New York Green Fest Blog

David Korten's Keynote Presentation Now Online

2011-08-12T13:34:00.002-04:00

Agenda for a Green Economy

David Korten's keynote presentation at Green Fest, August 5, 2011, is posted on his website at
http://livingeconomiesforum.org/agenda-for-a-green-economy

Greetings to those gathered at Alfred University and those watching via live streaming across the country. Special greetings to Michael Greenman and my friends in Columbus, Ohio. It is wonderful to join you by Skype for this important conversation.

As you all know, this timely event is an interesting combination of a local New York Green Fest conversation on Building a Green Economy and the annual conference of the Green Party US. My assignment for this session is to spell out an Agenda for creating a Green Economy based on living system principles that is rooted in and serves the needs of people and the human and natural communities in which we live. I want to begin, however, by setting a context and spelling out the connection between the New Green Economy and the work of New York Green Fest, Transition Towns, and the Green Party US.

Economic Failure

Our nation remains in the midst of a deep economic crisis. Official unemployment continues to hover around 9 percent. If you factor in both short-term and long-term discouraged workers and those forced to work part-time, because they can’t find full-time jobs, the total of unemployed and under employed in the United States runs near 23%. The worst hit are people of color, young people in general, and young to middle aged men.On top of that, over 11 million homes in America are vacant and one out of every 46 homes is in foreclosure.

There is no hope for a Main Street recovery on the horizon. And those in charge haven’t a clue what to do about it.

The only recovery since the 2008 crash has been on Wall Street. Thanks to massive bailout funding from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, the folks who brought down the economy are doing splendidly. They enjoy record share prices, corporate profits, and executive bonuses. The financial assets of America's billionaires and the idle cash reserves of the most profitable corporations are at historic highs. Their biggest challenge is figuring out where to park all their cash.

The glaring disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street creates an unprecedented moment of opportunity for a deep rethinking of the economy.

The reality that returning to pre-2008 business as usual is not an option seems totally to escape the awareness of those in power. It is, however, evident to an ever growing segment of a deeply frightened electorate increasingly susceptible to the siren call of political demagogues of the far right.

We in America have come to the end of the road for an economy that assumes America’s global economic role is to live beyond our own means by consuming the products and resources of the rest of the world, while running up an international credit card bill we have no plan ever to repay.

We have become masters of gaming the international system to live ever further beyond our own means, while running up ever more massive environmental, social, and financial deficits. We know in our hearts that the party is over.

The day of reckoning has arrived. We need a radical redirection of the economy. There is, however, no national political voice framing the real issues and articulating a compelling positive vision of the America that can be.

Why America Needs the Green Party

Both major parties are in the pocket of Wall Street interests. The Republicans push their standard agenda of tax cuts for the rich, a rollback of regulations on predatory corporations, andelimination of the social safety net—a well proven prescription for further job loss and devastation of the middle class.The Democrats put up a feeble, but ineffective and unconvincing show of resistance. Neither has a credible vision or program for America.

America’s political future belongs to the party or movement that can provide a credible positive vision and program for America’s future. Among America’s political parties, only the Green Party is positioned to frame and build support for the missing vision and agenda. We desperately need a strong Green Party voice to help define the upcoming 2012 cycle political debates.

Most of the essential elements of a New Economy based on living system principles are already included in the Green US party platform. It remains only to pull it all together into a coherent, credible, compelling, and easily understood vision for America’s future.

And we are fortunate to have within our ranks a number of strong, politically and emotionally mature leaders with the potential to function as a strong politically savvy and publicly credible leadership team. America needs the Green Party and it is time to step up to the challenge of building a broad political base and mobilizing the funding required to make this party a coherent and effective national political force.

One of our leaders, David Cobb, in his role as the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate, defined and demonstrated what I consider to be a sophisticated political strategy for the Green Party consistent with America’s political reality. We demonstrated in the 2000 election the potential of the Green Party to play the electoral spoiler role at the national level by helping to put George Bush in office. I know this is a controversial issue within the party, but I clearly recall how that experience led me, and many of my friends and colleagues, to back away from the Green Party.

I was later drawn back to the Green Party by David Cobb and his nuanced strategy of being a Presidential candidate who used his national platform to outline the Green Party's principles and values and to focus attention and resources on local Green Party candidates. I hope and trust that the Green Party will present a similarly strong candidate with a similarly sophisticated strategy for 2012.

Beyond Traditional Left Right Politics

We can and must work for rule changes that open real space for third parties at the national level. In the meantime, we should build on the party’s past success electing hundreds of Greens to local offices in which they have played an important role in building green communities and economies. I believe we only do harm to both ourselves and the country if we take the Tea Party path of “My way or the highway.”

Much of the appeal of the Green Party resides in the fact that it offers solutions beyond conventional left-right political ideologies that present voters with a presumed choice between rule by big business or rule by big government.Greens know that this is a false frame that fails to address the reality that America is ruled by an oligarchy that that has achieved a seamless consolidation of economic and political power through its control of a Wall Street-Washington axis. This oligarchy will continue to rule the country in its own interests at the expense of the wishes and interests of the majority so long as we the people remain divided by a false debate about whether big business or big government is the problem.

We the people are not supposed to notice the real story that the obvious alternative to rule by an unaccountable oligarchy is what capitalism promises, but fails to deliver: real democracy and real market economies responsive to the needs and values of ordinary people.

The Green Party presents a real alternative of locally rooted, rule-based markets and democracy within a framework of community values and mutual caring. This is the economy envisioned by the Green Party values statement and policy platform. We seek the real, locally rooted markets of Adam Smith and the real locally rooted democracy of Thomas Jefferson.

We start from a set of values that define America at its best, align with the needs of our time, and frame a vision of the world of peace, justice, and environmental vibrancy for which most psychologically healthy humans have longed for millennia. We offer real solutions grounded in local control and popular sovereignty.

Which brings us to the theme of local green economies.

Living with the Biosphere

The significance of the national and global drive to rebuild local economies comprised of local businesses owned and managed by local people to serve local needs in harmonious partnership with natural systems goes well beyond what some may dismiss as merely a nostalgic longing for a return to the small and local.

We humans are confronting the reality of our nature as living beings—the reality that living beings, because of the way life manages energy, exist only in active relationships to other living beings—life exists only in community.

In a fit of adolescent hubris, we humans have been engaged for the past 5,000 years in an effort to liberate ourselves from the responsibilities of life in community. During the time of this misadventure, we have so confused individual autonomy with personal liberty that we have created economies that reduce caring human relationships to soulless financial exchange. We have structured our physical space around buildings and auto-dependent transportation systems that wall us off from one another and nature. In isolation from nature we rely on a nonrenewable and fast depleting fossil fuel subsidy to dominate and control rather than to work with nature’s life serving generative processes.

