Milk at the Sanctuary

Our partnership with the bees

“A bee colony is a very wise form of life. That which we experience within ourselves only at a time when our hearts develop love is actually the very same thing that is present as a substance in the entire beehive. The whole beehive is permeated with life based on love. In many ways the bees as individuals renounce love, and thereby this love develops within the entire beehive. You’ll begin to understand the life of bees once you’re clear about the fact that the bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love.” - from Rudolf Steiner, Lectures on Bees.

I got stung a couple of times when I was bringing the two colonies back from the Old Orchard farm in East Lyme back in April. It was my first time, but I could sense their anger and agitation from the menacing sound of their buzzing. After all, they had taken a truck from Georgia several weeks before, and now they were being moved around again after a bumpy ride in the back of a pick-up. Now their energy – and mine - is completely different. In my bee suit with leather gloves on, I enter into the sacred bee space as I open up the hives to check on the brood and try and find the queens. It’s a truly amazing experience to be inside their space and to feel the deep coherence of their coordinated efforts to capture and share the sweet energy of the sun. They are starting to trust us, and they seem to like the nook in the corner of the meadow that we chose for them. The hive on the right above is growing much faster than the one on the left, doubling in size since they arrived about six weeks ago.

Our colonies seem to be doing pretty well, so far. Already this year, so-called “Colony Collapse Syndrome (CCS)” has destroyed one out of every three hives on the east coast; an alarming phenomenon given the fact that bees are responsible for fertilizing something like 40% of US fruits and vegetables. Quite amazingly, Rudolf Steiner predicted back in 1923 during a public lecture in Dornach, that a general breakdown of the bee population would occur sometime in the next century, due to the weakening effects on successive generations of bees caused by the industrialization of bee keeping and rearing and the commodification of honey production. In a prophetic moment during an exchange with an indignant beekeeper named Mr. Muller who was defending the new industrial methods, Steiner responded by saying “It is quite correct that we can’t determine this today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other in one hundred years, Mr. Muller, then we’ll see what kind of opinion you’ll have at that point.” (p.178) Mr. Muller has now been proved frightfully wrong.

Only the symptoms of CCS have been studied, not the causes. Hives attacked by CCS end up having multiple bee viruses, not just one pathogen but a systemic failure, a general weakening or breakdown of the bee system which seems to point to large scale environmental causes such as increased toxification, use of antibiotics, electromagnetic activity, or stresses to bees caused by their being driven around in noisy and noxious eighteen wheelers to work on huge industrial farms – just the kind of causes that Steiner saw as interrupting the subtle harmonization that bee societies had achieved with natural systems during their long and steady evolution with flowers and plants over hundreds of millions of years.

At the Sanctuary, we are intentionally entering into a partnership with the community of life here, and bees are one of our partners. We feed them during the colder months, give them a place to stay and look after their home a bit. They in turn share some of their store of magical life-energy substance – that is, honey - that they have evolved to produce out of their own bodies and through the collective quasi-divine wisdom embodied in the hive. An exciting dimension of our partnership with the bees lies in what have to learn from each other, from our different modes of awareness, our different attunements to natural systems, our different ways of accessing spiritual wisdom, our different ways of producing and transforming energy.

Our human sanctuary necessarily is a bee sanctuary and a bee sanctuary is also a human sanctuary.

OurSanctuary.Org

Nine Questions About Love

The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life.

Next class: Tuesday, July 14th, 6-8 PM in the Sanctuary Yurt
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT
(860) 319-1134



QUESTION NO. 4: How do we steal energy from each other and how do we evolve our love?

Our next class will be examining the role of energy in relationships. Do you ever feel like your energy is being taken by someone or something? Do you every feel depressed because you cannot access the energy all around you? Do you ever feel mysteriously energized by some small thing that happens? Are there some individuals who generally give you energy when you talk to them and others who generally take your energy?

The recommended text for this class is Toru Sato’s The Ever-Transcending Spirit: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Consciousness and Development. You can order the book from Amazon HERE, or read online or download for free the book HERE. Additionally, in you want something quicker to read, Sato has recently written a short article, “The Gradual Blooming Process of Consciousness” available HERE making some of the same points he makes in the book.

Here are some quotes from the beginning of the book.

Here he raises the basic question of what the energy of love is:

“The Mohawk native North American tribe has a proverb that translates, ‘Life is both giving and receiving.’ In human interaction, we often say that we need to give and take. Sometimes we give and receive visible things from each other such as food, money, gifts etc., but sometimes we cannot physically ‘see’ what we are giving and receiving. For instance, if I say I will do our laundry if you clean our dishes, most of us would interpret this as giving and receiving. What is it that are giving and receiving (or taking)?

“In many ways it is something we seem to gain when we receive attention and something that we seem to lose when we are forced to pay attention to someone. When we receive attention from others, we feel energized and happy. When we are forced to pay attention to someone, we feel de-energized and often uncomfortable. Thus, perhaps the closest word to this thing we are giving and taking in the English language may be ENERGY.”

What is fascinating about Sato's theory is that he begins with the observation that energy level is actually relative to your perspective! Depending on their perspectives, the same individual can be energizing to one person, and draining to another. Hence the solution to energy is not to hord but to change your state of mind, from scarcity-perception to seeing abundance around you. As Sato puts it,

“The quality of our life is really just a reflection of the quality of our internal state of mind. Our internal state of mind is a reflection of where we are in our maturation process. Where most of us are in our maturation process is a reflection of where we are in the process of evolution.” – Toru Sato

NOTES FROM OUR LAST CLASS ON THE SUSTAINABILITY OF LOVE

Our conversation now has three questions in play:
(1) How can love make you a better person?
(2) Is passion compatible with happiness?
(3) Is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?

Our last discussion centered on the ideas of the influential relational psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell who argues that romantic intimacy often fails because we ourselves degrade it, in a self-defeating process he terms “protective degradation”. Romantic love has a special intensity for us because it unifies our two deepest primal longings: the longing for home, trust, acceptance, nurturance (LOVE) and our longing for transcendence, risk, the unknown, surrender (DESIRE). This special fusion of love and desire that makes romance so powerful and meaningful to us also makes it especially dangerous and difficult to control. In long-term relationships, the individuals involved often come to feel that the uncontrollability and unpredictability of desire makes romantic intimacy an unsafe glue for commitment. And so we try to protect ourself (from the painful possibility of our beloved’s failure of desire for us, or of our own failure of desire for our beloved) by subtly degrading the life of that romance and desire so that we will not be vulnerable to its contingencies. We neutralize the force of the fusion of love and desire by separating them – reserving love for long-term relationships and desire for fantasy and flirtation, and “segregating permanence from adventure.” But in so doing, we destroy the very thing that we are so afraid to lose, the unity of home and transcendence.

The key to sustaining romance in this perspective is also the key to living mindfully. We need to be able to desire without clinging, without attachment. We need to master our mind so that we will not undermine the life of our own life in the process of trying to achieve an impossible sense of security. Stephen Mitchell sees this as the truth behind the tragic romantic love story. In his book that we looked, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance through Time, Mitchell sums up his message with a metaphor from another searching romantic modernist, Friedrich Nietzsche:

“In his theory of tragedy, Nietzsche captures the delicate balance in the genuinely tragic, between the creation of forms and the dissolving of forms. Our individual lives, Nietzsche suggests, are transitory and in some sense illusory, ephemeral shapes that emerge from the energy that is the universe and that, in short order, are reabsorbed into the oneness. The enriching tragic in life can be missed in two ways. We can attribute to ourselves and our productions an illusory impermanence, like a deluded builder of sandcastles who believes his creation is eternal. Or, alternatively, we can be defeated by our transience, unable to build, paralyzed as we wait for the tide to come in. Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.”

Is Love Sustainable?

NINE QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is offering a special community philosophy seminar for individuals seeking a meaningful life. This course presupposes no prior experience with philosophy. In this seminar, we will work together to understand the meaning of this mysterious thing by looking at its natural history, cultural meanings, poetry, ethics, mythology and evolutionary possibilities.

Next class: Tuesday June 16th at 6PM in the Sanctuary Yurt, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

QUESTION NO. 3: IS ROMANTIC INTIMACY SUSTAINABLE?

Our first two questions are now in play. They were (1) How can love make you a better person? And (2) Is passion compatible with happiness? Our next class will take up this most pertinent of questions, is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?

FORMAT FOR OUR NEXT CLASS ON TUESDAY, JUNE 16th at 6 PM.

We will be exploring this question through the work of the brilliant psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell. There are many theories of romantic intimacy, many of them with pessimistic views about sustaining the romantic intimacy. Freud’s theory which still influences contemporary theory on this matter, is totally pessimistic on the possibility of unifying love and desire for the same person in a sustainable way. He in fact believed that unifying our spiritual and sexual sides into a relationship was intrinsically impossible and would always degenerate into hatred, fear, loss. Stephen Mitchell’s view, as expressed beautifully in his masterful book, “Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Through Time” is the most inspiring, most optimistic book on this subject I have found. In this class, we will look at his view and try and make sense of his powerful message.

If you’d like some background on his book before class, you can read a review of this book from Salon HERE, or read larger sections of it HERE.

"Our problem with sustaining love and desire in the same relationship is because they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missiong, disowned pieces of ourselves and for for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protest so fiercely." - Stephen Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Through Time

Exit 6 back at the Ivory, Saturday June 13th to lay down some fierce musical love

The Objective Beauty of Wind Farms

This is a piece I was just asked to write for the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, which is printing a debate about wind farm aesthetics. They wanted me to write a defense of their beauty.

THE OBJECTIVE BEAUTY OF WIND FARMS

By Justin Good

To the extent that wind farms serve to heal the environment and economy by reducing our dependence on dirty and finite fossil fuels, they are objectively beautiful. How can beauty be objective, you ask? Some people find wind farms to be ugly industrial artifacts which encroach negatively on their immediate visual environment. Others love their functionalist-modernist look. Both views are superficial because they are based on mere appearance.

Superficial beauty is subjective because it is based on surface appearances, but deep or true beauty is about relationship. It is about the harmonizing of beings and natural systems, it is about wholeness, and it can be defined in terms of a coherent system. A system is coherent if its existence benefits, and is benefited by, the larger environment on which it depends. When we experience deep beauty, the beauty we experience is not in our eye, it is in the pattern of interaction. The beauty of nature, which everyone can see, is deep in this sense: nature balances and harmonizes opposing forces in ways which make even the most sophisticated of human creations seem impossibly crude.

Consequently, you cannot tell just by looking at a wind farm whether or not it is truly, or deeply beautiful. However, you are able to feel it, provided you are adequately informed about the true ecological ramifications of the energy technology. An oil derrick and a wind turbine might look identical on the surface, but the derrick would still be ugly and the wind farm beautiful. Insofar as wind farms serve to correct the incoherent patterns of development introduced by our hydrocarbon energy system, they shine with a beauty that mimics the stability, interconnectedness and harmony of a bee colony or a river or a flower.

Come Celebrate the Spring with Us

On Saturday, May 30th from 3 to 7 PM we will be hosting a spring party at the Sanctuary to kick off our summer season. All are welcome, and families are encouraged to come, dogs also welcome. Live music, food and games are sure to make this event a memorable occasion. We will be unveiling our Eco-Temple composting toilet project and there will be a special presentation at 4 PM by architect Hans Lohse, builder of the Eco-Temple, called "The Origins of Beauty". Drawing from his recently completed memior, Hans will talk about the principles of sacred geometry and green design which underlie the construction both of the eco-temple as well as his amazing off-grid dwell he built by hand in the mountains of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Suggested donation for this event is $10 (or what you can afford.)

Philosophy at the Sanctuary: Nine Questions about Love

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is offering a special community philosophy seminar for individuals seeking a meaningful life. This course presupposes no prior experience with philosophy. In this seminar, we will work together to understand the meaning of this mysterious thing by looking at its natural history, cultural meanings, poetry, ethics, mythology and evolutionary possibilities.

Our next class meets on Tues., May 19th and focuses on question number 2: Is passion compatible with happiness? (or, Why do the lovers in classic love stories always have to overcome obstacles to win their love? For more information visit OurSanctuary.org.

FORMAT FOR CLASS ON MAY 19th

We will begin by looking at the story of Tristan and Iseult. If you have time, we would recommend reading Joseph Bedier’s telling of the story. You can download for free HERE or purchase on Amazon HERE. You can find a good survey of information about the story HERE at Wikipedia. After discussion the classic version of the romantic love story, we will share our favorite versions of the story from contemporary film, novels, TV, anywhere. If you’d like to bring a snipet from your favorite film to view together, please do so!

To get your juices flowing, start by listening to the famous prelude to Richard Wagner’s operatic version of the story.



NOTES FOR THE CLASS

Our first class concerned the connection between love and ethics or goodness. We began with the question, how can love make you a better person? Most people have experienced and understand the feeling of how when you are in love with someone, your love and respect for that person makes you want to be a better person. But not always. If you are in love with a person who is not virtuous, their desire for you to act a certain way to please their narcosis may lead you to morally hazardous behavior yourself. So what kind of love/desire is the kind that moves you to transcend yourself, and which kind turns you into a slave? This is the topic of Plato’s dialogue on love called Symposium which we discussed in our first meeting.

Plato ultimately argues (or seems to argue) that the only kind of love that is guaranteed to lead to complete and perfect satisfaction is not the desire/love – what the Greeks termed “eros” – for a person at all, but the desire for wisdom, the desire for the Whole of life. This kind of love – literally a kind of falling in love with the world its its truth and evolutionary possibilities – is what offers true eternal bliss, because it pulls you away from the temporal satisfactions and inevitable dissatisfactions with identifying with your Ego (or someone else’s Ego). On this perspective, our eros for individuals is actually a deeper desire to identify – to find our true non-ordinary identity – in a cosmic unity with the truth of the universe. Is this an unrealistic, grandiose goal or is it an inspiring, and urgent one?

In our next class, we pick up the theme of romanticism, and the kind of love that historically was named by the French word “amour”. Historically and philosophically, romanticism rejects the ancient Judeo-Christian-Greek emphasis on the eternity and ethicality of love, and instead focuses on the beauty and goodness of the Individual – not simply as a soul but as an irreducible unity of body and mind and spirit. Passionate desire and longing for a unique individual is the key phenomenon in romanticism.

Each concept of love carries with it a basic question, a tension or a problem which shapes and gives meaning to the struggle for existence and happiness and awareness. For romanticism, the key to passion or amour is that it transcends other reasons that bound people together, such as political alliances – the key function of marriages in the medieval world – or economics, or obligation, or something external to the experience of intimacy itself. This is the significance of why the first and archetypal or classical love story of Tristan and Iseult is a tragic adulterous and politically incorrect love affair. True passion shows itself by trumping every other reason for wanting to be together with someone, regardless it seems of the larger consequences.

Free your ass and your mind will follow

Exit 6 is back, performing at the Ivory Pub in Deep River, Saturday April 25th. Come down to see live soul R&B featuring eclectic arrangements and grooves to dance your ass off. First set starts at 9:30 PM

The Ivory Restaurant and Pub is located at 1 Kirtland Street Deep River, (860) 526-2528.

To contact the Exit 6 band, contact (617) 733-9270 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

Spring at the Sanctuary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – March 19th. The Sanctuary at Shepardfields announces its 2009 schedule of courses and events, and unveils its new website OurSanctuary.org.

Beginning this week, this local environmental education non-profit organization will be offering courses and workshops in yoga, meditation, circus arts, philosophy and integrated spirituality for all ages. In addition, the Sanctuary will be hosting a busy season of special community events including musical open mics, poetry readings, outdoor film screenings, a local music festival, and an innovative environmental arts circus summer camp.

The Cirque de Lune /Eco-Circus Camp is the Sanctuary’s holistic arts and environmental educational summer camp for kids ages 7-18. Activities include circus arts, trapeze, acrobatics, yoga and meditation, sculpture and video production, field ecology, architecture and hands-on green building techniques. Featuring a circus performance at the camp’s conclusion with a community potluck barbeque reception and live circus music band. Two 3-week sessions – June 29 to July 18 and July 27 to August 15. Register today! For more information, call the Sanctuary at (860) 319-1134.
or visit www.OurSanctuary.org.

Courses and events offered at the Sanctuary yurt beginning March 25th

OM-FLY (“Exercise through the Art-science of Play”) • Circus arts, yoga, meditation and creative movement for kids. Weekly, Thursdays (4:30 for 3-7 years and 5:30 for 10-18 years).

SANCTUARY YOGA • Explore the six directions of the spine in yoga, breath and play. Adults all levels welcome. Weekly, Wednesdays, 6-7 PM.

NINE QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE • A community discussion seminar for individuals seeking a meaningful life. Each class will be dedicated to a fundamental and recurring question about love. This course presupposes no prior experience with philosophy. Monthly, Second Tuesdays, beginning April 14th. Register for all 9 classes and receive a discount.

DREAM WORKSHOP • This workgroup’s focus is to explore, through discussion and free association, the messages we are receiving through dreams First & Third Thursdays, 7-9 PM.

OPEN MEDITATION • The Sanctuary’s meditation led by someone from within the Sanctuary’s extended family of meditation practitioners. Weekly, Sundays, 11-12 noon.

MUSIC OF THE MOMENT • Drum circle and coffee house open mic. Bring your instrument or your voice. Share your music or hang out and listen. Monthly, First Friday, 7 PM.

LGBT CINEMA • Screening of movies featuring lesbian and gay themes, followed by discussion and community. Run by the Active Contemplatives of the Sanctuary which supports the needs of the local LGBT community. All are welcome. Monthly, Third Saturday, 7 PM.

SACRED CIRCLE • Experience the seasonal changes. Weather permitting, the Sacred Circle meets in the Peace Ring. Drumming, guided meditation, and the Four Directions ceremony. Monthly, Fourth Sunday, 5 PM.

POETRY POTLUCK • Share the work of well-loved poets. Discuss poetry and build community. Monthly, First Sunday, 4:30 PM.

For more information about these courses or events or to download our 2009 brochure, visit OurSanctuary.org.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is located on a 40-acre land preserve in East Haddam that features a yurt, peace circle, labyrinth, community garden, bee hives, and walking trails through fields, forests and quiet brooks. The Sanctuary 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offers environmental education for the local communities and is dedicated to the values of body-mind wellness, community development, ecological restoration, sustainability and the inclusive search for sacred meaning. Additionally, the Sanctuary grounds and facilities are available for private and community retreats and events.

The Sanctuary’s mission is to live in harmony with the environment, to build a local economy which values and protects our community’s social and natural wealth, and to share a spiritual practice inclusive of all and energized by the process of an evolving global consciousness. Become our partner in this worthwhile endeavor. Visitors are welcome to wander the grounds and discover for themselves this uniquely beautiful place near to home.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT 06423
(860) 319-1134

Music of the Moment

Slow Latin at the Brookside

"Music, which may span the space between the finite and the infinite, should become fully integrated into any truly holistic approach to healing. There is much to be rediscovered about the healing effects of music and the human voice." - Edgar Cayce.

The Slow Latin Groove Project will be playing at the Brookside Steakhouse & Tavern on Friday, March 27th at 8 PM. Those of you who will remember where the old Glockenspiel restaurant used to be will know where to find the Brookside, in Higganum center, 26 Killingworth Road. The Slow Latin band is a jazz quartet that recasts an eclectic selection of classic tunes as funky, soulful, calming grooves to relax and stimulate your spiritual ears. Come for drinks or dinner.

The Brookside Steakhouse & Tavern, 26 Killingworth Road, Higganum. (860) 554-0710.

To contact the SLGP, call (617) 733-9270 or vood@cummings-good.com.

Invitation to attend the Sanctuary's Annual Board of Directors Meeting

If you are interested in the Sanctuary at Shepardfields, the Board of Directors of the Sanctuary would like to invite you to their Annual Meeting held on March 12th at 7:30pm to 8:30pm in the Yurt located at the Sanctuary, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam, CT  06423. Being a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Sanctuary's annual board of directors meeting is open to the public and interested folks are warmly welcome to attend.





The agenda for the meeting is as follows:
 
1. Call to order
2. Agenda review
3. 2008 Financial report – Treasurer Bob Thompson
4. 2009 Events and Programming – Jen Taylor and Justin Good, Executive Directors
5. Vote on Board of Directors
Slate of Officers
• President: Pat Gallagher
• Vice President: Shannon Hawkins
• Secretary: Jen Taylor
• Treasurer: Bob Thompson
Slate of Directors
• Laurie Alt
• Mary Murphy
• Justin Good

6. Public questions or comments
7. Closing
 
This meeting is open to the public and provides a question and comments section for the public.
 
Thank you for your support!

Stepping into the Same River Twice

Vanessa, the Sanctuary's canine ambassador, studies the life of the stream which passes around and through the Sanctuary, before going for a refreshing February swim. I wish I had the same commitment to drinking up the beauty around me. She's working on me though, her and Heket, teaching me about the many billions of spirits swirling around us out here in the forest. One soul, three beings. Actually, one soul, one trillion bazillion beings around here.


























The stream itself contains a least a billion centers of life, probably more. All of these beings and their fields of life are gonna tell us what to do this year, if we are patient enough to listen. Their collective wisdom and experience is is not only thousands of times deeper than ours, it is divine. This is the Sanctuary's soul and body.


























What makes a place feel like a center? Out here in the forest, near the stream, it feels like the center of East Haddam, but deeper than the geometry of a Main Street, and less hectic, less confused. The human made world is part of the natural world too of course, it's just often so much cruder than the non-human world, less civilized.

Love is Metaphysical Gravity.

Mateo Marinez-Good has arrived! The newest creation of Jesse Maxwell Good and Mirna Martinez, and our new nephew. This Tuesday his first day and night, I saw his first sneeze and his tiny hand squeeze his sister Olive's finger. Home-birthed in New London, the family is rejoicing.

"Love is metaphysical gravity" - Buckminster Fuller

Building an Ark at the Sanctuary

"The hydrogen atom doesn't have to earn a living before behaving like a hydrogen atom. In fact, as best I can see, only human beings operate on the basis of 'having to earn a living.' The concept is one introduction into social conventions only by the temporal power structure's dictums of the ages. If I am doing what God's evolutionary strategy needs to have accomplished, I need spend no further time worrying about such matters. We can live handsomely using only daily income of the Sun's and gravity's multi-way-intergenerated energies." - Buckminster Fuller

What is the easiest way toward sustainability? How do you reduce as much as possible your energy needs? How do you grow your own food year round in an affordable way? How do you learn to see, to feel, to benefit from, the SUPERABUNDANCE OF LIFE-ENERGY that surrounds you? These are the questions we are wrestling with and the Sanctuary is our laboratory. One idea we are pursuing is a geodesic green house. The engineer-poet Buckminster Fuller discovered the challenge and promise of sustainability when he discovered that our planet is a spaceship without an instruction manual. The geodesic dome is one of his solutions to the problem of affordable, ecological beautiful, low energy housing. Many people have been figuring out how to use geodesic greenhouses to grow food affordably year round. We are looking at a company in Colorado called Growing Spaces which offers greenhouse domes which are passively heated and cooled, easy to build, beautiful inside, and perfectly shaped for growing food year round even in cold climates.

How would it look at the Sanctuary?












If you are interested in sustainability, come visit the Sanctuary to talk with us or to become our partner in building a real sustainable community in the lower Connecticut River valley.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT 06423 (860) 319-1134. Namaste!

The Eye of the Beholder is in the Beauty

"There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart."
- Chandogya Upanishad

What is the meaning of beauty? The humanist idea is that beauty can be explained in terms of human bio-psychology; beauty is something to do with the brain. The new view, call it the deep-ecological view, is that beauty is the perception of a relation, a relation of coherence; moreover, that coherence is meaningful to us because we share an essence with it - we share a SELF with it. To be beautiful is to manifest Self.

Not ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’ but rather ‘The Eye of the Beholder is in (is an extension of) the Beauty’. Beauty does not exist because there is a consciousness there to perceive it. The consciousness is an extension of the Beauty which already exists. Consciousness is created by the Beauty in order for the geometry underlying the Beauty to be fully actualized.

At the level of physical nature, every being (e.g. an electron, planet, cat, galaxy) is attracted to every other by the force of gravitation. This mysterious ability of two entities to exert an instantaneous force on each other, even if they are billions of light years away from each other, is still unexplained by cosmology and fundamental physics. At a different dimension of reality, every point of space/time embodies a degree of consciousness, of selfness as an intrinsic feature of the universe. And like the law of gravitation, there is a cosmological law of the integration of awareness: every point or ‘center’ of space/time has an instantaneous impulse to bond with every other center, to attain a more comprehensive, deeper level of cosmological awareness.

Beauty is the perception of a moment of integration of awareness of centers of space/time. Beauty is cosmological.

In the picture above, Vanessa, the Sanctuary's canine ambassador, leads us back to the house after a walk to the beaver ponds at the Sanctuary. Come visit us any time and take the mysterious walk yourself. You will find deep beauty there. You will find a Self there, many selves, trillions of them.

