January 29, 2010, 5 pm, San Francisco City Hall.

I spent three weeks in Scandinavia in late 2009. I’ve been to Denmark several times before (my mother hails from there), so I wasn’t expecting to have any revelations about how different life is there than here. To a great extent, things are quite similar. But there are deep and important differences that I experienced with greater clarity than during any previous visits.

In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, public transit systems are extremely modern, efficient, frequent and very comfortable, whether inner city subways or intracity train systems. In Sweden we saw no one living on the street and learned that the government was obliged to house each and every Swedish resident, citizen or not. Moreover, if you did not have a job, you qualified for a decent monthly income provided by the state. In Denmark everyone is eligible for practically free higher education, and like Sweden, housing and income are considered social rights. In Norway, a young group of radicals had squatted an abandoned house near the port in Oslo a few years ago, moved out during negotiations with the city government, and eventually reoccupied the building towards the end of their protracted negotiations. The city government finally authorized their presence in the building and set the rent well below market rate in the painfully expensive Norwegian capital. Minimum public-financed income was also the norm there.

How is this all paid for? Taxes! Individuals and corporations pay more than 50% of their income in taxes. But in exchange for these higher taxes, they get free top-notch health care, free university educations, a solid social safety net that includes guaranteed rights to housing and income, and a well-financed and sustainable public transit system.

Americans are notoriously uninformed about the wider political spectrum that exists outside of our borders. In our two-party system, we are regaled with a political spectrum that runs from left (“liberal,” Democrat) to right (“conservative,” Republican) and seems to spend most of its time at the center (“moderate”). But go to Sweden, for example, and you find that none of the dozen or so political parties represented in their national parliament are as far to the right as the liberal Democratic Party of the United States. Our politics has been sliding steadily to the right since Franklin Roosevelt died in 1944, and in spite of much nostalgic enthusiasm for the New Deal, even FDR’s government wasn’t as progressive and lefty as today’s European social democratic regimes.

During the Cold War, Americans were taught to be terrified of anything that might be “socialism,” because that was the first step on an inexorable slide into totalitarian Communism. In spite of a powerful working class movement that gained Social Security through the New Deal, and later got Medicare and Medicaid in the “Great Society” programs of Kennedy/Johnson, a backlash rooted in anti-communism, xenophobia, and white racism has managed to unravel many of the social assumptions that underpinned those gains.

Starting with Richard Nixon in 1969, and going on steadily since then, American politics has shifted further and further to the right. Now we have President Obama, a pro-corporate, pro-military leader, who is doing nothing for the lower classes in society, but somehow represents what “progressive” politics has become. In a European or a Latin American context, Obama would be a clear right-wing figure.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, European social historian Tony Judt takes up the question of what is living and what is dead in Social Democracy?

Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.” This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story.

With the anti-tax revolt in California in 1978, and the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, the rightward tilt of U.S. society gained momentum. This tilt was built on Nixon’s earlier shift towards a “southern strategy,” a more-or-less overt embrace of southern white racism in an effort to pry the long-term white Democratic vote loose and shift it to the Republicans. By the time George Bush the Lesser is appointed president by the Supreme Court in 2000, the blue/red split in America mirrors pretty closely the old North/South split from the Civil War. The Republican strategy to exacerbate racial fears to gain political power has had the additional effect of further eroding support for public services, and a culture of mutual aid or sharing.

And indeed, it is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.

So as we begin the arduous process of rebuilding a culture of mutual aid and solidarity, the racialized mistrust that underlies so much of our politics has to be clearly targeted. The fact that we actually live in a multicultural society, one that is more often tolerant and inclusive than not, is important to remember. But while our eyes have been on status, de facto tolerance, and multicultural diversity, we’ve also allowed the government to shred the safety net, and to facilitate the impoverishment of millions of fellow citizens of all races, while criminalizing and incarcerating over two million of us.

This is not to say that the welfare state was problem-free. But from the point of view of a society that takes care of its own, that shares an ethical approach to the wealth created by everyone working together, providing housing and income as a matter of social right is vital. It’s not charity, a degrading and humiliating social relationship. It’s a right to live with a minimum of decency. In such a society people are inherently “in it together” in a way that people in our dog-eat-dog society aren’t.

Tony Judt succinctly reminds us what Social Democracy means historically, even if it’s largely absent from the U.S. frame of reference. In a more humane future, this history is a crucially important antecedent.

The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

I think we can do a lot better than “imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances,” but it’s true that the grand schemes of revolutionaries have rarely produced utopias. Grand schemes and utopias are in short supply these days. Instead, we have marginal political parties like the Green Party of California. This sorry political formation emerged during the early 1990s to reinvigorate a progressive social agenda:

“It was in direct response to the right-wing shift of the Democrats during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. It was so obvious that there had been an evacuation of the left-of-center values and policies that needed attention. So the era was just crying out woefully for a third party,” [San Francisco Supervisor and Green Party star Ross] Mirkarimi said of the Green Party of California and its feminist, antiwar, ecological, and social justice belief system.

Now it is on the verge of collapse, having never articulated much of an agenda, certainly not an ecological one! The Green Party of California was just a slightly leftier split off from the Democrats, and these days their former leading lights are all jumping ship, usually to go back to the Democratic Mothership.

Thinking about the trajectory of Social Democracy in the 20th century, and the rather urgent need for a full-blown transition to an ecologically reconfigured daily life in the 21st century, it’s astonishing at how completely the Green Party has failed to address this. Its members prefer to squabble over electoral strategies for this or that local office. Meanwhile, a legitimate agenda of social transformation is beginning to emerge in such fledgling efforts as the Wigg Party and StreetUtopia North Beach.

The Transition Town movement informs some of these new efforts, but what’s still missing is a political party or group of candidates who aren’t just running for office, but represent a specific, articulated agenda based on Transition ideas, and ultimately permacultural principles. I don’t think such an effort would succeed right away, but after an election cycle or two, with the usual array of empty, advertising-driven candidates who serve power, I think it could eventually win. But such a win would be empty itself if there isn’t a pretty thorough-going agenda that challenges economic power, ecological crises, and the technologies of daily life. I’ll come back to this in a later post, but I wanted to throw it out there. Political power cannot be ignored forever, and if we’re serious about overthrowing the social system that oppresses us, we’ll have to show that we have a better way to organize it. Reinforcing a system that is based on celebrity-manufacturing-to-win-elections is clearly a bad idea. What else might be done? Some of it is already visible in efforts underway, but none of those efforts express themselves in electoral parties or with enough specificity to really challenge the power structure. Somehow we have to leap across that chasm, even if you are, like me, antipathetical towards electoralism and government, not to mention capitalism!

Climbing to apx. 3,000 meters, the view back is gorgeous... Notice the welcoming party of Monarchs fluttering here and here in the foreground?

We made it on horseback to the high mountains along the Michoacan/State of Mexico border and immersed ourselves in the magical wonderland of the Monarch butterfly’s wintering biosphere reserve among the oyamel trees. Absolutely amazing experience!

All over the forest were dense clusters of Monarchs like these.

This dense colony of hibernating butterflies is somewhat far away from where I was standing (the preserve is managed by locals, who keep a string barrier up to prevent clumsy tourists from tramping through the whole area).

The back story to the Monarchs makes it twice as interesting. They are amazing migrants, and the biological processes underlying their migration are still rather mysterious. It’s known that Monarchs from as far north as Ontario in Canada make their way across the Great Lakes and in a few months, starting on the Autumn Equinox September 21 they make their way to central Mexico. The Monarchs to the east of the Rockies trek down to Mexico, the ones to the west winter in California (and are far fewer in number). But the Monarchs who make this improbably 3,000 mile migration have never been to Mexico! They are the great-great-great-grandchildren of the Monarchs who left the Mexican mountains about eight months earlier. The butterflies live for about a month, one generation succeeding the next, until it’s time to migrate back south. Then the Monarch lives for about 8 months until it starts back to the north after the hibernation period.

We had absolutely perfect weather! About 70 degrees F. and blue skies with a few pretty clouds.

And as you can see from the video above, they are far from inert during their hibernation. As the midday sun warms them, they break away in search of water to sustain themselves, no longer in need of food, but definitely needing to sip from dew on leaves, or if that’s not available, flying down and down until they find water. We didn’t get to see it, but apparently far below this area on the mountain is a small body of water with thousands of butterflies sipping in it!

