New and Upcoming Books! Nine new books are coming out this month and the next! We’ve got a fresh and fascinating crop of titles on the politics and practice of sustainable living–from composting manure in your own backyard to raising hell on the national political stage. Check out new titles from agrarian superstars Gene Logsdon and Joel [...]

This article was originally published on NORML.org On Tuesday, Congressional Representatives passed by voice vote H.R. 5143, the House version of the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2010. NORML first blogged about this federal legislation back in November, and encouraged supporters to contact their members of Congress in favor of this [...]

Stella Otto is the author of two books, The Backyard Berry Book and The Backyard Orchardist. Recently, her own garden was featured on The Good Stuff Guide, with some dreamy, fog-banked, morning photos. Definitely good for some inspiration. Stella has her own beautiful website: stellaotto.com where she shares tips for the home orchardist. She has recently [...]

An enthusiastic review of Bill Kauffman’s latest book, Bye Bye, Miss American Empire from the Front Porch Republic: Reader alert: FPR editor Bill Kauffman’s latest is now available. Titled Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map, it is vintage Kauffman. It also [...]

Matthew Stein, author of When Technology Fails, A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency Visionary Culture Radio inspires through bringing leading edge artists, scientists, ecologists, authors, musicians, social architects and healers into deep, awesome conversation to help us bridge forward into a higher awareness and more awakened consciousness. Listen to [...]

This article was originally published by Yes! Magazine. Shortly after her second birthday, we noticed that Ula (now three) was developing a wandering eye. She had difficulty seeing the pictures in her books, and flatly refused to eat with a fork. We took her to a developmental optometrist, and spent an hour in [...]

How many slick tricks have you learned about farming and gardening more or less by accident? My favorite example happened because of laziness. I didn’t clean out the roof gutter on the barn for over a year. I have a longstanding prejudice against roof gutters anyway. Why not just let the [...]

by Brad Lancaster, www.HarvestingRainwater.com, © 2010

Number 3 in a series of Drops in a Bucket blog entries on Brad Lancaster’s and David Eisenberg’s U.S. State Department-sponsored adventures and gleanings in the Middle East

Al Absaa, Saudi Arabia, April 2009

At Al Absaa we toured irrigation projects within the largest oasis in Saudi Arabia. Over one million date palms grow here. But the springs that have fed the oasis for generations are going dry. Oil drilling by Aramco has diverted, blocked, or consumed water flows that used to feed the oasis. The city of 1.5 million is also rapidly growing and consuming additional water. This is a story I encounter again and again the world over; this time it just happens to be in Saudi Arabia.

[...]

One spring, “The Mother of Seven (Streams),” is now the mother of none. Twenty years ago it stopped flowing on its own. Water must now be pumped. We looked down into the deep hole from which the spring water used to flow. The hole was dripping, but empty.

A father and son were swimming in a pool fed by the spring’s pumps. The father told me that the water used to be warmer, that he always swam here as a boy, and was glad his son could do likewise. I wondered if there would be water here for his grandson to swim in.

For the rest of the blog post and photos, follow this link to Brad's blog on his website.

Gordon Edgar’s memoir has been widely praised for its funny, passionate, unpretentious style. In it, the cheesemonger for the country’s largest worker owned cooperative, Rainbow Grocery, tells the story of his life in cheese. He tells how he first fell in love with an alpine cheese, talks about the origins of cheese, and shares plenty [...]

This article was originally published by The American Conservative. In A Tragic Honesty, his biography of Richard Yates, Blake Bailey describes a scene sure to send a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God shiver down the spine of any writer who has ever approached a podium, book in hand, straining to hear the sound of one hand [...]

This article was originally published on The Daily Hurricane CBS is now reporting that Tony Hayward, embattled yacht racing CEO of BPplc, will be stepping down in October, moving to take a job at the company’s joint venture in Russia, TNK-BP. I guess they figure he can’t screw that up much, or [...]

It seems that everything the government does to fix the economy only makes matters worse. Why? Because they are trying to sustain a moribund system of money, banking, and finance. The recent passage of a “financial reform” measure by Congress, while hailed as a measure to prevent a recurrence of the abuses of the recent past, will do nothing of the kind. In fact, it will enable them to continue and will further strengthen the huge financial institutions that have been robbing the American people.