Live soul music for earthlings

Exit 6 will be at the Ivory Restaurant and Tavern in Deep River, Saturday, February 21st for an evening of classic soul, R & B, and blues-rock music. Transforming old and new standards with funky eclectic and danceable arrangements, the band features Joel Jacob and Jason Baker on vocals, Mark Zanardi on bass, Chris Grosman and Justin Vood Good on guitars, Leif Nilsson on banjo and Jeremy Wang Ziemann on the kit. First set starts at 9:30.

The Ivory Restaurant and Tavern is located at 1 Kirtland Street. For more information call (860) 526-2528. To book the Exit 6 band, call (617) 733-9270 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

"I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will."
- Sam Cooke

Morning light in the Sanctuary forest

In the pursuit of learning, every day
something is acquired.

In the pursuit of Tao, every day
something is dropped.

- Tao Te Ching

The Music We Are

"Philosophers have said that we love music
because it resembles the Sphere-sounds

of union. We've been part of a harmony
before, so these moments of treble and bass

keep our remembering fresh. But how
does this happen within these dense bodies

full of forgetfulness and doubt and
grieving? It's like water passing through us.

It becomes acidic and bitter, but still as
urine it retains watery qualities.

It will put out a fire. So there is music
flowing through our bodies that can dowse

restlessness. Hearing the sound, we gather
strength. Love kindles with melody. Music

feeds a lover composure, and provides form
for the imagination. Music breathes

on personal fire and makes it keener." - Rumi

Learn How To Fly

Jen Taylor's OM-FLY circus yoga winter classes are starting at the Tree of Life in Old Saybrook. These classes introduce students to a wide range of physical arts that awaken the body and center the mind. For more information visit Circus School Xena.

January Labyrinth at the Sanctuary

"Many are attracted to the labyrinth as a healing tool because it deepens self-knowledge and empowers creativity. Walking the labyrinth clears the mind and gives insight into the life journey. It calms those in the throes of transition, and helps us to see life in the context of a path. It urges actions and stirs creative fires. To those who are in sorrow, it gives solace and peace. The walk is different for everyone, as they bring only themselves to the labyrinth. Each person comes in uniqueness, and often departs with a greater sense of connectedness." - from the CJ Holistic Health Foundation

Come walk the Labyrinth at the Sanctuary any time of the week to experience the restful peace of a winter meadow in East Haddam. For more information visit the Sanctuary website or call 860-319-1134.

December 21st, 2008: The storm slows everything down to a sacred tempo

GLBT Movie Night at the Sanctuary

ALL BEINGS WELCOME.

The Shortest Day

WINTER SOLSTICE OBSERVANCE

Sunday, December 21st 4 PM

Observe the Shortest Day with a Sacred Circle Ritual at the fire circle.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

Come for a Sacred Circle Ritual around the fire. Light snacks and beverages. Dress warmly. Suggested donation: Something to share or $5, more if you can, less if you can’t. Weather permitting.

ALL BEINGS WELCOME

Sponsored by the Active Contemplatives of the Sanctuary. The ACTS are the Sanctuary’s special ministry to the local LGBT community. For more information call the Sanctuary at Shepardfields at 860.319.1134

The Eco-Temple Learning Ecology continues to unfold

Saturday, December 13th at the Sanctuary

"Reverence awakens in the soul a sympathetic power through which we attract qualities in the beings around us, which would otherwise remain concealed." - Rudolf Steiner

Heating our temporary tent structure with a kerosene heater to allow the mortar to dry, we were out in the blistery wind this morning working with Hans, finishing the containment structure for our Composting Toilet Eco-Temple. Hans Lohse is the ring leader of the Eco-temple Project. He runs Lifespace Architecture and Interior Design with his partner Kris D’Errico. Hans is a green architect and builder rooted in the traditions of sacred geometry, Native American architecture, and views the pursuit of Beautiful Form as a Process of Unfolding Wholeness. Good architecture designs itself, is ecologically regenerative by heaing the environment, is alive and sentient, and tunnels through to cosmic consciousness.

The Sanctuary currently pays about $100 each month to service a “porta-potty”, whose waste is collected and processed at a central sewer treatment plant. The process –centralized sewage treatment - is costly, energy intensive, not as effective as nature’s own way of breaking down harmful pathogens, chemicals and heavy metals through microbial digestion, and produces a toxic waste (sewage sludge) for which there is currently no environmentally safe way to dispose of. This is what you call a high entropy technology, since a lot of energy – both the energy used in the treatment, and the organic energy contained in the human “waste” - are lost in the treatment process. In contrast, a composting toilet - essentially a constructed paradise for worms and microorganisms - helps nature’s own digestive processes to breathe more deeply, closing a nutrient cycle and returning human excreta back to condition the soil. After we complete this project, the Sanctuary will save a cost, reduce its harmful eco-footprint, and replace an ugly industrial artifact with a beautiful shrine which will harmonize deeply with its locale, and ornament the meadow stand of trees like a some strange flower.

Built and designed of mostly local materials, labor, ideas and inspiration, the process of the construction itself will serve as a healthy learning ecology. A learning ecology is a project or situation in which individuals work towards understanding an aspect of their natural, social or economic environment which reveals something fundamental about their collective fate, their values, their identities. When one experiences a larger self, a community-sized self, an invisible bond is uncovered, through which information from a deeper pool of life activity can be transmitted to the individual. This information is a source of energy which empowers the individual to the level of spontaneous, patient, loving commitment to the long-term health of the community. This is where the Sanctuary sees the connection between ecology and spirituality.

Keep Your Neighbor Warm

On Sunday, December 21st from 2 to 5 PM at the Chester Meeting House, the Chester Neighborhood Collaborative will be hosting a holiday event to raise money for an emergency fuel fund for residents unable to afford heating fuels this winter.

The fund-raiser will include warm beverages, tasty treats and live music by two local musical acts, singer/songwriter Jen Taylor and the Slow Latin Groove Project.

The Chester Collaborative represents a broad and growing coalition Chester organizations including the Chester Town Hall, the United Church Of Chester, Congregation Beth Shalom, the Chester Rotary, the Chester Merchants and Chester Village West.

Cash donations are appreciated. The fund-raiser will also be accepting non-perishable food items for the Chester Food Bank.

Stop by during your holiday shopping to warm up on snacks and listen to soothing music while helping your neighbors in need to keep warm!

First Snow at the Sanctuary

"It has been said that God is immanent, that all matter is imbued with God, that God is the ultimate material of the Universe. And that may be so. But if so, why is it that this shining forth of God is visible more in some things than others; why is God visible more in some events, and less in others. What causes the life in things; what causes God to be more visible in one thing, more visible in one moment, less visible in another?" - Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground

Jazz Breakfast in Chester Center

"Living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one's ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one's thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical." - John Cage

The Slow Latin Groove is Chris Devlin Brown (acoustic bass), Brendon D'Arcy (piano), Justin Good (acoustic guitar), Hans Lohse (percussion and accordion, and Hillyn Natter (drums). For more information call 860.575.5236 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

Simon's Marketplace is located on Main Street in Chester Center.

Notes on the Theory of Beauty as Wholeness

Notes from my Media Ecology seminar at the School of Fine Arts UCONN, fall 2008. The picture was taken November 29th on the top of Selden's Island.

§1. YOU CANNOT AVOID HAVING A THEORY OF BEAUTY. If you say that you do not want to define beauty because defining beauty limits what you can experience as beautiful, and hence what you can define as art, you haven’t avoided defining beauty. What you’ve done is unconsciously accept the Duchampian Modernist view of beauty as inherently subjective, relative, and undefinable – but that is a definition of beauty which carries its own limitations on your experience. The paradigm shift in knowledge of nature carries with it a new concept of beauty which contradicts the Duchampian-modernist view. Beauty is life and life has a specific geometry.

§2. WHAT DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT WIND FARM AESTHETICS ARE ABOUT. Despite the beauty of their ecological rationality, large-scale wind farms still jar many visual sensibilities with their industrial look. The truth contained in that nimby response is that industrial infrastructure, and often modernist architectural icons, tends to have a fragmenting effect on the unity of natural landscapes and the systems which unfold that unity or wholeness in stable patterns following multiple patterns of least resistance through time. Everyone is in perceptual agreement: fragmentation is objectively ugly. Vice versa, wholeness is objectively beautiful. Life is objectively beautiful.

§3. A NEW CONCEPT OF BEAUTY: THE THEORY OF WHOLENESS. Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness. Wholeness is an objective property of nature and natural systems. This is a very deep objective quality of a place, a work of art, an organism, that affects us deeply. For a place, it is a sense of belonging, a sense that everything feels right, natural, stable, alive – most especially a feeling of life, and a feeling of being yourself. Christopher Alexander has developed a comprehensive theory of wholeness in his revolutionary study, The Nature of Order. The following is an encapsulation of his theory as it pertains specifically to the Meaning of Beauty.

§4. OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT OF BEAUTY AS WHOLENESS. The new scientific/mystical understanding of beauty, as the cognizing of wholeness, can be explained in three, related ways. To be beautiful is:

1. To be a coherent system (to exhibit a high degree of relatedness.)
2. To exhibit living structure. (to come to exist through a continuous process of unfolding.)
3. To manifest the (transpersonal) Self.

§5. FIRST ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS COHERENCE. In a system which is good: (a) any identifiable subsystems would be in good condition, and (b) any larger systems which the system is a part of would be in good condition. That is, a system is good if its activity helps both the systems around it and those which it contains. Reciprocally, a good system is helped by the systems it contains and the larger systems which contain it. Wholeness is about the harmonizing of beings within a region of space/time. Such patterns of interaction are perceived as beautiful by us. The beauty is not in our eye, it is in the pattern. An example of a coherent system: a healthy ecosystem.

"When we speak of "healthy" eco-systems, we mean stable eco-systems: that is, both tending toward diversity and not subject to cataclysmic drops in diversity. Such conditions, also called balanced, create relationships--ever more intricate relationships-- that increasingly locate the inorganic elements necessary to life in cycles that make those inorganic elements increasingly available to life. The more extensive these relationships, the more consistently available the nutrient-elements will be to the life forms within those relationships. Expanding diversity of life forms is, relatively speaking, a low entropy enterprise. The more diverse the forms of life, the more matter and energy are kept available for use, or "work," and the less they are lost to use or work through either irretrievable dissipation or unresolvable mixing." - Abby Rockefeller

§6. SECOND ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS LIVELINESS. To exhibit wholeness is to exhibit living structure.

The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has. What determines degree of life?

The difference between living and non-living form has to do with the process through which the form came to be. What kind of process?

To have a living geometry is to come to exist through a continuous process of unfolding.

One can see, just by looking, that something with living form came to be by way of a process
of unfolding, where each step of the growing grew out of the prior steps, and where each development enhanced the structure (the wholeness) that already existed.

What lacks living form has the look of something that was put together. Its structure did not unfold out of itself. (e.g. Frankenstein)

Because something that is beautiful is alive, it makes one feel alive – feel deeply human. Industrially-produced structure seldom has this quality of being alive, and so of creating a sense of wholeness.

Biological versus geometrical concept of Life. This theory implies a broad concept of life: The narrow biological concept of life is: To be alive is to be a kind of Mechanism (Reactive, constructed, reducible) - Life as mechanical structure explicable in terms of chemistry, physics and: either a) god, or b) natural selection –organized chance, and/or c) symbiosis. Machine behavior which is reactive (vs. active) and constructed (vs. self-generated). A broader systems theory concept of life is found in General Systems Theory - Life as any self-organizing structure. A still broader concept is the geometrical/spatial concept of life: To be alive is to exhibit a certain kind of geometrical structure. Life is a metaphysical process intrinsic to space/time, not something that begins with biology, but which reaches a new and higher level of intensity and harmonization with biological systems.

The specific geometry of Life. Degree of life in a structure has to do with the ways it embodies the geometrical properties of stable natural systems. There are fifteen properties universally found in stable, natural processes. In fact, they are actually geometrical properties of reality found in any complex system: 1. LEVELS OF SCALE, 2. STRONG CENTERS, 3. BOUNDARIES, 4. ALTERNATING REPETITION, 5. POSITIVE SPACE, 6. GOOD SHAPE, 7. LOCAL SYMMETRIES, 8. DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY, 9. CONTRAST, 10. GRADIENTS, II. ROUGHNESS, 12. ECHOES, 13. THE VOID, 14. SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM, 15. NON-SEPARATENESS.

§7. THIRD ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS BEING FILLED WITH SELF. To be beautiful is to manifest the (transpersonal) Self. Not ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’ but rather ‘The Eye of the Beholder is in (is an extension of) the Beauty’. Beauty does not exist because there is a consciousness there to perceive it. The consciousness is an extension of the Beauty which already exists. Consciousness is created by the Beauty in order for the geometry underlying the Beauty to be fully actualized.

At the level of physical nature, every being (e.g. an electron, planet, cat, galaxy) is attracted to every other by the force of gravitation. This mysterious ability of two entities to exert an instantaneous force on each other, even if they are billions of light years away from each other, is still unexplained by cosmology and fundamental physics. At a different dimension of reality, every point of space/time embodies a degree of consciousness, of selfness as an intrinsic feature of the universe. And like the law of gravitation, there is a cosmological law of the integration of awareness: every point or ‘center’ of space/time has an instantaneous impulse to bond with every other center, to attain a more comprehensive, deeper level of cosmological awareness. Beauty is the perception of a moment of integration of awareness of centers of space/time.

“The environment is good, or bad, according to the degree that its thousands and thousands of centers are pictures of the self, what we might call ‘beings.” The practical matters of fire, cost, family structure, wall construction, structural efficiency, ecology, solar energy, wind, water, pedestrian traffic – all these have their place. Function must be at the core of everything. But what governs the life of the buildings is not to be found in these matters, alone, but in a single question, always built on the foundation of these matters, but elevating them to a different level of understanding: To what extent is every building, and the whole building, and every garden, and the whole street, all made of beings?... Every center in the matter of the universe starts this tunneling towards the I-stuff. And the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self.” – Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order

Those who can't be, do.

"In this way, something begins to live within her which ranges above the purely personal. Her gaze is directed to worlds higher than those with which everyday life connects her. And thus she begins to feel and realize, as an inner experience, that she belongs to those higher worlds. These are worlds concerning which her senses and her daily occupation can tell her nothing. Thus she now shifts the central point of her being to the inner part of her nature. She listens to the voices within her which speak to her in moments of tranquility; she cultivates an intercourse with the spiritual world. All around there is silence. She must learn to love what the spirit pours into her. She will soon cease to feel that this thought-world is less real than the everyday things which surround her. She discovers that something living expresses itself in this thought-world. She sees that her thoughts do not merely harbor shadow-pictures, but that through them hidden beings speak to her. Out of silence, speech becomes audible to her. Formerly sound only reached her through her ear; now it resounds through her soul. Through her being there pours a divine stream from a world of divine rapture." - from Rudolf Steiner, "How to Know Higher Worlds"

The image above is a mandala drawing I created during a Holotropic Breathing Workshop I participated in this year. Holotropic breathing is a meditation technique developed by Christina and Stanislav Grof as a way to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. Grof's latest book, "Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research" is a fantastic outline for what will happen to mainstream psychology and psychotherapy when the materialistic ideology of modern medicine finally accepts mystical experience as something more than merely delusional. You can listen to his presentation about this fascinating book here.

Sacred Circle

SACRED CIRCLE • This Sunday, Nov. 30th at 5 PM, the Active Contemplatives of the Sanctuary (ACTS) will be hosting their monthly Sacred Circle Ceremony in the Yurt at the Sanctuary at Shepardfields.

This special event includes drumming, guided meditation, and the Four Directions Ritual of Native American Traditions.

Please join us for a unique opportunity to hold and share sacred intentions together. All are welcome!

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is located on 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam. For more information call 319-1134.

Sunday Meditation at the Sanctuary

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own eyes. All is a miracle. - Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunlight On The Move

Jen X. W. P. Taylor made this wonderful short film for our Start-A-Movement fund-raising party at the Sanctuary and showed it in the yurt as part of our presentation on our composting toilet project. It features footage of Abby Rockefeller's speech at the Chester Eco Arts Festival from September, Hans Lohse doing a humanure dance to awaken the soil and mineral spirits, our Pitbull Vanessa, and an original song composed by Jen which sums up the spirit of the project. Abby Rockefeller, co-founder of the Clivus Multum Company, is a world-expert on composting toilets and has been our technical advisor on this project. We owe her enormous thanks for helping us to see how ancient wisdom and modern technology can work together to produce low tech, no impact solutions to environmental nightmares produced by centralized, industrial "waste" management systems. Special thanks also to Hans Lohse, a green architect deeply connected to Native American wisdom and Sacred Geometry. He is the heart and soul of this project. Thanks to Hans, this Eco-temple will not only compost humanure in a effortless, safe and clean way, but it will be a stunningly beautiful and alive structure which will harmonize deeply with its environs.

If you are curious or want more information about this project, please call the Sanctuary (860-319-1134) or just drop by.



The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is an environmental education and spiritual life center dedicated to community development, ecological restoration, sustainability, localism, and the inclusive search for sacred meaning. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Sanctuary is located on an ecologically-intact 40 acre land preserve located in East Haddam and features a yurt for classes and meditation, drumming circle, labyrinth, community garden, composting toilet eco-temple, and walking trails through rich forest and inland wetlands ecosystems. The Sanctuary currently offers classes in Tai’ Chi, Yoga, Meditation, Environmental Philosophy and Spirituality. Additionally, the grounds are yurt are available for day retreats and other events.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road
East Haddam CT 06423
860.319.1134

Come to the Start-A-Movement Composting Toilet Eco-temple Fund-raising Party at the Sanctuary at Shepardfields

“Waste is not found in nature, except in human nature.” – Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook

On Oct. 25th, the Sanctuary at Shepardfields will be having a special fund-raising event, The Start-A-Movement Composting Toilet Eco-Temple Party.

This all ages event will feature a unique public environmental education workshop on composting toilets where participants learn about the ecology of wastewater treatment, the eco-design engineering principles of composting, composting toilets and permaculture. The educational aspect of the fund-raiser will be complemented by fun and celebration with food, dancing and live music, drumming, circus fun and games, a silent auction, and a silent walking meditation through the beautiful grounds of the Sanctuary.

Suggested donation for this event is $20, or $30 if you can afford it. Children and lower income guests are $10. The donation admission includes lunch, fascinating discussion and a great party.


















The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is a spiritual life center dedicated to the inclusive search for sacred meaning, community development, ecological restoration, sustainability and localism. With a special ministry to the LGBT community, the Sanctuary offers a sacred space amidst natural beauty for personal transformation and a locus for sustainable living. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Sanctuary is located on an ecologically-intact 40 acre land preserve located in East Haddam and features a yurt, drumming circle, labyrinth, community garden and rich forest and inland wetlands ecosystems.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road
East Haddam CT 06423
860.319.1134

So why build a composting toilet?

NOTES ON THE ECOLOGY OF TOILETS

"Compost is sunlight on the move from one form to another." – S. Sides

Many sanitation experts believe that standard toilets are the most poorly designed technologies of all time. In their seminal book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Paul Hawken and the legendary engineering gurus Amory and L. Hunter Lovins discuss the engineering virtues of the standard American toilet: “In an effort to make them ‘invisible’ a toilet mixes pathogen-bearing feces with relatively clean urine. Then it dilutes that slurry with about 100 times its volume in pure drinking water, and further mixes the mess with industrial toxins in the sewer system, thus turning ‘an excellent fertilizer and soil conditioner into a serious, far-reaching, and dispersed disposal problem. Supplying the clean water, treating the sewage, and providing all the delivery and collection in between requires systems whose cost strains the resources even of wealthy countries, let alone the 2 billion people who lack basic sanitation.”

Composting toilets, now being used in parks all over Connecticut, offer restroom service without the need for expensive wastewater treatment. They are safe, less odorous (really no smell whatsoever) than conventional toilets, and an invaluable educational tool for helping people to appreciate, like in olden times, the agricultural value of human waste. Embodying the ecological principle that waste=food, they are the most advanced technological expression of sustainability, and cheaper than conventional toilets. The only barriers to this ultra-rational technology are modernist cultural prejudices about human ‘waste’.

The Sanctuary currently pays about $100 each month to service a “porta-potty”, whose waste is collected and processed at a central sewer treatment plant. The process –centralized sewage treatment - is costly, energy intensive, not as effective as nature’s own way of breaking down harmful pathogens, chemicals and heavy metals through microbial digestion, and produces a toxic waste (sewage sludge) for which there is currently no environmentally safe way to dispose of. This is what you call a high entropy technology, since a lot of energy – both the energy used in the treatment, and the organic energy contained in the human “waste” - are lost in the treatment process. In contrast, a composting toilet helps nature’s own digestive processes to breathe more deeply, closing a nutrient cycle and returning human excreta back to condition the soil. After we complete this project, the Sanctuary will save a cost, reduce its harmful eco-footprint, and replace an ugly industrial artifact with a beautiful shrine which which will harmonize deeply with its locale, and ornament the meadow stand of trees like a some strange flower. Built and designed of mostly local materials, labor, ideas and inspiration, the process of the construction itself will serve as a healthy learning ecology.

A learning ecology is a project or situation in which individuals work towards understanding an aspect of their natural, social or economic environment which reveals something fundamental about their collective fate, their values, their identities. When one experiences a larger self, a community-sized self, an invisible bond is uncovered, through which information from a deeper pool of life activity can be transmitted to the individual. This information is a source of energy which empowers the individual to the level of spontaneous, patient, loving commitment to the long-term health of the community.

Sustainability can be mathematically defined as a property of a system: a system is sustainable if its activity is beneficial to the sub-systems contained within it and the macro-systems within which it is contained. In evolutionary terms, the smallest viable unit affected by natural selection is not the individual organism, nor even the species, but the organism-in-communion with the biosphere, or Gaia. Nature ultimately selects against organisms which act as if they are closed systems. This is why ethics is an objective science. The myth that ethical values are relative and subjective is based on the myth that the individual person is a closed system whose well-being depends in no way on the well-being of the community of beings within which the individual finds herself.

“It is ironic that humans have ignored one waste issue that all of us contribute to each and every day — an environmental problem that has stalked our species from our genesis, and which will accompany us to our extinction. Perhaps one reason we have taken such a head-in-the-sand approach to the recycling of human excrement is because we can’t even talk about it. If there is one thing that the human consumer culture refuses to deal with maturely and constructively, it’s bodily excretions. This is the taboo topic, the unthinkable issue. It’s also the one we are about to dive headlong into. For waste is not found in nature — except in human nature. It’s up to us humans to unlock the secret to its elimination. Nature herself provides a key and she has held it out to us for eons…

“One organism’s excrement is another’s food. Everything is recycled in natural systems, thereby eliminating waste. Humans create waste because we insist on ignoring the natural systems upon which we depend. We are so adept at doing so that we take waste for granted and have given the word a prominent place in our vocabulary. We have kitchen “waste,” garden “waste,” agricultural “waste,” human “waste,” municipal “waste,” “biowaste,” and on and on. Yet, our long-term survival requires us to learn to live in harmony with our host planet. This also requires that we understand natural cycles and incorporate them into our day to day lives. In essence, this means that we humans must attempt to eliminate waste altogether. As we progressively eliminate waste from our living habits, we can also progressively eliminate the word “waste” from our vocabulary.” – Joseph Jenkins, “The Humanure Manual”

For more information about composting humanure read The Humanure Manual.


























“I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what it best to do in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams which would purify their lives.” – Brave Buffalo

Your Local Dionysian Music Outfit

"There are people who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly or pityingly away from [Dionysian music] phenomena as from a “sickness of the people,” with a sense of their own health. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very “health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them.

"Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths; under his yolk stride panthers and tigers.

"If someone were to transform Beethoven's Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil of Maja had been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so something supernatural also echoes out of him: he feels himself a god; he now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist. He has become a work of art: the artistic power of all of nature, to the highest rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the transports of intoxication. The finest clay, the most expensive marble — man — is here worked and chiselled, and the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"

Socialism for the Rich

TEN REASONS NOT TO BAIL OUT WALL STREET

Catherine, Geopolitical, Life and News & Commentary, October 1, 2008 at 6:10 pm by Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn Betts, Esq.

(1) Crime that pays, is crime that stays.

There is reason to believe that Wall Street and those they represent are holding loans without collateral, multiple loans secured by the same properties, and other fraudulent instruments among the “troubled assets.” Based on the secret “Treasury Conference Call” with 800 Wall Street insiders, we know the deal proposed to be passed by Congress isn’t the real deal promised to Wall Street.

(2) This smells like obstruction of justice.

Bail-out without due diligence of so called “troubled assets” is a perfect way to hide documentation of financial crimes. It is also a perfect means to launder both the past ill-gotten gains and new federal money spent recklessly and without necessary safeguards and oversight mechanisms. Be very suspicious when they tell you “we just can’t tell what’s in these troubled assets.” We can assure you the federal government has field offices all across the country that deal with significant amounts of real estate and mortgage assets. If Treasury refuses for more than a decade to comply with the laws, with approximately $4 trillion missing (and counting), it is not competent to manage $700 billion of taxpayer money while its arm is twisted by Wall Street.

