I Am Not Hamlet

Again, this link is a month old.  Yet, I have to say I'm quite proud of this piece and feel the faint rumblings (or is that simply gas?) of a book.  Time will tattle, I suppose.  Anyway, tell me what you think of this piece.  Subscribe to Stand Magazine while you're at it. Love Is Action from the Stand Magazine blog.

Have you seen this narrowly-interested bumper sticker around in Michigan? I believe it comes from the UAW. The punchline is "Keep Buying Foreign." While I'm glad people realize the interconnectedness of the U.S. Auto industry with the health of Michigan--a fact the last 6-8 months here has only been made stunningly real--it is quite short sighted. I'd like to engage one of the possessors of these stickers and ask the following questions: 1. Where were your TV, stereo, and DVD player made and what is their parent company? 2. Is the food you eat grown in Michigan and do you eat seasonally? 3. Why does the quality of American cars make buying foreign so palatble? I imagine I'd receive either the bird, a narrowing of eyes, or a blank stare.

Why did you select it? Were you also able to download a video? On my previous post I knocked YouTube--and I stand by that knocking, but I did say there were some worthwhile things on there. Here is one of them; I discovered this in the summer of '07 on two different blogs. While not a perfect fit for the idea of localism, it certainly is a jeremiad against globalization. A British group bemoaning a loss of their culture (oh, yes, it is rich with irony, but these aren't imperialists). Enjoy. I tried a couple of different videos to download including this, but to no avail. Zamzar is interesting and could be useful for the classroom, but I kept getting "file has no extension" error messages. I'll have to try again.

This posting is a bit overdue as we arrived backed from Mr. Penn's woods a week ago today. We stayed at Cook Forest State Park. A good-sized park in the Allegheny mountains, which included an old growth forest. One morning I took a walk before the family was awake and found a large fallen tree. I know I didn't count correctly, because some of the rings were obscured, but I did count 216 of them. That places the tree as a seedling around 1792. Not bad for a plant. Overall the trip was pleasant, the first two-and-a-half days it rained on and off--so much so that we were visiting the crappy souvenir tourist traps, but we also, out of desperation visited Punxsutawney, you know, of groundhog fame(see the last photo). A pleasant small burg with an embarrassingly tiny library. So we hiked, fished, canoed, built fires, harassed chipmunks (which, BTW, if they would organize I think they could take over campgrounds around North America, but alas, they live up to Darwinian expectat...

Here's Tom Philpott's (from Grist) round up of the most important food stories of 2007. Notice the link to the community garden in Detroit.

I like the idea of Trader Joe's stores and have patronized one in Northville a few times, but after shopping there today I don't think I'll be visiting much anymore. Here's the problem--outside of wines--no local products. How hard is it to stock MICHIGAN apples in October? Better yet how hard is it to stock local apple cider? There was no local produce, no local meat, no local dairy, nothing except the wine. I'm trying to make this a blog with as few F-bombs as possible, but this is testing my limits. If they don't want to support local/regional farmers then I don't really want to support them. They are sending money outside of a state that badly needs income. What about you? Do you even care that you eat South African oranges, Chilean apples, and New Zealand lamb?

Having recently taken (and passed, I might add) an Ecological Economics course and in reading a couple of books namely McKibben's Deep Economy and currently Wendell Berry's Another Turn of the Crank has changed my thinking immensely . A few years years ago I wouldn't have made the connection between economics and the environment other than the usual tired arguments about jobs versus saving some particular place or ecosystem. The issue is deeper than that. What is your view of the global ecosystem? Is it a subset of the economy or is our economy, both local and global, a subset of both kinds of ecosystems? As we move farther and farther away from living and having our being in and on the land we would probably choose the first option. I think, based on science and the Bible, that it is the second one. Anyway, in thinking about these things nearly incessantly these days, I come across Berry's comments in his essay "Private Property and the Common Wealth" wher...

I'm reading Bill McKibben's Deep Economy , a popularist approach to populism and its cultural accoutrement, localism. Anyway, here's McKibben's take on one way Detroit may be saved: Say you're a dreamer. Imagine the most ruined city in America. That would be Detroit, which has lost half its population in the last few decades. A million people have moved away; as much as a third of the city's 139 square miles consists of empty lots and dilapidated buildings, "an urban core giving way to an urban prairie," in the words of the New York Times . But slowly, some of that land is coming under cultivation: forty community gardens and microfarms, some covering entire city blocks, have sprung up in recent years. A farmer named Paul Weertz farms ten acres spread over seven lots, prducing hay, alfalfa, honey, eggs, goats' milk, even beef cattle. His tractor barn is an old garage. In 2000, a group of architects, urban planners, and local activists convened by t...