Bioneers: Michael Ableman

Good food is the result of the passion of the people who love and work the land. Michael Ableman made this point well with slides of photos catalogued in his book Fields of Plenty. He talked about simple solutions, kids raised on kale, and families who have lived on the land for generations. He described grain share program for residents of San Francisco who buy whole grains—oats, wheat, millet, and the like—grown by a single farmer named Jennifer and some horses. Two of my favorite photos were of rooftop gardens in New York City and some wacky people who decided that a sheep dairy was a good idea. They make sheep cheeses that look like "moldy horse turds." Mmmm...horse turds. I also loved the images of black farmers who work with black farmers collectives. They drive their goods into Chicago for the Austin Farmers Market in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store. There’s a black farmers market here in West Oakland too, and of course, the People’s Grocery which drives an organic grocery truck around West Oakland trying to heal food poverty one block of tofu at a time.



Ableman says that those who know how to coax food from the earth are true leaders. I believe that. The passionate, beyond-organic farmers that he described are leaders pointing a way to a new future. Another speaker, David Orr, contended that ecological design points to two different futures: one, agrarian-based, simplified, and extremely local, and the other technological, prosperous, and fecund. I don’t see the conflict between the two. Why not build a world where there are small organic farms at the heart of every neighborhood, people work near where they live or telecommute frequently, mass transit provides comfortable and convenient transport, and the biological and technological ingredients of our world—from the plastics in our computer monitors to the toppings on our pizzas flow continuously in separate cycles of reuse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and why don’t we all just hold hands and sing. I type that with a sort of bitter sarcasm borne in the distance between utopia and reality, but there’s real power in song and Bernice Johnson Reagon told us all about it at Bioneers. More on her later!

Bioneers: Jeremy Narby

This past weekend I went to the Bioneers Conference in Marin County. I might get to a few comments about affluent white hippies later, but in the mean time, I'll post some notes from the speakers and try to boil down their main points to just a few sentences.



The first speaker I saw was Jeremy Narby. He’s a slow talking anthropologist who aims to hold the scientific community in the same high esteem as he holds shamanistic communities around the world. Narby got his Ph.D at Stanford--mattafact he was in the same program as my dear friend Marcia Ochoa. He has lived in the Amazon for the last 15 years and has spent a good deal of time communing with the vegetable mind, sucking on tobacco paste with shamans. The basic gist of his talk was that nature, the source of life on the planet and everything that supports life in the world, is intelligent. He asserts that intelligence, intentional behavior and the capacity to know, may be a property of all forms of nature and may be fundamental to life itself. He talked about recent experiments with slime molds that can solve mazes and bees that can abstract that particular patterns result in reward, and stilt palms which walk about imperceptibly slowly foraging for sunlight, all possess a capacity to know and intend.

This area of study has caused some consternation in the scientific community; it’s been called an “awkward growth of knowledge.” It’s awkward because it requires humans to rethink our notion of intelligence, and step down from our privileged position as the only species who possesses it. We’ve got this silly idea that nature is everything in the world except humans and that humans are the only species that possess intelligence. Thus it’s conceptually difficult for us to even conceive of sentience beyond ourselves. Narby contends that it’s not nature that lacks intelligence, but our concepts.

I love my new neighborhood.

I just posted an audioblog as I walked down the street in my new neighborhood. It hasn't arrived yet, so I'll re-cap the key phrases:

"...tight white pants..."
"...she hopped out of book-mobile..."
"...black cowboys riding horses in the street..."

This may not make any sense to you--I was there and I'm a bit baffled yet pleased. Too bad I only got one photo.




A cowgirl on mount at 18th and Adeline gave a brilliant speech about why William Bennet should be deported.