I’ve never ridden a horse anywhere before. I have usually been completely allergic when around horses in the past… moreover, my parents haven’t ridden horses either, my mom not since teenage life, and my dad probably like me, only once in his life when he was about 8… So it was a shocking thrill to find our horseback ride into the Michoacan mountains to see the wintering site of the Monarch butterflies turning off the relatively easy rutted dirt road onto a practically vertical narrow trail. We went up and up, about 4,500 feet from where we started in Zitacuaro at the friendly and very comfy Rancho San Cayetano.

My father and I on horses in Michoacan!

Adriana took this good shot when the butterflies were on the move in the warm sun.

So magical!

My father at the very top of the climb! Wow! 77 years old and never rode a horse! What a trooper!

My mom and Adriana coming up the trail... but my mother's sciatica was killing her so she had to stop a bit before the top... still she got to sit among the flowing rivers of butterflies too!

Adriana on the trail from where we left our horses, butterflies swirling all about.

Patzcuaro in Michoacan, a fantastically well-preserved colonial town, mostly dedicated to tourism, but still incredibly charming!

Adriana introduced me to a favorite Mexican pastime: puebleando… in English it might be “towning;” essentially driving from town to town in search of the serendipitous and fascinating, the cultural specialties, the curious hybrids produced by centuries of Mexican life… what fun!

Michoacan countryside.

View across lake from TzinTzunTzan's ruins.

And the state of Michoacan is a great place to do it! The countryside is stunning, with dozens of old volcanoes and long ridges surrounding breathtaking valleys and providing long vistas at every turn. There are a lot of great lakes in this state too, and we had the pleasure of taking the “Ruta de Don Quiroga” through the town of Tzintzuntzan, where the Purepecha people were the dominant culture long ago.

Adriana at the Purepecha ruins above Tzintzuntzan.

A major ruin sits above the town, but Don Quiroga is honored all around the lake for having encouraged each local village to specialize in its own type of product, a basic division of labor in the region. Somehow this centuries-old scheme has prevented both heavy industrialization in the area and also kept the lake or local towns from being taken over by wealthy locals or tourism entirely.

One of the great pleasures of travelling with Adriana is her propensity to chat up everyone we meet. This guy is 75 years old and has been making and selling his own ice cream for 50 years!

Mexico is a dynamic political society. Here locals in Tzintzuntzan had set up an encampment in front of the town hall in an attempt to force the resignation of the Treasurer, who they claimed had embezzled funds and was completely corrupt.

While we were having lunch in Tzintzuntzan's tiny zocalo a wedding marched by with this rockin' band!

In Tzintzuntzan there is also a monastery that originally had 33 olive trees planted (to represent Jesus Christ’s 33 years). The trees that are still standing are absolutely haunting, each one over 400 years old.

400 year old olive trees in Tzintzuntzan.

My parents are treating us to this lovely tour, and they’re hanging in there admirably as we take them to and fro. Here’s my mom communing with the olive trees:

My mother shares a moment with the 400-year-old olive trees of Tzintzuntzan.

After a nice 3 hours in Tzintzuntzan we continued south along the Ruta de Don Quiroga to Patzcuaro, a spectacularly beautiful town full of vitality. The town maintains its historic look as best it can, and the entire center uses only the same familiar fonts in black and red to indicate what stores or businesses are where. Even supermarkets and farmacias are disguised by the unchanging facades and signage.

This is the standard look of central Patzcuaro. The Plaza de Don Quiroga is at the end of the street in this photo, and you can see the signage over the door to the right.

Even the local Montessori school used the same signage.

The town is gorgeous, full of Calvino-style “Invisible Cities” architectural moments.

Adriana on a stairway to nowhere in Patzcuaro!

Arches and angles at every turn!

My parents and me lurking off to the side in Patzcuaro... what colors!

This is also in Patzcuaro.

Local feminists erected this statue to Gertrudis Bocanegra in the 1970s. She was a hero of the Mexican Revolution, put to death by Spanish soldiers in 1818 when she refused to divulge any names of the insurgents.

Outside a town cathedral, a busy market sold many tourist items, but for those in pain or ill after a visit to church, there were a couple of competing medicinal herb booths.

After we spent the night in Patzcuaro and part of the following morning, we took off to a lake and town called Zirahuen, which several people had recommended to us. As we approached we saw signs indicating it was a federal protective reserve of some sort, which corresponded to its reputation of being much cleaner and more beautiful than a lot of the towns or the island town in the big lake near Patzcuaro. We rolled down through pungent pine forests under crisp blue skies, and stopped to take a panoramic view of the lake.

Adriana caught me gazing at beautiful Lake Zirahuen.

Apparently an old hacienda or monastery used to sit at the lake shore, but all that's left are these arches. A few dozen yards to my right in this photo is a pier stretching out into the lake for boat trips, and a weird cluster of fish restaurants and artesania booths.

After a brief stop in Zirahuen we took the back road over to Santa Clara del Cobre. Mostly it’s a hand-paved road of mixed cobblestones through pine forests and agricultural fields. There was a sign prohibiting heavy vehicles, and when we drove along the odd pavement we could understand why, since such a road surface would be wrecked in short order by trucks and buses. As we departed Zirahuen, a bit of history rolled by in the shape of an ox-drawn cart:

Oxcart on hand-paved road between Zirahuen and Santa Clara del Cobre.

Different cobblestones pave the road from Zirahuen to Santa Clara del Cobre. Shortly before we reached Santa Clara it gave way to a gravel road for about 2 km.

In Santa Clara del Cobre, the town is mostly dedicated to what its name would indicate: copper. There are countless small vendors of copper kitchenware, as well as vases, jewelry, and all manner of useful items. There were a couple of small factories in town churning it all out, another remnant of Don Quiroga’s original division of labor in this region. In the town’s center, a small market yielded a few nice purchases, and in the gazebo the town hung a giant copper pot, honoring its source of sustenance.

The Great Copper Pot of Santa Clara del Cobre.

From Santa Clara we drove about 4 hours across Michoacan to get to our hotel that night, Hacienda San Cayetano in Zitacuaro. We had a great visit there too, but that’s for the next post. In my next post I’ll show the amazing Monarch butterfly reserve we visited, which meant riding horses up a nearly vertical incline for about 3,500 or 4,000 feet! My parents, age 72 and 77, were not ready for THAT, but my dad made it all the way, and my mom made it most of the way, though I think they were left with permanent scars!

At the river's edge on the grounds of Hacienda San Cayetano just before leaving for the butterfly reserves.

December 12, 2009 march of 100,000 through Copenhagen demanding Climate Justice and "System Change, Not Climate Change!" Note the power plant chugging along in the distant background!

It was impossible to be everywhere and know everything going on in Copenhagen, and any account can’t help but miss large parts of the story. There will be much bloodletting and lots of efforts to draw conclusions from the failure there. As John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, put it: “It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

Interestingly, the radically different model will have to be not just among the nation-states who turned a catastrophic environmental situation into a mundane, unsuccessful trade negotiation, but equally the Climate Justice movement, which reproduced a lot of the anti-globalization rhetoric and tactics that have developed in a decade of summit protests (WTO, IMF, G8, etc.), but was unable to alter the discussion or change the agenda. Meanwhile the protests that tried to go beyond the alternative Forums were thoroughly shut down by pre-emptive police repression again and again.

From the local paper, arrestees held on street for 3 hours with no bathrooms, drink, or food, in freezing temperatures. A young Swede told us how neighbors hung red curtains and blankets out the windows in solidarity, that one person set up a projector and projected "Let Them Go" on the opposite wall, and another neighbor played loud music into the street. At least two demonstrators were hustled into someone's home to avoid arrest too!

Police were everywhere, using dogs and close inspections as they tried to ferret out crimes before they were committed... so much for rule of law!

I knew Copenhagen was going to be a disappointment not long after I arrived. The three separate conferences reproduced a pattern of modern political discourse, where different conversations speak across or at cross purposes with each other… No doubt smart exchanges took place within the three conferences and in the countless conversations that surrounded and permeated all three venues (Bella Center, site of the UN COP15 Climate Conference; DGI Byen, site of the sprawling KlimaForum09; and Christiania, site of the Climate Bottom Conference). But the separate spaces reinforced a stratified public discourse and anyway, the nature of the discussions tended to be quite different depending on where you sat. It is difficult to talk politics without falling into clichés these days, and it’s getting harder as time goes on. We also tend to talk with those we already agree with, and rarely with those we don’t…

The Daily Funeral at the Climate Bottom Conference, this one for "Economic Growth."

Klimaforum lobby where all the real discussions took place.

