We had some awesome torrential rains over the past few days, initiating the new roof on our building (it seems to have done its job!). After my trip through the Amazon and its equatorial rains, then the stormy weather I had in LA, it seems only fair that I’d come home to heavy winter storms in San Francisco too. And we really need ‘em, since we’re in the midst of a serious drought. Highly recommend a quick perusal of Tom Englehardt’s latest, “Nobody Knows How Dry We Are,” on the global drought conditions, written as a self-proclaimed amateur, he’s trying to connect the many disparate stories, from Australia’s horrific Great Drying and wildfires, to the droughts besetting Texas, Eastern Africa, Central China, Northern California, and more…

As I rode my bike under pouring rain (and loving it!) I had this rising feeling that we ought to be catching it and trying to save it. Seems an insane waste, to see such incredible quantities of fresh water falling on our asphalted city, and getting whisked away through the sewer system and into the bay (the aging sewer systems around the once-abundant Bay always threaten to dump raw sewage; in Marin a broken system dumped 300,000 gallons of fetid sewage during the storms).

I came home soaked a couple of times…

At the top of my stairs, dripping.

Soaked and happy!

I’m swamped with more than water, too… tons of reading materials piling up all the time, still trying to finalize negotiations with the SF Museum and Historical Society on our wiki, foundsf.org. I’m as overwhelmed as the next person trying to keep my morale up in the face of a global collapse and the ever-more dire news about climate change.

But I take heart from the slow convergence of some of my own Nowtopian arguments and those of radical colleagues near and far. Werner Bonefield has published some great collections of radical thought over the past few years, and in this piece he helpfully argues that “The business of negation, the anti in anti-globalization, is the creation of alternative social relations by means of practical critique of existing social relations…”

He goes on to critique the summit hopper/protesters, wondering if their activities can “assume practical relevance…” because “Suddenly, or not so suddenly, there is the long awaited and predicted crisis and the movement seems paralyzed.” He wonders how the anti-globalization movement can respond if it sees the crisis as a crisis of greed, which is a crisis of regulation, rather than a deeply systemic crisis for which the apparent greed and unregulated chaos are only visible peaks. “An anti-globalization movement that only focuses on the issue of greed does not see the vampire that sucks labor out in the production process as the basis of that greed.”

“I think what has to be left behind is the old social democratic or state socialist idea of class. That idea was based on the notion of market position, and sought to rebalance the inhumanity of exploitative producdtion relations by means of re-distribution… class struggle is correctly understood as the movement against the existence of social classes… Class struggle is the struggle to dissolve class society, relations of class domination and exploitation, in favor of commune–this society of the free and equal, an association of the freely assembled social individuals… so if correctly understood, class should be a critical concept, not an affirmative concept. The old class concept… wanted to re-distribute in order to create a fairer deal, a new deal, for those on the wrong side, or the wrong end of the stick…”

Once again to my surprise, John Robb gives some supportive coverage to emerging movements against evictions. But it will clearly come down a combination of these kinds of practical resistance efforts based on solidarity and local community support, combined with more far-sighted efforts to restructure how we meet our basic needs. As Dmitry Orlov argued the other night at Long Now, it comes down to “food, shelter, transportation, and security” to which I would add, water, energy, and communications. But these are the kinds of things that a great many Nowtopian initiatives are beginning to address.

A local effort that I recommend to anyone wanting to get started learning how to be more self-reliant in urban communities is my pal Ruby’s Institute of Urban Homesteading over in Oakland. She’s starting a batch of new classes shortly, and there could hardly be a better time to jump in and start figuring these things out, and she’s a great teacher to boot! She’ll be coming to our Talks series at CounterPULSE next Wednesday Feb. 25 to talk about Bees in the City. And in our upcoming Talks March-May, many practical conversations are scheduled, from March 11′s “Remanufacturing Our Way Out of the Depression” to April 22′s “Global Commons/Global Enclosures” to April 29′s “Transition City: Permacultural Transformation” which will feature Ruby again along with Novella Carpenter (Ghost Town Farm), Kevin Bayuk (SF Permaculture Guild), Laura Allen (Greywater Guerrillas)…

So more to come soon, but a quick blurt… Save the Rain! Catch it, store it, use it!…

Four planes and 24 hours in transit but I made it without much trouble… Kicking myself that I didn’t have my camera ready when we were soaring over the Amazon from Manaus to Belem, especially towards the end when an incredible view at dusk opened up to the west. Multiple giant rivers and vast interlocking estuarial canals, all heavily forested, all quite close to Belem, were framed by a thick layer of fluffy white clouds, a weird set of horizontal gray ellipse clouds in front of them, and then a high storm layer above it all, with the sun pouring through randomly in all directions. It was breathtaking! I had been assigned to a middle seat and thus, had put my bag away, out of reach, and couldn’t easily get my camera when I ended up in the window with the amazing view… alas. You’ll just have to take my word for it!