Blinded to the realities of a living planet by a seemingly unquenchable thirst for corporate profits, we have created a global economy that uses Earth’s finite store of fossil fuels to isolate people and communities from the sources of their food, energy, water, materials, manufactured goods and leave them dependent on corporate controlled global supply chains that are wasteful, unstable, unaccountable, and environmentally and social destructive. Working in opposition to nature, the global economy is maintained only by unsustainable dependence on a non-renewable fossil fuels subsidy.

The institutions of the old economy are by design, extremely efficient, but only at converting the real wealth of people and nature into the financial assets of the already richest members of the society. The result is an economic system that in an act of collective suicide self-organizes toward environmental collapse, social disintegration, and political corruption. So let’s call it what it is: a suicide economy supported by the theories of a suicide economics propagated by legions of suicide economists.

The future of humanity depends on navigating a transition to the culture and institutions of a planetary system of local living economies, green economies that work in cooperative integral partnership with nature. Properly designed, they will self-organize toward:

Ecological Balance between aggregate human consumption and the regenerative capacity of Earth’s biosphere.

Equitable Distribution of real wealth to meet the needs of all.

Living Democracy to secure the accountability of our governing economic and political institutions to people and community through active citizen participation.These outcomes align well with the 10 Green Party values.

Basics of a Green Economy

Realization of the Green Party values depends on restructuring our economic institutions to align and partner with the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere. This requires segmenting the borderless global economy into a planetary system of interlinked self-reliant bio-regional living-economies, each rooted in a community of place and organized to optimize the lives of all who live within the community’s borders.

Each bioregional economy will meet most of its needs with local production using local resources in the manner of local ecosystems. Rather than gearing their economies to export, they will benefit from trading their surplus with their neighbors in return for that which they cannot reasonably produce for themselves.

Millions of people around the world are already engaged in living this new reality into being through an emergent local living economies movement. Transitions towns and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies are at the forefront of this movement.

There is an emerging parallel living buildings movement that is dealing with the physical/spatial dimension of this transformation. It is designing buildings to eliminate waste, feature natural lighting, and provide for onsite capture of rainwater, energy (wind, solar, and thermal) and organic matter (food scraps and human waste) for recycling and reuse, including for urban gardens (edible roofs and walls and built-in greenhouses). It requires a capacity to adapt to local micro-environments in the manner of healthy ecosystems.

Water is used in the first cycle for drinking, dish washing, and showering; recycled for laundry and micro-flush composting toilets, and directed from there to onsite gardens from which it filters into the local aquifer. Hot water, cooking, and space heating are integrated to optimize overall energy efficiency.

Integrating multi-purpose buildings into larger multi-building neighborhood and district systems adds opportunities to develop public green spaces, community gardens, edible landscaping, small-scale poultry and livestock production, natural wetlands and living machine water purification to continuously recycle nutrients, water and energy at a micro-local level.

Integrative projects also create opportunities to balance the utility loads of businesses, which generally have greater energy needs during the day, and residences, which have greater needs during evening and early morning. Bringing residences, employment, shopping, and recreation together in close proximity minimizes transportation requirements and facilitates the sharing of autos, bicycles, appliances, and tools, and community connections to mass transit, bike trails, and other transportation alternatives.

These are very practical dimensions of the human transformation now underway. Every aspect rebuilds active relationships of community between people and between people & nature. The only political party in a position to translate this into a coherent political agenda is the Green Party.

For the remainder of the presentation, visit http://livingeconomiesforum.org/agenda-for-a-green-economy

Video of Protest Songs Concert by Helene Williams and Leonard Lehrman

2011-08-12T13:17:00.000-04:00

Nine selections from the concert by Helene Williams, soprano and Leonard Lehrman, composer/pianist of Songs of Protest, Naturism and Broadway at Green Fest on Sat., Aug. 6, 2011, are posted on YouTube. Check out the links at http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/ljlehrmanvideos.html

Darin Robbins' Presentation on Courting the Anarchist Vote

2011-08-11T10:17:00.001-04:00

COURTING THE ANARCHIST VOTE: FINDING THE COMMON DENOMINATOR OF AUTONOMY

Summary of presentation by Darin Robbins, Aug. 6, 2011 at NY Green Fest in Alfred, NY.

This presentation has two goals: proposing that if placed on a chart of political ideology the Green Party would be closest to anarchism, and through a generalized analysis of anarchism demonstrating that those who identify as anarchist should be approached by the Green Party for coalitions or direct support. These two goals will be achieved by concentrating on such issues as the resistance to hierarchy, the distinction between liberty and autonomy, and the role of power in an anarchist or Green vision.

1. All forms of anarchism, despite particular differences, are a general opposition to hierarchy in political, cultural, and economic terms. This arises in the distinction between centralization and decentralization, transcendence and immanence, as well as vertical and horizontal systems.

anarchism as opposition to authority rather than the state
anarchism as premodern, modern, and postmodern
anarchism as convergence of theory and practice through ethics

2. Anarchism brings into the foreground basic conflicts that have been continuous in human social history, and supplies an overall structural critique that is always coupled to direct action.

original political conflict between centralization and decentralization
original cultural conflict between the past and the future
original economic conflict between freedom and equality

3. Anarchism is separate from libertarianism through the proposition of a fuller sensibility of freedom that does not foreclose the relationship between individual desire and collective action.

liberty, autonomy, and authority
liberty as power from
autonomy as power to
authority as power over
freedom as resistance and creation
freedom as ownership through participation
freedom as equality of power

4. An anarchist critique is a direct opposition to the state and the market. The state and the market are separate but primary forms of power through hierarchy within society. The anarchist critique is accompanied by an alternative social form.

from the state and the market to community and the commons
autonomy as internal control and equality of power
autonomy through community and the commons
community as use of the commons

5. Libertarianism is a limited critique of the state without a critique of the market, and therefore fails at offering alternatives to hierarchy.

appearance of self ownership that obscures autonomy
self ownership as divergence of subjective mind and objective body
subjective mind as desire and objective body as expression of desire
autonomy as convergence of subjective unconscious and objective reality
participation in public power through political decentralization
participation in private power through economic decentralization
democracy as political and economic decentralization of public and private power

6. The opposition to representative democracy, and the electoral politics that occur within it, by anarchists must be analyzed not as a rejection of democracy but a rejection of political hierarchy.

representation as abstraction of choice
representation as alienation of participation
representation as alienation of power through abstraction
representation as formation of majority and minority
representation as use of the public
democracy as vanishing mediator between individuals and collectives
democracy as experience of ownership through participation
democracy as equality of power through autonomy
democracy as the voice option and the refusal option
democracy as participation and ownership of the commons

7. The importance of democracy lies in the vital distinction between constituent power and constituted power. This distinction is a correlation to the critique of the hierarchy in political representation.