Peter Schiff has a better understanding of the situation than most financial pundits. While even he does not seem to get quite to the root of what ails our economy and our society, his insights go deeper than most. He offers three reasons why the new law will fail do achieve its stated purpose:

1. The bill doesn’t get to the root causes of the crisis.

2. The law fails to end ‘Too Big to Fail.’

3. More regulation means higher costs for smaller financial services firms, reducing competition.

He explains this in this brief video.

I have pointed out in my books and writings that the very nature of the money creation process is at fault. The creation of money by banks on the basis of interest-bearing debt creates a “debt imperative,” which in turn creates an economic “growth imperative.” Since the physical limits to growth have been reached on planet Earth, this money system cannot be sustained, yet every action by the governments of the developed nations attempts to do just that.

The crisis will continue to deepen until people create parallel decentralized systems of exchange (money) and finance that enhance the vitality of their communities and local economies. –t.h.g.

Tom Greco is the author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

Last week, following my July 15 posting, Barney Google addressed a sharp complaint my way about the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

"You keep promoting a legal team that has yet to show a victory in the raw milk battle…They keep promoting these herdshare/cowshare/farmshare programs, but everyone that has come under fire is still under fire or tied up in court…We farmers are in worse shape now than we were before because of the legal advice the FTCLDF is giving. Look at the cease-and-desist orders, look at the warrants and confiscations. In Wisconsin, Ohio and New York it's all the same. Meadowsweet has been tied up in court for three years…If this is a valid business model, where are the victories?"

Before I provide my response, let me say that Barney Google isn't alone. Complaints about FTCLDF seem to crop up every so often from various people.

One of latest objectors is Aajonus Vonderplanitz, the raw food advocate who runs a nonprofit organization, Right to Choose Healthy Food. One of the organization's food distribution sites, Rawesome Foods in Venice, CA, was the site of a multi-agency raid three weeks ago.

Vonderplanitz and his RTCHF push a different "business model" than FTCLDF–a lease-based model. Quite simply, RTCHF leases the land and/or animals of about 40 farms around the country, which provide products, including raw dairy, to many hundreds of RTCHF members.

As I understand it, the lease-based model differs in a number of ways from the herdshare/cowshare model. A lease is akin to rental, while a herdshare/cowshare is akin to ownership, which would seem to be an advantage for the herdshare/cowshare. But leases have a lot more solid legal standing in business than herdshares/cowshares.

Land and buildings, not to mention cars, trucks, and machinery, are commonly leased every day around the country, and have a long history in agriculture, going back to sharecropping, which became common in the days following the U.S. Civil War. Herdshares and cowshares? The main court test in this country has been in Ohio, where a state court upheld the concept in 2006, and the state decided not to appeal the case. I explore the distinctions in my latest article on Grist.

For these reasons, Vonderplanitz is frustrated that the FTCLDF has shied away from the lease concept, especially given that he's now taking considerable official heat. "I've shown Sally Fallon and the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund people the lease agreements," he says. They've declined to embrace the idea and the result, in his view, has been something akin to what Barney Google described.

The lawyers at FTCLDF said they didn't want to comment publicly about the Vonderplanitz assessment, in the interests of not sowing divisions in the food rights movement. But they have made clear previously that they think the ownership privileges conferred by herdshares and cowshares are preferable to the more limited privileges of leases.

Since I'm not a lawyer, I can't say which approach is best. I do find the long history and strong standing of leases in our legal system to be reassuring. RTCHF has been using the lease model for eight years and, as far as I know, its farmers haven't been legally challenged by authorities. Yes, there have been raids. Aajonus' Rawesome foods endured one in 2005 in Venice, and no charges resulted from it.

As one farmer has pointed out to me, Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger, who has embraced the lease model, is producing raw dairy products for consumption, while the Zinnickers are dumping their milk and trying to get Wisconsin courts to sign on to the couple's hershare model, with backing from FTCLDF.

If it's results you want, then you have to say RTCHF is getting the better results…up to now.

Now, no one can say what might result out of the recent raids of Rawesome Foods and Sharon Palmer's farm (she has a RTCHF lease). There could be indictments and long court battles, forcing them to fight the feds for years.

Then again, the feds may well confine themselves to harassment, perhaps working with local officials seeking the less risky tack of trying to force RTCHF outlets to obtain health and retail licenses. But even here, a loss could encourage private groups to widely expand their distribution of nutrient-dense foods–something Big Ag would definitely not approve of. And a direct government challenge to the leasing model–for example, challenging RTCHF on the basis of the ban on interstate commerce in raw milk–could be more risky than the feds will tolerate, since they could well lose. Then, the raw milk spigots everywhere would be opened wide.