All three conferences were convened to address the Climate crisis. The UN COP15 process was a nation-to-nation negotiating process with thousands of NGO delegates present to press their national representatives to adjust to popular demands. But the conversation inside turned into a mirror of trade negotiations in spite of resistance from many national delegations and most of the accredited NGO representatives. Many of the NGO delegates, from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace to countless lesser known activists, consultants, writers, and advocates, did move back and forth between the different conferences, mostly KlimaForum and the UN. Lots of delegates from the Global South also made the trek back and forth between conferences. The Climate Bottom Conference was sponsored by several associations based in Christiania as well as various local associations of eco-villages. It seemed to draw folks from coops, ecovillages,  and transition town movements (the latter also appeared prominently at the Klimaforum), spiritualists, advocates of local currencies, “social entrepreneurship,” and individuals from many parts of the world.

Insofar as the Climate Bottom conference had a wide-ranging, ambitious agenda much like the Klimaforum, it was hard to see why both conferences were happening simultaneously. My sense is that there is a second culture war on the left, at the bottom, among those who know we have to change life. The Klimaforum folks are closer to the traditional Left and wanted to influence the debate at the UN Conference. The Climate Bottom folks are more the anarchistic, lifestyle, personal-is-political types who have dropped out of mainstream culture, written it off, and are getting on with building a fulfilling, sustainable life immediately. They’ve mostly given up on expecting any real change from governments, corporations, or the larger population who still sustain those institutions. I myself have felt more comfortable with this strategy of exodus than with the Left strategy of trying to win state power, or engage with institutions more directly.

A typical Danish Christiania bike passes by a permacultural rain catchment installation (in blue) on coop apartment building behind.

But Copenhagen underscored the limits of a local strategy. The Climate Bottom Conference barely registered on the radar for most of the folks going to the Klimaforum or the Bella Center. The Klimaforum workshops, panels, and presentations were often quite earnest and well-meaning, sometimes eloquent and insightful. But the ones I attended left me feeling empty, and sometimes frustrated that I’d heard it all before. Unlike Naomi Klein, who said before Copenhagen that this time the movement wasn’t going to show up just to say ‘no’ but would have a real alternative agenda, I didn’t see an agenda in the myriad of good ideas germinating there. I saw a similar mishmash of leftists, socialists, democratic reformers, trade unionists, eco-agitators, immigrant and refugee civil rights campaigners, etc., that I saw at the World Social Forum in January in Brazil. And that have been meeting to give content to the slogan “Another World is Possible” for the better part of a decade now.

Reaching a state of discontent with what was on offer doesn’t seem altogether a bad thing. We clearly need a new politics commensurate with the gravity of our times, and the enormity of the opportunity to shift human/planetary life to a new paradigm. This new politics will depend on a lot of the knowledge and networks that were present at the Climate Bottom Conference and at the Klimaforum, but so far, there is a big piece missing. Since I got home, I’ve been pondering it, and think it has something to do with a clearer view of transitions, of power, of institutions, and finally of history. I argued in the last chapter of Nowtopia that we need a politically savvy Nowtopian movement to emerge, one that understands that we have to take our challenge to the technosphere and social life much further. The broad challenge to the General Intellect which is embodied in the effort to redesign life in the face of catastrophic climate change was ignored in Copenhagen. To reach the scale at which our challenge can become systemic, we’ll have to deal with the fundamental questions of political power, and probably military/police power too.

A typical scene of cyclists crossing the Norrebro Bridge in Copenhagen.

Jerichausgade, a lovely small street in Vesterbro where we stayed.

David Harvey argues that

“An anti-capitalist movement has to be far broader than groups mobilizing around social relations or over questions of daily life in themselves.  Traditional hostilities between, for example, those with technical, scientific, and administrative expertise and those animating social movements on the ground have to be addressed and overcome.  We now have to hand, in the example of the climate change movement, a significant example of how such alliances can begin to work.”

Well sort of! I think the Klimaforum and Climate Bottom gatherings embody a growing alliance between eco-scientists and grassroots activists, who together are contesting the direction of the General Intellect in their challenge to business-as-usual. But this emerging alliance is still stuck in its own limits, part of which stem from the lack of imaginative goals for where we’re headed.

This is the shoreline at Sydhavntippen, or South Harbor Dump, which our friends had spent two decades helping to turn into parkland. On Dec. 10 the Copenhagen city government authorized the entire area be made permanently parkland, a great victory for the community. At one point years earlier, when the city government had plans to develop the whole area into condominiums, activists staged a "coffee-in" where they set up a 1 km-long table and people sat in, drinking coffee for 3 days to convince the local government to change their plans... which they did!

In Copenhagen I got a copy of Turbulence, a great publication with a number of fascinating and important articles. The opening editorial “Life in Limbo” described well the predicament we find ourselves in:

There is a crisis of belief in the future, leaving us with the prospect of an endless, deteriorating present that hangs around by sheer inertia. In spite of all this turmoil – this time of ‘crisis’ when it seems like everything could, and should, have changed – it paradoxically feels as though history has stopped. There is an unwillingness, or inability, to face up to the scale of the crisis.

Harvey he comes right out and says “There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy.”

Precarious in more ways than one! Balancing on Turbulence!

Harvey addresses the problematic limits of the Nowtopian strategy:

[A] broad wing of opposition arises out of anarchist, autonomist, and grassroots organizations (GROs) which refuse outside funding even as some of them do rely upon some alternative institutional base…  This group is far from homogeneous… There is, however, a common antipathy to negotiation with state power and an emphasis upon civil society as the sphere where change can be accomplished.  The self-organizing powers of people in the daily situations in which they live has to be the basis for any anti-capitalist alternative.  Horizontal networking is their preferred organizing model.  So-called “solidarity economies” based on bartering, collectives, and local production systems is their preferred political economic form.  They typically oppose the idea that any central direction might be necessary and reject hierarchical social relations or hierarchical political power structures along with conventional political parties.  Organizations of this sort can be found everywhere and in some places have achieved a high degree of political prominence… But the effectiveness of all these movements is limited by their reluctance and inability to scale up their activism into large-scale organizational forms capable of confronting global problems.  The presumption that local action is the only meaningful level of change and that anything that smacks of hierarchy is anti-revolutionary is self-defeating when it comes to larger questions.  Yet these movements are unquestionably providing a widespread base for experimentation with anti-capitalist politics.

The co-revolutionary theory earlier laid out would suggest that there is no way that an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it, and re-working the constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system, and endless capital accumulation.  Inter-state competition and geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles over everything from trade and money to questions of hegemony are also far too significant to be left to local social movements or cast aside as too big to contemplate.  How the architecture of the state-finance nexus is to be re-worked along with the pressing question of the common measure of value given by money cannot be ignored in the quest to construct alternatives to capitalist political economy.  To ignore the state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept.

Radicals in the Turbulence group seem to share some of this thinking, when towards the end of their opening editorial “Life in Limbo” they make this argument:

The counter-globalisation movement was suspicious of – often even opposed to – institutions per se, constituted forms of power… But when the crisis of neoliberalism irrupted, it became apparent that this mistrust of institutions had translated into an inability to consistently shape politics and the economy. Antagonism against institutions as an end in itself is a dead end…Today, it is necessary to have more than the sporadic show of strength: we need forms of organisation that start from the collective management of needs, that politicise the structures and mechanisms of social reproduction, and build force from there…

A dozen massive hardwood stumps were brought from West Africa and installed as a Climate Change art exhibition in one of the city's main plazas.

Jens Galschiot put Justitia in the water a few meters from Copenhagen's famous Little Mermaid statue. "I'm sitting on the back of a man--he is sinking under the burden--I will do everything to help him--except to step down from his back." Justitia, Western Goddess of Justice... see more of his amazing work at www.sevenmeters.net.

These two pieces, Harvey in Monthly Review, and Turbulence’s editorial, resonated for me. They both credit a lot of the good work that’s gone on, but don’t shy away from paying attention to the gap between good intentions and political effectiveness. Where saying no has made sense for a while, it doesn’t anymore. We need to constitute a new order, a new way of organizing our lives. We may not be able to get the state to support or underwrite our efforts, but the implication of both of these writings is that we’ll have to use the state—or at least some new institutions with the power to shape life as powerful as the state has been historically—to rewrite the rules of our shared economic life. Our efforts will have to move to a higher level than our local gardens and bikeshops, our health clinics and websites. Harvey seems to embrace a traditional effort to take the state, while the Turbulence group leave it open to a new form of collective management of needs that might not call itself a state, exactly. In any case, finding a way to act politically at a higher level is becoming much more urgent.