from constituent power to constituted power
from the multitude to the people
change in the state as change in identity
change in identity as alienation of power
appearance of social contract that obscures the event
social contract as retroactive causality of transcendent structures
the event as space for creation of immanent structures
appearance of constituted power that obscures class formation
constituted power as universal identity of the people
class formation as the multitude and sovereign position of authority
constituent power and constituted power as simultaneous
constituent power as surplus of constituted power
subsumption of constituent power by constituted power
constituent power as disruption of constituted power

8. The critique of power through hierarchy must exist side-by-side with the advocacy for power through desire.

power as relationship between forces
power as many and unique
power as expression of desire
power as equality through deterritorialization
authority as hierarchy of power
authority as one and uniform
authority as mediation of desire
authority as inequality through reterritorialization

9. Political action, as an expression of desire, must be willing to enact change that takes apart previous political, cultural, and economic structures without reproducing those previous structures.

the event as structural rupture
structural rupture as expression of desire
expression of desire as collective action
collective action as immanent structures

10. If choice is intrinsic to a conception of freedom as well as political power, then it must be more than a precluded economic choice and be more of an original democratic choice.

choice as internal to structural formation
choice as parts in differential relationships
choice as scarcity in constituted power
choice as external to structural rupture
choice as creation of immanent structures
choice as abundance in constituent power

11. The basic method of anarchism, in all its manifestations, is the creation of horizontal systems as both a disruption and alternative to vertical systems through the practice of prefiguration.

collectives in horizontal systems
individuals in vertical systems
from horizontal systems to vertical systems as alienation of participation
from vertical systems to horizontal systems as distribution of participation
from experience of content to experience of form
from experience of form to control of form
countercultures as prefiguration rather than revolution or reform
countercultures as both libertarian and communitarian

12. The ultimate goal of anarchism and other movements for decentralization is the development of mutuality within the entire social sphere, the eradication of hierarchy in all its forms.

from reciprocity to mutuality through the commons
from reciprocity to finite debt through the market
from reciprocity to infinite debt through the state

13. Anarchism in its generalized state not only reflects the more specific Green Party values of decentralization, grassroots democracy, and community economics but points to an underground spirit of America that has been continually suppressed for the sake of hierarchy in the political, the cultural, and the economic.

convergence of anarchism and small businesses (G8 summit at Pittsburgh in 2009)
finite collective as experience of community
from individual creation of natural rights to collective use through law
appearance of collective use through law as transcendent source

1. opposition to hierarchy
2. critique of the state and capitalism
3. autonomy versus liberty
4. alternative of the commons and community
5. anarchism more comprehensive than libertarianism
6. democracy versus republic
7. constituent power versus constituted power
8. power and freedom through desire
9. avoidance of structural reproduction
10. original choice versus precluded choice
11. horizontal systems versus vertical systems
12. mutuality as goal
13. decentralization, grassroots democracy, and community economics

Change The World Without Taking Power by John Holloway
Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
For All The People by John Curl
Gramsci Is Dead by Richard J.F. Day
Insurgencies by Antonio Negri

Videos of the Presentations

2011-08-10T11:18:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to our presenters for the great panels and workshops and to those who video-taped many of the presentations so that the presentations are available to a wider audience: Wilton Vought, Sanda Everette, Lou Novak, Michael O'Neill, Barry Miller, Claudia Flanagan and Sonya Cady. We will be posting these videos shortly, so please check back. Lou Novak has posted videos he took of the weekend on his YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/lounovak

We also thank the livestreaming team of Craig Seeman, Starlene Rankin, Sanda Everette and Michael O'Neill who livestreamed events through the weekend at http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus . The videos that were livestreamed during the weekend may be downloaded from the site's ON-DEMAND archive.
Finally, we thank Wilton Vought for editing some of the videos from Green Fest 2009, including Cyril Michalejko on the Rights of Nature, Tony Gronowicz on the History of Rights for Nature in the US , Viginia Rasmussen on Who Has the Power to Implement Sustainability, and Joel Kovel on Revitalizing the Relationship Between Humans and Nature, which can be viewed at http://blip.tv/nygreenfest/

Media Coverage

Two presidential candidates visit Steuben County on Monday, Andrew Poole, Hornell Evening Tribune, August 9, 2011
Green Party members debate political strategy at Green Fest in Alfred, Angela Sutfin, Hornell Evening Tribune, August 7, 2011
Green Fest this weekend at Alfred University campus, Angela Sutfin, Hornell Evening Tribune, August 3, 2011

It is not enough to just say no— What's the alternative?

2011-07-15T12:09:00.002-04:00

Join us for New York Green Fest/GP-US ANM
Fri., Aug. 5 to Sun., Aug. 7 in Alfred, NY
on the campus of Alfred University

It is not enough to oppose toxic drilling and injustice, we need alternatives. The most difficult questions of sustainability are not about technology; they are about implementing our values. Implementation is achieved in the political arena. At NY Green Fest we explore the politics that enable us to live in a sustainable world.

For NY Green Fest 2011, we return to the beautiful campus of Alfred University in Alfred, NY. We are joined by Greens from across the country and Canada coming to the 2011 Green Annual National Meeting (ANM), which is being held in conjunction with Green Fest this year.

Our program features more than 30 great workshops on politics, energy, media and ecology (check out the list on the right), four forums and great music on our solar stage. Presenters include Elizabeth May, Canada's first elected Green Party member of Parliament, David Korten, author of Corporations will Rule the World and co-founder of YES! Magazine, Tina Clarke from the Transition Towns Movement, David Cobb, 2004 Green nominee for President, Virginia Rasmussen from the Program for Corporations Law and Democracy (POCLAD), Gay Nicholson from Sustainable Tompkins, Richard Grossman from Frack Free Catskills and Jack Ossont and Kate Bartholomew from the Coalition to Protect New York among many. Several Green Party candidates and officeholders from New York and other states will attend. At least one candidate for the Green presidential nomination, Kent Mesplay, will be present.

Four excellent forums will be held during the event:

Building Local Economies, Fri., Aug. 5, 6:45 pm

David Korten (via Skype) on "Agenda for a Local Economy," Tina Clarke (via Skype) and David Doonan on the Transistion Town Movement, Opening music: Woven Green Band, Location: Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Asserting Local Sovereignty over Fossil Fuel Extraction, Sat., Aug. 6, 1:15 pm

Richard Grossman, Virginia Rasmussen, Mary Jo Long, Jack Ossont, Gary Abraham, Opening poetry: Michael Czarnecki, Location: Solar Stage on Campus Quad

Campaigning for Local Economies and Clean Energy, Sat., Aug. 6, 6:45 pm

Elizabeth May (via Skype), Kent Mesplay, Colia Clark, Bill Belitskus, Jay Sweeney, Green Candidates and Office Holders, Opening music: Crow Weaver, Moderator: David Cobb, Location: Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

The Future of Sustainable Politics, Sun., Aug. 7, 11:15 am

John Resenbrinck, Greg Gerritt, Howie Hawkins, Cecile Lawrence, Opening music: Carl Lundgren, Location: Solar Stage on Campus Quad

Check out http://nygreenfest.or/2011schedule.html for the workshop schedule. Bios of our 55 presenters are at http://nygreenfest.org/presenterbios11.html

Dorm rooms, camping and the Saxon Inn are available for lodging on campus at reasonable cost. Swimming is available at the Foster Lake campground this year from 11 am to 7 pm. Meals prepared from locally-grown food will be served at the Alfred University dining hall. You may register and reserve a camping space, dorm room or meals, online at http://nygreenfest.org/registration.html.