Now, some individuals in the food rights movement don't like me doing such public analysis and assessment. But I've come to realize that one of the big advantages we have over the government overlords is our transparency. They work in secret, trying to figure out ways to stymie the public will. We are upfront about what we want, and gain ever more supporters.

Moreover, they are cowardly. All you have to do is view the video from Rawesome Foods of the agents entering the premises in Venice three weeks ago, with guns drawn, to get an idea of how pathetic they are. Guns drawn coming into a food outlet? Maybe they worry about getting too many fumes from healthy food. No, they are so distant from their subjects that they are afraid of ordinary unarmed citizens.

I see the division between RTCHF and FTCLDF as healthy. Just as we are entitled to choices in our food, we should also have choices about which legal course to choose and support. I support both RTCHF and FTCLDF, and whomever else comes forward to lend a hand to farmers and consumers in this ever expanding struggle. It's going to be a long and tough battle, and the enemy has become increasingly aggressive.

When I hear the stories, and see the videos like that of the agents at Rawesome Foods, I find myself thinking about Winston Churchill's eloquent and, ultimately electifying, rallying cries to his countrymen during 1940, following the worst defeats against the Nazis. Do yourself a favor, listen to this recording. If you don't have time for the whole ten minutes, listen to the last 70 seconds, beginning at the 8-minute-50-second point, where he concludes, "We will fight in France…" Our situation isn't nearly so desperate…yet.

This article was originally published by Yes! Magazine Shrimper Diane Wilson might be going to jail for her high-profile protests against BP. Why is she so sure it’s worth it? by [...]

This review was originally published by OpEdNews. By Herbert Calhoun Is it a Presidency or a Nation that is in Peril? This is the book I thought I was buying when I bought the “valentine to Obama” by Jonathan Alter called “The “Promise.” Alter’s book, disappointingly, proved to be little more than a gift-wrapped package [...]

The bird pictured at right (credit Roland Jordahl) is a Swainson’s Thrush, a regular summer visitor here on Bowen Island. Like most birds, it has both “songs” and “calls”. The songs tend to be more melodious and variable — each bird’s is slightly different. The calls are simpler, standard and more abrupt. Here is the song, followed by the call, of the Swainson’s Thrush.

I imagine that songs and calls convey entirely different types of messages. Songs, I think, are a bird’s way of expressing herself — what she feels and who she is. Calls, I would think, are urgent messages to the flock or potential flockmates, such as “come” or “danger”.

Some smarter birds, like the corvids and parrots, are excellent mimics. They have such a vast repertoire of others’ songs and calls (those of other birds, people, animals and even inanimate sounds) that we rarely hear their own song. Yet according to ornithologist Bernd Heinrich, ravens, when alone, will sing themselves to sleep. Only in private moments, perhaps, do they sing their own true song.

There is a theory espoused by some scientists that wild creatures spend the bulk of their lives in “Now Time”, a kind of recursive time-out-of-time that stretches out seemingly forever — what we feel sometimes when we say that “time has stopped”. In these moments out of time, the theory says, these creatures are utterly present, totally a part of the oneness of all-life-on-Earth.

In moments of stress, they quickly snap out of Now Time into Clock Time, when instincts of fight-or-flight kick in, adrenaline pumps, the mind and heart race to keep up with the sudden break-neck pace of time, and all their energies are focused on identifying and responding appropriately to the source of stress.

I imagine that birds’ calls are mostly alerts to shift out of Now Time into Clock Time. Then, once the cause of the stress is gone, the creature quickly re-enters Now Time, with soft clucks of comfort that signal “all clear”, when the creature is free to sing her song once again.

I wonder if the “smarter” creatures on our planet have fewer songs and more calls by virtue of their (our) greater awareness of all the potential dangers and their (our) greater population density (a result of evolutionary success and adaptive skill) — to the point we end up so chronically stressed we never have the opportunity to shift into Now Time. Perhaps we lose the capacity to do so entirely, from lack of opportunity and practice.

This would seem to be the message of many New Age pundits — that we need to find ways and practices to rediscover this presence, slow our lives down to relearn the capacity to enter into Now Time, the seemingly eternal present.

Artists, I think, have this sense, this capacity, more than most others. They seem able to immerse themselves, to open themselves to what is present, to set aside temporarily the pervasive stresses of our civilization and really see, feel, and re-present, what really is. I wonder whether our human languages, designed as they are for the conveyance of commands, instruction and information, are really just elaborate sets of calls, and whether it is in poetry, story, art and music that our human songs find their voice.