From a great art exhibit at Louisiana, one of my all-time favorite art museums about a half hour north of Copenhagen.

Sun set on the December 12 march about 2/3 of the way through, leading to this gorgeous moment.

I wrote a few different things on this journey and they went on to other blogs and websites than this one. Here are the titles and links:

A Shared Climate, A Sharing Solution?

Copenhagen, Deluged

Chris Carlsson and Tom Athanasiou Debate Cap and Trade at COP15

The Art of COP15

Back to Civilization

Free Public Transit?

Hopenhagen or Carbonhagen, We’ll Still Be Cycling Regardless

Around the corner from where we stayed on Jerichausgade is the old Carlsberg Brewery, now being converted into a series of art galleries and offices. A fantastic gate graced by stone elephant sculptures still sits over the road ahead.

This swastika is one of four different symbols on the sides of the elephants, and dates from well before the Nazi occupation, rooted in Indian mythology.

On the train from Oslo to Stockholm, we finally had clear skies. Towards the "end of the day" which is about 3:20 in this photo, we got this amazing sunset, which turns out to be somewhat typical of these days in Stockholm too. After seeing the Edward Munch museum in Oslo, and his famous painting The Scream, Adriana immediately tagged this view as the source of his inspiration...

A pedestrian alley in the Old City.

Visiting my cousin and his boyfriend in Stockholm, we’ve had a few days to be tourists and wander around. It’s the perfect city for wandering, that’s for sure! I kept thinking of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” as we climbed staircases and stumbled upon elegant old churches and explored the Old City (Gamla Stan)… I also got a head cold, probably from the endless passage between too cold (outdoors) and too hot (indoors)… I forget what real winter is like!

View towards the Old City from Sodermalm.

We stumbled upon the Sofia Kirke (Church), which was an impressive Lutheran edifice sitting atop a steep hill in eastern Sodermalm (a central island in Stockholm, rather trendy now after being a working-class district for most of its history).

This Church won an architectural contest in 1899 and opened in 1906.

These are the charming workers houses that are now considered super desirable on Vita Bergen...

It is surrounded by charming small wooden houses with garden plots, and of course I was excited to discover this Nowtopian element in the heart of the city. Frommer’s City Guide to Stockholm told us: “[The church] is surrounded by just a few old wooden houses painted in the traditional red and once owned by the working classes, today they are highly desirable, particularly as they are near the necessary accessory of the young professional, an allotment.” So! Now the community garden is the “necessary accessory” of the young professional?!? Guess I’ll have to rewrite my book!

The gardens are pretty frozen now anyway!

Not far from the Sofia Kirke we found this lovely street alongside a park where a bunch of folks were sun worshipping... We heard Stockholm had a total of 14 hours of sunshine in November, so people here are starved for sun!

As you can see with this Stockholmer, sunworshipping here takes the form of facing the sun with your eyes closed and remaining still while soaking in the weak rays coming from the distant winter orb.

The new Turbulence is out and has a bunch of fantastic articles. Here’s a quote from the opening editorial that I thought important:

Allowing a new common ground to emerge involves a moment of grace, a stepping back from the assumptions, tactics and strategies of the anti-neoliberal, counter-globalist protest cycle of the turn of the century. The common ground constructed and maintained from that period must be recomposed through the prism of our contemporary situation.

The counter-globalisation movement was suspicious of – often even opposed to – institutions per se, constituted forms of power. This suspicion was obvious, for example, in the tension within one of its most institutionalised forms, the World Social Forum (WSF). The reason for the counter-globalisation movement’s scepticism was, of course, well founded: the result of the generalised recognition that neoliberal ideology had successfully colonised most social democratic parties and trade unions.

But when the crisis of neoliberalism irrupted, it became apparent that this mistrust of institutions had translated into an inability to consistently shape politics and the economy. Antagonism against institutions as an end in itself is a dead end. The power to vacate institutions leaves a void that politics, which abhors vacuum, tends to cover up with the calculations of piecemeal cooptation. Moments of antagonism are either part of ongoing processes of building autonomy and constituting new forms of power, or they risk dissipation, or even worse, backlashes. Today, it is necessary to have more than the sporadic show of strength: we need forms of organisation that start from the collective management of needs, that politicise the structures and mechanisms of social reproduction, and build force from there. What form could these take in the present climate? Campaigns against foreclosures, around the cost of utility bills, private debt, energy resources…? In any case, what is needed are interventions that start from shared life and acquire their consistency there; that employ moments of antagonism in order to increase their constituent power, rather than as ends in themselves.

If a decade ago, with the neoliberal doctrine at the height of its power and most institutional roads well and truly blocked, outright rejection was a credible tactic, the brittle ground of today presents us with very different problems.

This essay offers a lot more to chew on than this meaty piece, but I appreciated this one especially because it overlaps with a concern I’ve been writing about for the past few years: the cul-de-sacs of radical politics (pdf). It’s an ongoing contradiction that we’ve been up against for quite a while: how do we maintain and expand our presence without succumbing to institutionalization? Or put another way, how do we mount oppositional political activities without having to reinvent the wheel (and rent a new office, get new phone lines, etc.) every time? Our inability to avoid the suffocating realities of small business life (whether for-, non-, or not-for-profit) has led many of us to refuse to create any lasting institutions. Discomfort with the authority that tends to accompany seniority or longevity is another problem. We don’t want to fetishize expertise or experience, but then again, do we really want to naively pretend that everyone is equally capable of all activities, organizational as well as technical? Probably not.

So for all us who lean towards the anti-authoritarian end of the spectrum, we have to go beyond our usual cliches and easy answers. We can’t rely on the endless assertion that things will spontaneously work themselves out when they need to. That might happen, but it’s just as likely that they won’t, not without some meaningful institutional SPACE that we spend real time and effort to create now, well before the moment when we’ll really need it. Heading to Copenhagen in a couple of days, I’m intrigued to see how the various “movement” actors play their roles in the next 10 days. A great deal of preparation has gone into the protests and demonstrations, and there’s also a whole legacy of summit-hopping protest that this moment is a logical consequence of. I’m especially glad to have this unfolding in a modern, relatively affluent and comfy city, a place where we might be able to engage more deeply and intelligently with the complicated questions of a redesigned, complex, highly technologized urban life. So far, I’ve not encountered any primitivists who glibly insist that civilization is falling, or should fall, and in any case, there’s not much to do but to help it along… Here in social democratic Scandinavia, the sense of a safety net is still palpable, and the harsh climate and long nights also reinforce a strong sense of social interdependence. A potential breakdown in electricity or running water or communications is not welcomed as a harbinger of a new way of life, in the way that a lot of North American anarchists have tended to do in the past few years.

Anyway, more on this in the coming posts… I have a brief essay online at Shareable.net pointing to a possible grassroots approach to addressing the climate crisis. And I’ll be posting a piece on Monday at sf.streetsblog.org on a fascinating political intervention into transit politics here in Sweden called Planka.nu. My writings from Copenhagen will appear in all three locations, shareable.net, sf.streetsblog.org, and here. Hope you’ll check ‘em out, and chime in via the comments! Love to hear from my readers…

Meanwhile, here’s some more images I wanted to share:

Sunset in Stockholm, around 3:30 pm.

Setting sun on tower in Skansen, an open-air museum of historic Swedish buildings.

This is the sun at 1 pm on a Stockholm Street... and when it shines like this, locals tend to stop what they're doing and soak it up!

In Skansen museum, these are allotment huts, aka community gardens with small shacks, one from WWI era and the other from the 1940s.

Explanation of allotment huts at museum.

It's been hovering around zero centrigrade and frost has stayed on the ground all day... until today, when everything was wet and it felt almost warm... about forty+ degrees fahrenheit I think.

The Vasa Museum is a great experience, and the Vasa is a fantastic modern lesson! A massive warship built by the Swedish crown in 1628, it sailed few thousand meters on its maiden voyage and was blown over in a squall and sank. The most feared warship of its time was a lemon! It laid buried for 333 years until it was found and brought up in a 4 year effort in the early 1960s, a real archeological tour-de-force. Now it's on display in a dedicated museum and it's absolutely stunning. Frighteningly huge, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of its day.

This is a model of the below-deck crews at work in the Vasa...

An actual diving bell from the 1700s, in which the diver stands inside the bell, breathing the air at the top, while submerged in 16 meters of freezing cold water. From the invisible top of the inside, he hooked the 1.5 ton cannon in the sunken Vasa, and one at a time they recovered more than 50 of them using this unbelievable technology!