(3) Wall Street owes the federal government money.

We need to get stolen money back from the banks that served as depositories for the US government (including trillions for which the Pentagon and HUD could not account) and punish them, not create another opportunity for them to game the system and engage in criminal enterprises to rob consumers. To the extent there has been regulatory wrong-doing, let’s not let the miscreants leave town with the evidence.

(4) Good guys are shut out.

A bail-out provides no way for honest leaders to come to the fore and use their creativity and expertise to restore balance and integrity to the system or for unproductive and poorly-managed banks that contribute to current over-capacity to die a dignified death.

(5) More investment in the “bubble economy.”

Spending massive amounts on non-productive uses (“buying” worthless credit default swaps, mortgages with no collateral, other derivatives) as opposed to productive uses (repairing infrastructure, creating alternative energy systems, supporting inventing and production of “green” products) is inflationary. This bail-out will drive prices of food, water and energy up for the people who can least afford it.

(6) Does not result in capital circulating in healthy ways.

The bail-out of Wall Street and too-big-to-fail banks and insurance companies that are getting bigger by the minute by swallowing up other failing financial institutions (and creating more institutions that are “too big to fail”) does not result in trickle-down to those whose money was stolen in recent swindles (S&L, dot.com, current housing crisis), i.e., the taxpayers/middle class and working poor.

(7) Arrangements that result in more corruption.

Centralized “fixes” are sure to result in black holes, no-bid contracts and other scandals.

(8) Drains the real economy, rather than invests in the real economy.

The US economy can’t be productive or grow if consumers don’t have jobs and can’t afford to purchase goods and services. Real stimulation of Main Street is accomplished through investment in productive investment, not bail-outs that shift money to unproductive sectors. We should use all of our precious resources to reinvest in our people in the real economy.

(9) It props up sectors which need to downsize and consolidate.

There is significant overcapacity in the financial and banking sectors. Brainpower and talent needs to stop blowing financial bubbles and shift to economic activities that create real value.

(10) It is a temporary “fix” to keep Wall Street afloat until after the election.

These resources are better invested in permanent, long-term solutions. This bail-out will not fix anything. Rather, it will help the perpetrators get away and ensure that the ultimate day of reckoning is worse.

The Administration wants to drain the real economy to bail out Wall Street. Seems to us that the more appropriate plan would be to require Wall Street to return $4 trillion plus that is missing and use that to rebuild the real economy.

We think the time has come to reverse the flow. Go to any business school in the country. That is what they teach. Money should move out of unproductive sectors into productive sectors. The bail-out does just the opposite.

“Just say NO!”

What is Consciousness?

Ecological Philosophy and Spirituality at the Sanctuary

(2) THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE EXTENDED MIND HYPOTHESIS

Wednesday, October 1st, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
In the Yurt at the Sanctuary
Suggested donation: $15

This class will explore some of the basic questions surrounding the nature of consciousness.

Some helpful texts:

1. Rupert Sheldrake, “The Sense of Being Stared At”
2. Rupert Sheldrake, “The Extended Mind” video.
3. Famous 'Double Slit' experiment in quantum mechanics, video.

A New Social Contract for a Sustainable Society

THE EARTH CHARTER

Preamble

We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.

Earth, Our Home

Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe. Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life. The forces of nature make existence a demanding and uncertain adventure, but Earth has provided the conditions essential to life's evolution. The resilience of the community of life and the well-being of humanity depend upon preserving a healthy biosphere with all its ecological systems, a rich variety of plants and animals, fertile soils, pure waters, and clean air. The global environment with its finite resources is a common concern of all peoples. The protection of Earth's vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust.

The Global Situation

The dominant patterns of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species. Communities are being undermined. The benefits of development are not shared equitably and the gap between rich and poor is widening. Injustice, poverty, ignorance, and violent conflict are widespread and the cause of great suffering. An unprecedented rise in human population has overburdened ecological and social systems. The foundations of global security are threatened. These trends are perilous—but not inevitable.

The Challenges Ahead

The choice is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We have the knowledge and technology to provide for all and to reduce our impacts on the environment. The emergence of a global civil society is creating new opportunities to build a democratic and humane world. Our environmental, economic, political, social, and spiritual challenges are interconnected, and together we can forge inclusive solutions.

Universal Responsibility

To realize these aspirations, we must decide to live with a sense of universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole Earth community as well as our local communities. We are at once citizens of different nations and of one world in which the local and global are linked. Everyone shares responsibility for the present and future well-being of the human family and the larger living world. The spirit of human solidarity and kinship with all life is strengthened when we live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature.

We urgently need a shared vision of basic values to provide an ethical foundation for the emerging world community. Therefore, together in hope we affirm the following interdependent principles for a sustainable way of life as a common standard by which the conduct of all individuals, organizations, businesses, governments, and transnational institutions is to be guided and assessed.

PRINCIPLES

I. RESPECT AND CARE FOR THE COMMUNITY OF LIFE

1. Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.

a. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.
b. Affirm faith in the inherent dignity of all human beings and in the intellectual, artistic, ethical, and spiritual potential of humanity.

2. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.

a. Accept that with the right to own, manage, and use natural resources comes the duty to prevent environmental harm and to protect the rights of people.
b. Affirm that with increased freedom, knowledge, and power comes increased responsibility to promote the common good.

3. Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful.

a. Ensure that communities at all levels guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms and provide everyone an opportunity to realize his or her full potential.
b. Promote social and economic justice, enabling all to achieve a secure and meaningful livelihood that is ecologically responsible.

4. Secure Earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations.

a. Recognize that the freedom of action of each generation is qualified by the needs of future generations.
b. Transmit to future generations values, traditions, and institutions that support the long-term flourishing of Earth's human and ecological communities.

In order to fulfill these four broad commitments, it is necessary to:

II. ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY

5. Protect and restore the integrity of Earth's ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.

a. Adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations that make environmental conservation and rehabilitation integral to all development initiatives.
b. Establish and safeguard viable nature and biosphere reserves, including wild lands and marine areas, to protect Earth's life support systems, maintain biodiversity, and preserve our natural heritage.
c. Promote the recovery of endangered species and ecosystems.
d. Control and eradicate non-native or genetically modified organisms harmful to native species and the environment, and prevent introduction of such harmful organisms.
e. Manage the use of renewable resources such as water, soil, forest products, and marine life in ways that do not exceed rates of regeneration and that protect the health of ecosystems.
f. Manage the extraction and use of non-renewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels in ways that minimize depletion and cause no serious environmental damage.

6. Prevent harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, apply a precautionary approach.

a. Take action to avoid the possibility of serious or irreversible environmental harm even when scientific knowledge is incomplete or inconclusive.
b. Place the burden of proof on those who argue that a proposed activity will not cause significant harm, and make the responsible parties liable for environmental harm.
c. Ensure that decision making addresses the cumulative, long-term, indirect, long distance, and global consequences of human activities.
d. Prevent pollution of any part of the environment and allow no build-up of radioactive, toxic, or other hazardous substances.
e. Avoid military activities damaging to the environment.

7. Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth's regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well-being.

a. Reduce, reuse, and recycle the materials used in production and consumption systems, and ensure that residual waste can be assimilated by ecological systems.
b. Act with restraint and efficiency when using energy, and rely increasingly on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.
c. Promote the development, adoption, and equitable transfer of environmentally sound technologies.
d. Internalize the full environmental and social costs of goods and services in the selling price, and enable consumers to identify products that meet the highest social and environmental standards.
e. Ensure universal access to health care that fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction.
f. Adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and material sufficiency in a finite world.

8. Advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and wide application of the knowledge acquired.

a. Support international scientific and technical cooperation on sustainability, with special attention to the needs of developing nations.
b. Recognize and preserve the traditional knowledge and spiritual wisdom in all cultures that contribute to environmental protection and human well-being.
c. Ensure that information of vital importance to human health and environmental protection, including genetic information, remains available in the public domain.

III. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

9. Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative.

a. Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international resources required.
b. Empower every human being with the education and resources to secure a sustainable livelihood, and provide social security and safety nets for those who are unable to support themselves.
c. Recognize the ignored, protect the vulnerable, serve those who suffer, and enable them to develop their capacities and to pursue their aspirations.

10. Ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner.

a. Promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.
b. Enhance the intellectual, financial, technical, and social resources of developing nations, and relieve them of onerous international debt.
c. Ensure that all trade supports sustainable resource use, environmental protection, and progressive labor standards.
d. Require multinational corporations and international financial organizations to act transparently in the public good, and hold them accountable for the consequences of their activities.

11. Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care, and economic opportunity.

a. Secure the human rights of women and girls and end all violence against them.
b. Promote the active participation of women in all aspects of economic, political, civil, social, and cultural life as full and equal partners, decision makers, leaders, and beneficiaries.
c. Strengthen families and ensure the safety and loving nurture of all family members.

12. Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.

a. Eliminate discrimination in all its forms, such as that based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, language, and national, ethnic or social origin.
b. Affirm the right of indigenous peoples to their spirituality, knowledge, lands and resources and to their related practice of sustainable livelihoods.
c. Honor and support the young people of our communities, enabling them to fulfill their essential role in creating sustainable societies.
d. Protect and restore outstanding places of cultural and spiritual significance.

IV. DEMOCRACY, NONVIOLENCE, AND PEACE

13. Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to justice.

a. Uphold the right of everyone to receive clear and timely information on environmental matters and all development plans and activities which are likely to affect them or in which they have an interest.
b. Support local, regional and global civil society, and promote the meaningful participation of all interested individuals and organizations in decision making.
c. Protect the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, peaceful assembly, association, and dissent.
d. Institute effective and efficient access to administrative and independent judicial procedures, including remedies and redress for environmental harm and the threat of such harm.
e. Eliminate corruption in all public and private institutions.
f. Strengthen local communities, enabling them to care for their environments, and assign environmental responsibilities to the levels of government where they can be carried out most effectively.

14. Integrate into formal education and life-long learning the knowledge, values, and skills needed for a sustainable way of life.

a. Provide all, especially children and youth, with educational opportunities that empower them to contribute actively to sustainable development.
b. Promote the contribution of the arts and humanities as well as the sciences in sustainability education.
c. Enhance the role of the mass media in raising awareness of ecological and social challenges.
d. Recognize the importance of moral and spiritual education for sustainable living.

15. Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.

a. Prevent cruelty to animals kept in human societies and protect them from suffering.
b. Protect wild animals from methods of hunting, trapping, and fishing that cause extreme, prolonged, or avoidable suffering.
c. Avoid or eliminate to the full extent possible the taking or destruction of non-targeted species.

16. Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace.

a. Encourage and support mutual understanding, solidarity, and cooperation among all peoples and within and among nations.
b. Implement comprehensive strategies to prevent violent conflict and use collaborative problem solving to manage and resolve environmental conflicts and other disputes.
c. Demilitarize national security systems to the level of a non-provocative defense posture, and convert military resources to peaceful purposes, including ecological restoration.
d. Eliminate nuclear, biological, and toxic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
e. Ensure that the use of orbital and outer space supports environmental protection and peace.
f. Recognize that peace is the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which all are a part.

THE WAY FORWARD

As never before in history, common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning. Such renewal is the promise of these Earth Charter principles. To fulfill this promise, we must commit ourselves to adopt and promote the values and objectives of the Charter.

This requires a change of mind and heart. It requires a new sense of global interdependence and universal responsibility. We must imaginatively develop and apply the vision of a sustainable way of life locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. Our cultural diversity is a precious heritage and different cultures will find their own distinctive ways to realize the vision. We must deepen and expand the global dialogue that generated the Earth Charter, for we have much to learn from the ongoing collaborative search for truth and wisdom.

Life often involves tensions between important values. This can mean difficult choices. However, we must find ways to harmonize diversity with unity, the exercise of freedom with the common good, short-term objectives with long-term goals. Every individual, family, organization, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership. The partnership of government, civil society, and business is essential for effective governance.

In order to build a sustainable global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.

Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.

The Earth Charter Initiative

Unfolding Wholeness

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION

Wednesday, September 24th, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
In the Yurt at the Sanctuary
Suggested donation: $15

Our first class will offer a friendly introduction to philosophy by examining some of the most ancient and enduring questions about the nature of perception and experience.

Readings:
1. Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see”
2. Oliver Sacks, "To See and Not to See"

Ecological Philosophy and Spirituality Seminar at the Sanctuary

UNFOLDING WHOLENESS:
Ecological Philosophy and Spirituality

An innovative mix of philosophy and yoga in a relaxed salon setting.

This seminar offers a survey of exciting issues in contemporary philosophy. It is designed to be both cumulative and also modular, so that later classes do not presuppose knowledge from earlier classes. The reading materials for each class are available online, at the course blog, so no books are required. Students who sign up for the entire series receive a discount per course and are entitled to detailed feedback on an optional paper assignment.

SCHEDULE

• 10 Wednesdays, 6:30 to 8:30 PM starting September 24th.

• $15 per session. $100 for the whole ten week course. Each session includes 20 minutes of circus yoga mind-body relaxation and a 90 minute directed philosophy seminar. Refreshments served.

• Classes will be held in the Yurt..

INSTRUCTORS

• Jen Taylor (BA Vassar) is a philosopher, Yoga instructor and political activist who studied engaged Buddhism with the legendary Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh. Her philosophical work focuses on gender and sexual politics, metaphysics, ecofeminism and the cultural mythology of partnership societies.

• Justin Good (BA SUNY Purchase, PHD Boston University) is a philosopher and community organizer whose philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of mind, political and environmental philosophy, aesthetics and epistemology. He teaches philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the University of Hartford.

CURRICULUM

(1) 9/24 Introduction to the Philosophy of Perception

(2) 10/1 TBA

(3) 10/8 TBA

(4) 10/15 TBA

(5) 10/22 TBA

(6) 10/29 TBA

(7) 11/5 TBA

(8) 11/12 TBA

(9) 11/19 TBA

(10) 11/26 TBA

To reserve a spot for the complete course, or for individual sessions contact Jen at 860.575.1166 (jen@circusyoga.com) or Justin at 617.733.9270 (vood@cummings-good.com)

What is the philosophy of the future?

Mystical and Scientific Eco-Circuses coming to Town!

The first annual Chester Eco Arts Fest 2008 will be featuring two special circus performances, ArtFarm's CIRCUS FOR A FRAGILE PLANET, and our very own local CIRCUS H20 produced by CircusSchool.

Circus H20 is the creation of Jen Taylor's local circus outfit CircusSchool, and features local acrobats and trapezists, ages 6-10. A mystical tribute to water in trapeze, acrobatics and film, CircusH2O is a community-based, circus yoga exploration of the life of water and the water of life through the magic of individual creative mindfulness and serious play. Cirque du Soleil meets the Little Rascals. Circus H20 will be performing at 2 PM.

Circus H20 is followed by an entertaining blend of circus and science from Middletown-based ARTFARM.

ARTFARM, a Middletown, Connecticut based non-profit organization which creates high quality theater with a commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice, has launched an exciting new touring circus.

Imagine a circus in which actors juggle bottled water, polar bears dance on melting ice floes, the props and set are recycled, and the core of clowns are called the Fossil Fools. That’s part of what you get in ARTFARM’s Circus for a Fragile Planet, a brand new educational circus performance featuring juggling, clowning, physical comedy, acrobatics, unicycling and other circus arts built around a strong environmental message. The show is written, directed and features ARTFARM co-founder Dic Wheeler, who plays an offbeat Austrian scientist whose attempts at enlightening the audience about critical environmental issues are undermined by four fun loving clowns with an agenda of their own. Featuring a lively contemporary and classical musical score, Circus for a Fragile Planet is a side-splitting, mind-opening blend of circus and science.

Although Circus for a Fragile Planet was designed to connect to the grades six through ten earth and environmental science curriculum, the fast-paced, hour-long show has entertained and inspired audiences of all ages. The circus has performed with great success at universities, arts centers, festivals and nature centers. What every audience receives is a terrific small-scale circus which leaves them asking “what changes can I make in my lifestyle to become a more responsible world citizen?”
Circus for a Fragile Planet will be available for touring through 2009. The show addresses issues such as global warming, critical habitat, resource management, alternative energy sources, bottled water, recycling, species sustainability and individual responsibility in a way that is accessible and upbeat, accentuating the positive choices each individual or community can make to help build a better future for the planet.

A study guide for teachers and students is available to accompany the performance. For more information, contact ARTFARM at (860) 346-4390 or info@art-farm.org. Photos, a short video and additional information can be found at www.art-farm.org.

Circus for a Fragile Planet will be performing at 3 PM.

The First Annual Chester Eco Arts Festival 2008

Join us on the grounds of the Chester Meeting House for a day
to celebrate life, the earth, and our future as a community. The day
will be filled with music for all ages, exhibitors/vendors of green
environmentally friendly products and services, locally grown products,
films to raise environmental awareness, informative speakers, comfort
food with beverages, and a general lifting of the spirits.

For kids, and the young at heart there will be “Creative creations”
workshop for make your own Recycled Art and Jewelry or what ever
strikes your fancy.

The event will be held rain or shine. We have two large tents as
well as the meeting house and Gazebo to provide cover. the site
layout and detailed program can be found inside this flyer.
In the sprit of reducing our carbon footprint: walk, jog, bike, or
carpool to the fairgrounds. Stay awhile. Stay the day. Other than your
purchase of food or goods, the Fest is being offered at no cost to
one and all. A special invitation is offered to our young people. It is
they who will inherit the environment for which we are all responsible.

Free Admission, All Ages

The Self of Music

"Song" by Justin Good

There’s no why about it when each note,
having its way with you,
like wet mountain ferns brushing against your ankles,
unfolds a pocket of silence between tones
to triangulate the meaning of an inscrutable mood.

Truth-bubbles from the realm of suffering and bliss,
go to work on your average everydayness,
hence the feeling of relief as you ride
on a melody past the fragile wonders
of your unfinished feelings.

Wiggling, humming, crying, rejoicing,
following the energy of the notes potential,
a favorite song, that song which is your song,
inherits the genius of an early morning dream,
how does the self recognize itself in
a sonic form of stardust memories?

Entering through your belly,
reaching up into your chest to overtake you,
the magic lasso ensnarls eternal spirits
hauling them down to human ground,
and cantilevers the biological heart into
a fountain of nothingness.

You need to ask the eternal witness who
lives inside your ears of silence,
Friend, where is all of this music coming from?

Welcome to the Sanctuary

Dear Friends of SolarClarity,

In September my partner Jen Taylor and I will be moving from Chester to East Haddam to live at the Sanctuary at Shepardfields where we will serve as the Sanctuary's new Executive Directors. The Sanctuary is a spiritual life center founded by Reverend Pat Gallager and is located on a beautiful 40 acre land preserve. Rev. Pat will be moving to Florida to lay roots in a burgeoning spiritual community in Sarasota while Jen and I bring new energy and an emphasis on sustainability, environmental spirituality, circus arts, philosophy and music to this special center.

We will be having our first event there on Sunday, September 7th and you are cordially invited to join us for a very special evening of music, games, vision, a potluck dinner, meditation, drumming and dancing. The event is free and open to all ages. Bring your kids and a favorite dish.

Regards,
Justin Good

Open House Vision Party
Sunday, September 7th, 4 to 8 PM
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

Program

4 PM Games, mingling and music
5 PM Potluck dinner, introductions and vision
6 PM Silent walking meditation and labyrinth
7 PM Drumming and dancing

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is a spiritual life center dedicated to the inclusive search for sacred meaning, community development, ecological restoration, sustainability and localism. With a special ministry to the LGBT community, the Sanctuary offers a sacred space amidst natural beauty for personal transformation and a locus for sustainable living.

Directions:

FROM HARTFORD: 
Take I-84 East towards East Hartford. Take exit 55 onto Route 2 East towards Norwich. Take exit 16. Go RIGHT onto Route 149. Turn LEFT onto Route 151 (Plains Road). Turn LEFT onto Daniels Road. Turn LEFT onto Bogel Road.

FROM OLD SAYBROOK: Take Route 9 North towards Middletown. Take exit 7 onto Route 82 East. Turn LEFT onto Route 154 (Saybrook Road). Turn RIGHT onto Route 82 (Bridge Road). Turn LEFT onto Route 151 (Town Street). Turn RIGHT onto Daniels Road. Turn LEFT onto Bogel Road.

Notes on the Solar Revolution

"What we did in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait was we put a bunch of our young people into .56 mpg tanks and 17 feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we had not put them into 32 mpg cars." - Amory Lovins

The sustainability revolution is underway. Every one is talking about renewable energy these days. Liberal and conservative media alike have finally begun to yank their heads out of the sand and take a look at reality. The federal government is still in denial, but upward pressure from scared communities around the country may start to register in voting booths this November. I'll be happy if Obama takes the top seat but utterly surprised if his victory makes enough of a difference to avert total collapse. There seem to be several misconceptions that still dog conversations about renewables however. Below are three prophets of sustainability offering lucid observations addressing these misconceptions.

1. FIRST MISPERCEPTION • A RETURN TO NUCLEAR ENERGY IS IMMINENT

Many politicians left and right are mentioning nuclear energy as a solution to high fossil fuel costs and global warming. According to Solartopian Harvey Wasserman in this recent article, however, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which licences nuclear reactors has essentially stated that the technology is in disarray and the entire permitting process is at a standstill. Below is the article feed and a video of Wasserman putting nuclear into the context of a viable sustainable energy economy.

THE NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION SAYS THE REACTOR REVIVAL IS NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME
By Harvey Wasserman, July 25, 2008

"A devastating blow to the much-hyped revival of atomic power has been delivered by an unlikely source---the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC says the "standardized" designs on which the entire premise of returning nuclear power to center stage is based have massive holes in them, and may not be ready for approval for years to come.

"Delivered by one of America's most notoriously docile agencies, the NRC's warning essentially says: that all cost estimates for new nuclear reactors---and all licensing and construction schedules---are completely up for grabs, and have no reliable basis in fact. Thus any comparisons between future atomic reactors and renewable technologies are moot at best. And any "hard number" basis for independent financing for future nukes may not be available for years to come, if ever.

"These key points have been raised in searing testimony before state regulators by Jim Warren of the North Carolina Waste and Awareness Reduction Network and Tom Clements of the South Carolina Friends of the Earth, and by others now challenging proposed state-based financing for new Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. The NRC gave conditional "certification" to this "standardized" design in 2004, allowing design work to continue. But as recently as June 27, the NRC has issued written warnings that hundreds of key design components remain without official approval. Indeed, Westinghouse has been forced to actually withdraw numerous key designs, throwing the entire permitting process into chaos.

"The catastrophic outcome of similar problems has already become tangible. After two years under construction, the first "new generation" French reactor being built in Finland is already more than two years behind schedule, and more than $2.5 billion over budget. The scenario is reminiscent of the economic disaster that hit scores of "first generation" reactors, which came in massively over budget and, in many cases, decades behind promised completion dates. (continue reading)



2. SECOND MISPERCEPTION • THE FREE MARKET IS LEADING THE WAY TO SUSTAINABILITY

If you took seriously the terms of the political debate about energy, you would get the impression that Republicans love fossil fuels and free markets and liberals love government and the environment. These are essential Cold War Era categories however and are totally useless in understanding 21st century politics, in which the political forces are not right and left, but PRO-CENTRALIZATION and PRO-DECENTRALIZATION of wealth and power. For instance, the Clintons and Gores on the face of it are liberal in terms of their stance on civil rights, abortion and education, but their politics are pro-centralization, helping to support the drivers of chaos - consolidation of wealth, the growth of a quasi-fascist federal government and the spread of globalization as the victory of investor rights over human rights.

Amory Lovins is a true legend in the sustainability movement. Founder of the amazing green think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, Lovins is a lucid and brilliant scientist and engineer who has a fully articulated vision of the economy of the future, a vision he writes about compellingly in his book Natural Capitalism. In the interview below with Charlie Rose, he speaks about the promise of the green revolution, and in the process dispels several myths about the politics of energy markets, such as:

- There is no ECONOMIC argument for drilling in Alaska, and doing so would jeopardize national security.

- Due to its cost, nuclear energy offers 2 to 10 times less carbon emissions reduction per dollar invested compared to efficiency and micro renewable, hence building more nuclear plants would make global warming WORSE.

- Many who profess to be political conservatives are the biggest subsidizers of their favorite technology, the most opposed to real competition.

We would be better off IF the market was leading the way. The problem is that those in power, as libertarians have observed time and again, don't like markets because they decentralize power over resources.

Watch the Charlie Rose interview here.