As I focus my new life more on creative activities — writing music, stories and poetry — perhaps I am seeking ways to create, or discover, my own song. What nuances and messages would be captured in this song, what expressions of nobody-but-myself? My guess is that it would have notes of joy and others of melancholy, sounds that convey a passion to learn and to play and to imagine what is possible, to reflect and express and explore, and to love. Could a song be subtle enough to convey all this, and even accentuate those passions that I believe I am more (or less) gifted at, and which are “on purpose” for me rather than just for fun?

Perhaps this is what all our conversations, the endless cacophony of words we speak and write and think, are all directed at — expressing, both for our own evolving sense of self and for the discovery of others, who we really are.

What, do you imagine, is your true song?

Dave Pollard is the author of Finding the Sweet Spot, The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work

This article was originally published on The Huffington Post

The campaign to get Elizabeth Warren appointed to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau got me thinking — why is it that so many of the heroic leaders who have pushed the Obama administration to be more steadfastly progressive on financial issues just happen to be female?

That honor roll would begin with Warren; it would include Sheila Bair, who heads the FDIC; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State; former commodities regulator Brooksley Born; and Heather Booth who spearheaded Americans for Financial Reform.

Inside the administration, the member of the senior economics team who has pushed hardest for a more expansive approach to economic recovery is the chair of President Obama's Economic Council, Christina Romer.

What these people have in common is that they are not members of the financial old boys' club, in both senses. They are neither one of the boys, nor did they come out of the Wall Street milieu.

And two of the three Republican senators who broke ranks to provide the sixty votes to pass financial reform, Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, are also women. The third, Senator Scott Brown, who must run for re-election in liberal Massachusetts in 2012, in less fluky circumstances than the special election of January 2010, is not so much a profile in courage as an expedient politician.

It's not that all the good guys are female — Rich Trumka and Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO have played a heroic role, too; as has Paul Volcker; as well as other leading Senate progressives such as Dick Durban, Jeff Merkley, and Ted Kaufman.

But Warren and the other female members of the Administration's loyal opposition have displayed real bravery. Warren surely knew that when she was asking hard questions of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, she was reducing the chances that she would be welcomed into the administration. But she never pulled her punches.

Sheila Bair, when she was resisting Geithner's plans to bail out and prop up banks without drastically reforming them at the same time, made herself the odd woman out. Read any of the several books on the financial crisis that rely on insider background interviews, and you will read the same putdowns of Bair emanating from the Geithner camp. Yet Bair has remained steadfast.

Gender, of course, is no guarantee of progressive politics, clear thinking, or political bravery. One of the odd things of our era is that two generations after radical feminists began battering down barriers to full participation, some of the most visible beneficiaries are rightwing women, many of them truly whacked out in their views. The fact that Sarah Palin can thank Gloria Steinem is small comfort.

For instance, the prize for the most disingenuous commentary on the Shirley Sherrod affair has to go to that female pioneer, Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. Writing in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, and spinning the Sherrod affair to suggest symmetrical blame, Noonan began,

"She was smeared by rightwing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama Administration. It wasn't pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod."

But in the entire piece, which took up nearly half of the Journal's op-ed page, you never learn what actually happened. The details of the doctored video and the Fox pile-on are left out, suggesting that the entire establishment just happened to gang up on poor Sherrod, while good old Noonan, a paladin of the respectable right, is seeking lessons of redemption.

Shamelessness evidently knows no bounds of gender. Sherrod, by contrast, was a picture of dignity and bravery, as she has been throughout her career.

It would be comforting believe that greater gender equality, per se, will produce a more constructive substantive politics. Linda Tarr-Whelan has written an important book titled Women Lead the Way. Her research demonstrates that when women hit a tipping point of about 30 percent in leadership roles in organizations of all kinds, the dynamic changes and there is more receptivity to fresh thinking.

But we are a long way from that magic number in the House or the Senate, nor in large corporations, nor among President Obama's top financial officials. (Still, it is to Obama's credit that his first two selections for the Supreme Court have been women, as have two of his three recent appointees to the powerful Federal Reserve Board.)

The Atlantic recently ran one of its patented cover pieces that combine serious exploration of a complex topic with pop-culture hyperbole. This one, titled "The End of Men," speculated that something about post-industrial society at last will overthrow male dominance ("What if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?"), and that the displacement of males is already well advanced. But this breathless proclamation of writer Hanna Rosin may be a bit premature.