A gray wintery city, Oslo only has daylight from about 8 am to 4 pm these days.

On Saturday, I gave a Nowtopia talk as part of a “Social Change, Not Climate Change” talk at a local social center called Humla. About 20 people showed up, and I gave a shortened version of my usual talk since the point here is to fit it in a larger discussion about Climate politics. I shared billing with a couple of Swedes who came over from Stockholm to talk about their fascinating group called Planka.nu, which means something like “Crash it now!”, referring to their program of advocating free transit by jumping turnstiles and gates and not paying. The organization enrolls dues-paying members and if they get caught by the transit police without a paid fare, Planka pays their ticket. It’s a kind of insurance for free riders, and has its roots in both the anarcho-syndicalist youth movement (that has been around since the 1930s, and is connected to a national anarcho-syndicalist labor federation) and an autonomous Marxist think tank. I’ll write more about this later, probably in a full length report at Streetsblog after I interview them this week.

Lots of water surrounding Oslo.

This is Humla, where our presentations were made on Saturday, Nov. 28.

Here in Norway, there’s not a lot of excitement about social activism or resistance, although I was invited to speak here in part to promote both. The Saturday presentation devolved into three different discussions, and the one I joined was focused on the question of how Nowtopian initiatives could develop in the context of a swaddling/smothering Norwegian welfare state.  There were only four of us, and two of the participants were long-time local politicos, the third guy was probably only 25 or so. He kept referring to the rest of us as “adults” which seemed rather odd… but he emphasized that he was coming of age with stories about what had happened to the Norwegian left over the past generation (one account had it that the most vital part of it had been the Maoists, who had now settled into a comfortable middle-aged parliamentarism). The other two, one of whom I’d been in brief correspondence with in Processed World days, were very pessimistic, and pretty dour about any possibilities for reinventing political agency here in the present. Both shared a sense that things had grown much worse from what they’d been before … Try as I did, I couldn’t budge the discussion into a more creative direction, and we went round several times about why there wasn’t much going on locally…

This Per Gynt reindeer sculpture is on the bridge crossing the Aker river in central Oslo.

Interestingly, the next day we went to the home of some of the folks who had come to the event. They live in a house they squatted several years ago, then moved out for two years while they pressured the city to give it to them, finally moving back in prior to an agreement that they can stay and rent it for a fraction of prevailing rents. They are busily turning it into an ecological model home, though it’ll be some years before they get there. Already they are putting hemp insulation into the basement, and preparing to build a chicken coop as well as various other home improvement projects. With the cold dark winter upon them, it looked like a lot of work will be delayed until next year, but there’s a solid group living there already, full of ideas and plans. It was a Nowtopian-style household, without a doubt!

This was our old subway at the end of the line.

Like many cities now, Oslo has a public bike program, and we saw a lot of them whizzing around town while we were here, even though they're taking most of the fleet in for the winter.

Before we went there, Audun took us on a long subway ride up hill where we enjoyed some spectacular views, albeit under gray skies. Oslo sits on a big sprawling bay, and has a small pretty river running down the middle.

The Aker River in central Oslo.

The city is curiously divided between east and west, with the wealthier locals living on the west side in old elegant apartment buildings, streetside storefronts full of fancy boutiques and upscale shopping.

The old hotels at the center of the city, at 3:30 in the afternoon as dusk is settling.

City center at dusk.

Xmas is in full swing here, with decorations over the shopping district, and in countless windows.

On the east side by contrast the architecture is made up of large apartment blocks, nicer than the worst ones seen in some places, but still pretty impersonal. The population is noticeably less wealthy than their west-side counterparts, and the immigrant population is entirely focused in certain parts of the east side too. (There are sizeable numbers of Turks, Pakistanis, and various other refugees in Oslo. The population of Norway is about 4.5 million, only 2/3 of the Bay Area’s!)

Here I am with Audun beneath an 1881 Hotel, a lovely example of Norwegian romanticism, combining rural Norway with Gilded Era ostentation and a dash of Viking thrown in...

Oslo loves it statues; here is Adriana mimicking a miltary hero overlooking the city.

Audun also took us to see what he considered an essential showplace for Norwegian culture: Oslo’s City Hall. It’s a 1950s big brick building swathed in friezes and surrounded by sculptures highlighting in equal parts workers and mythical characters of Norway’s past. (One could argue I suppose that the workers as presented in the sculptures and murals inside are somewhat mythical too!) Norway is a Scandinavian social-welfare state par excellence. They have had the advantage of big North Sea oil reserves in their coastal waters, so for some time the country has been buoyed by oil money, helping to avoid the kind of retrenchment and austerity that a lot of other countries have had to endure lately. Still, the aura of neoliberalism shows up here in small ways (and larger ones too, I’m sure, but I’m less aware of them). Somehow Norway is the last place I’d expect all public bathrooms to charge for use, but so it is (apparently they do this to avoid junkies, of which there are a good number in the central city, using bathrooms as shooting galleries). And at the awful exchange rate, the 10 kroner comes out to about $1.85 per visit! The bus costs 25 kroner a ride (apx. $4.50 a ride) or 65 for day pass (about $11.50). Both our take-out Thai meal last night and our coffee and scone breakfasts cost around 200 kroner for two of us, so about $37! Very expensive to be here!…

The main room in the sprawling 1950s City Hall, a monument to Norwegian Social Democracy.

Bricklayer gazes out with determination while a Norse god celebrates on upper facade...

Left side of a mural inside City Hall depicting the Norwegian workers getting basic rights.

More scenes of victorious social democracy, this in mosaic in big hall.

Anyway, today we went across town in cold intermittent rain/snow to see Vigeland Park, a sculpture park that we’d heard about from many people. I looked at some photos online before we went, and I was worried that I’d find it completely kitschy and awful, but actually, I liked it very much! The human figures that cluster along the bridge and adorn the elevated obelisk plaza are super realistic, mostly nude, and all in various stages of wrestling, cuddling, hugging, etc. Taken one by one as you walk along, it’s amazing how many different emotions are evoked. In general, the sculptor Vigeland did an incredible job of portraying empathic characters, often in vulnerable and revealing poses. Here’s a gallery of images that we took.

This sculpture and all that follow are in the Vigeland Sculpture Park, built in the 1920s-1930s, and filled with sculptures by Gustav Vigeland, a prolific Norwegian artist.

I was worried that I'd find the park really kitschy, but actually the characters are quite moving, often very vulnerable and empathatic.

A lot of the sculptures are quite energetic, and some, like this one, are completely strange.

A half dozen or so depict a man and woman in the throes of serious wrestling, while others seem more like an early type of contact improvisational dance.

There are also these remarkable wrought iron gates.

One side has men in the gate, the other has women.

This is the view from the obelisk back across the park promenade.

We couldn't resist, as it seems most visitors cannot, getting into the act with these intense characters.

Next stop: Stockholm!

Buffalo, an animal and a city...

Spent two and a half days in Buffalo, a place I’d never been before… Always wondered why it was named Buffalo since that beast probably never roamed anywhere near here. Locals say it’s derived from a French expression Beau L’eau, with an ‘f’ somehow inserted into it by long lost accents… the beautiful water of course would refer to the Niagara River meeting Lake Erie here, along with a variety of smaller waterways. Pouring through the Niagara Gorge, a famously beautiful natural rock formation, the waters then plunge over Niagara Falls a short way north of here.

I heard a lot about the local water from a woman I met last night, Katie B., who hails from Athens, Georgia. She works locally with a Riverwatcher nonprofit, helping local citizens monitor water quality in wetlands, creeks, and rivers hereabouts. She loves her job which she was anxious to tell me after my public appearance on a panel last night, where I gave my usual rant against useless, stupid work. It was at a place called “Sugar City,” mostly known as a punk rock venue. (Oddly it seemed like a sweet local art gallery much more than a punk venue, but I think that’s because they had to shut down for 3 months due to hostile neighbors, and are now reinventing themselves as a good neighbor.) It’s a great spot in one of Buffalo’s thriving districts, Allentown, full of historic architecture, a hopping bar scene at night, and a fine used bookshop, Rust Belt Books. The bookstore owner, Christie, told me in a brief conversation about the city, “Buffalo is not depressed. Buffalo is unimpressed!”

Rust Belt Books in Allentown district of Buffalo, NY.

Cool rusting bike racks in front of Rust Belt Books.