3. THIRD MISPERCEPTION • THE TECHNOLOGY NECESSARY FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING DOES NOT YET EXIST

I know many folks who would love to install solar voltaic panels on their homes right now, or install geothermal heating and cooling systems, but cannot afford to do so. And there is a constant refrain that we need to wait for the technology to catch up so that sustainability can become "economic". While all that is true regarding solar voltaics and other high-tech solutions, many people have not realized that sustainable housing does not require high-tech solutions. Back in the 1970s during the first oil shocks, a first generation of green designers figured out how to build structures which would be passively heated and cooled, without using ANY high-technology whatsoever. Dr. Ty Cashman is the president of the Solar Economy Institute. He was instrumental in the founding and rapid development of the wind energy industry in the 1970s and 80s at the New Alchemy Institute in Massachusetts and Canada, in the California Governor¹s Office, and as President of the American Wind Energy Association. If you watch the following interview with him, you'll discover that he built a passively heated and cooled house in Canada back in the 1970s which used no fancy heating system, produced all of its own food, and was the most beautiful place he ever lived. This shows that sustainable living is more of a design problem than a technical problem, and that design is fundmentally a CULTURAL issue. We need to change how we think. (Thanks to Errol Horner for finding this video)



4. FOURTH MISPERCEPTION • UNLESS YOU ALREAD LIVE IN A SPECIALLY-DESIGNED HOUSE, IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE TO GROW ALL OF YOUR OWN FOOD

Back in the 1980s, two students of Buckminster Fuller developed the Biodome Project in Colorado as an experiment in off-the-grid self-sufficient living. The biodome was a geodesic greenhouse. The brain child of Bucky Fuller, geodesic domes are marvelous architectural structures. Having no corners, but constructed using triangles which evenly displace the weight of the structure, geodesic domes are incredibly strong and maximize the space available for growing plants.

While the original Biodome was expensive, another sustainability activist Ungar Parsons set out to design a low cost version of a geodesic green house - a structure that would be very affordable and totally passively heated and cooled so as not to be expensive to maintain. You can now purchase your own geodesic dome from his company Growing Spaces. The structures are utterly affordable ($8000 for a 22 ft diameter greenhouse which heats and cools itself and can grow enough food for 4 to 6 people year round!) and beautiful. Here are some notes from their website:

• Because the dome is made of triangles, it can withstand heavy snow loads and winds of up to 130mph. The strong structure also eliminates the need to pour a concrete foundation, required by so many hobby greenhouse designs on the market, thus reducing the overall cost and ease of installation.

• The dome has been designed to be off-the-grid and independent of fossil fuels. It is the most energy-efficient structure because it can enclose the most volume for the minimum surface area. The dome is always facing the sun giving an even heat input from sun-up to sun-down. A rectangular greenhouse with a large amount of south facing glazing can experience over-heating problems during the middle of the day when the sun hits the glazing surface at 90 degrees. Underground utilities, that can be a hassle to install and maintain, are not necessary to operate the greenhouse. Eliminating this dependency reduces costs and headaches.

• The research that was done with the Bio-dome found that they could grow 3 lbs. of food per square foot, per year. A 15’ Growing Dome greenhouse can produce 400-500 lbs. per year. That is enough food to feed 2-3 adults, if the average adult eats 200 lbs. per year. The dome has the potential to return your investment--in full--every 4-5 years, assuming the dome will last 20 years.

• In Colorado, it is common for temperatures to fall below freezing. The Growing Dome can withstand sub-zero temperatures with no supplemental heating. If the temperature in the dome dips a few degrees below freezing, once the sun comes out the vegetables and other plants will soon begin growing again. One of the key features to the dome is the solar-operated subterranean heating system that works to warm the soil where the plants grow. The warm soil significantly helps the plants to thrive in colder months.

• The heart and soul of the Growing Dome is a 1200-gallon oval shaped water tank that supplies the thermal mass (heat) in the greenhouse. Water is the most effective solar collector because of its ability to keep heat stable. The water also helps to cool and stabilize the temperatures in the greenhouse in the summer. The greenhouse stays warmer in the winter months and cooler in the summer--another feature that sets it apart from other greenhouse designs.

• Other unique features include the tough, long-lived but lightweight polycarbonate glazing that softly diffuses the light for optimum growing conditions, and the special reflective double-packed R-10 insulation that covers the northern 2/5 of the dome. Automatic compressed wax activators open and close lower vents for ventilation, as well as the two windows at the top of the dome.

• The dome is not just for growing plants. It has been used as the ultimate indoor eco-system to enclose hot tubs, meditation centers, massage and physical therapy studios, and as a community greenhouse/center. Schools have implemented fundraising programs to build a dome to help educate children on the living earth, nurturing, and science.

• The Growing Dome comes as a kit, with or without the Douglas Fir lumber, and all the other necessary components are pre-cut, pre-drilled, color coded and are ready for assembly. You can tackle the installation job yourself, or have the knowledgeable and friendly crews at Growing Spaces help out with the process. Growing Spaces has attempted to reduce the cost to you by allowing some of the components that are bulky and expensive to ship to be purchased locally.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Come celebrate what would have happened IF America had won the revolutionary war against England. Taxation with representation? A democratically-controlled money system? True government by the people? A cure for the pathology of civilization?








"Why should Americans care what happened in the mideast? Or anywhere else? Did the Swiss care what kind of government Iraq should have? Did the Swiss try to make the rest of the world more like Switzerland, or allow themselves the vain fantasy of imagining that everyone on the planet secretly yearned to be more like the Swiss themselves?

"While no one noticed, the imperial weed put down roots deep in the soil of North America. By the early twenty-first century, hardly anything else grew; it had completely crowded out the delicate flowers planted by the Founding Fathers. The debate surrounding the invasion of Iraq was an imperial debate - about means and methods, not about right and wrong or national interest. No one from either major political party bothered to suggest that the United States had no business nosing around in other peoples' business. Both parties recognized that Iraq was not a matter of national interest - it was a matter of imperial interest. No business, no where, was too small or too remote not to be of interest to the empire. From its military bases all over the globe, and its sensors orbiting the planet, the American imperium watched everyone, everywhere, all the time.

"This marks what may be the peak of a trend that began more than one hundred years ago. Just about the turn of the century, the United States became the world's biggest economy - and its fastest growing one. Near the same time, Theodore Roosevelt began riding rough over small, poor nations. America's fat proto-imperialist rarely saw a fight he didn't want to get into. It was at his urging ( he had threatened to raise his own army to do the job) that Wilson announced his readiness to join the war in Europe in 1917. Wilson said he was doing it to 'make the world safe for democracy.' This is the stated goal of nearly all U.S. foreign policy every since: to improve the planet with more democracy. Of course, almost all empire builders think that they are improving the planet. Even Alexander the Great thought he was doing it a favor by spreading greek culture."

- Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, "Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis.

This is a fantastic book that puts the current financial situation into the larger context of the political economy of empires. It offers a great financial-military history of the US since World War 1, when the authors argue the republic turned into an empire, and compares and contrasts it with other empires in history. Empires are bubbles in the evolutionary process that necessarily rise and fall. Characteristically, they force the peoples they dominate to pay for the expansionary forces. Following the logic of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, empires are weakened by their wealth, as they pay others to supply them with what they need as they loose their self-reliance. Empires are high-entropy systems that way, ultimately losing more wealth, more energy, than they can every hope to gain. The American Empire doesn't demand tribute in its protection racket, however. It borrows the money from its vassals: a bubble that is currently bursting in horrifying slow motion.



“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

The response is attributed to BENJAMIN FRANKLIN—at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation—in the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention.

Be the change you want to see.

"When I was a little girl, James Cameron’s epic cinematic spectacle, the Titanic, had not yet hit the screen. But the story of the Titanic was as big in the cultural dialogue and collective subconscious of the time as walking on the moon. The human spirit soared that high and sank that low. At age eight, I saw a made for television documentary about the sinking. One image would haunt me for years. The women who fell overboard couldn’t lift their own body weight up out of the ocean and back onto the ship or life rafts. Unless someone helped them, many women drowned because they couldn’t do one pull-up.

The implications ran deep. On a personal level, I looked around at the women in my life. There was no doubt about it. My mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, my favorite teachers were all going to die on a sinking ship. And I would too. I was a girl. And that I was biologically doomed to the same fate terrified me. My own body felt like a death trap.

I practice joy and trapeze, and more recently circus and yoga, as my own personal antidote. It works. I have been described as a limitless fountain of joy by my teacher, fellow yogi and clown friend, Kevin O’Keefe. And I share my practice with as many as I can.

Because if you’re sinking on the Titanic, you don’t need to do twenty pull-up’s to save your life. You need to do one."

- From Jen Taylor's Circus Yoga biography.

CircusSchool is Jen Taylor’s unique and innovative approach to teaching dance, yoga and mind/body mindfulness to children & adults in a focused but relaxed manner. As a dancer, yoga instructor, teacher and philosopher, Ms. Taylor approaches teaching the art of body movement and mindful creativity from a rich diversity of traditions and perspectives. Trained in creative movement play, tumbling, trapeze and acrobatics, as well as African dance and improvisation, Taylor helps children and adults discover their native inner bodily wisdom and youthful flexibility through interactive and imaginative exercises and games.

Visit her at CircusSchoolXena.

Chester's New Plan of Conservation and Development

Come gather round People! On Sunday, June 1st at 1 PM, Chester's new Plan of Conservation and Development will be presented at the Chester Meeting House. This is a plan for Chester residents to be proud of. The Planning and Zoning Commission has done a lot of hard work, as has the Conservation Commission and the brilliant planners at the Connecticut River Estuary Regional Planning Agency (CRERPA). SolarClarity drafted the Sustainability chapter which offers real progressive vision for a sane, long-term approach to economic development. Linda Krause, the director of CREPRA told me that she wants Chester's Plan to be a model for progressive development to be used for the whole planning region. Please come and participate in this discussion. What is important now is to give this inspired document some civic life, to let it guide and inform our policy and planning decisions.

You can read the new Plan of Conservation and Development on the Town of Chester website.

PRINCIPLES OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

By SolarClarity

Sometimes the terms conservation and sustainability are used to mean the same thing, as when we are speaking generally about stewardship of the land. But the terms also can be used to indicate a difference which really matters. The difference has to do with how third wave environmentalism, sustainable or regenerative development, improves upon the limitations of its predecessors. If the first stage of environmentalism promoted land conservation, while second generation environmentalism focused on governmental regulation of industrial processes, third generation environmentalism, sustainability, aims at systematic reintegration of economic activity with natural processes, a higher unity of economics and ecology, accounting and capital. Whereas conservation aims to curtail economic activity towards the interest of preserving remaining intact ecosystems from the fragmentation of urban and suburban development, sustainability aims at releasing economic activity, by a more accurate and realistic accounting of wealth and by pursuing the untapped ways we have to preserve and increase it, rather than consuming and wasting and desecrating it.

The fact is that, despite the unquestionable benefits of environmental regulations, extreme environmental degradation is not being stemmed, but rather accelerated exponentially by standard development practices that claim to be conservationist at heart. The hopeful side of sustainability is the knowledge, demonstrated by courageous successful experiments made by communities across the world, that a local economy can be strengthened – paradoxically - by less emphasis on financial wealth, and more emphasis on social and natural value. This ‘triple bottom line’ of ‘People, Place and Profit,’ or social, natural and financial capital, is not fuzzy economics, it is a way to make standard accounting principles consistent with the known laws of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology and ethics. When town planners distinguish ‘conservation’ from ‘development,’ they show that they are still working within the assumptions of the older school environmentalism of the 20th century. Sustainability is not just a new word for conservation, it is an new evolutionary stage of capitalism, and one step closer to the little understood ideal of a ‘free market.’

What should we understand to be the goal of sustainable development? According to the widely-accepted definition adopted by the United Nations Brundtland Commission, sustainable development is development which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” and it can only be pursued if “population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.”

How should this concept of sustainability influence how we understand economic development? Minimally it implies the following: first, that our natural and social environment in Chester presents certain concrete limitations for how much infrastructure we construct, how many houses we build, how many fields we pave, how many human beings live here; such that if we grow beyond that point, we will incur costs faster than any benefits we might hope to achieve through further growth. Secondly, it implies that we become psychologically-mindful of the nonvisible, negative consequences that our economic activity in Chester has elsewhere in the world, and that we become economically capable of reducing those negative impacts, ultimately to nothing or even further, to a net-positive result.

These implications are both necessary and at present controversial. The first aspect points towards the need for communally-decided growth threshold standards to hold the line on local livability. Unless the community can reach a consensus on how much growth is too much growth, the town will not know what too much is until it is too late. The second requires a new approach to economic development. Generally, moving in the direction of sustainability means reducing our impact or ‘ecological footprint’ on the environment, by producing less waste, using less toxic substances, consuming less of everything, especially energy and water, and developing more wholesome relationships to the land and all of its living beings, especially when it comes to the production of basic necessities like food and energy.

One overall strategy for accomplishing these economic goals that is being implemented with success all over the world is economic relocalization. Economic relocalization is a way to develop a local economy by developing its resilience and self-sufficiency, as opposed to increasing its income. According to the internationally-respected sustainability think-tank Rocky Mountain Institute, sustainable development:

• Redefines prosperity, weighing community values, quality of life, and the environment alongside economic considerations.

• Seeks true development, in the sense of getting better, instead of expansion, which is merely getting bigger.

• Advocates the long-term stewardship of community resources, ensuring that present actions don’t erode the basis for future prosperity.

• Pursues self-reliance and a more democratic approach to decision-making, representing community-wide interests over those of an elite few.

• Stresses diversity, resilience, and a conviction that many small efforts work better than a single one-size-fits-all solution.

The logic of economic relocalization can be illustrated with a simple picture, the ‘leaky bucket model’ of economic development. According to RMI:

"In many ways a local economy is like a bucket that the community would like to keep full. However, economic buckets invariably have holes in them. Every time someone buys something from outside the community, dollars leak out. To balance the dollar drain, money must flow in from outside the local economy. Money comes in when people in other places buy products or services created by local people. Extracted raw materials, harvested crops, or manufactured goods are “exported”; many communities also earn income from tourists and other visitors. However they do it, communities must bring in at least as much money as they spend or they will wither and die. When income falls short of outgoings, communities typically react by trying to recruit outside businesses—a risky and expensive strategy. Even if its accounts balance, a local economy that’s heavily reliant on only one or two industries may be vulnerable to swings in the national or global economy. To achieve greater diversity, the usual response, again, is business recruitment.

"Products of international trade enrich our lives. However, many other imports— notably such necessities as energy, food, water, health care, and housing—can often be supplied locally at no extra cost, and sometimes at a saving. In our analogy of the community bucket, these expenditures are leaks; before trying to pour more money into a leaky bucket, a town should simply plug some of its leaks. Economists call this strategy “import substitution,” but it’s little more than practicing the old adage, “a penny saved is a penny earned,” at the community level. When a community plugs an unnecessary leak, it puts money back into the local economy just as surely as if it had earned it through new industry. Likewise, as individual residents spend and respend the money they’ve saved, the local economic benefit multiplies in the same way it does with new income: more money in circulation creates more value, pays more wages, finances more investments, and ultimately creates more jobs. Unlike income, however, savings are inflation- proof—once you’ve cut out an expense, you no longer need to worry about its price going up. Further, money spent on local goods and services often goes to small businesses, the backbone of most local economies."

Implementing this non-growth approach to development implies an ambitious program by the town to relocalize the production of essential goods and services in town, especially food and energy, and to do this using technologies which are less harmful than the destructive, fossil-fuel based macro-systems on which we currently depend.

Sustainable Violence

In The Know: How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly?

Materialism is bunk

Wholeness is a function of the coherence of a region of space, in the sense of the high degree of relatedness of the entities within that space to each other. We know that ecosystems naturally tend towards greater harmonization of beings, hence higher degrees of biodiversity and lower entropy. The experience of beauty makes us feel related to the world, makes us feel at home with something, that we can find our self within it, that we feel centered in the presence of it.

Wholeness is difficult for us moderns to perceive because our cosmological picture and understanding of material reality. We make the assumption that what is truly real – physical matter – lacks meaning, purpose, subjectivity, self. If you make this assumption, then the feeling of relatedness between your personal self and the universe is mere illusion and scientifically meaningless. The science of complex adaptive systems however is revealing that nature is not a machine (reactive, reducible and constructed) but rather an active self-organizing and evolving system. The concept of perception is coterminous with the concept of life, in the sense that to be alive is to have an inside and an outside and so a need to perceive what to let in and what to keep out. The study of wholeness expands considerably our idea of what life is, and therefore what can be said to perceive, to be sentient, have purposes. The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has.

The feeling of being grounded and centered which people often experience when finally alone with nature is not ‘subjective’, but rather a keen cognitive awareness of the geometry of the wholeness of living processes. What explains this deep affinity between us and the deep geometry of living processes? How is it possible for us to relate so deeply to the world? There is a startling, and yet ancient, belief that the sense of relatedness we feel in nature, in all beautiful things, things exhibiting wholeness, is that we are rediscovering a deeper identity of Self. To find the world beautiful and to feel that you belong there is to experience the limitations of your identity as an ego and to sense your deeper identity as a moment of the Self as a ground of the world.

Trust in Abundance

"The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is HEWN FROM NEGATION, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system -- then they put themselves out of reach of that REPLENTISHMENT OF INVENTION which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a CAUTIOUS DIPPING INTO THE NEGATION THAT LIES OUTSIDE SYSTEM from a position firmly ensconced in system." - Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould is one of my biggest musical and philosophical heros. Like John Cage, Gould’s music is not about creating beautiful things, or mastering something. It is a part of a continuous 24/7/365 meditation, the lifelong cultivation of a state of expanding self-presence in which the Void beyond the everyday world, at the heart of the everyday world, is spoken to, communicated with, understood by.

The human arrogance which reveals itself as the celebration and shadow of the modern world denies the reality of emptiness when it teaches that the cosmos is meaningless and explainable mechanistically. It measures meaning against the cramped space of human concerns. That is when, as Gould puts it, mechanical failures begin to disrupt the human personality.

In order to be artists rather than narcissists, in order to be sustainable, we need to learn how to trust in that abundance again. Fear of scarcity leads to hoarding and desire to control, which leads to conflict and metaphysical anxiety, which cuts off our connection to the Void, which leads to mechanical failure in system, which leads to scarcity. A self-fulfilling belief.

The Psychology of 9/11 Truth

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death... And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past... Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." - George Orwell, 1984.

In many circles of people who consider themselves to be progressive or fearless seekers of truth, the subject of 9/11 truth is still an unwelcome and impolite elephant in the room. Once you think about it, it makes sense. Like the psychology of money, the psychology of history is also very complex, filled with multiple, unconscious and often mutually inconsistent beliefs and desires. Even mentioning it invites smirks and nervous silence. People don't know how to even start to think about it.

People who reject outright questions about the official story of 9/11 instinctively point to a psychological - by which they mean irrational and subjective - motivation to believe in a government conspiracy. They say, history is messy and governments are incompetent, and if you are open to the possibility of a government conspiracy, then you must have an unconscious desire to find meaning and purpose in the world where there is none. Or you childishly believe that the world is run by a few evil men, when in fact the whole thing is out of control and too complex to be controlled. These responses to "9/11 conspiracy theories" are what philosophers call "Ad Hominem" arguments. Ad Hominem means "against the man," which means that instead of attacking someone's argument, you attack the person instead. While extremely effective rhetorically and politically, it is a fallacy of reasoning for obvious reasons. The truth and validity of an argument has logically nothing to do with the person uttering the argument. Logically, it's a desperate way to counter an argument.

The main problem with ad hominem arguments against conspiracy theories is that they also apply to the other side of the debate, and hence cancel themselves out. If there is a psychological tendency in some to believe in government conspiracies, then there is clearly a pronounced psychological tendency in others - I would say the majority - to believe in the moral righteousness of their government. Clearly there is more ego-gratification involved with the latter. There is nothing more disturbing than contemplating the possibility that your own government is being run as a criminal enterprise. After all, Tony Soprano might be bad, but he doesn't have the full weight of the law, finance, police and military systems to back up his racket.

Facts are important here, and my own process of coming to question the 9/11 story as certified by the 9/11 Commission Report was initiated by the jarring facts I learned about the many anomalies surrounding the events of 9/11, many of which are recounted in the video posted below. But as the history of theorizing about the JFK assassination shows so painfully, facts prove nothing. That is because if you find a fact to be just totally incompatible with what other things you believe about the world, then your response to the fact is to assume some explanation for why that fact just isn't a fact. Nothing is more ideological than the selection of facts. Not even pure science works by converting individuals through rational proof. Max Planck's observation about the nature of scientific proof applies even more directly to contrasting interpretations of contemporary political history:“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”

As it turns out, even high-ranking insiders to the official story of what happened on 9/11 have serious doubts about their government's version of the truth. Not only have many intelligence, military and government officials begun to reject the official account as physically impossible and self-contradictory, the chairmen of the 9/11 Commission - Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton - have themselves expressed utter frustration and suspicion over the Pentagon's and the FAA's answers to their questions as to why a trillion air defense system experienced so many improbable and catastrophic failures on the morning of 9/11. This is an absolutely crucial issue. One of the greatest anomalies of the whole tragedy is how multiple highjacked airliners could prance easily through the most heavily monitored and defended airspace in the world without any resistance. In their new book, Kean and Hamilton describe how the Pentagon and FAA repeatedly lied to them about when and how the military responded to the hijackings. Why, they ask, did the shootdown order come only after all the highjacked planes had crashed, and why did the Pentagon and FAA conceal this fact? And how do you square the official Pentagon account - now rejected by Kean and Hamilton - with what actual air traffic controllers have said about the nature of the failure of the air defense system?



Many people who are loathe to contemplate a government conspiracy nevertheless will agree with George Orwell's statement that "History is written by the winners." They can appreciate how a certain sentimentality that people have about politics can mask the raw power and violence involved with the history of modern states. And anti-conspiracy theorists often appreciate Baron Acton's famous adage that power corrupts and "absolute power corrupts absolutely." And yet if these statements are approximately true, it implies that what passes as official history in the most powerful empire in world history must be saturated with ideology and concealing the true origins of its power and stability. Indeed, it would be highly improbable if the powers who benefit from a political-economic system designed from the beginning to centralize control felt some weird ethical obligation to publicize their plans for consolidation of wealth, therefore inviting public oversight, scrutiny, and ultimately resistance.

Apropos of 9/11 truth is the political philosophy of Neoconservatism, based on the thought of one of America's most infamous political philosophers, Leo Strauss. A key feature of Strauss's advocacy of the political theory developed in Plato's Republic is the justification for political leaders to tell "noble lies" to citizens not philosophical enough to appreciate the Truth.

For better or worse, conspiracy, which literally means "breathing together" is how things get done in this world. As one of my sustainability heros Catherine Austin Fitts says, "Don't worry whether there is a conspiracy because if you are not in one, you need to start one."



The painting at the top of this post is Graydon Parrish's The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy. It can be viewed at the New Britain Museum of Art.

Be a Trim-tab

A trim-tab is a miniature rudder on the edge of the main steering rudder on large ships or the wing flaps on airplanes. Due to profound water pressure on the rudder of a large ship, enormous force is required to exert enough pressure on the rudder in order to redirect the vessel. What a trim-tab does is to create a tiny vacuum, which literally sucks the rudder in the desired direction. Created with minimum effort, the small vacuum self-regenerates itself to build up larger vacuums which easily shift the hulking volume of ship into a new trajectory. Hence, a trim-tab is an example of something which is tiny that can have enormous changes in the direction and behavior of complex systems. The idea of a trim-tab is also a central design principle in the sustainability research of Buckminster Fuller who once wrote:

"Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim-tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim-tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim-tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, 'Call me Trimtab'.” (From a R. Buckminster Fuller tape transcript for Barry Farrell for Playboy interview, 2/1972)

In a universe in which everything is in continuous, complex, changing motion following multiple patterns of least resistance, what we need therefore are trim-tab sized inventions to alter the “least resistant directions” of various macro-processes, in order to cause “man’s ecological patterning to evolve in preferred patterns.” So if you are thinking about the problem of fundamental change in society, the trim-tab concept is a very satisfying notion because it helps to counteract the numbing effect of ideology and propaganda, which is to make you believe that how things are now is inevitable and inexorable, and therefore that change is impossible. The trim-tab concept fits together with my own approach to sustainability activism, which is that we don’t need to push the town towards sustainability, we just need to take away the obstructions that are stopping the town from moving in that direction itself. Natural systems have their own goals, desires, intentions and values that are more profound than our human ideas about how the world should world.

Community-Supported Hitchhiking

What a brilliant idea! Use the internet to coordinate commuting and traveling plans with friends and/or strangers to save money, reduce carbon emissions, and to develop the new SHARING ECONOMY. And it's free too.

As in other areas of our chaordic transitional economy, the internet is making it possible to save money and energy by coordinating activities of individuals in ways which were impossible just a couple of years ago. GOLOCO is a company based on the ingenious and simple idea of using the internet to coordinate car-sharing plans. This kind of web-based cooperative activity is the future: cutting out the need for a costly system - requiring lots of physical and bureaucratic infrastructure - by using new technologies to maximize the benefit of productive resources through sharing and the decentralizing of control and responsibility. Capitalism could actually be evolving into something resembling the distant dream of a "free market."