Hanging around in Manaus for a couple of hours I met some other U.S. folks heading here, an environmental lawyer and a NGO staffer for Amazon Watch. I am now sitting in a school room at the Universidad Federal do Para, some Italians and Spaniards discussing how to properly write various documents that will be used to register the 80,000+ delegates who are already pouring into town. I come to the World Social Forum with curiosity and some modest excitement. I don’t know if this sprawling gathering aspires to invent a new form of global self-governance, but they still promote the slogan “another world is possible,” so it opens questions without necessarily providing an answer. The slogan may be better updated to a plural version to acknowledge the resistance to yet another hegemonic program for life, allowing instead for many other possible worlds…

My first take on Belem this time is very different from my memory, but then I haven’t yet been to the historic center where I have this vivid memory of watching torrential equatorial rains falling on ancient Mangueiras (mango trees) and hundreds of mangoes falling into the rushing black runoff, hungry kids scrambling to grab as many as they can and stuff them in their shorts for safe keeping (that was 20 years ago!). Today a taxi took me on a long ride across the city (from the plane it was really quite big, many dozens of 15-25 story buildings dotting the urbanscape from the air), which resembled many other rides I’ve had like this in the past into such cities as Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome or Naples… a seedy, crumbling cityscape, lots of the trappings of modernity, but somehow already sliding beyond that into a post-prosperity seediness, many structures covered in tags and inartistic graffiti, others just succumbing to the endless humidity and tropical decay that relentlessly confronts any attempt at permanence here. I started reading China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” on my way here and the dark, hybrid alien/animal/human/machine life forms in New Crubazon City seemed weirdly premonitory for what I might find here in this odd outpost just below the equator, on the shores of the Amazon as it meets the southern Atlantic.

I’m a bit worried that it’ll be mostly a giant convention of leftists, assembling the usual litany of demands and spending a lot of time spinning wheels and waxing eloquently about injustice and so on, but if I’m lucky it’ll be a fantastic gathering full of endlessly challenging conversations that while not able to solve the problems of the world, might start framing better questions and better solutions too… Reading also Bill McKibben’s “Deep Economy,” a smart book that goes head-on against Growth, dovetailing with the skype interview I did a couple of days ago with Fernanda and Mario from DecrescitaFeliz (Happy DeGrowth) somewhere on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The Nowtopian arguments also parallel and overlap this line of thought, of course, but it’s interesting to me how powerfully this new way of thinking seems to be bubbling up from below in many quarters. I’m extremely interested to find it here in Belem, and if I can’t, to add it to the mix as best I can…

I hope to have a good opportunity to do that in conversation with folks from India and England on the Global Charter for Labour. Peter Waterman is one of the conveners of this discussion, and he’s trying to push it beyond and outside the many other efforts that are likely to appear here, from the “Decent Work” campaign endorsed by the ISO, to the numerous trade union confederations (esp. from Global South) that tend to ignore or dismiss the vast numbers of precarious workers, ambulantes, etc. StreetNet is a group that has been organizing among the street vendors in India, so I’m excited to learn more about their thoughts and approach. Gratifyingly, some online comments on Peter’s pre-WSF documents were quite committed to challenging the regime of work as defined by Capitalism, and to make a new approach to global labour contingent on a serious reappraisal of what we do. Whew! I think I’ve found some people I can finally have a good conversation with!… it’s a bit odd that I’m such a loner, only organizationally affiliated (with the Global Commons Foundation) as a flag of convenience, but I hope that doesn’t leave me in a bad position in these conversations. Waterman seemed to know what I’ve been up to all these years, so I think I’ll get a good chance to partake…

or maybe not! Having arrived and had a quick look at the overwhelming program booklet, with over 2000 events and workshops, I will be surprised if any focused conversation really happens here… but anyway, it’s still good to be here…

Today I walked around a bunch and took photos to get a sense of the place… here’s a gallery:

Equatorial rains pour down on Belem, this view from my balcony.

The Workers' Party of President Lula has put these up around town.

19th century low-rise structures, often covered in graffiti, sit side by side with typical highrise apartments.

The old harbor in Belem, as the rain is starting again.

Dinner time at the Harbor!

The street's residents demand signalization!

On my walk around town today I came upon this charming neighborhood where the neighbors are organizing for a traffic signal… much more to come on streets and street conditions here in Belem in a later post at the sf.streetsblog.org site… and much more to come here in the next days about the World Social Forum, the chaos and the excitement, the politics and the confusion…