If you need a ride, or can offer a ride, visit our ride board, http://nygreenfest.org/rideshare.html. Public transportation is available to Alfred by bus and to Rochester and Buffalo by train. Bus service to Alfred is available through Shortline or Trailways. Bus service between New York City and Alfred is available three times a day. See schedule. Train service to Rochester or Buffalo is provided by Amtrak

We look forward to seeing you in three weeks!

Green Party Nat'l Meeting in Alfred, NY, Aug. 5-7

2011-07-14T22:27:00.001-04:00

WASHINGTON, DC -- The Green Party of the United States will feature an array of candidates and guest speakers at its 2011 Annual National Meeting at Alfred University in Alfred in western New York, from Friday, August 5 to Sunday, August 7.

The meeting will take place at the fourth biennial New York Green Fest, "a gathering of folks interested in exploring the politics and practices that will help enable us to live in a sustainable world, and sharing a weekend of good discussions, good food, and good music."

Among the speakers will be leaders in the campaign to ban hydrofracking (hydraulic fracturing), an environmentally destructive and dangerous technique for accessing gas in the Marcellus Shale beneath Pennsylvania, New York, and other states. David Cobb, 2004 Green nominee for President, will speak on the need to abolish corporate 'personhood' and restrict the political power of corporations.

Elizabeth May, Canada's first elected Green Party member of Parliament, will speak to Greens at the meeting by Skype. David C. Korten, economist, co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, and author of 'When Corporations Rule the World' and other books, will also address the meeting by Skype.

"There are many people throughout the US, including Green elected officials and community activists, who are thinking, talking, planning, and working for a sustainable energy economy despite lack of broader government engagement," said Peter LaVenia, co-chair of the Green Party of New York State. "Many of them will be coming to the meeting in Alfred or will speak to meeting participants via Skype. Alfred is the perfect place for Green Fest."

Several Green candidates from New York and other states will attend the meeting, speak at press conferences, and be available for interview. At least one candidate for the Green presidential nomination, Kent Mesplay, will be present. A preliminary list of candidates who plan to attend the meeting is appended below. David Doonan, Green Party member and mayor of Greenwich, New York, will also be at the meeting.

Green Party leaders at the meeting will begin organizing for the 2012 election season, including the presidential race. The party will nominate a candidate for the White House at its 2012 national convention. The 2011 meeting in Alfred will also feature Green Party panels, workshops, meetings of the Green National Committee, and other events.

The meeting is open to the media and public. Press conferences will feature Green candidates for public office from across the US, with a special press conference on Friday, August 6, for women candidates hosted by the party's Women Caucus. Journalists are encouraged to register ahead of time, at the Green Party's media credentialing page. Registration for media will also take place on site during the meeting.

GREEN CANDIDATES who will attend the Green Party's 2011 Annual National Meeting:

* Mike Bernhard, for Town Board member in Afton, New York.
* Audrey Clement, for Arlington County Board, Virginia, in the 2011 general election, http://www.AudreyClement.org. Ms. Clement is a member of the Green Party's national steering committee.
* Joe Duffy, for City Alderman in Hornell, New York. Mr. Duffy is chair of the Steuben County Green Party.
* Howie Hawkins for Common Councillor of Syracuse, New York. The Green Party of New York State regained ballot status in 2010 as a result of Mr. Hawkin's Green campaign for Governor.
* Cheri Honkala, for Sheriff of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (http://www.cherihonkala.com) in the 2011 general election. Ms. Honkala founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the national Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign. She was included in Philadelphia Magazine’s list of 100 Most Powerful Philadelphians and was named Philadelphia Weekly’s “Woman of the Year” in 1997.
* Cecile Lawrence, candidate for the Tioga County Legislature (District 3), New York, in the 2011 general election. Ms. Lawrence, who will conduct a workshop at the meeting, was the Green Party's candidate for US Senate from New York in 2010. A member of Tioga Peace and Justice, she testified at hearings towards the passage of the New York State Managed Care Bill of Rights.
* Kent Mesplay, candidate for the Green Party's nomination for President, http://www.mesplay.org. Dr. Mesplay also sought the nomination in 2008.
* Anita Rios, candidate for City Council in Toledo (District 4), Ohio, in the 2011 general election. Ms. Rios ran for Lieutenant Governor of Ohio in 2006 and 2010 and is former of the Green Party's national steering committee.
* Jay Sweeney, for Supervisor in Falls Township, Pennsylvania, in the 2011 general election, http://www.jaysweeney.org. Mr. Sweeney currently serves as Auditor in Falls Township.

Building A State-wide Mass Movement to Criminalize Corporate+Government Hydrofracking

2011-07-12T20:52:00.002-04:00

Richard Grossman will lead a series of three workshops on Building A State-wide Mass Movement to Criminalize Corporate+Government Hydrofracking in New York …While Asserting People’s Authority to Define and Control Our Energy Futures)...[While Sowing Seeds To Govern Our Communities and Our State]; that is, opening multiple organizing fronts and building-in 2nd, 3rd, 4th steps towards dethroning institutional, cultural, educational, financial, constitutional, legal and cultural mechanics of our disembodiment & disempowerment.

Workshop I: Liberation via Reality

What groundwork has been laid for such business+ government as usual?

That is, what happened in the past that keeps people divided, disabled, subordinated, indoctrinated, disembodied, mangled & handled?

USA’s and NY State’s designs of governance, laws, jurisprudential theories & precedents, regulatory agencies, the USA’s federal structure, with regard to:

(1) the Earth; (2) human labor; (3) laws of the land defining decisionmaking on money, investment & production as “ private;” (4) industrial, financial, utility, media,
insurance, lawyer, accounting, propaganda and etc., corporations; (5) the corporate class’ non-profit corporations; (6) our municipal and non-profit corporations; (7) access to remedy; (8) speech, assembly and petition; (9) consent of the governed, majority rule, self-governance; (10) Earth law & cosmic imperatives; (11) History...

In current USA political and societal contexts, what is: “ Energy”?

“Energy & the Economy?” Energy and Jobs?” “Alternative Energy?”

“Energy & E*N*D*L*E*S*S M*O*R*E?”