Allentown District sign, with its surprising invitation to anarchists to be residents!

True enough, it’s a town full of secret energies and a palpable sense of an interesting future embedded in a depopulated, often devastated landscape. This is after all the home of Love Canal and countless other lesser known toxic catastrophes (probably some still ahead). Buffalo was one of the most important cities in the U.S. back in the 19th century, first when the Erie Canal arrived in the early part of that century, and then during the long booms and busts of industrialization that followed. At its earliest moments around 1820 there was even a communal society that built a thriving village called Harmony on forested land purchased from the Seneca Indians, in an area now absorbed by the city of Buffalo.

My sponsor here, Al Larsen, teaches in the Media Studies Department at SUNY Buffalo. I learned that the north campus where I appeared midday yesterday (and where that Buffalo statue sits) is a symbol of much that has gone terribly wrong in local urban design and planning over the past two generations. There was already a smaller downtown campus, and what is called the South Campus, when Nelson Rockefeller in his stint as governor of NY allocated a great deal of funding to establish the SUNY system (absorbing various local universities, including Buffalo’s). A new campus was planned, and after three different commissions approved its location downtown the decision was made… put it in swamplands far north of the existing South Campus (the landowner was obviously connected to the actual decision-makers). There is in Buffalo a one-line subway system (apparently the smallest city in the world with an underground subway) that runs from the downtown campus to the South Campus. As part of the planning for the new campus, monies were allocated to extend the subway to the new North Campus. They were never spent and the subway was never extended. The two campuses are far apart, and it was explained to me last night that the bicycle ride to the North Campus is about 10.5 miles on heavily trafficked highways—extremely unpleasant. So thousands of faculty, staff, and students drive to the campus every day, for lack of reasonable alternatives (there is a shuttle between the campuses too).

The bronze mascot in front of the North Campus Center for Arts.

Buffalo was an early car city. The streets are super wide, and at this point, given the smaller population (only about 300,000 in the city) there is a huge surplus of street parking in downtown and elsewhere. Thousands of homes are crumbling and abandoned. It’s possible to buy houses in Buffalo for as little as $10,000 each, and easy to find huge, old homes with elegant architecture and a dozen rooms for under $100,000. There is a stark divide in the city between east and west, a divide imposed by the wrecker of New York, Robert Moses, when he was the state director of Energy and Highways. A major freeway was put down the spine of the city, another was wrapped around the waterfront (they could use a good earthquake here to help get rid of it!), and today the east side has vast tracts of abandoned lands where houses once stood.

Freeway in need of a quake! In distance are windmills on an otherwise toxic site.

Buffalo's gorgeous art deco City Hall, built in the 1930s.

The lobby is full of Indian motif deco and some mosaic murals... through the arc the slogan on the mural says: "Frontiers Unfettered by any Frowning Fortress."

Instructions for elevator use?

Yes!

The good news is that there are over 80 community gardens and a great deal of energy to expand those efforts. Bicycling has its advocates: there is a small-ish Critical Mass, a larger Sunday midnight ride, and a great deal of promise when it comes to putting local streets on a “road diet” and moving towards a Copenhagen-style system of dedicated bike paths. But, as the eloquent Justin Booth of GreenOptions Buffalo said last night, there is a dearth of political vision or leadership in this city. In fact, by all accounts, it’s a thoroughly corrupt city government doing very little to help or advance the many initiatives underway. According to Booth, Buffalo is one of the few cities to pass an ordinance that requires all street repairs or changes to accommodate bicycles and pedestrians, but it has been mostly ignored in practice. He took a couple of local transit engineers to a conference in New York City recently and they were quite inspired by the many (Danish-inspired) changes underway in the Big Apple. So maybe Buffalo is about to enjoy some meaningful repurposing of its streets towards a more human-scaled life, less car-centric.

There are over 80 community gardens in Buffalo.

November strawberries in Buffalo!

Not far from the Allentown district where I spent the night last night is an effort called the Massachusetts Avenue Project. The neighborhood around it is quite poor and the housing is not in good shape, plus there are a lot of vacant lots. In one two-lot area the MAP has established a green garden, mostly using raised beds (there’s a lot of concern here about contaminated soils due to the long history of industrial waste).

These green tires are growing in a garden near a place called Buffalo Reuse, sort of like SF's Building Resources.

Jesse Meeder, the garden director, has built an incredibly impressive small fish farm, taking his inspiration from Milwaukee’s Growing Power. In this small cob-walled structure the temperature hovers around 80 degrees while water circulates in and out of watercress tanks, the fish tank where small tilapia are growing, and a variety of other buckets full of herbs and plants to help filter the water before it circulates back to the start again. The black tubing absorbs a lot of solar heat and keeps the whole place quite toasty (outside it was 39 degrees!).  In a local newspaper article that happened to appear the day I arrived in Buffalo, they insist that calling it a fish farm is to miss the point,

which is to create a miniature ecosystem where the fish, plants such as basil, parsley and watercress, and compost energized by 5,000 red worms feed one another in a manner similar to the way nature operates. The technical term is “aquaponics.” “The system is perfectly balanced,” Meeder said. “We’re trying  to replicate the natural environment. That’s what farmers should be doing.”… With the major expense being the water pump and the heater, the whole project came in at no more than $500 for materials.

They have a 1000 gallon rain barrel to capture the water they use, and with solar heat, they have developed a system that will deliver a lot of fresh fish protein to the surrounding residents. A good deal of Buffalo was described to me as  “food desert,” so these kinds of projects are really exciting for their replicability and low cost.  They expect their first crop of tilapia to be ready in early Spring and to be 1 to 1.5 lbs each.

1000 gallon rain catchment barrel at the Massachusetts Avenue Project in Buffalo.

The fish farm is in here, cob-walls and a full facility built for less than $500.

Jesse Meeder explains how the water circulates from one area to another in his fish farm.

The black tubes help circulate warm water from one tank to another.

Watercress thrives in upper pool.

Tilapia thrive in lower pool.

The tilapia will be 1 to 1.5 lbs each when they're ready for sale.

This morning I woke up in the home of Isabelle and Tim. She’s part of a local community improvement nonprofit called “Heart of the City” and they organized a tree-planting today. Over 1000 trees were going to be planted around the city and they had a few dozen going in to the ground as I was leaving. Buffalo has a huge potential. There are countless elegant homes waiting for rehabilitation, fantastic old stone churches everywhere are ripe for conversion to social centers, and the seeds of a new Commons are taking root in small pockets across the city. Thanks to everyone in Buffalo who gave me such a warm welcome and showed that inspirational and prefigurative activities are everywhere!

Allentown neighbors heading out to plant trees.

Jump digging in soil that had been near freezing the day before.

Another group plants trees down the street.

While we were on the observation deck on the 28th floor of City Hall we had a brief flurry of hail and snow… by the next morning it was over 60 degrees. Crazy weather in Buffalo, which is one reason there’s so many available houses there… But anyway, the last photo is your history lesson for the day. Who knew that Irish Civil War vets invaded Canada in 1866? To use a canal as ransom to free Ireland from England? Wow…

Lost history is everywhere!

These are now available from me via my personal website... perfect for hanging on your bike as the oceans rise!

I’m planning to be in Copenhagen at the Climate Conference (not inside, but outside) in December, and along with a whole lot of other folks on the planet, I’m thinking more and more about the dire facts piling up… We’ll be riding this Saturday in San Francisco along one possible future shoreline, as part of the thousands of actions across the country clamoring for meaningful policy change on Climate Change. We’re hosting a Talk next Wednesday at CounterPULSE on “Climate Change/Climate Justice” and I hope a lot of folks will come out for it.

I’ve been expecting to see a major rise in ocean levels in my life time, in spite of the commonly cited figures of a meter rise by 2100 or even less. I think it’s all going a lot faster than anyone can measure, and the synergistic reactions among different factors, like melting ice sheets, thawing arctic tundra, etc., are coalescing into a perfect storm. Inundation of coastal areas seems like it could happen rather suddenly, like within 10-20 years. Here’s a piece I came upon today that drives it home with a bit more science:

And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there?

The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world’s potential ice melt – the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland – simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the issue by suggesting that current knowledge is inadequate to estimate confidently the contribution that ice sheets might make to sea-level rise in coming centuries. While technology makes sea-level rise easier to observe, and we can predict some contributions to future sea-level rise with increasing certainty, we cannot yet fully predict the ice sheets’ contribution. There is thus a risk that sea-level rise could be higher than the (incomplete) estimates provided by the IPCC.