GoLoco is a service that helps people and communities create their own personal public transportation network. Your cars, your friends, your trips, your expenses -- GoLoco puts them all together for a seamless way to share travel and expenses.

(Poster above by UCONN Communication Design student Kristi-Lynn Jacovino.)

A Beautiful Thing is a Tunnel into a Higher Dimension of Reality

"Somehow – whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it – some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity. What, physically, is this unity which seems to speak to us of I?" - Christopher Alexander

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN BEAUTY AND SUSTAINABILITY

by Justin Good

The cosmos is not indifferent to you. In fact, every act of creating or witnessing beauty is both an ethical act, and also a part of a larger cosmological process. It is a cosmological act which serves to bring forward the evolution of Nature, the evolution of the Spirit which created and creates the world.

Sustainability has a metaphysical significance. The reestablishing of social and ecological coherence within a community as a vehicle for sustainable living is metaphysically identical to a new moment of self-recognition of the Void (the universal self, the quantum vacuum, the Akashic Field). If we can discover our own deeper identity within the world, for example, in the sunlight dancing on the cool waters of a forest stream in the early spring, then the metaphysical conclusion is that the self that you find inside your skin-defined ego body and the self you find in the dancing light are two aspects of a single universal Self. This explains the unity of ethics and aesthetics, or of goodness and beauty.

Ethics and aesthetics are the same phenomenon viewed from reciprocal directions in the flow of energy-information-awareness. Both concern the essence of a coherent system: a system is coherent (has a high degree of life or wholeness) if its activity helps both the systems around it and those which it contains. A coherent system is therefore a just or ethical system, because it minimizes its destructive potential and works to harmonize the beings around which it lives. And when we perceive a coherent system, we experience it as beautiful, because we are naturally attuned to perceive wholeness and naturally directed by Spirit to work to nurture and evolve wholeness.

Ethics looks at information-awareness as informing reality. Aesthetics studies the experience of a reality informed by selfness as the universal medium or self-plenum. Beautiful objects are centers of space-time which create multi-dimensional tunnels connecting their spatio-temporally located, physical matter and properties to the universal self plenum which interconnects all centers in the cosmos, past and present. Since the connection one discovers in a moment of transcendent self-discovery is already there, what is being actualized is simply the recognition of an identity that was somehow forgotten.

This echos the Hindu cosmology. When Spirit creates the cosmos, she decided to play a game of hide and seek with herself by involving her self as the material world. Alongside the process of natural evolution, there is consequently a deeper process of spiritual involution – the process of wholeness. In the phenomenon of wholeness, the past meets the future. The new holistic worldview is more realistic than materialism, more meaningful than religion, more optimistic than capitalism, more idealistic than socialism, more alive than humanism. The cosmos is not only alive, it is conscious.

How does this relate to art? The Theory of Art as Unfolding Wholeness sees art making as in the service of the cosmological evolution of Spirit, of the universal Self-like stuff that unites all beings (every point of space-time) in the universe. On this view, the ultimate effort of all serious art is to make things which connect with the I of every person. This ‘I,’ not normally available, is dredged up, forced to the light, forced into the light of day, by the work of art. The more personal art is, the more universal it is. The more alive it is, the more divine it is. The less Ego it has, the more Self it manifests.

The Way of Love is the Path of Fire

Some people go into politics to grow their ego, and others do it to escape their ego. For me, the ego-enhancing motive to become a politician is a complete turn-off, leading to everything I find spiritually and ethically pernicious about politics. The latter motive is deeply appealing, and it was that possibility, together with very deep concerns and dreams about the future of my beloved home town that enticed me into running for First Selectman in Chester last year. Even though we lost, we didn't do too badly for a first attempt.

Our sustainable development platform made so much sense that it has only grown since the election and is alive and well in the new Plan of Conservation and Development as well as activity about town. The Conservation Commission in town is charging ahead with greening the town's municipal buildings and there is a lot of excitement about a community garden, bicycle and pedestrian links between the towns, and bringing back the farmer's market. As gasoline leaps towards $5 per gallon, I think more folks in town will start to realize that we weren't joking about the looming threat of energy famine in the near future.

Last year when I was deciding whether to run or not, I was warned repeatedly by political veterans about the brutality of the local campaigning process. Those voices turned out to be quite correct. This is not surprising given the amount of money at stake in a wealthy town in a wealthy state in a period of extreme uncertainty. I feel no anger or resentment about what happened to me. To the contrary, I feel greatly privileged to have had the opportunity to learn so much about the town and have spoken my mind about what I think is important.

However, it is disappointing that young energetic individuals who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their community should be punished for doing so. This is not the free marketplace of ideas and skills that political campaigns seek to tap, but the arrogance of power, and it does not serve the long-term health of our community. Power is always the biggest elephant in the room, and the hardest for a community to openly talk about.

Members of my own party were mentally unwilling or unable to contemplate that my arrest could have been politically motivated. Others who could accept that possibility had no stomach to speak the truth of their beliefs. As if there is a standard rule of politics that you just NEVER speak the truth. I guess this is why, as Socrates discovered two thousand years ago, philosophy and politics do not mix. But our country is clearly not better off because of that.

Anyone interested in looking into the actual events surrounding my arrest during the campaign can visit the
Justin Good Arrest Information Blog.

The Way of Love is the Path of Fire.

Poor Man's Credit Card: The History and Future of Money

Chester Mind-Body Philosophy Seminar Series ~
Seminar No. 6: Philosophy of Money

Friday, April 25th
5:30 to 7:30 PM
at the Cave, 19-1 Bates Road
Chester (directions)
Two hours of yoga, philosophy, refreshments, wonderment.
Suggested donation: $20

For more info call 526-9186 or email solarclarityct@aol.com

“From coin to paper currency, and from currency to credit card there is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as the movement of information itself. This trend toward an inclusive information is the kind of image represented by the credit card, and approaches once more the character of tribal money. For tribal society, not knowing the specialisms of job or of work, does not specialize money either. Its money can be eaten, drunk, or worn like the new space ships that are now designed to be edible. “Work,” however, does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media)

Primary text for seminar:

• Sarah Gelder, “Beyond Greed and Scarcity: An Interview with Bernard Lietaer”

Other recommended texts:

• Stephen Zarlenga, “A Brief Monetary History of the United States”

• E. C. Riegel, "Breaking The English Tradition"

• Catherine Austin Fitts, "Narcodollars for Beginners"

• Thomas Greco, "New Money for Healthy Communities"

Recommended videos:

• Money As Debt: Paul Grignon's brillian animated film about the history of money.

• G. Edward Griffin's The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

• Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve: Analysis of the American banking system from the Austrian School of Economics (Ludwig von Mises Institute)

• The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America

Sustain your Groove

You are the notes, and we are the flute.
We are the mountains, you are the sounds coming down.
We are the pawns and kings and rooks
you set out on a board: we win or we lose.
We are lions rolling and unrolling on flags.
Your invisible wind carries us through the world.
-Rumi

Earth Day in Chester

Chester Conservation Commission presents

Talking Green Energy for Chester's Future

Celebrate Earth Day with an evening of ecological awareness, discussion and communal celebration of empowering solutions to our most serious ecological and economic challenges.

This FREE program includes:

• FILM SCREENING of "The Connecticut Plan to Fight Global Warming" produced by the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.

• PANEL DISCUSSION by local green energy experts including Rick Hosley (Hale Hill Farm Biofuels) on biodiesel, Hans Lohse (Lifespace Architecture) on green building, and Errol Horner (architect) on solar voltaics.

• WHOLESOME REFRESHMENTS by Chester's River Tavern.

• INFORMATION from Chester's Energy Task Force about clean energy options for local residents and green energy projects for the whole community.

• DRUM CIRCLE bring your drum.

7:30 - 9 PM
Tuesday, April 22nd
Chester Meeting House

Buddhist Economics: Or, What is true wealth and how do you measure it?

Chester Mind-Body Philosophy Seminar Series ~
Seminar No. 5: Introduction to Sustainable Economics

Friday, April 11th
5:30 to 7:30 PM
at the Cave, 19-1 Bates Road
Chester (directions)
Two hours of yoga, philosophy, refreshments, wonderment.
Suggested donation: $20

For more info call 526-9186 or email vood@cummings-good.com



What is wealth? How do you measure true wealth? And what kind of economic system would actually produce real wealth? In this class we will explore the most famous essay by the legendary British economist E. F. Schumacher. This essay, "Buddhist Economics" appeared in Schumacher's seminal book "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," which articulated a compelling vision of a just and sustainable global economic system over thirty years ago.

Readings
1. E. F. Schumacher, "Buddhist Economics"

"From the point of view of Buddhist economics, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale. Just as the modern economist would admit that a high rate of consumption of transport services between a man's home and his place of work signifies a misfortune and not a high standard of life, so the Buddhist would hold that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success. The former tends to take statistics showing an increase in the number of ton/miles per head of the population carried by a country's transport system as proof of economic progress, while to the latter-the Buddhist economist-the same statistics would indicate a highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern of consumption." - E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beauty Economics As If People Mattered

Remembering Who You Are

"Somehow – whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it – some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity. What, physically, is this unity which seems to speak to us of I?" - Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground.

Letter to the Connecticut River Watershed Council

Letter to the Connecticut River Watershed Council

April 3, 2008

Megan Hearne, River Steward (Connecticut)
Alan Morgan, Regional Office Manager
15 Bank Row
Connecticut River Watershed Council
Greenfield, MA 01301

Dear Mr. Morgan and Ms. Hearne,

As someone firmly committed to the ideals of environmentalism and the promise of sustainable economics, I applaud the efforts of your organization, the Connecticut River Watershed Council, to protect the Connecticut River. Growing up in Chester, Connecticut and supremely fortunate to have had access to the miracle of the lower estuary via a 13-ft Boston Whaler, I developed a deep bond to this place and all of its life. Thank you for your valuable work and mission.

I am writing to express my deep disappointment and anger, however, in your views and media efforts last year advocating for a sewer expansion project in my town. In your 2007 annual report you proudly claim to have educated Chester residents about the realities of their wastewater problems, a campaign which resulted in a 2-1 victory at referendum vote supporting a $2.5 million sewer project. Your report fails to mention other interesting facts about the vote; for example, that the town had already voted the project down, by a 2-to-1 margin earlier that year and that the town’s First Selectman and WPCA Board had simply ignored the outcome; that the WPCA Board illegally used public funds to advocate for its position on the vote, outspending the environmental citizen groups opposed to the project 50-to-1; that the engineering firm justifying the necessity of the sewer project faced a patent conflict of interest in being the same firm chosen to design the system; or that the central sewer treatment plants you advocate as the solution to water pollution have their own massive, unresolved and likely unresolvable environmental problems.

During a very contentious debate in town, of which I was a vocal member, the CRWC ran an advertisement in the Hartford Courant on October 18th advocating that Chester citizens vote yes on the October 23 sewer expansion project referendum. The ad was titled “Raw sewage in our rivers” and I’m sure that anyone who was confused over the real facts of the matter was greatly impressed by such a stark fact being asserted by a reputable steward of the environment. As an evironmentalist and a philosopher, I was quite shocked to see your ad, and amazed that an organization like yours dedicated to a healthier world was willing to lie so brazenly.

I asked myself, well, were they lying or were they just ignorant? Perhaps you can enlighten me. In fact, there is no engineering report I’m aware of that says anything about raw sewage being released into the river. Such a condition was never asserted at any WPCA meeting I attended, nor was it even the position of the DEP which was advocating a sewer solution. At worst, the pollution problem concerned trace amounts of phosphorus in a small stream near the community septic system. In fact, in part thanks to you, we still don’t know whether or not we even have a problem. The travesty is that, after spending hundreds of thousands $$ of public money on testing and project design, the Chester WPCA Board had yet (by Oct 23rd) to do the inexpensive tests – for pathogen travel time and measuring nitrogen levels closer to the actual points of concern on the septic system site – that the town’s own engineering firm Nathan Jacobson Assoc. had called for in a 2005 assessment of the site’s potential for onsite remediation using aeration technology. So to this day, it is an open question whether the site could have been remediated without recourse to sewer expansion.

Nitrogen removal from the river is a noble end, but nitrogen was never even measured at the true points of concern on the septic system leeching field, and there’s no evidence that any nitrogen ever so much as made it into the stream. Now – or if and when our grant comes through to build this dinosaur - our waste will be going to Deep River for pretreatment and then on to the Mattabessett plant where it will become sludge. The Mattabessett Plant is currently being considered for a long-term, multi-million dollar upgrade since it wasn’t even designed to remove nitrogen. Meanwhile, instead of composting most of our waste material using a community septic system, we will be sending it away to a central treatment plant which produces a toxic waste - sewage sludge – as an inevitable result of a high entropy treatment process.

Not only is there currently no safe way to dispose of sludge, Mattabassett has been repeatedly cited for illegal mercury emissions from the burning of sludge. Moreover, the entire process is extremely energy intensive, and so essentially unsustainable in a period of spiking energy costs. Cities need to use central sewage treatment plants, but small towns like Chester have a choice, and the new low footprint green technologies are changing the rules about how to deal with our “waste.” There are people at the CT DEP who understand these matters, and others schooled in 1950s sewer science who will never understand the challenge of sustainable economics.

This is a very complicated issue to understand and the only way to make informed decisions that will benefit the long-term health of the community is open debate. What your advertisement actually helped to do was to close down an extremely important community debate by scaring citizens into a false sense of urgency and fear. But the urgency was only legal, not ecological, and politics and money had everything to do with the interpretation of the problem. Becoming a sustainable, healthy society means that we learn to take a whole systems perspective on our infrastructure, and that means that we don’t just remove waste from awareness, but we consider the entire future consequences of our lifestyles. When special interests are making the decisions with obvious short-term payoffs for themselves, nothing is more ideological than “facts.”

I hope that you will consider a broader, whole systems perspective in the future, and that you will adopt a more realistic nose for the ways that politics and money get in the way of healing our beloved river.

Sincerely,
Justin Good

NOTES

• While necessary for large urban areas, centralized sewer treatment plants are dangerous, environmentally-risky, energy-intensive ways to treat water and they have the known, unresolved, and potentially unresolvable problem of producing sewer sludge: the solid residue left over from the water treatment process. As a hazardous waste, sewage sludge cannot be monitored, regulated or remediated. Containing upwards of 80,000 known chemical agents, unknown numbers of biological organisms, virulent and resistant strains of disease organisms as well as synthetic pharmaceutical drugs of every kind, sludge has a chemical make up which is constantly changing, too complex to monitor and too toxic to simply regulate. Centralized treatment methods like central sewers increase the production of sludge. In contrast, onsite biological based wastewater technologies help to increase the natural abilities of leeching fields to break down and filter wastewater on location. Easier to monitor and maintain, onsite systems use less energy, require minimal infrastructure, reduce the production of sludge, incentivize responsibility in the user to be mindful of careless disposal of toxic agents, and do not accelerate growth in by building in spare capacity. (Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems)

• “No Dumping on the Sound”, Hartford Courant, Aug.16th, 2007: “The Environmental Protection Agency notes that untreated sewage in a 20-gallon holding tank (a typical size for many boats) contains the same amount of fecal coliform bacteria as several thousand gallons of discharge from a well-run sewage treatment plant.”

• “City weighing options on sewage,” Middletown Press, Aug. 25th 2007: “The 43-year-old Mattabassett sewage treatment plant has undergone numerous upgrades since it went into operation in 1964. Mattabassett - which is renowned for its superior odor-control technology - is already in the process of planning the next round of improvements, the most expensive of which would satisfy the Department of Environmental Protection's regulations to keep nitrogen out of Long Island Sound. Nitrogen acts as a fertilizer, which causes algae to grow and deprive fish of oxygen... There are some upgrades we are going to do whether Middletown comes in or not," said the plant's Executive Director Brian Armet. "We have one of the best operating waste-water treatment plants. But we were not designed to remove nitrogen." Mattabassett is hoping to produce no more than of 1,040 pounds of a nitrogen a day, which isn't much, considering the plant discharges some 15 to 20 million gallons a day into the Connecticut River. Armet estimated that the upgrades will cost $38 million to $50 million…”

• From Toxics Action Center, Mattabassett won a 2002 Dirty Dozen Award for being an environmental threat of special distinction to the state: "Mattabassett District, Cromwell, 
A Dirty Dozen recipient in 1999 for mercury emissions into the Connecticut River, the Mattabassett District has yet to clean up its act. This year the Mattabassett's sewage treatment plant failed emissions inspections, yet again releasing mercury into the environment. The plant's sewage outfall pours into the Connecticut River, leaving its noxious outflow to hug the banks of the river, and the plant's sludge incinerator burns out-of-district sludge, exposing the Cromwell community to harmful air emissions. The Mattabassett District board has been unresponsive to the community's concerns about the plant's impact on public health and the local environment. Concerned Citizens of Cromwell are calling on the Mattabassett District to stop the out-of-district importation of sludge and to promote policies that ensure the protection of public health and the environment."

The Metaphysics of Collaboration

Presented at the New England Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA)
Building Energy Conference, March 2008, Boston

THE METAPHYSICS OF COLLABORATION

By Justin Good

§1. Ecological collapse is caused by wholeness-destroying systems.

There is a deep integrity, coherence and meaningfulness to the world that is being destroyed by our political-economic system, its design culture and its standard operating system. Despite the beauty of their ecological rationality, large-scale wind farms still jar many visual sensibilities with their industrial look. The truth contained in that nimby response is that industrial infrastructure, and often modernist architectural icons, tends to have a fragmenting effect on the unity of natural landscapes and the systems which unfold that unity or wholeness in stable patterns following multiple patterns of least resistance through time. Although the reality of evil need not be denied, global ecological unsustainability is largely a design problem, although design is an evolutionary process with a cultural and metaphysical dimension.

§2. Sustainability requires wholeness-enhancing systems.

Every great crisis is also a great opportunity. The design flaws of industrial modernism reveal a deeper level of order in the world. When understood in terms of the new science of complex systems theory – a view with interesting similarities to Buddhist and Hindu cosmology - nature is grasped as a nested hierarchy of interrelated whole-parts, or holons, generating a pattern called wholeness. Wholeness is a structure of space-time coherence which causes - and is caused by - systems which preserve and enhance natural and social wealth (i.e. energy-information potentiality). From the light of this dynamic view of natural systems as self-organizing, tending towards low-entropy and coherence, sustainability can be mathematically defined as a property of a system: a system is sustainable if its activity is beneficial to the sub-systems contained within it and the macro-systems within which it is contained. In evolutionary terms, the smallest viable unit affected by natural selection is not the individual organism, nor even the species, but the organism-in-communion with the biosphere, or Gaia. Nature ultimately selects against organisms which act as if they are closed systems. This is why ethics is an objective science. The myth that ethical values are relative and subjective is based on the myth that the individual person is a closed system whose well-being depends in no way on the well-being of the community of beings within which the individual finds herself.

§3. Building systems that enhance wholeness requires systemic change.

It is the process through which new environmental structures emerge that determines the wholeness of those structures. Industrial-era political and economic institutions, and the behaviors they incentivize, rupture wholeness with impunity, causing the genocidal destruction of life. Corporately-managed markets tend to institutionalize irresponsibility by not distinguishing between renewable and non-renewable resources, being biased towards the near future, externalizing costs, centralizing political and economic power, and introducing criminal activity into every aspect of public and private life. Sustainability doesn’t just require ecological accounting and social investment, but structural-evolutionary changes in markets, corporations and governments. Complex systems are capable of existing in different stable states, e.g. a collection of water molecules can exist as liquid, solid or gas. Sustainability requires creating the conditions for system evolution to occur.

§4. Systemic change requires collaborative action.

The system is too complex and dynamic to be controlled. Given enough integration of information, however, the system can adapt itself to a higher condition of balance and efficiency, stabilizing itself better than any individual human efforts ever could. Redesigning and reprogramming political and economic institutions to function in ways which harmonize with stable natural systems requires a whole-systems perspective. Whole-systems planning and building requires “getting the system into the room,” ideally, integrating and coordinating information and interests from every relevant sub-system, i.e. every being affected by planning efforts. Without coordinated effort and participation from all stakeholders, mitigation attempts amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. With the synergistic integration of information that occurs in genuine collaboration, complex systems evolve themselves, following new paths of least resistance assembled through the collaboration. Complex systems do not behave like objects, they behave like minds, like selves. They literally have selves, have minds.

§5. Collaborative action requires a common interest.

The maximizing of personal autonomy is taken to be one of the chief ethical virtues of free markets, where a larger coordination occurs, like order out of chaos, from the unplanned actions of individuals seeking their own “personal self-interest.” In this picture, the boundary of the self is taken to be the personal skin-defined ego, and its interest is characterized as the maximization of personal pleasurable well-being via the maximizing of the consumption of resources. Both assumptions, while politically useful for a while back, are ecologically, psychologically and metaphysically false. A sustainable economics will be built on the more venerable, and old-fashioned premise of trust in abundance, rather than postulated greed and scarcity. If social and natural wholeness structures (i.e. wealth) are included in the accounting of capital, then economic institutions and economic relationships will be required which support, and are supported by, a broader sense of self and of interest. Sustainability requires the psychological development of selves past the stage of ego-centric and tribal-centric perception to a genuinely transpersonal identity.

§6. Common interest requires the fusing of separate interests.

Given the improbable condition of perfect information and perfect economic freedom, transactional (e.g. monetary) economic interactions between individuals can lead to efficient allocation of resources, but never to long-term commitments to each other, to a place, or to the experience of the sacredness of the world. As Marshall Mcluhan put it, capitalism obsolesces community responsibility. The geometrical integrity of a healthy social and natural environment is a value and an end in itself which the individualism incentivized by “free markets” transforms into the abstract wealth of financial capital. Without economic opportunities to transcend the narrow logic of “self-interest,” individuals can never evolve past narrow selfish regard to perception of the whole system.

§7. The fusing of separate interests requires a transformation of self.

One can only form the intention to support the evolution of human society if one can grasp one’s own true identity with this larger system of Life. Merely thinking or believing that one’s true identity transcends the concern-boundaries of one’s own body-ego is not enough to empower true change. One can only grasp one’s true transpersonal identity if one has had a transforming experience and discovers this larger and deeper identity as a perceivable fact. Transformation of self is necessary in order to liberate the energy required to work for change. All the energy necessary for opening up to the infinite possibilities for change in one’s daily life is potentially available inside, but has been captured by addictive relationships to ego-boosting substances, technologies, images and daily comfort-inducing rituals. One’s ability to enact system change in the world rests on one’s ability to release one’s inner spiritual energies from the grip of fear, judgment, self-narcissism and self-doubt. Moreover, by laying down ego-boosting fears and judgments, one’s spiritual pores are opened up, allowing one to capture and transform ambient energy in the environment into self-intensifying energy. Self-intensifying energy, often experienced in moments when one’s dignity and creativity as a divine and living being are acknowledged, is what makes one feel alive and awake.

§8. A transformation of self requires the perception of a transpersonal self in the experience of mutual self-discovery.

Ordinary transactional interactions with others reassert the illusion of the independence of the ego-self. The efficiency of monetary transactions is spiritually the lowest level of interaction. A slightly higher level of interaction is involved with the giving of professional or friendly advice or the sharing of information, where a common interest in mutual well-being is tacitly acknowledged. Still higher are moments of giving, where a gift is offered without the condition of reciprocity, which explicitly actualizes awareness of a deeper underlying unity of identity between the giver and the receiver. Gift giving transcends by dis-empowering the illusion of separateness. The highest level of interaction involves a moment of mutual self-discovery, where one discovers something about oneself that could only have been uncovered through the interaction with the other. Discovering that one’s own self-knowledge is bound up necessarily with the self-knowledge of others directly reveals the deeper metaphysical unity of self – an experience sufficient for releasing spiritual transformation.

§9. The experience of mutual self-discovery in a community requires a special learning process.

Moments of mutual self-discovery can occur just about anywhere. In a clothing store, for example, a person might discover something about herself through a particular article of clothing or fashion which releases part of her identity she was unaware of. That person will now go to that store not simply to buy things, but to find herself. That deeper connection is the basis for the kind of long-term commitments to each other which sustainability requires. In the communal process of working collaboratively towards sustainability, what is required are contexts where such moments can arise for whole sections of the community. Call these contexts “learning ecologies.” A learning ecology is a project or situation in which individuals work towards understanding an aspect of their natural, social or economic environment which reveals something fundamental about their collective fate, their values, their identities. Constructing a town-wide energy audit, which paints a landscape image of a community’s energy consumption, is an example of a community learning ecology. Without healthy learning ecologies which afford such moments, individual efforts at collaboration will degenerate into a focus on “building political leverage and power rather than creating new knowledge and possibilities together" (Peter Senge).