What can we learn from past people’s struggles against business + government as usual?

Workshop II: Conceptualizing Commensurate Campaigns

Who are WE? What is our base?

The nature, structure, collective memories, inherited ideologies, language, jubilations, melancholias, hopes, apprehensions, goals, struggles of anti-fracking people in NY
& beyond, summer 2011.

What does it mean to ban corporate+government hydrofracking in New York State?

When is a “ban” not a ban? What seeds have people sown for banning corporate hydrofracking? What educating, what trainings, have taken place within our base? What are relations with State and National environmental, social justice and related groups?

What changes in power relationships, structures of governance, law, habits of thought, can we forge to ban fracking in ways that assert people’s authority to make ALL
energy decisions? To make all GOVERNING decisions....? What changes in ourselves will be necessary (for example, in how WE see, think, speak, write, talk, educate, organize)? What tools do we have? What tools don’t we have?

What legitimacy do we claim for our demands: where -- in history, culture, law, science, morality, solidarity, etc., -- do we plant our feet?

Realizing short-term, mid-term, long-term, goals & strategies; opening creative offensives & multiple fronts.

Building-in 2nd, 3rd, & 4th steps.

Reaching beyond single issue struggles and out to diverse constituencies.

Training ourselves to:

* Design campaigns to reveal and contest constitutional, legal and cultural barriers denying remedy, denying authority to govern;

* Sow counter-histories, counter-ideologies, counterconsciousness;

* Adjust the state -- especially its institutions of ideology, education and rule -- to Earth’s and our values, experiences, imperatives;

* Undermine NY State Government kingly prerogatives & Federal monarchical preemptions;

* Sabotage corporate job and royalty and tax carrots, along with corporate and politician threats to freeze and starve us, jobless, in the dark;

* Subvert “legal” violence by sheriffs, police, National Guard;

* Engage in escalating civil disobedience targeting illegitimate law and constitutional doctrine, perverted culture, pillars of the Corporate State, and Lally columns of liberalism.

* Escalate the costs of governance-by-the-few.

Workshop III: Solidifying Our Base

Establish basic principles and goals in context of long range visions of public law and public governing authority; Design campaigns to ban fracking in ways which teach public decisionmaking on energy investment, technology and policy; Lay out commensurate strategies, tactics, arenas of struggle, language...

Proposed educating/organizing vehicles:

We write, and oblige state legislators to enact:

* laws criminalizing corporate+government hydrofracking;

* laws correcting people’s disembodiment at work, & which provide a Workers’ Guarantee of Education & Income a la Tony Mazzocchi’s concept of 25 years ago;

* laws nullifying corporate contracts for land, gas, oil, and water;

* laws banning incorporation;

* (for starters).

Framing multiple offensives;

Building-in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., steps;

Designing & implementing internal education and training;

Expanding our base by creating state-wide (multi-state?) anti-fracking confederation(s), We compel legislators to enact, and governors to sign, our law criminalizing corporate hydrofracking. With our tapestry of next steps on “energy” investment, technology, use -- and on “public governance” -- embedded in the consciousness of our base, we present State officials with a new list of demands.

Solidifying our base.
About Richard Grossman

The lead presenter for the workshops will be Richard L. Grossman. A native New Yorker back home after 35 years of wandering, Richard co-founded and taught ‘Stop the Poisoning’ Schools in the ‘80s; ‘Rethinking The Corporation, Rethinking Strategy’ Schools in the ‘90s; and ‘Democracy Schools’ in the ‘00s. He is co-author of the books: Energy, Jobs & The Economy (1979); Fear At Work: Job Blackmail, Labor & The Environment (1982; 1991); Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy (2001); and author of the pamphlets: On the First Day We Bulldozed it: Building the Rainforest Movement (1987); Taking Care of Business: Citizenship & the Charter of Incorporation (1993); Revoking the Corporation (1996); and The WTO, the US Constitution and Self-Government (1999), along with scores of articles. Richard is active with Frack Free Catskills in Ulster and Green counties, NY. For more information about the workshops, contact Richard at (845) 338-6857 or rgrossman@riseup.net

Top Green Theorists Offer Political Workshops at Green Fest

2011-07-09T14:08:00.000-04:00

A number of our top Green theorists are offering ten outstanding workshops on political topics during the weekend of Green Fest. For the complete Green Fest schedule, click here.

Abolish Corporate "Personhood,", David Cobb and Virginia Rasmussen

Building Unity

The Bias of Temperament in American Politics, William Kreml
Courting the Anarchist Vote: Finding the Common Denominator of Autonomy, Darin Robbins
Ecological Socialism vs. Capitalist Exterminism, Howie Hawkins
Leveraging Privilege to Transform Oppression & Build Power, George Friday and David Cobb
The Malapportionment Penalty Initiative to Democratize the Electoral College, Asa Gordon
The Principle of Green Political Independence, or Why Progressive Democrats Reinforce Corporate Rule, Howie Hawkins
Third Parties as Real Change, Anthony Gronowicz
Welcoming Muslims to the Green Movement: Fighting Islamophobia, Farheen Hakeem
What would a Green Non-Violent Foreign Policy Look Like?, John Rensenbrinck

Woven Green to Open Friday Plenary

2011-07-08T15:04:00.000-04:00

Woven Green will open Friday night's plenary session with David Korten and Tina Clarke, and will perform on the Solar Stage during the weekend. The six musicians that comprise Woven Green have created an original sound with elements of rock, folk, funk, fusion, and world music addressing themes of nature, love, awakening, and empowerment. Wildy's World says, "Woven Green is a bit off the beaten path; creating wonderfully addictive Pop/Folk/Rock songs with highly unusual subject matter. . . The band sings their beliefs and is obviously looking to change the world through their music. . . Ashley Cash is going to get comparisons to Grace Slick, among others, and her voice is well-deserving of praise. Jim Cash's songwriting is also superb; nuanced and complex without ever overdoing on either quality." The band's debut album has been nominated for a Washington Area Music Award (“Wammie”) in the pop-rock category. Their song "Sixth Sun" received first prize in the Relix Magazine 2010 Jam Off Competition and was awarded honorable mention in the 27th Annual Mid-Atlantic Songwriting Contest. Visit their website at http://www.wovengreenmusic.com/. Woven Green is from northern Virginia.

Share a Ride to Green Fest

2011-07-07T08:29:00.004-04:00

If you need a ride for all or part of your trip to Green Fest or the Green Party annual national meeting, go to the 2011 Green Party ANM page on rideshare.us, http://www.rideshare.us/page.php?next=eventdisplay&event=1164 To find the event after you register on the site, use the lookup code "Green Party." Enter the state you need a ride from, e.g., NY if you are flying into NY and need a ride from the airport.

