about the problems in villages, they decided to focus on developing ecological agriculture as the best path to food safety and feeding the countryside. I would love to have a better understanding of what Li Zhao meant by “self-controlling” as a new way to build social trust. I missed sessions on the multi-functionality of agriculture, the many new farmers’ markets in Shanghai, Chengdu and Nanjing, “original taste,” restaurant supported agriculture, a community kitchen in Hongkong and Slow Food in China.

At the closing plenary, after a concise report on the IFOAM certification system and the principles of organic agriculture, Zhou Zelong, IFOAM’s representative in China, concluded with the new emphasis on Participatory Guarantee Systems. I was surprised that as illustration, he showed photos of his recent visit to a US farm in Connecticut that uses the NOFA Farmers Pledge instead of certification.

The final speech was delivered by Tiejun Wen, the Dean of the School of Agronomics & Rural Development at Renmin University and the Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies for Sustainability, at the People’s University of China, (wentj@ruc.edu.cn). Wen was also a keynote speaker at the IFOAM Organic World Congress. Yan and Cheng’s teacher, Wen is one of the inspirations, an organizer and leader of the new grassroots organic movement. The center of his teaching are the “three Peoples’ Principles: people’s livelihood, people’s solidarity, and people’s cultural diversity.” I refer those who want to delve deeper to the February, 2011 issue of Monthly Review that will carry an article by Wen and close associates. You can also read Yan and Cheng’s article “Safe Food, Green Food, Good Food: Chinese CSA and the Rising Middle Class,” in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, 9:4, pp. 551-558, (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735903.2011.619327).

With a quiet, self-denigrating speaking style that contrasted sharply with the self-assured and even strident tones of the other big-wigs, Professor Wen, urged the conference participants to practice modesty and to listen carefully to others who may disagree, to try to understand each other and be prepared to compromise. “What we have done, ordinary people do – if ordinary people do ordinary things, the tragedy of 2012 will not happen,” he explained. In his wide-ranging talk, he cited Mao and pointed to the Chinese Communist Party position on “Ecological civilization” as the doctrinal support for the work of the people at the conference. He reflected on how a policy of cheap food leads to pollution, to cheating and the crisis of food safety and lack of trust. The solution, Wen suggested, lies in involving and empowering the full diversity of stakeholders. He urged his listeners, “Controversy is normal… We are leading the trend. Create your own network or union – you will be more powerful – that is the meaning of community. … (Authorities) find it difficult to refuse an organized group. My words will disappear when you leave. I will not be dean forever. I am 62 – please listen. Starting a social network – we can have a community. Let’s do some ordinary things.”

Life is full of surprises, and my visits to Taiwan, Japan and China are among them, unexpected rewards for writing about my own farming experience with CSA. So much of what I have seen in these travels turns out to be familiar despite the unfamiliar context. At this moment in Taiwanese and mainland Chinese history when the pressure to develop farmland is so intense, CSA shows a way to preserve existing farms, inspire the founding of new ones and give a different meaning to the labels “Made in Taiwan” and “Made in China,” so familiar in the USA. If Yan and Cheng, Da Wang, Chientai and Tseniong are examples, the Chinese capacity for intense, concentrated work for extraordinarily high quality food production is alive and well. The CSA model, linking farmers and their customers in sustainable collaborations, can build on the richness of peasant farming and ancient Chinese food traditions. As AMAP has been doing in France, CSA could sweep these countries as an antidote to the excesses of industrialization and contaminated food.

Elizabeth Henderson is the author of Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture.

It’s National Pie Day folks — not to be confused with Pi Day — and your pie-loving friends here at Chelsea Green thought we’d share with you one of our favorite fruit pie recipes. The following apple pie recipe was adapted from Michael Phillips’ book The Apple Grower by the foodies over at The Washington Post [...]

As we’ve learned the hard way, the core of our modern capitalist economy is finance, and finance is run entirely by a few large Wall Street firms. But here’s the ultimate irony: while modern capitalism depends on Wall Street, Wall Street no longer depends on capitalist principles. In finance a new system has emerged that makes a mockery of the idea that entrepreneurs should be rewarded for their successes and suffer losses when they fail.

Capitalist Values Vanish from Wall Street

This week we are reminded again that the ideals of capitalism are a joke on Wall Street, as the heads of the largest Wall Street banks earn enormous incomes while the values of their banks plummet. “According to data from Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove, the heads of major banking groups including JPMorganChase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Bank of America (BAC) are out-earning their employees and shareholders even as shares of bank stocks as a group lost about 26 percent [in 2011].” (Ron Haruni, “Big Bank CEOs Walk Away with Big Bucks in 2011”)

The big boys are raking it in again even while the economy suffers through the highest sustained level of unemployment since the Great Depression. More to the point, these very bank executives were complicit up to their eyeballs in helping to crash the economy in the first place! Chase CEO Jamie Dimon hauled in $41.9 million in 2011 while its bank stock lost roughly 23 percent of its value. Lloyd “I’m doing God’s work” Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, walked off with $22 million while his bank lost more than 46 percent of its value.

But, at this point, why should we be surprised? Before the crash, the heads of too-big-to-fail banks made billions in packaging, selling and then betting against toxic mortgage-backed securities that directly puffed up the housing bubble. When they couldn’t escape the crash they helped to foster, they went down on their knees begging for government help. At the same time they publicly claimed all was well, while privately taking in more than $7 trillion in secret government loans. And then after sucking up all these enormous bailouts, they used these nearly interest-free government loans to buy up other banks and lobby to prevent rules that might constrain their gambling activities. Meanwhile, they paid not a dime in personal restitution for killing 8 million jobs in a matter of months, most of which have not returned.

Financial Plutocracy is Real

That’s not capitalism. Rather, it’s the very definition of a plutocracy. These banks and those who run them are living off the rest of us and have no intention, ever, of suffering through the ups and downs of capitalist rewards and losses. When you run the casino, it’s always payday for the house.

We’ve got a choice. Either we learn to live under their thumbs or we do something dramatic about it. The porous Frank-Dodd bill has no chance of ending the plutocracy. Instead, we’re going to need some bold thinking and even bolder, more massive mobilizations a la Occupy Wall Street. But first, we need to have a better notion of what the democratizing of Wall Street might look like.

How to Really Overhaul Wall Street

I put this question to Marshall Auerback, global portfolio strategist for Madison Street Partners, a Denver-based fund management group, and a fellow for the Economists for Peace and Security (and an AlterNet contributor). With those titles, he should have an insider's grasp on what needs to be done. In fact, Brother Auerback is more than willing to take an axe to Wall Street as we know it. Here’s his brilliant wish list:

1. Banks should only be allowed to lend directly to borrowers and then service and keep those loans on their own balance sheets. There is no further public purpose served by selling loans or other financial assets to third parties, but there are substantial real costs to government regarding the regulation and supervision of those activities. Goodbye CDOs, synthetic CDOs and the slew of profitable but dangerous financial casino games banks so love.
…Read the rest of this article at AlterNet!

Les Leopold is the author of
The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of
Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and
Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It

This spring is shaping up to be one of our most exciting seasons yet, with new titles to fill important niches in your sustainable living library. Are you already an avid sauerkraut fermenter, but looking to raise your microbial game to the next level? Check out The Art of Fermentation from Sandor Ellix Katz! Are you [...]