Thus, the most peer-reviewed piece of climate science ever written turns out to be completely inadequate when it comes to estimating the level of disruption associated with a very important aspect of climate change: the rising seas. If Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, like that in the Arctic, does not directly cause the oceans to rise when it melts) and Greenland contains most of the rest, then what’s going to happen when they start to melt with a vengeance, and when are they going to start melting? Official science is mute on the subject.

Our logo for Saturday's ride.

It’s hard to figure out how to address this and what to do… I wrote this up today, to be distributed as a handbill on Saturday:

We are bicycling along one of many future shorelines of San Francisco to dramatize the inevitable rise in oceans and the subsequent inundation most coastal cities will face due to catastrophic human-induced climate change. As we approach the December global climate summit in Copenhagen, we ride today in solidarity with thousands of others around the planet, demanding real action—not bogus market-oriented, cap-and-trade, smoke-and-mirrors inaction. Drastic reductions in carbon emissions are a straightforward and urgent necessity, and will not be achieved by auctioning off the last true commons, our skies.

We bicycle, too, to demonstrate one of the many ways we can change our daily lives towards a just world that provides a good life to everyone as a matter of right. Addressing the climate involves the way we live as much as it does planet-wide agreements on technology and public policy. The failure of the U.S. to enact strict federal rules to promote clean, green technologies and restrict, reduce and eliminate dinosaurs like coal, oil and nuclear is paralleled by a failure of imagination among activists here. Too many of us think we can solve the ecological crisis by recycling more, or shopping responsibly, while continuing to rely on fossil fuels in other areas of our lives.

Join us in raising the temperature of public pressure. Industrialized food production, a auto-centric transit system, oil dependency, and a long list of bad technological choices cannot be solved by simply committing to good shopping. They require a sudden, dramatic, and forceful shift at the national and state levels. This inevitable shift cannot be made at the expense of those who have already been left behind or left out, subjected to polluting factories, toxic waste dumps, power plants, and incinerators. We can create a healthy, prosperous life for everyone—not just in the Bay Area—but across the country, and crucially, across the world. You can start changing how you live by using less energy, water, and resources. But we also can’t leave power in the hands of the same business and government leaders who have profited so handsomely from the mess they’ve already made.

Committee for Full Enjoyment, Oct. 24, 2009
Get active!:   ActForClimateJustice.org/West

Our route.

Join us at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24 on the lawn just south of PeeWee Herman Plaza in San Francisco (more or less the end of the red line that leaves on Market Street).

Lastly, the oceans rising are only one part of a larger problem of our inability to live intelligently on earth. One of the ongoing dramas that is way out of sight and out of mind is the mid-Pacific gyre, the immense pile of plastic soup that fills a space said to be twice the size of Texas, where countless millions of pounds of plastic are slowly decaying in the sea. A friend just sent me this link to some really stunning photos of dead Albatross chicks on Midway Island, 2000 miles from any continent. They more than eloquently speak for themselves. Brace yourself and have a look…

When I think of bicycles in Mexico beautiful images of workers spring to mind. Delivery men flutter on the streets on two or three wheels pollinating the neighborhoods with water, bread, telegrams, mail, newspapers, flowers, pharmacy errands, tacos de canasta, and other daily comforts. The factory workers also arrive on their bicycles. The films of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema — often in the same category as cult Mexican films — nurtured the national imagination with an abundance of characters on bicycle. Pedro Infante -– a legendary Mexican singer and actor of that era — in a biographical film about his life is depicted as a humble bicycle mechanic in his beginnings. Among my favorite cast of characters on bicycle is the knife sharpener. He blows a sharp whistle as he rides through the street, telling his clients that he is available. When I lived in Mexico City, many times I called out from my top window “I’ll be right out!” El Afilador de Cuchillos places his back wheel on a stand. He sits and peddles backwards on his bike to whirl the sharpening stone; sparks fly to give knives a new edge. For more than a century, such workers have peddled the streets of Mexico. Even in the most populated cities of Mexico, the flowers, the bread, the water, the news, the mail, still arrive on bicycle.

Knife sharpening on the streets of Mexico with a bicycle-based machine.

On Saturday, September 19th 2009, Chris and I wandered the pedestrian zones of the historical colonial center of Guadalajara during the lunch hour, here known as la hora de la comida or la hora de la siesta. La hora lasts about two hours. We spent the hour eating pistachio and prune ice paletas, while window shopping, buying a wooden spatula on the street, and people watching; I even tried on a sparkly Quinceañera crown made of silver and crystals because it was rather remarkable. In other words, we were making time before the afternoon conferences of the second day of the Second Annual National Cycling Conference. (I say making time, because while English speakers “kill time” whenever they have a surplus of time on their hand before an event, we Spanish speakers say we are haciendo tiempo: making time.)

While we wander around, making time, I see an elder gentleman with his bicycle in front of a pharmacy. I shamelessly ask him “Disculpe, señor, are you a messenger?” Messengers are on my mind. Later that afternoon, we will attend a conference delivered by a panel of bike messengers.

Well, this is my own purchase, right now”, he says pointing to a bag in the crate on the back of his bike, “But, I am a messenger in everyday life. … Once upon a time, I delivered telegrams.”

Adriana and Don Francisco Gonzalez Estrada with his 1957 bicycle.

We have a conversation, and part ways. Chris and I retrace our steps to the Museo de la Ciudad to attend the Bicycle Messenger Talk headed by bike messenger Jimmy Lazima from Los Angeles, California, one young bike messenger from Ciudad Guzman, Jalisco, and fixie bike aficionados from Guadalajara. Jimmy engages the audience with stories about riding and working through gridlocked Los Angeles streets. The Mexican messenger talks about his on-going and painstaking efforts to set-up business, create a clientele basis, and promote ecological culture in Ciudad Guzman without yet being able to make a living from his efforts.

The messenger presentation is followed with a promotional video of fixie riders careening through San Francisco without breaks or gear shifts, and a talk about the Alley Cat bike messenger races and comparable rally races in Mexico. These collective experiences infuse me with a wanton desire for the adrenaline and glamour of outlaw bicyclist.  Yet, I wonder about the bike messengers delivering to the conference. I venture to describe these bicycle messengers as blue-collar-urban-guerrillas opting out of a life in an office cubicle for a life of daily delivery rally races. They represent a new generation of bicycle workers, who are most visible due to their extreme physical dexterity, wit, and environmental commitment. They are workers responding to a frenetic labor and car-choked city environment. Without a doubt, they make bicycling sexy and this attraction is fundamental towards creating new city cyclists, but I wonder, how novel are bike messengers in a country such as Mexico with a long tradition of bicycle workers?

I won’t argue against importing the benefits of a new bicycle messenger culture into Mexico. After all, as mentioned, this new culture is an adaptation to current city conditions in many places. Furthermore, the conference organizers represented by a handful of educated college Mexican students, have busted their asses to bring people together from across the country and the world to share a diversity of experiences of environmental activists and new urbanists across the planet. So, I shift towards wondering about the former generation of bike messengers. How do we connect a cult classic generation of Mexican bicycle workers to this new sexy generation of bike messengers? How do we honor and recover Mexico’s self-definition as a bicycling nation while adapting to the flux of thoughtful and provocative environmental politics coming in from the outside?

Before the presentation ends, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I smile, and lean over enthusiastically to shake the hand of Don Francisco Gonzalez Estrada; the older gentleman who I had met earlier, and who I invited to the bike messenger conference. He knew where to find the museum without an address, he found the panel on the second floor, found me, and found a seat. The Q&A portion of the talk begins. He leans over, “Do you think my bike will be alright outside? There is a young man watching over the bikes. He said he would watch over my bike. I put a chain on it anyways.”

“Yes, I think it will be ok.”

There are questions about helmets. Don Francisco leans over again. “I have a helmet also. I rarely use it. It’s more like an aviator helmet, like the one Cantinflas used.”

I nod, and I am trying to catch the eye of the moderator. He passes me over for the last question, but I insist. The talk is running late, and the moderator does not want to allow me to take a final question, but I insist, and the room supports my petition.

“I am not here to ask a question. I want to tell a story.” I get booed. I smile and insist, “This is important. I want to introduce Don Francisco Gonzalez Estrada born in 1943 in the Colonia Del Santuario of Guadalajara. He bought his bicycle on April 15, 1957, the same day Pedro Infante lost his life in an aviation accident. He has been a bicycle messenger since then. I thought I would introduce the new generation of bicyclist messengers to the former generation.”