Public transportation is available to Alfred by bus and to Rochester and Buffalo by train. Bus service to Alfred is available through Shortline (1.800.631.8405) or Trailways (1.800.858.8555). Bus service between New York City and Alfred is available three times a day. See schedule. Train service to Rochester or Buffalo is provided by Amtrak (1.800.872.7245). If you fly into the Elmira/Corning airport, you can take the bus to Alfred from Corning. The Elmira/ Corning airport is served by Northwest Airlines/Delta.

Click here for a list of Alfred/Southern Tier area, Buffalo and Rochester taxi services.

Hydrofracking Activists Join Green Party Gathering

2011-07-01T15:25:00.001-04:00

A series of workshops, presentations and strategic planning sessions on the political steps needed to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power with reduced energy usage and alternative energy sources is attracting hydrofracking activists to Green Fest. The program features four forums and 30 workshops on a wide range of ecological, peace and justice topics (see workshop list below).

Confirmed speakers include Richard Grossman, David Cobb, Virginia Rasmussen, Howie Hawkins, Cecile Lawrence, Tony Gronowicz, Farheen Hakeem, Ursula Rozum, John Rensenbrinck, Bill Belitskus, Jay Sweeney, Mary Jo Long, Mike Bernhard, Ken Gale, David Doonan, Jack Ossont, Kate Bartholomew, Barry Miller and Dianne Roe. Elizabeth May, the first Green elected to the Canadian parliament, David Korten, author of Agenda for a Local Economy and Tina Clarke from the transition towns movement will address the gathering by Skype.

Building Local Economies, Fri., Aug. 5, 6:45 pm — 8:45 pm

Presenters: David Korten on "Agenda for a Local Economy," Tina Clarke and David Doonan on the Transistion Town Movement, Opening music: Woven Green Band, Moderator: Tim Bancroft, Location: Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Local Sovereignty over Fossil Fuel Extraction, Sat., Aug. 6, 1:15 pm - 2:30 pm

Presenters: Richard Grossman, Virginia Rasmussen, Mary Jo Long, Jack Ossont, Gary Abraham, Opening music: Carl Lundgren, Moderator: Kate Bartholomew, Location: Solar Stage on Campus Quad

Campaigning for Local Economies and Clean Energ, Sat., Aug. 6, 6:45 pm — 8:45 pm

Presenters: Elizabeth May, Kent Mesplay, Colia Clark, Bill Belitskus, Jay Sweeney, Green Candidates and Office Holders, Opening music: Crow Weaver, Moderator: David Cobb, Location: Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

The Future of Sustainable Politics, Sun., Aug. 7, 11:15 am — 12:45 pm

Presenters: John Resenbrinck, Greg Gerritt, Howie Hawkins, Cecile Lawrence, Opening poetry: Michael Czarnecki, Moderator: Jason Nabewaniec, Location: Solar Stage on Campus Quad

For more information about the presenters, click here. Outstanding musicians will perform throughout the weekend on our solar stage and for the evening programs: including Crow Weaver, Carl Lundgren, Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams, the Woven Green band from northern Virginia, and the Lucky Pluckers.The Bloodthirsty Vegans from Buffalo will return with their great dance music for the Saturday evening fundraiser.

Draft Green Fest Schedule

2011-06-20T08:54:00.001-04:00

Fri.-Sun., Aug. 5-7, 2011
Alfred University, Alfred, New York

Thursday, August 4, 2011
5:00 pm — Registration opens — Powell Campus Center
6:00-7:00 pm — Dinner in Dining Hall

Friday, August 5, 2011
8:00-9:00 am — Breakfast, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
8:00 am — Registration opens, Welcome Tent on Campus Green
11:30 am — Exhibits open, Campus Green
11:30-12:30 pm — Workshop Session 1
12:30-1:30 pm — Lunch, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
1:30-2:30 pm — Workshop Session 2
2:45-3:45 pm — Workshop Session 3
4:00-5:00 pm — Workshop Session 4
5:30-6:30 pm — Dinner, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
6:45-8:45 pm — Forum 1, Nevins Theater in Powell Campus Center
9:00-11:00 pm — Jam session/get together, Knight Club in Powell Campus Center

Saturday, August 6, 2011
7:45-8:45 am — Breakfast, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
8:45-9:45 am — Workshop Session 5
10:00-11:00 am — Workshop Session 6
11:15-12:15 pm — Workshop Session 7
12:15-1:15 pm — Lunch, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
1:15-2:30 pm — Forum 2, Solar Stage
2:45-3:45 pm — Workshop Session 8
4:00-5:00 pm — Workshop Session 9
5:30-6:30 pm — Dinner, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
6:45-8:45 pm — Forum 3, Nevins Theater in Powell Campus Center
9:00-11:00 pm — Dance Party/Fundraiser, Knight Club in Powell Campus Center

Sunday, August 7, 2011
7:45-8:45 am — Breakfast, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center
8:45-9:45 am — Workshop Session 10
10:00-11:00 am — Workshop Session 11
11:15-12:45 pm — Forum 4, Solar Stage
12:45-1:45 pm — Lunch, Dining Hall in Powell Campus Center

Check for updates at http://nygreenfest.org/2011schedule.html

Swimming Available at Foster Lake

2011-06-20T08:45:00.000-04:00

Swimming will be available for campers at NY Green Fest this summer. Green Fest offers tent camping at Foster Lake, a 25-acre lake owned by Alfred University 2 miles from the central Green Fest location, Alfred University's Powell Campus Center, in Alfred, NY. Swimming is allowed in the lake while a life guard is on duty: from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. Boating is also available. For more information about camping at Green Fest, visit our registration page.

Registration Now Open for 2011

2011-03-18T11:28:00.001-04:00

Registration is now open for Green Fest 2011. The registration fee for Green Fest attendees, presenters and exhibitors is $45 for the weekend, $25 for a single day. The teen rates are $25 for the weekend, $15 for a single day. Children 12 and under are free. Delicious meals and attractive lodging options are available on-campus for reasonable rates. To see details and to register, please visit our registration page, http://nygreenfest.org/registration.html

ANM Comes to Green Fest

2011-03-13T13:13:00.004-04:00

We are delighted to have the national Green Party join us in Alfred this year, Aug. 5-7, 2011. Green Fest is being held in conjunction with the 2011 Green Annual National Meeting (ANM). Greens and supporters from across the country will participate in Green Fest workshops, perform and exhibit in our Green Fair.

We welcome participation in Green Fest 2011 as a panelist, musician or workshop presenter. Our panels, performances and workshops enable the Green community to grow and pass on vital knowledge and skills. Musicians will perform throughout the weekend on our solar stage. For more information about presenting or performing at Green Fest 2011, click here.

For more information about exhibiting in our Green Fair, click here. We welcome five types of exhibitors:

1. Activist organizations displaying information about their work on Green issues
2. Craftspeople and artists selling their own crafts and art
3. Local farmers and local food producers selling their own food items
4. Authors, booksellers and publishers selling books on sustainable living and sustainable politics
5. Producers and distributors selling renewable energy systems and zero emission vehicles.