Wall Street, after all, is the ultimate post-industrial redoubt — they don't make anything, they just manipulate paper — and it doesn't get much more male. The typical trading floor is pure frat-house. And the crowd making financial policy in Washington are only a shade more in touch with their inner-woman.

Elizabeth Warren would be a serious offset to the usual financial Animal House. Alas, that's why her nomination remains something of a long shot.

Robert Kuttner's new book is A Presidency in Peril. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.

Ever since 1970, and probably before, a huge movement has emerged around the globe whose determination has been to save the environment of the Earth from being utterly destroyed by industrial development, to save our water, air and soils from being irrevocably poisoned, our forests destroyed, our oceans denuded of fish.

Some notable victories have been won in various places, but the destruction wrought by the appetites of mankind, and the greed of private (and some public) entrepreneurs, have led to continuing spectacular disasters, which have been no more than punctuations in the inexorable decline of our soils, air, and water, from the unreasonable demands made upon them.

For some years I have been doubtful about the possible efficacy of this movement: I have always felt one has only to go to Toronto to observe the ceaseless traffic that courses the 401 road across the city, and to realize that this is multiplied across the world thousands of times in other cities, to get the sinking feeling that the battle is probably lost even before it is started.

These gloomy thoughts have been stimulated by an article published this week in The Guardian Weekly, reprinted from The Observer, and taken originally as an extract from a book written by Jonathan Watts, called When a Billion Chinese Jump.

The extract deals with what has happened in Shanghai, which, when I visited it in 1983 in the course of researching a film, struck me as being not only the most heavily populated place on earth, certainly the most crowded place I had ever experienced, but also one in which a strictly disciplined population appeared to have the possibility in hand of eventually overcoming the problems posed by their overcrowding and their poverty.

The Chinese were trying to reduce the rate of their population increase, the most essential step; most of their cities, as they developed, were based on the bicycle, rather than the automobile; this allowed the cities to be planned in a reasonable way, without the industrial parks and far-off residential areas that in our cities demand the use of the automobile, just to get to work; in addition, the Chinese appeared to be on the way to housing and clothing themselves; and in agriculture, unlike in the Soviet Union, they had discovered how to grow immense quantities of food, and how to get it to market in the cities.

In various parts of the country they were performing miracles of environmental stewardship, many of which I saw with my own eyes. Yet the logic of their immense population told its own story: some places I visited were clogged with smoke and aerial pollution so grave that it was sometimes difficult to breathe the air.

Nevertheless, in many parts of the country I saw for myself, brave attempts were underway to provide work for everybody. No doubt there were vast areas where poverty remained intense, and jobs scarce. But, to judge by the agricultural commune in which we filmed, they had a genuine concern for turning what we would call marginal land into productive, crop-yielding land, using methods derived from their traditions (for example, generating manure from the millions of pigs they raised in the villages).

While I was there, however, Deng Xiaoping, the power in the country at the time, made a declaration that I considered to be very foolish. He said one American worker could produce as much as 10,000 Chinese workers. Of course, in this equation he was ignoring the vast energy input that stood behind the highly mechanized American worker. If he had taken that into account, the equation would have been much closer to equal, I believed.

Unfortunately, Deng imposed his view of production and power on his country, which has since adopted capitalism in a big way, and has not only become the workshop of the world, but has imported all the negative effects of capitalism, holus-bolus.

Thus, according to Mr. Watts, “from Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s and Starbucks to Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel, international brands made (Shanghai) the biggest, richest and most globalized mass of modernity in China, home to the most luxuriant boutiques, the tallest buildings, the nation’s first formula one track, the biggest auto companies, the second-busiest port in the world and a gathering horde of international salesmen trying to sell the American consumer lifestyle.
“Chinese consumers have never had more options. America’s Wal-Mart, France’s Carrefour, Britain’s Tesco, and Japan’s Ito Yokado are expanding in China faster than in any other country.”

Since the first KFC opened in 1987, the company has built 2,000 outlets in 400 cities, employing 200,000 people, and McDonald’s have grown from one restaurant to 800. (As a result of changes in diet, obesity has emerged as a problem among young Chinese for the first time).

Well, okay, we said a few years ago when considering the possibility of this sort of thing: we have been through this, we have adopted an obscene consumer lifestyle, who are we to insist that the Chinese not be allowed to do the same thing? With their vast pool of labour, surely they have the right to provide them with work by whatever means is open to them?