§10. A special learning process frees the transpersonal self to unfold wholeness-helping structure spontaneously within the biotic community.

When one experiences a larger self, a community-sized self, an invisible bond is uncovered, through which information from a deeper pool of life activity can be transmitted to the individual. This information is a source of energy which not only empowers the individual to the level of spontaneous, patient, loving commitment to the long-term health of the community. It empowers her to attain literally super-human (relative to her ordinary expectations) level of openness to the inherent ambient wisdom of the community-organism. This openness literally elevates her intelligence, dramatically increases the acuteness of her perceptions, the force of her compassion, and feels like pure ecstasy. As an agent of a larger process of Becoming, the “individual” draws upon a source of energy and wisdom which transcends her own experiences and capacities.
“Things happen for a reason.” I used to smile when I heard someone utter that thought, that feeling, and I would think to myself: Things happen for trillions reasons, each of which is equally significant, hence equally insignificant. But that materialist picture of reality is an unrealistic view of the world based on the cumbersome mechanistic metaphysics of 18th century science. More directly, it contradicts our feeling for wholeness in the world. The science of wholeness in fact reveals that “profound coordination of the whole is occurring" (Christopher Alexander). Things do happen for a reason, and the cosmic system has purposes for us whose true meaning and beauty and cosmic significance easily overwhelm our sense of wonder and understanding and expectations when we are lucky enough to grasp them.

§11. When the transpersonal self is freed to unfold wholeness in the world, the cosmos recognizes herself (himself or itself) again as the underlying metaphysical unity within materially-evolving systems.

The reestablishing of social and ecological coherence within a community as a vehicle for sustainable living is metaphysically identical to a new moment of self-recognition of the Void (the universal self, the quantum vacuum, the Akashic Field). If we can discover our own deeper identity within the world, for example, in the sunlight dancing on the cool waters of a forest stream in the early spring, then the metaphysical conclusion is that the self that you find inside your skin-defined ego body and the self you find in the dancing light are two aspects of a single universal Self. This explains the unity of ethics and aesthetics, or of goodness and beauty. Ethics and aesthetics are the same phenomenon viewed from reciprocal directions in the flow of energy-information-awareness. Ethics looks at information-awareness as informing reality. Aesthetics studies the experience of a reality informed by selfness as the universal medium or self-plenum. Beautiful objects are centers of space-time which create multi-dimensional tunnels connecting their spatio-temporally located, physical matter and properties to the universal self plenum which interconnects all centers in the cosmos, past and present. Since the connection one discovers in a moment of transcendent self-discovery is already there, what is being actualized is simply the recognition of an identity that was somehow forgotten. This echos the Hindu cosmology. When Spirit creates the cosmos, she decided to play a game of hide and seek with herself by involving her self as the material world. Alongside the process of natural evolution, there is consequently a deeper process of spiritual involution – the process of wholeness. In the phenomenon of wholeness, the past meets the future. The new holistic worldview is more realistic than materialism, more meaningful than religion, more optimistic than capitalism, more idealistic than socialism, more alive than humanism. The cosmos is not only alive, it is conscious.

Sustainable Love

Chester Mind-Body Philosophy Seminar Series ~
Seminar No. 3: Can Love Last? Philosophy of Romantic Intimacy

Friday, March 28th
5:30 to 7:30 PM
at the Cave, 19-1 Bates Road
Chester (directions)
Suggested donation: $20

For more info call 526-9186 or email vood@cummings-good.com



In this class we will explore the ancient question concerning the sustainability of romantic intimacy. Does romantic love necessarily fade with familiarity and time, or can it be maintained and even intensified?

Our class will focus on the views of the late Stephen Mitchell, the now legendary psychoanalyst who wrote his last book on this pressing topic. Mitchell’s theory is the most optimistic theory by any psychologist we know of, since he argues that romance can in fact be sustained and that the reasons it dies have to do with our unconscious sabotoging of our desires. We mentally reduce the charms of our love in order to protect ourselves from disappointment.

Readings

1. You can read selections from his last great work Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance through Time here at Google Books.

2. There is also a nice review of the book here at Salon.com.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

The special role that Artists have in healing the planet

Dr. Vood’s Beginner’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media and art: How to study media-technologies ecologically? Or, The special role that Artists have in healing the planet

§1. Ecological definition of medium-technology. Technology as an environment.

Media (technology) always must be understood as an extension of the human mind-body. This is a broader definition of a medium than is usually meant, since it applies not just to communication but every technological innovation starting with language. By altering the relationship between our self-system and the environmental systems within which we live, we unintentionally cause changes to both our self and the environment. Because media are extensions of our mind body, We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

E.g. Clothing extends skin, shoes extend soles of feet, chairs extend the back, automobiles extend legs and stomach, phonetic literacy extends eyes and mind, electric media extend the entire nervous system.

§2. Psychological obstructions to studying media-technologies. The medium is the message.

As extensions of our body-mind, our use of media technologies changes us psychologically and socially. There are two basic reasons why it is very difficult for us to become aware of these changes.

• Rearview-mirror view of the world
The immediate sensory environment – the context within which things are experienced - is itself very difficult to experience because it ‘saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly.’ Perception is always only aware of changes in the field of awareness. Unless the field of awareness is itself changing quickly, it cannot become an object of perception. So we tend to experience the present in terms the prior environment which is visible from the outside.

• Narcissus narcosis, or Auto-amputation
Extensions of the human mind-body result in new relationships between our perceptual and bodily capacities, disrupting our self-system and giving rise to auto-protective measures, i.e. numbness (psychic anaesthesia, emotional dissociation, PTSD. One part of the system is isolated from the other parts in order to protect the whole nervous system. Our use of technologies easily becomes addictive, where we block out the psychic dissonance of the new media environment by absorbing ourselves in sense of control offered by the new technology.

§3. Ecological study of technology requires holism. Pattern recognition vs. classification

Because the environment is not a thing but a changing network of relationships which itself shapes our attention and awareness, there is no technical or specialized study of media ecology. An effective approach must be flexible, creative, not rooted in a particular theory or fixed point of view, and general enough to ‘encompass the entire environmental matrix which is in constant flux.’ Traditionally Artists have been the only people to develop this approach to perceiving ground rather than just figure.

§4. Art as anti-narcotic. Aesthetics is the new ethics.

Technical knowledge cannot solve the problem of numbness since technical knowledge is always about how to do something, not why something should be done or how personal and social identity are unconsciously altered by the use of a technological solution to a problem. So what kind of knowledge can help us avoid cultural narcosis? Only ART can. Art is the ability to overcome perceptual dissonance, not by becoming numb to the dissonance, but by REVEALING it, and therefore discovering a new way to reach a DEEPER LEVEL OF EQUILIBRIUM with the environment. The artist bridges the gap between past and future, reveals the dangers of the new media environment to others, unifies her experience rather than remaining fragmented, studies the distortions of experience created by our OUT-OF-BALANCE RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE, is the canary in the mineshaft warning us of spiritually-poisonous ways of relating to each other and the world, allows us to accept our experiences for what they truly are, frees our mind. Artists are the only people who actually live in the Present. The technical side of art is the technology of creating effects. The artist can see the present environment because she studies how to reproduce effects of the environment, but in a way that slows down the process to make it perceivable.

§5. Mcluhan’s conceptual toolbox for enhancing pattern recognition. Ideas as probes.

Marshall Mcluhan’s approach is pragmatic, not about explaining technological change but exploring and revealing its unconscious effects on personal and social behavior, experience and self-awareness. His many obwservations can be fit into three basic ways to approach the study of technology: (1) historical studies of the interface between technological innovation and social/psychological change, (2) hot-cool information interface characteristics, and (3) the tetrad form, or the four laws of media.

(a) Environmental history of technology

Looking at the history of technology is a powerful way to see patterns in experience which are otherwise impossible to perceive in the present environment. An overview of western history reveals that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication. Mcluhan’s analysis reveals four basic technological epochs which are defined in terms of the primary vehicle of communication: oral, phonetic-literate, typographic, and electric.

Pre-literate 1.00,000 - 4000 BCE (stone age society was amazingly stable and in touch)
Phonetic Literate 4000 BCE -1500 CE (explosive growth)
Typographic Literacy 1500 - 1950 (industrial modernism)
Post-literacy (retribalized) 1850 - 2010? (can the noosphere, the global nervous-cognitive system, restore balance to the biosphere?)

People living within these different periods have different experiences of space/time, different sensory balances, different ideas about knowledge, reality, causality, different social,political and economic institutions, and different self-conceptions.

(b) Hot-cool information interface characteristics

All media technologies can be compared with respect to the quality of their interface with the human mind.

HOT medium:
• extends a single sense
• offers high definition (complete filling in of) information
• little completion or active participation by recipient req.
• tends to exclude (sense from awareness, individual from group)
• leads to specialization, fragmentation
• numbs larger awareness, lessens total perception
• short, intense experiences
• tends to hijack attention

COOL medium:
• extends multiple senses
• offers low definition (incomplete filling in of) information
• requires high participation, active completion
• tends to include/integrate information and individuals into communities)
• leads to generalization, consolidation
• engages background awareness
• longer, sustained experiences

(c) Four ecological laws of media.

The environmental effects of technological innovations can be classified according to four laws of media which articulate four aspects involved in technological change. Normally, we only think of the first two categories of change.

• ENHANCE: What does the new medium improve or enhance, make possible or accelerate?
• OBSOLESCE: What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new medium?
• RETRIEVE: What earlier action or service is brought back into play by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and becomes an essential part of the new form?
• REVERSE: When pushed to its limits, of its potential, the new form will reverse what was its original characteristics. What is the potential reversal of the new form?

E.g. Automobile: enhance speed, obsolesces horse and buggy, retrieves nomadism, reverses into gridlock.

Cellphone: enhances voice, obsolesces phone booth, retrieves childhood yelling, reverses freedom into being a leash.

Capitalism: enhances liberty (of trade), obsoleses community responsibility, retrieves hunter-gatherer patterns, reverses abundance into starvation-scarcity.

§6. Themes from the environmental history of technology

(a) Visuality, literacy and detribalization

Many of our modernist assumptions, regarding either the neutrality or the intrinsic goodness of technological development, have obscured the cultural sacrifice we made in leaving oral-tribal society, which had established a balance with the environment, a harmonious internal balance of sensory experiences, a stable economic and political order, a deeply immersive involvement in the world. Literacy and symbolic consciousness generally, spreads our awareness past the present into the past and future, and into abstract possibilities which empowers us while at the same time impoverishing and dimming down the fullness of our experience. Literacy extends vision into a master sense, leading to the detached, linear, systematizing mentality of rationalism. Vision can touc h without being touched.

(b) Civilization has been a process of imbalance, ecological Instability, system slippage

Depression, mental illnesses, apathy, drug addictions and other compulsive-obsessive behaviors occur in ‘civilized’ or ‘modern’ societies, i.e. societies suffering from a continuous process of uncontrolled explosion/implosion, creating perpetual disequilibrium and stress from constant perceptual dissonance. Some technologies that are involved with our current civilizational disequilibrium with the world: phonetic literacy and typography, automobiles, paper/digital currency system, electricity, internet, totalitarian agriculture, certain ideas about: development, what it means to be human, to be happy, to be in control, to be alive. The ills of technology have nothing to do with it being unnatural, but with its introducing perpetual disequilibrium into a process which strives for equilibrium or BALANCE. Is there a way out of this pattern?

(c) Electric culture, space-time compaction and retribalization

Electric media do not merely extend one sense, they extend the entire nervous system, therefore extending self-awareness or consciousness past the body-defined self. The virtually instantaneous effect of electricity speeds up the form of every technology, leading to the establishment of a truly global consciousness (noosphere). We are now faced with trying to understand the infinite ramifications of INFORMATION SOCIETY while we still have time to effect its development. A key tension concerns the differences between the SELF as a disembodied, placeless cyberanimal which simply processes information and the self as a living being connected, and needing to be connected to a place and a time.

(d) Ethics of technology: comfort versus joy

Ignorance is not blissful, it is at best comfortable. True bliss requires optimal experience: i.e. a balance between being challenged and being in control. Technology presents us with a basic problem: how do we avoid narcissus narcosis in the use of new technologies?

Image above by Daniel Buttrey

Local continuing education for seriously playful thinkers

Spring 2008 Chester Mind-Body Philosophy Seminar Series

No.1: "Issues in Twenty-First Century Philosophy"

An innovative mix of philosophy and yoga in a relaxed salon setting.

This seminar offers a casual but intense survey of exciting issues in contemporary philosophy. It is designed to be both cumulative and also modular, so that later classes do not presuppose knowledge from earlier classes. The reading materials for each class are available online, at the course blog, so no books are required. Students who sign up for the entire series receive a discount per course and are entitled to detailed feedback on an optional paper assignment.

SCHEDULE

• 10 Fridays, 5:30 to 7:30 PM starting March 7th.

• $20 per session. $180 for the whole ten week course. Each session includes 20 minutes of circus yoga mind-body relaxation and a 90 minute directed philosophy seminar. Refreshments served.

• Classes will be held at The Cave, 19-1 Bates Road, Chester.

INSTRUCTORS

• Jen Taylor (BA Vassar) is a philosopher, Yoga instructor and political activist who studied engaged Buddhism with the legendary Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh. Her philosophical work focuses on gender and sexual politics, metaphysics, ecofeminism and the cultural mythology of partnership societies.

• Justin Good (BA SUNY Purchase, PHD Boston University) is a philosopher and community organizer whose philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of mind, political and environmental philosophy, aesthetics and epistemology. He teaches philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the University of Hartford.

CURRICULUM

3/7 The Sense of Being Stared At:
The Mind-Body Problem and the Extended Mind Hypothesis

3/14 Metaphysics of Pool:
Exploring the Experiential Body-Mind

3/21 Clowning as a Spiritual Vocation:
The Laughing Body and the Trickster Archetype

3/28 Can Love Last?
Philosophy of Romantic Intimacy

4/4 Gross Domestic Happiness:
Buddhist Economics and Essence of True Wealth

4/11 Art and Truth:
Plato’s Challenge to All Future Artists

4/18 Xena Studies:
Cultural Mythology of Gender Archetypes

4/25 Poor Man’s Credit Card:
The History and Future of Money

5/2 Legendary Female Warriors:
Resistance Movements in the History of Patriarchy

5/9 The Aesthetics of Green Energy:
Wind Farms and the Theory of Wholeness


To reserve a spot for the complete course, or for individual sessions call 860-526-9186 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

Visit the course blog at www.chestermindbody.wordpress.com. Readings for courses will be available soon!

What is the philosophy of the future?

Listen Globally, Groove Locally

Chester's "Exit 6" Blues, Rhythm and Roll (+ Banjo) band, featuring Jason Baker, Justin Good, Chris Gosman, Joell Jacob, Hans Lohse, Leif Nilsson, Mark Zanardi, and Jeremy Ziemann will perform live on Saturday Night, March 1, 2008 at Haddam Pizza, 1617 Saybrook Road, Haddam, CT, starting at 9:30 PM.

Call (860) 345-4472 for more information on Haddam Pizza.
Call (860) 526-2077 for information about "The Exit 6 Band" or visit Nilsson Studios.

Community Cinema

Where would Jesus bank?

"Where would Jesus bank?" by Catherine Austin Fitts.

"Jesus acted with ferocious and bold integrity when he threw the money changers out of the temple. Needless to say, he hiccuped their cash flows on what otherwise would have been a big grossing day. Their business model threatened, the priests who managed the money changers insisted that the Romans crucify Jesus. The Romans tried to pawn the problem off on the local king, Herod, who ducked and sent Jesus back to the Romans. The Romans, still looking for a way out, tried a flogging. That did not work. The priests meanwhile had succeeded in persuading the crowd to support them and scapegoat Jesus. Thirsting for a crucifixion, the crowd voted to set the criminal Barabbas free instead of Jesus.

"Jesus died because the crowd voted for the criminal enterprise. The crowd voted for the priests and their rich endowments and their alliance with the money changers. The crowd did not ask “Cui Bono?” which is Latin for “who benefits?” If they had, they would have seen the real deal on who was making money on the death of Jesus and voted with their conscience, and for their own best interests instead. It's 2000 Years Later and We're Still Voting for the Criminals..." (read on)

if you do not know Catherine Austin Fitts and are interested in how sustainable economics requires changing the way money works, you must read her! Start with this interview with her about Tape Worm Economics.

King's Call for a Worldwide Fellowship Still Ringing

King gave this speech one year before he was assassinated. The way of love is the path of fire.

What is the way of love? The following text is excerpted from Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Strive Towards Freedom" (1958). In this section, King articulates six principles of non-violence which he believes reflect the political and moral embodiment of love, as practiced by Gandhi.

"First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one used this method because he is afraid, he is not truly nonviolent. That is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight. He made this statement conscious of the fact that there is always another alternative: no individual or group need ever submit to any wrong, nor need they use violence to right the wrong; there is the way of nonviolent resistance. This is ultimately the way for the strong man. It is not a method of stagnant passivity. The phrase "passive resistance" often gives the false impression that this is a sort of "do-nothing method" in which the resister quietly and passively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth. For while the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponents that he is wrong. The method is passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. It is not passive resistance to evil, it is active nonviolent resistant to evil.

"A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that is does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister may often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends in themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.

"A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the person victimized by the evil. If he is opposing racial injustice, the nonviolent resister has the vision to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in the city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory, it will be a victory not merely for 50,000 Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out there to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust."

"A fourth point that characterizes nonviolent resistance is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back. "Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but is must be our blood," Gandhi said to his countrymen. The nonviolent resister is willing to accept violence if necessary, but never to inflict it. He does not seek to dodge jail. If going to jail is necessary, he enters it "as a bridegroom enters the bride's chamber."

"One may well ask: "What is the nonviolent resister's justification for this ordeal to which he invites men, for this mass political application of the ancient doctrine of turning the other cheek?" The answer is found in the realization that unearned suffering is redemptive. Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities. "Things of fundamental importance to people are not secured by reason alone, but have to be purchased with their suffering," said Gandhi. He continued: "Suffering is infinitely more powerful than the law of the jungle for converting the opponent and opening his ears which are otherwise shut to the voice of reason."

"A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of lour lives.

"In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental or affectionate emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. Love in this connection means understanding, redemptive good will. Here the Greek language comes to our aid. There are three words for love in the Greek New testament. First, there is eros. In Platonic philosophy eros meant the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love. Second, there is philia which means intimate affection between personal friends. Philia denotes a sort of reciprocal love; the person loves because he is loved. When we speak of loving those who oppose us, we refer to neither eros nor philia; we speak of love which is expressed in the Greek word Agape. Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.

"Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor (1 Cor. 10-24). 'Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely "neighbor-regarding concern for others," which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on account of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend's sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.

"Another basic point about agape is that it springs from the need of the other person - his need for belonging to the best of the human family. The Samaritan who helped the Jew in the Jericho Road was "good" because he responded to the human need that he was presented with. God's love is eternal and fails not because man needs his love. St. Paul assures us that the loving act of redemption was done "while we were yet sinners" - that is, at the point of our greatest need for love. Since the white man's personality is greatly distorted by segregation, and his soul is greatly scarred, he needs the love of the Negro. The Negro must love the white man, because the white man needs his love to remove his tensions, insecurities and fears. Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to sacrifice in the interest of mutuality. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn't stop at the first mile, but goes the second mile to restore community. The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation. Therefore, if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love. If I meet hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community. Booker T. Washington was right:"Let no man pull you so low that he makes you hate him." When he pulls you that low he brings you to the point of working against community; he drags you to the point of defying creation, and thereby becoming depersonalized.

"In the final analysis, agape means recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. For example, white men often refuse federal aid to education in order to avoid giving the Negro his rights; but because all men are brothers they cannot deny Negro children without harming their own. They end, all efforts to the contrary, by hurting themselves. Why is this? Because men are brothers. If you harm me, you harm yourself.

"Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken community together. When I am commanded to love, I am commanded to restore community, to resist injustice, to meet the needs of my brothers.

"A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future. This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. It is true that there are devout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God. But even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness. Whether we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a Personal Being of matchless power and infinite love, there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole."

Healing the Mind-Body-Soul Connection is not just Key to Sustainability, it's Lots of Fun!

"In our genetic past, we were swinging in trees. Males and females had tremendous upper body strength. We’ve given this up, but it’s still in there.

"Trapeze and handstand practice work with the body’s own weight, reducing risk of injury by giving the muscles a chance to calibrate to their natural capacities.

"Handstands or inversions (being upside down) are tremendous for oxygen circulation, particularly to the brain. Effects include increased concentration and sense of calm.

"On the trapeze, there is a release in the body stretch accessed swinging in the air not available in gravity bound, ground work.

"Trapeze and acrobatics take work. You can’t fake them. This makes a real impression in a child’s mind and cultivates the habit of discipline."

- From Jen Taylor's CircusSchool website.
















CircusSchool is Jen Taylor’s unique and innovative approach to teaching dance, yoga and mind/body mindfulness to children & adults in a focused but relaxed manner. As a dancer, yoga instructor, teacher and philosopher, Ms. Taylor approaches teaching the art of body movement and mindful creativity from a rich diversity of traditions and perspectives. Trained in creative movement play, tumbling, trapeze and acrobatics, as well as African dance and improvisation, Taylor helps children and adults discover their native inner bodily wisdom and youthful flexibility through interactive and imaginative exercises and games.

An Inconvenient Truth is Coming to Chester

A live presentation by Dr. Laurence Davis about the planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it.

Saturday, February 16th, 7-9 PM
Chester Meeting House
4 Liberty Street, Chester

This is a presentation by The Climate Project, in partnership with the Earth Charter Community of the Lower Valley and the Chester Conservation Commission.

For more information visit The Climate Project.

Email eccolov@comcast.net to reserve a seat.
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Impacts of Climate Change on New England (Source: ctclimatechange.com)

The findings of the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment show that the Northeast has been warming at a rate of nearly 0.5 degrees F per decade since 1970, with winter temperatures rising faster, at a rate of 1.3 degrees F per decade since 1970. This warming correlates with the following climate changes across the region:

• More frequent days with temperatures above 90 degrees F
• A longer growing season
• Less winter precipitation falling as snow and more as rain
• Reduced snowpack and increased snow density
• Earlier breakup of winter ice on lakes and rivers
• Earlier spring snow melt resulting in earlier peak river flows
• Rising sea-surface temperatures and sea levels

(Source: "Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast: Science, Impacts, and Solutions")

"Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast: Science, Impacts, and Solutions" ( July 2007), a report of the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment, projects climate impacts on New England over the next century. The projections are based on emissions choices we make today.

Click here to view Oct 9, 2007 powerpoint presentation on climate impacts by Gary Yohe (Wesleyan University and IPCC lead author) and Nancy Cole (Union of Concerned Scientists).

Psychedelic Soul to Groove your #&**!! off. Extend your nervous system using electricity and funk. Catch Exit 6, an eight-piece soul rock group plus banjo for improv and dancing at the Ivoryton Tavern.

The Ivoryton Tavern
8 Summitt St, Ivoryton, CT
(860) 767-1449
Directions to the Tavern

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"Play" by Justin Good

Even on a Monday morning, when eternity is buried beneath a week’s worth of duties, children and dogs can be there in a moment, at the toss of a ball or a curious shadow that looks like a man. This is not their innocence, rather their ageless and infinite wisdom, the evolving joy of organic choice, the opening of possibilities, when time is measured by the rhythm of the cards, or the blocks or the notes. This isn’t the opposite of work, but the unfolding of the world, through the funniest joke or the spontaneous game of catch.

Being on the clock, we seem to accept that alienation is the price of maturity, and we march off to the future, where we speculate the Present will be secured. As if some value deeper than Reality, was worth our sentimental sacrifice, of ordinary everydayness to the religion of Progress. What kind of a culture would forget that creating an opening in Time should be the goal of all economics?

When you are there in PLAY, an improbable balance is attained between freedom and definition, and between challenge and control, the self can breathe. Suddenly you are Here, grasping the purest wealth, your unalloyed attention sparkling. Everything makes sense and is also up in the air where, as you can now so clearly see, it really belongs.

-From the new 2008 Cummings & Good calendar.

How Space-Time Becomes Friends with Itself

"Ecological design is not a style. It is a mode of engagement and partnership with nature that is not bound to a particular design profession." - Sim van der Ryn.

"The ordinary Indian woman who worships the tulsi plant worships the cosmic as symbolized in the plant. The peasants who treat seeds as sacred, see in them the connection to the universe... In most sustainable traditional cultures, the great and the small have been linked so that limits, restraints, responsibilities are always transparent and cannot be externalized. The great exists in the small and hence every act has not only global but cosmic implications. Humble local acts, each expressing the whole web of life, adds up to a sustainable culture." - Vandana Shiva

THE COSMOLOGY OF BEAUTY

By Justin Good

There is a coherence to natural systems, a deep process of unfolding wholeness perceivable at every level of scale within the natural world, that it is good for us to support. The more we understand the processes within nature that maintain and extend the wholeness of the world, the more do we understand the larger ecological meaning of purpose, of meaning, of value and of consciousness.

Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness. Wholeness is an objective property of nature and natural systems. This is a very deep quality of a place, a work of art, an organism, that affects us deeply. For a neighborhood, it is a sense of belonging, a sense that everything feels right, natural, stable, alive – most especially a feeling of life, and a feeling of being yourself. Industrial structures and processes rupture wholeness with impunity. According to the theory of wholeness, the ugliness we see and feel about that destruction is a keen perception into the order of a certain region of space.

Wholeness is a function of the coherence of a region of space, in the sense of the high degree of relatedness of the entities within that space to each other. We know that ecosystems naturally tend towards greater harmonization of beings, hence higher degrees of biodiversity and lower entropy. The experience of beauty makes us feel related to the world, makes us feel at home with something, that we can find our self within it, that we feel centered in the presence of it.

Wholeness is difficult for us moderns to perceive because our cosmological picture and understanding of material reality. We make the assumption that what is truly real – physical matter – lacks meaning, purpose, subjectivity, self. If you make this assumption, then the feeling of relatedness between your personal self and the universe is mere illusion and scientifically meaningless. The science of complex adaptive systems however is revealing that nature is not a machine (reactive, reducible and constructed) but rather an active self-organizing and evolving system. The concept of perception is coterminous with the concept of life, in the sense that to be alive is to have an inside and an outside and so a need to perceive what to let in and what to keep out. The study of wholeness expands considerably our idea of what life is, and therefore what can be said to perceive, to be sentient, have purposes. The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has.

The difference between living and non-living form has to do with the process through which the form came to be. One can see, just by looking, that something with living form came to be by way of a process of unfolding, where each step of the growing grew out of the prior steps, and where each development enhanced the structure (the wholeness) that already existed. What lacks living form has the look of something that was put together. Its structure did not unfold out of itself. Frankenstein is the symbol of monsterousness because of his put-together look. Suburban sprawl has this look, this feel, as do many architectural icons of modernity.

The feeling of being grounded and centered which people often experience when finally alone with nature is not ‘subjective’, but rather a keen cognitive awareness of the geometry of the wholeness of living processes. What explains this deep affinity between us and the deep geometry of living processes? How is it possible for us to relate so deeply to the world? There is a startling, and yet ancient, belief that the sense of relatedness we feel in nature, in all beautiful things, things exhibiting wholeness, is that we are rediscovering a deeper identity of Self. To find the world beautiful and to feel that you belong there is to experience the limitations of your identity as an ego and to sense your deeper identity as a moment of the Self as a ground of the world.

Some texts:

1. Christopher Alexander's paper "New Concepts in Complexity Theory arising from Studies in the Field of Architecture". This summarizes the theory of form as he explicates it through the four meditative volumes in his masterpiece "The Nature of Order." What is the cultural aesthetic of the future? This is it.

2. Community Solution's documentary "The power of community: How cuba survived Peak Oil. Lessons we ALL need to know to prepare for the realities comming to our future". This sutainability group went to Cuba to see how well that post-Soviet era nation-state dealt with an artifical Peak Oil scenario after it lost most of its petroleum imports from Russia in the early 1990s.

The Cockaponsett Energy Cooperative

What are the things communities could decide if they owned their own sustainable energy resources? - Lynn Benander





BLUEPRINT FOR A COMMUNITY-OWNED CLEAN ENERGY COMPANY

Are you concerned about rising energy prices? Global warming? What about your taxes going up due to the rising costs of municipal services? Is the fall of the US dollar keeping you up at night? All of these problems are deep and interrelated, and together they constitute a mega-crisis that if ignored, will severely challenge our long-term social, economic and environmental health here in Chester. But all great crises are also great opportunities for change, if we are proactive and forward thinking in our response, rather than reactive and averse to new ideas.

In fact, all of these problems can be addressed in a very concrete and practical way by rethinking how we create and finance the production of energy resources. A group of citizens in Chester, Deep River and East Haddam have recently formed a working group, the Cockaponsett Energy Cooperative, which is now developing a business model to solve all of these problems in one fell swoop.

What is a community energy cooperative and how does it address these deep problems? A community energy cooperative is a community-owned and managed renewable energy corporation which serves three very important functions: 1) it creates a local investment circle, allowing citizens as well as private investors to invest in local renewable energy projects at the community level, 2) actually constructs onsite renewable energy resources in order to reduce carbon emissions while making the community less dependent on imported hydrocarbon fuels and boosting the sustainability and resilience of the local economy, 3) and separates equity ownership from return on investment so that the energy resources which are developed are held by the community as a whole. As such, a community energy cooperative solves a key problem in the centralized fossil-fuel dominated energy economy that small towns in the lower Connecticut river valley such as Chester is currently beholden to: bridging the funding gap for renewable energy projects, thus helping to move our towns towards sustainability at a faster rate than either the market or our town governments are able to do.

How will it work? Consider our plan to build a solar panel array on the roof of a local elementary school. A municipal building with a large and relatively flat roof, where many little people go to learn about how to change the world, is the perfect place for solar panels! Financing begins with Cockaponsett Coop member equity, money raised from selling shares to local citizens. This capital is then used to apply for state and federal grants. Finally private investors interested in progressive, green and local investment opportunities are brought in. A solar array is constructed on the roof of the elementary school – did I mention what fantastic pedagogical value such a project would have? The school/town government is offered a discounted electricity rate and a long-term contract for reasonably priced electricity – something that the large regional energy providers cannot offer, what with the cost of natural gas rising quickly. Over a five to ten year period, the private investors are paid off with a reasonable return on their investment, after which time ownership remains completely in the hands of the cooperative members and staff.

Voila! You now have a community-owned clean energy company with generating capacity to supply electricity locally, at a discount cost. The money stays local, improving the resilience and strength of the local economy, and the municipal government saves money on a cost which will surely be dramatically increasing in the near future, lowering the cost of government, and ultimately your taxes. And now, by leveraging the generating technology to attract new investment, the process can be repeated at a larger scale, to build more new clean energy resources in town. Sound good to you?

For more information or to be a part of this exciting way to develop our local economy by getting BETTER NOT BIGGER, call SolarClarity at 526-9186. Let’s be the change we want to see!

The Other Center of Chester

"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen." - Henry David Thoreau

One of the bigger elephants in the room

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain

For many people, both in the US and around the world, the burden of proof for justifying the official story of what happened on 9/11 falls squarely on the US government. According to a recent poll by the New York Times and CBS, 53 per cent of Americans think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it is lying about what actually happened on 9/11. This is not simply due to a psychological disposition to believe in conspiracy theories; there are equally irrational psychological impulses in people to not want to to believe in government conspiracies. A deep sentimentality about politics held by many people effectively establishes a psychological roadblock to examining objectively the seedy world of black budget operations. Agnosticism is due. A disinterested look at the evidence supporting the official account given by the 9/11 Commission Report raises serious questions about whom we are to believe.

But are there serious people in the government, or in the military and intelligence communities who actually believe that something is being covered up about what happened on 9/11? The following statements are from 40 experts, including the Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Thomas H. Kean, Former Governor of New Jersey and Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Homeland Security Advisory Council, about their misgivings with the 9/11 commission and the questions that are still smoldering:

Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Thomas H. Kean, Former Governor of New Jersey - "FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue...We, to this day, don't know why NORAD told us what they told us...It was just so far from the truth."

Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Homeland Security Advisory Council ~ "we got started late; we had a very short time frame...we did not have enough money...We had a lot of people strongly opposed to what we did. We had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people. ... So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail"

9/11 Commissioner, Timothy J. Roemer, PhD, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence - "that panel members so distrusted testimony from Pentagon officials that they referred their concerns to the Pentagon's inspector general...We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"

Senior Counsel, 9/11 Commission, John J. Farmer, Jr., Former Attorney General, NJ, Former Commissioner of the State Commission of Investigations ~ Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described...The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years"

Director of the FBI, Louis Freeh – "[9/11 Commission] findings--raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself"

Safety Engineer and accident Analyst, National Safety Technology Authority, Finland, Heikki Kurttila, PhD ~ "Conclusion: The observed collapse time of WTC 7 was 6.5 seconds. That is only half a second longer than it would have taken for the top of the building to fall to the ground in a vacuum, and half a second shorter than the falling time of an apple when air resistance is taken into account. ... The great speed of the collapse and the low value of the resistance factor strongly suggest controlled demolition."

Counter-Terrorism Officer, MI5 (Britain), David Shayler – regarding 9-11 "The available evidence indicates that people in key positions in the FBI, the State Department, the CIA and so on were not loyal to the Constitution; that they saw an opportunity in plans laid down by genuine Islamic terrorists to carry out an operation that would shock the world and would therefore justify U.S. adventurism in the middle East, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, PhD - "Distinguished national and international scientists and scholars present massive evidence that the 9/11 Commission Report is a hoax and that the 9/11 "terrorist attack" has been manipulated to serve a hegemonic agenda in the Middle East... We know that it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel columned buildings, to "pancake" at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false"

Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts - "Regarding 9/11 "The official story could not possibly have happened... It’s not possible. It’s not operationally feasible... The Commission was a whitewash. "

Major Douglas Rokke, PhD, U.S. Army (ret) – Former Director U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project. 30-year Army career. - Regarding the impact at the Pentagon on 9/11/2001 - "When you look at the whole thing, especially the crash site void of airplane parts, the size of the hole left in the building and the fact the projectile's impact penetrated numerous concrete walls, it looks like the work of a missile. And when you look at the damage, it was obviously a missile."

Col. Robert Bowman, U.S. Air Force, Director of Advanced Space Programs, PhD Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering - " the official 9/11 story is impossible .. There is a cover up .. high levels of our government don't want us to know what happened .. highly placed individuals in the administration .. Dick Cheney .. the very kindest thing we can say about George W Bush .. is high treason and cospiracy to commit murder "
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Below are some sources I’ve found helpful in trying to understand what happened on 9/11/01. I encourage you to visit these links and to have an open mind. Only by questioning can we practice the piety of thinking. Only by understanding can we practice LOVE, which is, as Cornell West puts it, the piety of living. Take everything you hear and read with a grain of sand.

1. 9/11 Commission Report

2. Paul Craig Roberts, ‘Five Years After and We Still Don’t Know’

3. Bill Christison, ‘Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11’

4. Senior Military, Intelligence, and Government Critics of 9/11 Commission Report

5. David Ray Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True’

6. David Ray Griffin on the 911 Commission Report: Distortions and Omissions

7. Jim Fetzer on reasons for doubting the identity of the Hijackers.

8. Scholars for 9/11 Truth

9. Loose Change 2nd Edition

10. Screw Loose Change, a critique of Loose Change

11. C-SPAN coverage of 9/11 Truth at the American Scholars Symposium

12. Canadian Journalist Barrie Zwicker’s news documentary on 9/11

13. Michael Ruppert’s documentary ‘The Truth and Lies of 9/11’

14. Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

15. 9/11 Press for Truth, a film about the Jersey Girls and Paul Thompson's timeline.

16. 80 Senior Military, Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials Question the 9/11 Commission Report

17. 100 9/11 survivors, victims and family members Question the 9/11 Commission Report.

18. 110 Professors Question the 9/11 Commission Report.

19. Mohamad Atta and the Venice Flying Circus - a film about Mohamad Atta's stay in Florida.

20. An interview with a Boston Air Traffic Controller who recently went public with his beliefs about 9/11 (click on arrow below to listen)



21. A chilling JFK speech on secret societies and freedom of the press.

22. Controlled Demolition in Oklahoma City 1995

Thoughts on the Ethics of Energy

HOW SHARING ENERGY IS THE KEY TO LIFE AND TO ETHICS

If energy is necessary for life, and if energy is available only in finite amounts, then there is a distribution problem: how can this energy be distributed equitably? Is there such a thing as an equitable distribution? Nihilists and relativists will say no, because ethics does not exist, that right and wrong is always just someone’s opinion. But a simple thought experiment seems to show otherwise.

Consider a table with enough food for 10 persons, and a line of 10 persons waiting to eat. How much food is the first person in line ethically justified in taking for herself?

Those who celebrate selfishness and the autonomous rights of the individual will say: she’s entitled to take as much as she can get her hands on! And if others come later who didn’t get a chance to eat, then that is because they are lazy, or because “life just isn’t fair,” or because they don’t really want to eat, they actually want to starve.

These are conventional justifications for the inequal distribution of wealth in the contemporary economy, even though they violate our own ethical intuitions about how much food someone is entitled to take, at a dinner party for example. In the ordinary context, it is a nearly universally-held feeling that the first person in line should leave enough food on the table for everyone to eat. Any other distribution is a denial of the very core idea of ethics: that ethical relationships concern the reciprocal recognition of the person, whether person be construed to include only Greeks, or only human beings, or all living beings.

At the material mode of reality, life consists physically of negative-entropy processes, which maintain their self-organizing unity and structure by consuming ambient energy from the environment (i. e. food), and discharging the low entropy, less available residual energy as waste, although in nature all waste becomes food for another set of beings. If there is a non-material, non-temporal dimension of the self, that part of the self does not require energy, and therefore falls within a completely different set of ethical principles, with completely different relationships to the world and other beings than the material self bears.

So ethics in a sense is rooted in the problem, intrinsic to the metaphysical structure of life as negative entropy, of how to distribute energy equitably to all of the living beings? You could infer from this definition of ethics that ethics is not a human invention, but rather a creation of nature itself. Nature as an infinite system appears to work towards the harmonization of energies among living beings, as can be evidenced in the maturing of an ecosystem towards every more efficient and cooperative sharings of energy and nutrients as ecological relationship between beings become ever more intricately entwined.

Darwin described Jesus’ injunction to love your neighbor as yourself as the expression of a principle central to the mystery of evolution. When Darwin was writing in the 1850s, species were going extinct at the rate of around one every five years. Today the rate of extinction is estimated to be one every nine minutes, and rising quickly. This extinction rate is rapid enough to be indicative of an entirely new geological period that is being brought about by the overconsumption of the planet's primary energy (bioproductivity) by the human species.

HOW WE'RE GONNA LEARN TO BE BETTER SHARERS

Just last week, the CEOs of British Petroleum, Conoco Philips, third biggest oil company in the US, and France’s biggest oil company Total went on record independently saying that world oil production has peaked. According to the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), while producing approximately 88 mb/d, the world will need to bring on line, in the next 7 to 8 years, an additional 37.5 mb/d, in order to meet projected demands and to make up for oil fields which are in depletion right now. For instance, Mexico is the third largest oil importer to the USA, after Canada and Saudi Arabia, and followed by Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria and Iraq. But Mexico’s largest oil field, the Cantarell, which is the third largest oil field ever discovered, after Ghawar in Saudi Arabia and Burgan in Kuwait, is in permanent and rapid decline, approximately 8% per year, and debate is not whether it will stop, but whether the decline rate will slow to 5% or increase to 15%. PEMEX has recently informed the USA that it will not be able to import a single drop of oil to the USA within 5 years.

Depending on how soon global oil production peak arrives, the major problems will be felt in agriculture, transportation, and energy costs generally. Our modern industrial agricultural system has been described as a way of using soil to turn oil into food, using ten calories of hydrocarbon fuel to create one calorie of food energy, not including cooking. Peak Oil will make the food production much more labor-intensive than it has been, and breakdowns in the industrial food system could lead to nation-wide food shortages. This is precisely what happened in Cuba when the collapse of the Soviet Union created an artificial Peak Oil there, leading to what Cuban’s now call the “special period.” Already, due to rising costs for diesel fuel to run tractors and hydrocarbon-based fertilizers and pesticides, Midwestern farmers are going bankrupt at a faster rate than during the Great Depression seven decades ago. Moreover, Peak Oil is primarily is liquid fuel’s crisis, which will drastically affect the transportation system, driving up the cost to ship everything. On the post-peak side of things, it will no longer make economic sense to buy grapes from Chile, or fresh fish from Indonesia. It will no longer make sense to have a mass transit system composed of 300 million internal combustion engines running on gasoline, and it will no longer make sense to trust the ability of our regional power providers to supply the electrical grids with as much cheap electricity as our flat screen TVs and microwaves can consume.

In a terrifying article dripping with wry Russian humor, Dimitri Orlov compares the collapse of the former Soviet Union to a near certain collapse we can expect of the American Empire. Certain key similarities justify reasoning by analogy between them. The Soviet Union was also a post-WWII military-industrial empire, designed to promote technological and economic progress, which exercised political and economic control over many countries and tried to project its ideology as a world system. It eventually collapsed when, suffering runaway foreign indebtedness, dwindling energy resources connected to peaking oil production, its huge, well-equiped and extremely expensive military got bogged down in an open-ended war of conquest fighting Muslim insurgents. Of all the horrendous similarities he draws, his description of the effect on the food system is especially vivid. In many ways the old Soviet society was better prepared for collapse than we are gonna be:

“The Soviet agricultural sector was notoriously inefficient. Many people grew and gathered their own food even in relatively prosperous times. There were food warehouses in every city, stocked according to a government allocation scheme. There were very few restaurants, and most families cooked and ate at home. Shopping was rather labor-intensive, and involved carrying heavy loads. Sometimes it resembled hunting – stalking that elusive piece of meat lurking behind some store counter. So the people were well-prepared for what came next. In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket, which is supplied from far away using refrigerated diesel trucks. Many people don't even bother to shop and just eat fast food. When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the nation's girth, is visible, clear across the parking lot. A lot of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what comes next. If they suddenly had to start living like the Russians, they would blow out their knees.”

One way or another, we’re gonna be forced to depend upon each other. We’re gonna have to learn how to share, how to cooperate, how to get to know each other. We are going to have to grasp that we all share a common economic fate in our Place here in river valley. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can get to work cleaning our lives and liberating our collective intelligence and energy.

"Civilization"

The following is from John Zerzan's book "Running on Emptiness":

"There has been a wholesale revision in scholarly ideas, in the past 20 or 30 years, of what life outside of civilization really was. One of the basic ideological foundations for civilization, for religion, the state, police, armies, everything else, is that you've got a pretty bloodthirsty, awful, subhuman condition before civilization. It has to be tamed and tutored and so on. It's Hobbes. It's that famous idea that the pre-civilized life was nasty, brutish and short, and so to rescue or enable humanity away from fear and superstitition, from this horrible condition into the light of civilization, you have to do that. You have to have what Freud called the 'forcible renunciation of instinctual freedom.' You just have to. That's the price.

"Anyway, that turns out to be completely wrong. Since the early '70s, we have a starkly different picture of what life was like in the two million or so years before civilization, a period that ended about 10,000 years ago, almost no time at all. Prehistory is now characterized more by intelligence, egalitarianism and sharing, leisure time, a great deal of sexual equality, robusticity and health, with no evidence at all of organized violence. I mean, that's just staggering. It's virtually a wholescale revision. We're still living, of course, with the cartoonish images, the caveman pulling the woman into the cave, Neanderthal meaningt someone who is a complete brute and subhuman, and so on. But the real picture has been wholly revised."
______________________

Could things actually have been easier back in the stone age before agriculture and civilization?!!!

According to the conventional Story of Progress, pre-modern or indigenous peoples not on the path to western-style development are living in an evolutionary backwater, still preoccupied with survival, and not able to evolve to their truly human potentialities. But new anthropological information, and new ecological histories of civilization, suggest that the truth may in fact be the opposite: that so-called ‘civilization’ is a form of spiritual captivity that generates scarcity out of abundance, nihilism out of meaningfulness, alienation out of belonging, and inevitable economic expansionism implying an endless series of resource wars. Is there any evidence to back up this shocking verdict?

The famous economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins looked into this very question in his book "Stone Age Economics", an anthropological study of the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies. He uncovered overwhelming evidence to support it. Here are some excerpts from the first chapter in that book, called “The Original Affluent Society”:

“Almost universally committed to the proposition that life was hard in the Paleolithic, our textbooks compete to convey a sense of impending doom, leaving one to wonder not only how hunters managed to live, but whether, after all, this was living? The specter of starvation stalks the stalker through these pages. His technical incompetence is said to enjoin continuous work just to survive, affording him neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the ‘leisure’ to ‘build culture.’…

“In fact, this was, when you come to examine it, the original affluent society. Paradoxical, that phrasing leads to another useful and unexpected conclusion. By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means…

“For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception… makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economics: that man’s wants are great, not to say, infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improveable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that ‘urgent goods’ become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty – with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters…

“Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation. Bringing together an international division of labor [i.e. globalization], the market makes available a dazzling array of products: all these Good Things within a man’s reach – but never all within his grasp. Worse, in this game of consumer free choice, every acquisition is simultaneously a deprivation, for every purchase of something is a foregoing of something else, in general only marginally less desirable, and in some particulars more desirable, that could have been had instead…

“When Herskovits was writing his ‘Economic Anthropology’ (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the [Kalahari] Bushmen or the native Australians as ‘a classic illustration of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest,’ so precariously situated that ‘only the most intense application makes survivial possible.’ Today the classic understanding can be fairly reversed – on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society…

“Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present – specifically on those in marginal environments – suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker’s hours, notably less than modern industrial workers who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week…

“One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture…

“This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstance an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people’s material wants usually can be easily satisfied…

“The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization…"

The Ethics of Energy Workshop in a Yurt!

How can a deeper understanding and experience of energy offer us a new ethics for an ecologically-destabilized world?

A fun interactive philosophical dialogue hosted by Hans Lohse (green architect), Jen Taylor (neolithic philosopher), Matthew Griffiths (fluid dynamics physicist), Justin Good (community organizer), You (if you come!)

2 PM This Sunday, November 11th
at the Yurt in the Earth Charter Sanctuary
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

Directions:
1) Come across the bridge, stay on CT-82 East (Norwich Road) through the village and up the hill. 2) At the STOP sign turn left onto Town Street (Bistro by Benigno is on the left). 3) Go ¼ mile north, turn Right on to Daniels Road. Go to end. 4) Turn left onto Bogel Road. #59 on the left about 3 houses up. 5) Take the second driveway marked YURT and LABRYNTH

493 Votes for a Completely Different Kind of Politics

By Justin Good

It was an extraordinary day. Winds of change and driving rain at 6 Tuesday morning just added that much more to the thickening of time and possibility. Martin Helt and Jim Pinno and I holding down the tent so the wind doesn't throw it against the road, all of it helps to focus your intentions. All day long, in the customary, and yet still incredibly strange ritual of the procession of Chester’s voting citizens: driving in, parking, passing the Marsh gang in the corner with the two huge red pick-ups, then passing the Democratic tent, with raging feminine energy and a funny looking guy with a mustache looking like he is frozen half solid. All of the hushed exchanges, glances, many languages of social and tribal display and messages and awarenesses. By 8 PM I did think that I was about to lose all of my body heat, and yet I was thrilled by even the cold, my wet socks, the tension of the endless facial expressions, comments, being gently pricked and pulled as the familiar and unknown denizens of Chester’s many communities suddenly appeared and then were gone.

And then the cool clear skies of the late afternoon, cold buckling down, what is your sense of the split? An accident on Route 9 in Middletown delaying many voters. A group of adventurous sailors huddled together at the bow of a ship, looking for land up ahead. Then the two hours of intense anticipation, where the entire cast of characters are all waiting together in the Chester Town Hall, basking in the energy glow of the whole campaign, feeling exhausted but revelatory. I felt deep kinship with every one there, even the certified assholes.

Yes, we got trounced, and yet I am unfazed by the outcome. In fact, while I think everyone was initially a bit shocked by the wide margin of our defeat, I just can’t but help to feel and see the whole campaign as a great success. I actually received 493 votes, or about 36% of the total votes cast. That’s almost 500 votes for uteri to the wall sustainable development, far more innovative and wide-reaching than the state’s plans for “smart growth.” 500 votes for a bold plan of genuine ecological economics and community relocalization. 500 votes for consensus politics and consensus planning. That’s a hugely significant number for a vision of economic development that is clear off the radar of mainstream democratic politics at the national level. This is radicalism in the good sense: in the sense of a set of recommendations which try to address the deep drivers of local economic, environmental and social stress, rather than just ineffectual band-aid symbolic acts which change nothing. I must say I am impressed with the voters. We are poised to spring forward on newly uncovered paths of least resistance. This is a surprisingly large call for real, direct democracy and ecological sanity.

Wasn’t it so dirty though, the campaigning? Yes and no. I can't take any of it personally. The community has its own neuroses and fears to work itself through. I’ve been purified by the whole campaigning process, and feel it was a unique opportunity to promote community dialogue about the future, to meet many new people, to learn a lot about the town, and to extend myself out past my comfort zone daily to see a larger picture. SolarClarity has increased its scope and hit mainstream political discussion in Chester, and we have a lively and dedicated group of aroused citizens looking for sustainable community-building projects to pour their energy into, and to practice the magical art of dynamic collaboration as a vehicle for positive systemic change in Chester. And the amazing energy of the whole group of people who bonded together, in a vital learning ecology, this is heady stuff, when brilliant minds from all walks put their hopes and dreams and longings for a better world together, to uncover a common ground, a common fate. Does this not sound like a victory to you?