Registration will be available soon. Click here for the draft 2011 schedule.

Green Fest 2011 in Alfred, NY, Aug. 5-7, 2011

2010-12-12T12:22:00.004-05:00

Mark Your Calendars!

NY Green Fest 2011, the 4th biennial NY Green Fest, will be held the first weekend in August, Aug. 5-7 in Alfred, NY.

Green Fest Panel on WNED

2009-08-28T13:15:00.003-04:00

An edited version of the Aug. 8th Green Fest panel on sovereignty and sustainability aired August 27th on Buffalo's WNED-AM 970 “Forum” program. Selections from the talks by Bill Kauffman, Peter Jemison, Mike Czarnecki, and Lynn Gerry appear in that order on the one hour program hosted by Jay Moran. Click here to listen to the program.

We Demand Transparency, NYC Sept. 12-13

2009-08-21T16:23:00.009-04:00

Sander Hicks, one of our Green Fest presenters, is organizing the We Demand Transparency Conference, a three-day conference for peace, truth, new economics, independent journalism, and the latest breakthroughs in the 9/11 cover-up.

Saturday, September 12th, 10 AM – 7 PM
Sunday, September 13th, 2 PM – 10 PM
St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, NYC
East 10th St. and 2nd Ave, NYC

The 30 authors, filmmakers, scientists, musicians, revolutionaries, and peace-makers. presenting at the conference seek to unite the peace and truth movements for real change in the USA.

The presenters include the author of “Web of Debt,” L.A. attorney Ellen Brown, who will be the lead presenter on September 13th. Maryland peace activist (and attorney) Barry Kissin will address the FBI's anthrax investigation. William Pepper, counsel to the NYC Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN), which has gathered over 70,000 signatures to get a referendum on a new 9/11 investigation on the ballot this Fall in NYC, will discuss the initiative.

For more information, contact Sander Hicks, Producer, at 347-627-4705 or visit
http://www.WeDemandTransparency.com/

What Do We Face?

2009-08-18T22:09:00.005-04:00

By Steve Welzer (Green Party of New Jersey)
Talk given at Green Fest, August 9, 2009, Alfred, NY

The Green Party of New York State has some great energy! It looks like Rev. Billy and the Green candidates for City Council are going to rock New York City this fall. We've been encouraging Greens from the northern part of New Jersey to cross the Hudson and help out with the petition drive to get Billy on the ballot.

Unfortunately, from what I'm hearing based on my participation on the National Committee, the vitality in New York is kind of the exception rather than the rule these days among state Green parties. It would be hard to characterize the activity in my own state as energetic. Odd-numbered years are actually major electoral years in New Jersey, so this year there's a gubernatorial race plus races for 80 State Assembly seats and 40 State Senate seats in addition to hundreds of municipal- and county-level offices. With all of those opportunities, the Greens have two candidates in New Jersey - one for Assembly and one for council in a small town.

I'm aware that individual state parties have their ups and downs. One year in New Jersey we ran almost a full slate for the Congressional races -- we fielded candidates in something like eleven of the thirteen races. I remember how the New Mexico Greens were so dynamic during the nineties, but have been much less so recently. On the other hand, the Illinois party was not much to speak about ten years ago, but has really blossomed since the breakthrough campaign of Rich Whitney for Governor in 2006.

But I think an overall assessment would have to acknowledge a degree of disappointment that the Green Party, generally ... nationwide ... is much farther from breaking through -- from breaking out of the shadows of marginalism -- than many of us had hoped would be the case at this point -- as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the movement.

It was on August 10, 1984 -- 25 years ago tomorrow -- that 62 people came together on the campus of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota to establish the Green Committees of Correspondence. That was the initiation of the Green politics movement in the United States. It followed in the wake of the successes of Die Grunen in Germany after they became the first Green Party to enter a national parliament in 1983.

By the latter part of the '80s, in the U.S., Green Party candidates had started to appear on some ballots in a few states. During the '90s permanent ballot status became the goal of the growing number of state parties. Then we had that great shot-in-the-arm from the Nader campaign in 2000. That put us on the map; it enabled us to increase our media coverage, ramp up our membership, recruit more candidates.

The impacts of the Reform Party campaign of 1996 and the Green Party campaign of 2000 generated some hopeful talk about the development of a four-party system in this country. The idea was that there could be a major party of the left, the Democrats, and a minor party of the left, the Greens; alongside a major party of the right, the Republicans, and a minor party of the right, either the Libertarians or the Reform Party.

If there was ever any real momentum in that direction, it didn't last. The Reform Party just faded away, as had so many others in recent memory: the Labor Party, the New Party, the Citizens Party, the 21st Century Party. It's actually something of a tribute to us that we've endured for 25 years. The Libertarian Party was founded in 1972 and thus has endured for even longer, 37 years.

But it's 25 years or 37 years of enduring at the margins of American political life.

We know that third party politics in a winner-take-all system is excruciatingly hard. Nonetheless, an argument can be made that we, the Greens here in the U.S., ought to be doing better. They have a winner-take-all system in Canada, but the Canadian Green Party has been growing impressively in the last couple of years and is anticipating electing their first Member of Parliament in a coming national election.

They have a winner-take-all system in England, but the Green Party there just garnered 8.7% of the national vote in June's European Parliament elections. That's up from 6.1% in 2004. Two of their candidates were elected to the parliament and the Greens polled the *highest* vote totals in three cities, receiving 31% of the vote in Brighton, 26% in Oxford, and 25% in Norwich.

When we look at countries with proportional representation systems the reports are even more encouraging. The Green Party of Germany now has a solid, consistent base of 10-12% of the electorate. In those European Parliament elections in June the big story across the continent was the surge in the Green vote. A story from Reuters on June 7 quoted Thomas Klau at the Center for European Reform saying: "The rise of the Green Party has been striking. The Greens are the one political force in the European Union that has been closest to creating a true European party, a true European political movement ... with a political message that is strong and plausible."

In France, where Sarkozy's center-right party won with about 28% of the vote, the Socialists received 16.5% and the Greens were right behind them with 16.2%. This resulted in the Socialists and the Greens each getting 14 seats in the European Parliament. In greater Paris and in the south-east region of the country the Greens were the second most popular party. A couple of days after the election, Sarkozy invited Daniel Cohn-Bendit and several other Green leaders to the Elysee Palace for a chat. According to the New York Times, after the meeting Cohn-Bendit said: "Sarkozy realizes there's a green wave in France and he wants to surf it."

Well, there's a green wave just about everywhere these days. I think I'm justified in saying that nothing has more mojo in our culture right now than the concept of greening. Everything is going green, right? ... buildings and homes, appliances, foods, cars ... college campuses ... mutual funds ... Goldman Sachs says the atrium of its corporate headquarters in Manhattan has gone green with organic plants and VOC-free finishes and a micro-porous bioceramic filtration system in its water coolers!