Fair enough: except that those jeremiahs who warned that if China were to adopt American consumer habits, we would need four or five Earths to provide the resources such a lifestyle demands, are now able to look on the present consumer splurge with some satisfaction because what they have always warned might happen is actually happening.

The Earthwatch Institute estimates that to sustain American levels of consumption, the world would have to double production of steel, paper and autos, produce 20 million more barrels of oil a day, and 5 billion more tons of coal would be needed.

Even to provide all Chinese with a Shanghai lifestyle, says Mr. Watts, would require 156 million refrigerators, 213 million televisions, 233 million computers, 166 million microwave ovens, 260 million air-conditioners, and 187 million cars.

Since the earth’s resources of air, water and soil are already groaning under the impact of Western materialism, to add Third World materialism would seem to pose questions that, on the face of it, we would have little prospect of finding the answer to. Five or six more Earths? Just where do we find them?

And where, in this frenzied race to global consumerism, does the environmental movement fit in? If you ask me, since it is a movement of people without resources, opposed to the wealth-owners, the movement has little chance of surviving, or achieving its goals. A snowball’s chance in hell, maybe?

Boyce Richardson is the author of Strangers Devour the Land

On Tuesday I penned a commentary for the Los Angeles Times rebutting Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s public condemnation of Prop. 19 — The Regulate, Control & Tax Cannabis Initiative of 2010.

Now the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), which provides non-partisan fiscal and policy advice, has come out with their own repudiation of Sen. Feinstein’s claims. Specifically, it sets the record straight regarding opponents allegations that passage of Prop. 19 would not result in significant cost savings, and counters the senator’s groundless argument (which nevertheless will appear in the 2010 California voter guidebook) that the measure is “a jumbled legal nightmare that will make our highways, our workplaces and our communities less safe.”

You can read the entire LAO summary here. Below are some key excerpts regarding what the passage or Prop 19 would and would not do. (Note: sections are set in bold for emphasis by the editor.)

Proposition 19 — Changes California Law to Legalize Marijuana and Allow It to Be Regulated and Taxed
via the California Legislative Analyst’s Office

State Legalization of Marijuana Possession and Cultivation for Personal Use
Under the measure, persons age 21 or older generally may (1) possess, process, share or transport up to one ounce of marijuana; (2) cultivate marijuana on private property in an area up to 25 square feet per private residence or parcel; (3) possess harvested and living marijuana plants cultivated in such an area; and (4) possess any items or equipment associated with the above activities. … The state and local governments could also authorize the possession and cultivation of larger amounts of marijuana. … State and local law enforcement agencies could not seize or destroy marijuana from persons in compliance with the measure.

In addition, the measure states that no individual could be punished, fined, or discriminated against for engaging in any conduct permitted by the measure.

[E]mployers would retain existing rights to address consumption of marijuana that impairs an employee’s job performance.

[T]he measure would not change existing laws that prohibit driving under the influence of drugs or that prohibit possessing marijuana on the grounds of elementary, middle, and high schools.

Authorization of Commercial Marijuana Activities
The measure allows local governments to adopt ordinances and regulations regarding commercial marijuana-related activities— including marijuana cultivation, processing, distribution, transportation, and retail sales. For example, local governments could license establishments that could sell marijuana to persons 21 and older. … As discussed below, the state also could authorize, regulate, and tax such activities.

… Whether or not local governments engaged in this regulation, the state could, on a statewide basis, regulate the commercial production of marijuana. The state could also authorize the production of hemp, a type of marijuana plant that can be used to make products such as fabric and paper.

Impacts on State and Local Expenditures
Reduction in State and Local Correctional Costs. The measure could result in savings to the state and local governments by reducing the number of marijuana offenders incarcerated in state prisons and county jails, as well as the number placed under county probation or state parole supervision. These savings could reach several tens of millions of dollars annually.

Reduction in Court and Law Enforcement Costs. The measure would result in a reduction in state and local costs for enforcement of marijuana-related offenses and the handling of related criminal cases in the court system.

Impacts on State and Local Revenues
The state and local governments could receive additional revenues from taxes, assessments, and fees from marijuana-related activities allowed under this measure. … To the extent that a commercial marijuana industry developed in the state, however, we estimate that the state and local governments could eventually collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in additional revenues.

NORML’s Outreach Coordinator Russ Belville also has recently posted a line-by-line analysis of Prop. 19 here for those of you who have any lingering questions or concerns.