I pass the microphone to Don Francisco, and a roar of applause breaks out from the room. The panelists are clapping. People with cameras approach Don Francisco. He is surrounded by bicyclist paparazzi. Flash. Flash. Flash. The young Mexicans approach him as if he was Pedro Infante himself (who by the way was known to Don Francisco, amongst other celebrities). He speaks with grace, clarity, and firmness.

Don Francisco regales the Cycling Congress, Sept. 19, 2009.

“I bought my first Turismo bicycle in 1957. Before the 1980’s, people respected cyclists on the roads of Guadalajara. Our bicycles had license plates, and we had to carry registration papers. We had to have a front light, and red back light. We were treated like another vehicle on the road by city regulations. … I always take my extreme right on every road; even when I cycle against traffic. If I see someone hurtling towards me, I step off the road, on to the sidewalk. I have never had an accident.”

Don Francisco’s presentation is brief. The crowd breaks into an uproarious applause again. The panel talk concludes. Young Mexicans come up to take his picture but can’t seem to find the words to speak to him. Here is an Icon. They admire him from afar. They do not know how to talk to him. This is not only a generational gap, but a class gap. Even so, his generation of bicycle workers has been reinserted into the discussion, and our imaginations, if but for a fleeting minute.

Afterwards, he shows me an old photograph of himself; a handsome 30-year-old to his handsome 66-year-old face. He is engaged; connected; and at the moment, acknowledged. Outside on the sidewalk we keep talking. He tells me he uses the new bicycle path on Federalismo to come to and fro on certain work routes, and hopes that good efforts will be made to respect the path, for fear that it will be invaded by other uses. Don Francisco hopes that a more substantial bicycle path is also placed on Chapultepec Avenue to provide a safer route than just a painted line on the street, which is not respected by motorists. He shows me his sound and light systems on his bicycle to be seen in traffic.

A woman takes photos of him, and I ask her to take his information in order to deliver a copy to him. She agrees. A conference organizer–El Negro–jots down Don Francisco’s work address, promising to pass by and provide him with information about bike rides and other bike activism. I hope they follow up. There is a natural momentum in creating contact between the old generation and the new generation of cyclists. How many people knew, before Don Francisco came along and spoke, that Guadalajara was a bicycle friendly city, where cyclists were treated fairly on the roads? There is much to be learned and recovered from past and present generations of Mexican workers on bicycles by young generations of environmental activists. I don’t believe in gaps. The entire urban cycling movement depends on making the invisible visible; quiet literally on making cyclists visible to motorists. I invite new generations of cyclists in Mexico to make an effort to see the old generation of cyclists: our icons.

Bread delivery by bike in Tlaquepaque, Guadalajara.

Two workers going home on bike pass a just-installed Ghost Bike.

Since our friends in Guadalajara started installing "ghost bikes" to commemorate killed cyclists, they've already had to put up 5, and it's only been a little over a month!

Mexicana airlines is probably among the world’s worst. I’ve had my bad experiences with them in the past, but this trip to Guadalajara has reached a new depth. It all started back in April when I was invited to speak at the 2nd Annual Mexican Cycling Congress in Guadalajara. They kindly offered to cover my airfare, which was handled by a sponsor with lots of frequent flyer miles on Mexicana (their program is known as “Frecuenta”). I was excited since Adriana’s family is mostly in Guadalajara, so she made plans to join me, using some of her surplus of Frecuenta miles to cover her airfare. We had our flights arranged, flying down on the last day of April, going to the conference and then flying home about 10 days later from Mexico City where we planned to go overland…

That’s when the fun started. The Big Flu Scare caused the conference to be postponed, so the tickets were put on hold, pending the new dates. Eventually, after many calls, our friends in Guadalajara got my ticket rescheduled for this trip. The problem is, now we didn’t want to go Mexico City ten days later. We wanted to go home after a week in Guadalajara. The ticket was switched to the right dates, but there was no connecting flight between Guadalajara and Mexico City and we had to return from there! Adriana’s ticket was even more ridiculous because though she got on the same flight down (which itself is just awful–leaving SFO at 12:20 a.m. and arriving in Guadalajara at 6:15 a.m. or 4:15 a.m. for us! no sleep), but her return ticket was scheduled for the same original return date, May 12, but now in 2010!!

We ate SO well here! Mexican cuisine is among the best in the world, easily!

I spent over an hour going through Mexicana’s 800 number in the U.S. trying to rebook my flight to the U.S. direct from Guadalajara. I was told, after 3 different operators passed me along, that I was not able to do it. Only the original Frecuenta account holder could alter the ticket. So I asked the friends in Guadalajara to do it, and they weren’t able to either. We were quite puzzled. Adriana spent two entire afternoons, almost 6 hours, on the phone with various Mexicana operators, trying to change her flight (they were HER miles for her flight), but at first they wouldn’t even credit her with the original miles they’d “spent” on the May trip that got postponed! After many hours she was told her miles had been returned to her. Still she could not alter the return date of the trip! Nor could she change the itinerary to return directly from Guadalajara (though on the phone two different operators had indicated that we COULD change that).

We finally gave up trying to solve the problem by phone, assuming that once we were in front of a Mexicana counter at the airport, about to board the plane, we’d be able to change the tickets as desired. Wrong. We could change the time of the flight in Mexico City, but we could do nothing about the missing leg of the trip from Guadalajara to Mexico City. Nor would they allow us to change the itinerary so we could just fly home from Guadalajara to SFO. . They finally got her off the phone by confirming with a supervisor that a note had been made on her reservation stating that she would fly home from Guadalajara and that the date had been changed. When we arrived at the SFO Mexican counter, we were told that no such changes existed, nor any note. So, we were able to fly down but had no confirmed way to go from Guadalajara to Mexico City on the date we expected to leave. We decided to wait and visit a Mexicana office here in Guadalajara.

Rainy season here, and the skies have been so spectacular!

In Guadalajara, on the first visit we waited 40 minutes while their computers were down. The clerk was gracious and tried to explain that he could not alter a Frecuenta-miles paid trip either. That could only be done by calling the Frecuenta office, a special frequent flyer office of Mexicana. However, Adriana had been told by phone that this could only be fixed by going to a local office. We spent $29 to change Adriana’s flight to the right day, leaving from Mexico City on the same flight as mine. But we still couldn’t get a direct flight to SFO, since the original flight route could not be changed. We need to buy a flight from Guadalajara to Mexico City. We spent more of her miles to cover the Guadalajara-Mexico City, and the Congress sponsors reserved a connecting flight for me. However, we were asked to go by a Mexican office to pick up our electronic tickets. On Monday we found out that we had to pay almost $100 in taxes for each of our so-called “free” flights. But when we tried to pay for my ticket we were told I could not, it had to be paid by the miles holder, some corporate sponsor of the Cycling Congress. Of course it was going to be nearly impossible to get that entity to personally go to a Mexicana office and pay the taxes and sign the deal, so we decided to spend more of Adriana’s miles to cover my ticket too, and then we were later reimbursed by the Congress for my taxes paid, although Adriana’s miles were by then unrecoverable. OK. Whew! It seemed all set, finally. We would go to the airport on Wednesday, fly to Mexico City and spend a day and a half, and then take our original flight home Friday night.

Chiles en Nogada... a special seasonal dish: stuffed pepper covered in walnut sauce and pomegranate seeds... yowza!

Got to the airport yesterday. The luggage inspection was pretty thorough and they forced us to pull out our three unmarked bottles of very special tequila that Adriana’s parents had given us. Luckily they had just dropped us off, so we called and they came back to the get the tequila. By the time her parents got back we’d found out that Mexicana was going to charge us $1000 to take our luggage to Mexico City since domestic rates applied. However, if we were going straight through to the U.S. the overweight charge would be $75 or so! But domestically they impose much stricter weight limits. No finagling could budge them. We contemplated changing our tickets again, to fly straight home to SF, saving a lot of money but missing the time in Mexico City. We were about to do it when it was revealed that we couldn’t possibly make the connection and would be stuck in Mexico City airport overnight!! This has now taken yet another 40 minutes of standing and discussing with Mexicana employees. Finally we decided to rebook our Guadalajara-Mexico City flight to Friday morning with our luggage going through to the U.S. on our 7:30 pm flight that evening. We’ll go into the city to have a meal with Adriana’s relatives and then we’ll go back to the airport for our evening flight… Supposedly this will assure that we only pay the international weight charges and there won’t be any other penalties….

Stay tuned!

Pollo con huitlacoche in salsa de flor de calabaza