In effect, the campaign is still going on. Our group dreaming has created a vaccum of possibilities out in front of us, and this vaccum has already begun to slowly suck us forward into the future. We don't even have to push it right now, just not willfully try to stop it.

And how is my inner community? Barbara Delaney, a hero of mine and one of Chester’s most wise and noble matriarchs, was the first person to encourage me, two years ago, to run for First Selectman. Founder of the Chester Historical Society and a tireless champion of the town, Barbara’s political wisdom, deep feeling for the town and hard sense are second to none. I never would have taken myself seriously as a candidate for such a role if she hadn’t expressed enthusiastic confidence in my capacities as a steward of the town. Well, Barbara told me today that she was sad for Chester - but happy for me - that I didn’t win the election. I must say, it is nice to have my life back.

The Nuts and Bolts of Improving Our Town: What You Can Expect from the Good & Heft Team

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

• Aggressively promote Chester’s businesses and merchants through extensive publicity using non-traditional channels.

• Seek out new light industrial businesses to fill out our underutilized industrial areas on Inspiration Point and RT145.

• Work to create a community garden in town, bring back the farmer’s market and proactively support local food to foster healthier eating and a stronger regional economy. Encourage changes in zoning regulations to support small scale agriculture in town.

• Undertake a town-wide energy audit to identify the potential financial savings with producing energy locally and a renewable energy resources inventory to identify and develop specific projects that could take us there.

• Install energy efficiency technologies and onsite solar energy generation capacity on town buildings to cut town operating expenses and reduce our carbon footprint.

• Create a community energy cooperative to help Chester residents finance the construction of clean onsite energy resources right in town.

ENVIRONMENT

• Switch from using harmful chemical fertilizers to organic fertilizers on all town properties.

• Promote an integrated plan to conserve water, through tax breaks for water efficient technologies.

• Start a municipal composting program to save citizens the cost of disposing of organic waste while providing free organic compost to support our vital local gardening community.

• Fund the open space account so that the town will be in a position to purchase new lands when they become available.

BUDGET

• Bring a proactive planning versus reactive pay-as-you-go approach to budgeting.

• Return to a consistent funding of long-term savings for capital projects.

• Bring greater discipline and transparency to the budgeting process by returning to regular budgetary presentations to all town boards and commissions and at town meetings, rather than just brief summaries at final hearings.

• Work with state and small town coalitions to lobby for more state aid for property tax relief and a progressive education cost sharing formula to reduce cost of education to Chester citizens.

• Keep an iron grip on the sewer expansion project budget to make sure the $2.5 million figure does not balloon.

• Follow standard bidding policy and sound planning proceedures, using local contractors if possible, to construct a Dock Road bridge in a timely and fiscally-sound manner.

COMMUNITY & GOVERNANCE

• Increase openness and participation in town government by establishing quarterly town meetings with a section allowed for public concerns and ideas.

• Create a First Selectman's website to facilitate continuous and open dialogue about all matters of town management, community well-being, and planning for the future.

• Promote greater transparency in municipal government by making sure all meeting minutes are available promptly and are available free of charge in an unedited form.

• Explore new property tax relief programs available for seniors and other qualified tax payers and publicize the Connecticut Commission on Aging’s new statewide inventory of tax relief programs.

• Push forward the discussion about restoring our community center at North Quarter Park with a special area devoted to Chester seniors.

• Promote a special design/village district vision and zoning for Chester center to maintain unique character of center with these goals in mind:

a. Enhance walkability and safety to pedestrians, bicyclists and children by aesthetic traffic-calming measures.
b. Developing safer and more convenient parking options.
c. Maintain the unique, small scale architecture in town.

To initiate this project, we would encourage a series of community-wide planning charettes, in which all citizens and stakeholders would share, debate, and think through together, their interests and dreams for Chester center.

• Value dissenting voices rather than punishing them with legal complaints or threats, and unilateral decision-making.

Dream Team

Chester has always been a place where creative and enterprising individuals could, with hard work and even harder play, live a decent and prosperous life, rich with family and community, alive with democracy and civic neighborliness, surrounded by natural wonders and cultural vitality. Many futures are possible, and the more proactive our planning, the more and better options we will have to enjoy. With all of our wealth, talents, natural and social resources, there is nothing we cannot accomplish, if we trust in each other and work together. Let's evolve ourselves a cleaner, safer community, a greener and more efficient economy, and a more perfect union of interests and dreams.

Vote for OPEN HORIZONS on November 6th!

Designing the Future Together

Chester’s uniqueness – natural, social, historical, architectural – is what makes you feel like you belong there. The sense of belonging cannot easily be created, and is easily destroyed. Conservation is the science of nurturing our uniqueness, and we have a holistic plan to protect Chester’s natural abundances that values them as the irreplaceable, wonder-filled resources that they are. We don’t want to be on the left or the right, we want to be ahead of the game of politics. The democratic process is not a hindrance, it is the soul of our community, and we believe the best decisions arise from debate which is inclusive of all voices, open and transparent, and certified by a dynamic consensus regarding the future of the community. Planning and development in town needs to be rooted in our love of Place, not mindless adherence to convention or a fear of the state.

Gently Down the Stream

by Justin Good

Chester voters decided yesterday to reverse their June vote and approve a sewer expansion project proposed by their WPCA board. What does SolarClarity have to say now about it?

It was a unique opportunity lost, but not the end of the world. I'm not going to second guess the citizens of Chester and call for a best two out of three. Time will tell if, in connecting our town to an aging, energy-intensive and environmentally-challenged sewer infrastructure, our long-term health as a town has been promoted. One of the problems with the planning process to date is that neither the WPCA nor the DEP has been willing to take a whole-systems perspective on wastewater management. There are several large invisible elephants still cruising the room, including: the assumption that continuous growth is inevitable and good, the long-term economic liabilities of losing local control over a cost that is guaranteed to spike with increasing energy prices in the near future, and the known and unresolved problems with disposing of sewage sludge.

Not to mention sustainability. In a recent statement, Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency was very blunt about the seriousness of the water issue: "The need to reduce water waste and inefficiency is greater now than ever before. Water efficiency is the wave of the future." Water shortages commonplace in the Western United States will be coming to the Northeast. Guess why my UCONN students are offered only cold showers in their dormitories? Water is Chester's most precious natural resource and we should be developing an integrated plan to CONSERVE it, not increasing by A FACTOR OF FIVE our ability to waste more of it in Chester center.

What is important now is to work together to manage the new development parameters that this project will determine. Scrutiny of the current Administration's claims to "fiscal discipline" suggests that the financial ramifications of this sewer project have by no means been secured. With our taxes rising the past two years, our capital funds now compromised, no new economic development to soften the blows, and the most recent revelation that the Wig Hill bridge is going to be $90,000 over budget (and require another town vote AFTER the election), that $2.5 million figure for the sewer project could easily grow into a real shiner.

Even more important are the zoning issues. After you've brought water pipes to a community, all you need is a sewer connection and you've removed a natural baseline limitation to growth. Ask anyone from Waterford what happened after the town spent its Millstone III lottery ticket on a new sewer system. All you need is for a big pile of money to come to town, looking to get bigger, and you're one zoning vote away from letting the genie out of the bottle.

Time to focus on the Plan of Conservation and Development, some innovative zoning for the village district, and a real Vision of where our long-term health as a community lies. Our current status-quo planning ideas are still on a dangerous collision course with reality.

As for all of those endless WPCA meetings? I wish to acknowledge the inspiring civic virtues of every member of the WPCA, the DEP, the BOS, ChesterFIRST, Cummings & Good, SolarClarity, Geomatrix, Fuss & O'Neill and Nathan Jacobson, and all the citizens who came to the meetings. THANK YOU for the discussion! We must deepen and enlarge it. We owe it to ourselves and to all future residents of this great town.

Vote for a sustainable future on Nov. 6th!

Reasonable taxes for honest town services

Where do we want to go?

Town Voters To Decide On A Direction

Marsh Stresses Continuity; Good Urges Creativity

By COLIN POITRAS
Courant Staff Writer
October 23, 2007
CHESTER



Two years after wresting control of the town's top administrative post from local Democrats, incumbent Republican First Selectman Tom Marsh feels like he's just hitting his stride.

The 48-year-old Marsh, owner of a local vending machine and workplace cleaning service, is proud of what he has done during his first term in office.

The town government budget is $158,000 lower this fiscal year than two years ago; repairs to the Wig Hill Road bridge are nearly complete; and a comprehensive long-range plan of development for Chester is finally being realized.

That said, Marsh admits there is still more to do, including resolving the 17-year-old septic system problem downtown, repairing three other aging bridges and working with surrounding towns to regionalize services without sacrificing Chester's autonomy.

"The reason I came into office is because there were a lot of issues facing the town in 2005," said Marsh, a father of three. "The town budget had failed, the Wig Hill bridge had been closed for three years and the sewer system problem had been lingering for 15.

"Over the last few years, it's been like turning a battleship around and we finally have it going in the right direction," Marsh said. "I would like to see these projects through to completion. They're too important to hand off the baton along the way...More than good ideas, it's going to take real management skills."

Marsh's Democratic challenger, Justin Good, agrees that much needs to be done to help the town grow, maintain services and preserve its local village charm. But he would go about it in a different way.

A 37-year-old part-time philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut and University of Hartford, Good said the right answers for Chester are not always found in the voluminous reports issued by experts at the state Department of Environmental Protection or other bureaucrats.

Good said he advocates creative, "out-of-the-box" thinking and believes Chester's greatest wealth, besides its abundant natural resources, is its intelligent, creative residents who, when banding together, can devise ways to meet the town's needs without radical development or exorbitant costs. He said he wants to make sure Chester does the right thing not just to resolve today's problems but also to anticipate the future.

"Plato once said that philosophers make good leaders because they don't really care about anything else," said Good, who was born and raised in Chester and whose mother - graphic artist Janet Cummings Good - is a prominent local businesswoman.

"The federal government and the state government are not doing what they can to help us prepare for the energy shock, the money shock that I believe is coming," said Good, who is making his first bid for elected office. "I just want to be a useful agent for change in this community."

A self-described dedicated scholar of economics and town planning, Good is also an avid blogger. He voices his concerns about Chester's management and global issues through his Internet blog, SolarClarity.blogspot.com. He is an appointed member of the Chester Conservation Commission and co-chairman of the Chester Democratic Town Committee. He is also the manager, singer and guitarist for a local rock band, Exit 6 (named after the Chester exit off Route 9).

He is a member of Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, a regional group of experts, professionals and civic leaders committed to the development and promotion of renewable energy resources. Good said he would like to see Chester reduce its annual operating costs through conservation, alternative energy sources and a town-wide energy "audit" if he is elected. Done properly, Good said, the savings could be in the millions of dollars.

While Marsh sides with state DEP officials in believing the construction of a $2.5 million sewer line linking Chester to a Deep River sewage treatment plant is the best way to resolve the village's septic woes, Good isn't sold on the idea.

Good thinks the septic system problem deserves greater study. He believes the project could be reduced in scope and possibly resolved through existing innovative biotechnologies that would be less costly and have less of an environmental impact.

"My position is right now we need more information," Good said in a recent debate with his opponent. Thought the DEP has ordered the problem resolved, Good said, "We shouldn't base this decision on a fear of being sued. I think it should be based on science and consensus."

Many voters don't like the idea of the sewer line link and rejected the $2.5 million project at a June referendum. A second referendum is scheduled for today. That move has angered some residents who feel Marsh and other town leaders are ignoring public sentiment in trying to push the project through.

Marsh said he supports a second referendum hoping that voters will see the light. The town needs to approve the project this year to take advantage of state grants and a state offer of a low-interest loan to pay more than half the cost, he says.

"It's the right thing to do," Marsh said. "At the end of the day, we're getting a sewer system for $750,000."

The divisive sewer issue could be a major factor in the outcome of the selectman's race on Nov. 6. It may also determine whether local Democrats reclaim ownership of the town's top elected post.

When he won in 2005, Marsh became the first Republican to become first selectman in 14 years. He defeated popular six-term Democrat Martin L. Heft by 30 votes. Heft, who has since taken a job with state Comptroller Nancy Wyman, isn't running for first selectman this year but is on the ticket as a candidate for the board of selectmen, partnering with Good.

Good said Heft's political experience and contacts with state and regional officials makes for a strong Democratic management team. Marsh is running with longtime Republican incumbent Bruce Watrous. Marsh said Watrous' local experience and long family history in town (his ancestors helped name Chester for their hometown in England) coupled with his more than 16 years of business management experience is what the town needs to steer into the future.

A 90-minute debate between the two first selectman candidates that took place on Oct. 16 is being re-broadcast on Chester's local Comcast cable station at 8 p.m. today; 8 p.m. on Thursday; 6 p.m. on Saturday and 6 p.m. on Nov. 3rd.

Contact Colin Poitras at cpoitras@courant.com.

Copyright © 2007, The Hartford Courant

The First Selectman Debate: Conventional Versus Sustainable Development

2 Seeking Top Post Exchange Views
Only Debate Of Race Draws 100 To Event

By COLIN POITRAS
Courant Staff Writer
October 17, 2007

CHESTER - Differences in the two candidates for first selectman were readily apparent Tuesday night as Republican incumbent Tom Marsh squared off against his Democratic challenger Justin Good in the only debate before next month's election. 

Marsh, who is seeking his second two-year term leading the town, came across as the no-nonsense 48-year-old local businessman trying to keep taxes down, repair the town's aging infrastructure and control development within a reasonable and responsible budget. 

Good was the 37-year-old philosophy instructor and local son interested in resolving local issues with "creative, out-of-the box thinking." Good advocated the use of innovative new technologies and forward-thinking to improve the local economy and infrastructure without sacrificing the town's quaint village heritage. 

The town's lingering septic problems downtown and concerns about economic development dominated a large part of the 90-minute debate, which was held at the Chester Meeting House. More than 100 people filled the room, some finding seats in the upper balcony. 

Marsh maintained his stance that linking the town to a sewage treatment system in Deep River - the plan most supported by experts at the state Department of Environmental Protection - is the best option. Marsh called it a "proven plan" that will allow the town to take advantage of a low-interest state loan to cover half of the expected $2.5 million cost. 

Marsh said he couldn't endorse alternate ideas floated by Good and others that might resolve the downtown septic woes without commercial sewers.

"I strongly support the idea of sending through a system with a proven track record," Marsh said. "We don't know what the ramifications of another Band-Aid fix will be." 

Good called large commercial sewer treatment systems "environmentally suspect" and said some of the sewage sludge produced by those plants contain potent toxins that could be harmful to the environment.

He accused Marsh and other town leaders of "buying something we don't need, for more than we can afford." He said officials were "buying the doctrine of DEP infallibility." Good said he wasn't convinced a large-scale sewer project is necessary and he would like the town to do further studies to see if a smaller, more creative solution is possible. 

Marsh said he supported controlled economic development in existing commercial areas such as the Corporate Park off Route 145 and those on Inspiration Lane. He wouldn't mind development along Route 154 as long as it was more "white-collar" office or computer oriented rather than having trucks exiting on to the busy thoroughfare. 

Good spoke of creating a more sustainable and self-sufficient local economy where residents might create a co-op to purchase renewable energy and conduct energy audits to reduce the town's "carbon footprint" while potentially savings millions. 

The two candidates agreed on the need to preserve open space. 


Contact Colin Poitras at cpoitras@courant.com.
Copyright © 2007, The Hartford Courant

Sustainability is Common Sense

Chester Democrats 2007 • A Common Sense Platform

The best thing about politics in a lively town like Chester is that the political process is still receptive to Common Sense. Our Common Sense platform offers bright prospects for our town and truly values our talents and resources. Our 2007 slate of candidates offers a sum-greater-than-its-parts team of hard-working, experienced, informed and down-to-earth citizens dedicated to the collective project of living together in the 21st century.

BETTER NOT BIGGER!
Keep it Local! Our vision for economic development doesn’t accept the assumption that local livability must be sacrificed to private interests. We believe in the spirit of self-reliance that still flows deeply from Chester’s rich past. The best value town government can offer is that of securing the long-term health of Chester. The surest way for us to get paid is to follow the triple bottom line — People, Place and Profit— and we have an integrated, long-term plan to do it!

NUTURE UNIQUENESS!
Chester’s uniqueness — natural, social, historical, architectural — is what makes you feel like you belong here. The sense of belonging cannot easily be created, and is easily destroyed. Conservation is the art/science of nurturing our uniqueness, and we have a systematic plan to protect Chester’s natural abundances that values them as the irreplaceable resources that they are.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A VILLAGE!
We don’t want to be on the left or the right, we want to be ahead of the game of politics. The democratic process is not a hindrance, it is the soul of our community, and we believe the best decisions arise from debate which is inclusive of all voices, open and transparent, and certified by a dynamic consensus regarding the future of the community. Planning and development in town needs to be rooted in our love of Place, not rigorous adherence to convention or a fear of the state.

SECURE THE NEST!
Like us, you probably feel that Chester is one of the best places in the world to raise a child. This child-friendliness illustrates like nothing else the unique set of conditions found in Chester that make it uncommonly human in scale, safety and livability. We will work to keep our neighborhoods safe and will support the continuous improvement of our model school system, in a way that coheres with regional trends while maintaining local diversity and autonomy.

OLD-FASHIONED VISION LEADERSHIP!
Once upon a time, politicians were not “political” and true leaders were not feared for their power, but honored for their ability to empower those around them. Our style of leadership promotes a free market of ideas and talent, consensus-decision making, and a planning process which taps both the collective wisdom of our elders and the innovative ideas of the next generation. We’re here to open doors.

Let’s put our wealth to work! Given the immense wealth we have in town, the wealth of clean and safe neighborhoods, beautiful intact ecosystems, rich and vital cultural traditions and resources, and a populace of extremely talented, hard-working, enterprising, and passionate individuals, Chester’s ability to prosper in the future, while remaining a beautiful, healthy, small and rural town depends only upon our imagination, our openness to new information and ideas, our trust in each other and willingness to cooperate, and our commitment to this most special of all Places.

A vote for the Chester Democrats on November 6th is a vote of confidence in the future! Vote for the future!

Better Not Bigger: How to Develop without Growing

By Justin Good

In an eloquent and thoughtful opinion piece in the Valley Courier (6/28) entitled “Region’s Destiny Is In Our Hands,” our State Representative James Spallone had something deep to say about sustainability. While many folks interested in sustainability focus on how to make our community more sustainable, Spallone argues that we are on the verge of losing a centuries-long trend of sustainable development in the Lower Connecticut River Valley. This trend was not planned at all, but a lucky consequence of geography; the sandy shoals that precluded the lower Connecticut River from becoming a major center of ports. This is a sobering thought: it is sheer luck that we are not already overfull with the same bland, homogeneous, autocentric, ugly built environment that is devouring many other parts of the state and country. But Middlesex County is growing at approximately twice the rate of the state average, and we have no good reasons to assume that our luck is going to hold.

The upshot of his concisely argued statement should give us pause. If we want things to remain special and precious and unique in our little corner of the world, a lot more people are going to have to get involved with planning. Saving the still-intact unique beauty of our area will require a new scale of community involvement in town planning. This is a MAJOR CHALLENGE.

According to Spallone the Lower Connecticut River Valley is facing ‘unprecedented development pressure’ due to the relatively ‘undeveloped’ state of our region, and the great wealth that now calls Middlesex County its home. How many people living around here think about the ramifications of living in the wealthiest county in one of the wealthiest state in the most powerful empire in history?

"Our centuries of sustainable development now makes us a target. Developers based far from here will pull out a map and see a gap between say, Madison and Waterford, or Old Saybrook and Middletown that needs to be filled. The company’s business plan might call for a franchise every 10 or 20 miles. Our area isn’t seen as one of the Last Great Places in the western hemisphere, as the Nature Conservancy has called it, but as an opportunity for expansion. If we cling to the notion that big box stores, chain restaurants and strip mall developers are not interested in Route 154 or the areas near Route 9 exits, our towns will look very different ten years from now."

But most people are unaware of this, and not involved at all in the planning decisions that will shape the development occuring in the next ten years. Spallone’s point that our area could be radically different – radically degraded – in ten year’s time is not a pessimistic, worst-case scenario, it is the major likelihood.

This process is neither inevitable nor natural nor 'what the people want.' It is being pushed forward by special interests with obvious financial inventives to make a pile of money by turning one of the "last great untouched places" in North America into a machine for making money. Do you want those people to be making the decisions?

Even if you have little financial wealth, you are wealthy in other, more important ways if you live in this area. This is because there are other kinds of wealth that we all own because they are part of the Commons here: the SOCIAL WEALTH of healthy, safe, culturally-alive, walkable neighborhoods, and the NATURAL WEALTH of clean air and water, beautiful intact forests and inland wetlands, and one of the most beautiful river ecosystems in the world.

These things are forms of capital that make us all very wealthy, but those who see economic development as an investment strategy want to turn all of the social and natural capital into financial capital, into money. Do you want our collective wealth in Chester or Deep River or Haddam to be siphoned off, for the benefit of a few and the detriment of the many?

But is this really happening? Yes, and the process can even be quantified. According to the Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality, which works on identifying quantifiable measures on environmental health, while a significant amount of land is being conserved, basic patterns of economic development are slowly but surely fragmenting the natural ecosystems which support life:

"Whether the problem is air quality, wildlife or water pollution, much of the solution lies in the better use and conservation of Connecticut’s land. The state has been slowing, not increasing, its conservation of land. But the direct conservation of land through acquisition is only one component of any solution. The central problem is that current patterns of development turn forest, field and coastline into a statewide plain of lawns, structures and pavement. The new landscape includes small patches of woods that do not function as true forests and streams that carry water but not trout." (Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality, Annual Report 2005)

Does this mean we can no longer develop? Certainly not! It means that we have to learn how DEVELOP our local economics without GROWING them. We need plans of economic development which do not attempt to lower taxes by increasing the consumption of resources or production of waste by inviting in new industries, e.g. Rather we need to figure out how to make money by repairing nature, not by raping her. We need plans which focus on lowering the costs of living by relocalizing the production of basic life necessities like food and energy.

But this will require, as Spallone urges, greater communal involvement in planning. Some of those special interests and professional planners might tell you otherwise; that planning is technical knowledge reserved for "experts." But the proof is in the pudding: are the planners and business interests driving the ship are doing a perfect job? Why should we take their word for it?

So where do we start? The lowest hanging fruit is energy efficiency. Instead of trying to bring more money into the local economy by attracting new industries, think of all the money that could be saved by cutting dramatically your local energy bill. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, every small town has an invisible clean energy power plant within it, in the form of potential energy efficiency measures that could cut the town’s public and private energy cost by up to 90%. The first step in such a project would be to create a town-wide energy audit, to start to understand how much money the community as a whole spends annually on energy, and therefore to get a sense of the amazing multiplier effects of keeping all that money in the local economy by simply being more efficient with our use of energy. Chester’s Conservation Commission is taking the lead on this by working out an energy audit for the entire town. If you’d like to participate in this exciting project, please email solarclarityct@aol.com.

Be an agent for change!

"We have to move toward a politics that offers a choice not between left and right but between corporatism and democracy, not between big government and big business but between overbearing institutions and supportive communities, and not between oppression and anarchy but between the force of the state and the good sense of its citizens. We need a new politics that offers not only new policies but a new way of going about politics, one that is centered on consent rather than on power." - From Sam Smith's 'Great American Political Repair Manual'

What is the truth about the energy crisis?

What is Peak Oil?

Peak Oil is a geological event theorized by the most famous petroleum geologist of the last century, Dr. M. King Hubbert, and hence Peak Oil is also referred to as ‘Hubbert’s Peak.’ As it turns out, the extraction rate of natural resources like oil or water follows a bell-shaped curve, beginning quickly and cheaply, reaching a plateau, and then declining quickly, becoming more difficult and expensive to extract. In the 1950s, Hubbert correctly predicted that domestic oil production in the United States – then the petroleum king of the universe – would peak in 1971. More recently, a group of the world’s leading petroleum geologists, ASPO or the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, have been attempting to predict global Peak Oil. At their last conference which was in Boston in November, there was a deepening consensus that world Peak Oil will take place between 2005 and 2013. Peak Oil doesn’t mean the end of oil, per se, but the end of cheap oil, and it occurs when approximately 50% of the oil in the world has been extracted. Is it serious?














While global warming is finally starting to become a politically acceptable topic for mainstream corporate media, Peak Oil is still off the charts. But the government is surely worried. Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed by several former CIA directors about the dangers that Peak Oil poses for domestic and international security. In their discussion, they referred to a now famous report, the Hirsch Report, created by request for the US Department of Energy in 2005, to study the effects of oil depletion on the US economy. The Hirsch Report, officially titled “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management,” argues that, in order to avoid a economic contraction on the