We know that there's an enormous amount of greenwashing going on, an enormous amount of hype and opportunism associated with this trend, but we shouldn't discount its genuine significance and energy. Greening is clearly becoming a major phenomenon, one that can potentially, at least, change lifeways. I see it as the beginning - just the beginning - of a long-term transformation of human consciousness, one that's happening globally and ultimately involves nothing less than the trajectory of our civilization ... which must be re-directed onto a path of sustainability. This is *starting* to become understood; younger generations grow up now very aware of what Earth Day means.

It would seem logical that the political parties that give electoral expression to this phenomenon - the Green parties - would thrive. And what's happening in Europe bears this out.

So the question has to be asked: What's wrong with Kansas? What's wrong with New Jersey? Why are so many of our state parties and the US Green Party suffering from lethargy or arrested development ... and from an ongoing, frustrating consignment to the margins?

We need to understand where we're at, and why. We need to be able to explain it ... to ourselves and to others.

Some of the factors are clearcut. Any analysis of the situation has to start off mentioning that inescapable bane-of-existence for all third parties operating within a winner-take-all system, namely: the so-called "spoiler" problem. This issue hangs over our heads at all times, but it became a front-and-center source of division among Greens, in particular, after the very prominent and controversial impact we had during what was essentially our very first full national campaign in 2000.

The division in our ranks about this - whether to care about spoiling or not - was surely one factor, if not the primary factor, that resulted in the dissolution of the alliance between the Greens and Ralph Nader after the 2000 campaign. Whether viewed as Nader abandoning us, or our failure to sustain the alliance; whether his mistake or our mistake ... the bottom line was that it was a bad situation for us. His competing candidacies as an independent in 2004 and 2008 hurt our campaigns. Some of the electorate continued to blame *us* for the 2000 Bush/Gore fiasco, while some people chastised us for "losing Nader." The whole thing ended up being dispiriting for many Greens and disheartening for potential supporters who had been intrigued by the idea that a Nader/Green alliance might become a serious new political force.

Another ongoing factor contributing to our marginalization - another constant of third party political life - is cooptation. The lettering or background on the campaign signs of Democratic Party candidates in local races in my state often is ... emerald green. The signs shout: "If you care about the environment, vote Democrat." If Nader's vote-total really did make any difference in terms of Al Gore being denied the presidency in 2000, then a case can be made that he did the Democrats a great favor. Out of office Gore was liberated to take a strong environmentalist stance he never would have taken as president. Subsequently Gore's books and his movie very much helped the Dems to co-opt the greening issue.

We also have to understand that a party like ours will always tend to be subject to the vagaries of the power cycle in Washington. No surprise that it was the Democrats who were the primary beneficiaries of the revulsion engendered by the Bush II Republican administration. When they - the Democrats - were in power during the 1990s, the inevitable disillusionment and dissatisfaction with them helped us to make the case that we are the real progressive alternative. It made sense, then, that our best showing in a national campaign, in 2000, came after the eight years of Clinton-Gore, and our weakest national vote total, in 2008, came after the eight years of Bush-Cheney.

Cynthia McKinney was a terrific candidate for us last year. She had to be disappointed to wind up with under 200,000 votes in the whole country and the lowest total among the minor party candidates.

Are we the least viable among the third parties? No ... to the contrary, I think we have the most potential among them. But we could get discouraged with results like we saw nationally last year. Unless - again - we're clear about where we're at, where we've been, and what we face.

After being down for the last so many years - three, four, five years - on account of the factors I've mentioned, and others, most of us are *not* discouraged, it seems to me - and I think the main reason is that we see the growth of the sustainability movement all around us - and we feel it should mean that it's just a question of time and continued effort and the confluence of the right set of circumstances until we break through -- in the way that the Canadian Greens seem to be on the verge of doing. They also languished for many years until recently when a couple of fortuitous things happened. First of all, with Canada having stronger cultural ties to Europe than America has, the successes of the European Green parties have had more influence on the electorate there than here. Second of all, the well-known, well-respected, and dynamic longstanding executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada made the growth of the Green Party her passion three or four years ago. Elizabeth May has been helping enormously to transform that party into a serious force in Canadian politics, and their time seems to have arrived.

And now, here in the U.S., the Democrats are in power again, giving us the chance to better make the case that we're the real alternative. There are a lot of positives suggesting that the time for our breakthrough may be nearer at hand than our recent frustrations would otherwise indicate.

But ...

I want to finish with a kind of cautionary projection regarding what we might be facing as activists working for social and political change in this particular time and place.

I think there is a *possibility* that neither the Green Party nor any other third party will ever break through here in the United States.

The microcosmic feeling we've had of being kind of stuck-in-place may be a function of operating within a society which is, in fact and indeed, stuck-in-place at a macro level.

This is the so-called cradle of democracy, yet progress toward multi-party democracy, evident in country after county all over the world, has been notably absent here. It is not inconceivable that America may never replace its archaic winner-take-all electoral system. Or, to put it the other way, as grotesque, outlandish, and morbid as it may sound, America may pass into oblivion still mesmerized by the sorry spectacle of Republican vs. Democrat.

Why? Well, there is an historical pattern whereby the most dominant and ostensibly successful empires can just atrophy over time into a stupor of inertia, complacency, and stasis. Things that are going in a direction deemed to be successful tend to keep going in that direction ... beyond the point where they've maxxed out their potential ... and then they ossify, unable to resolve festering problems or to even recognize them: consumption rather than production; intractable inequality; breakdown of community; disregard for limits.

Egypt, Rome, Spain, England ... America ...

Those of us who came of age during the sixties know how clearly the imperative for fundamental social change in this country was articulated at that time. Well, a full adult lifetime has passed since then, over 40 years, and the extent of significant social change has been extremely disappointing . . .

. This country just can't seem to get anywhere in terms of significantly resolving its healthcare crisis. Try after try after half-hearted try.
. This country is on a track leading to bankruptcy - entitlement obligations, as well as social programs, are way underfunded - yet the United States just can't find a way to reduce its insanely bloated and unnecessary military expenditures - whether the administration is Republican or Democratic.
. The American suburban middle class lifestyle paradigm is unsustainable and spiritually bankrupt, but efforts to transform it - like the cohousing, relocalization, and new urbanism movements - remain marginal.
. The two establishment parties command less and less loyalty as the decades pass, but electoral alternatives like the Green Party just can't get any traction.

These are signs of atrophy. The folly of aspiring to dominance and imperial expansion is so persistent, so ingrained at this point, that the United States of America, as a nation-state and a society, could conceivably be beyond redemption.

Maybe the onset of what Richard Heinberg calls Peak Everything will jolt this country out of its imperialist, materialist rut ... and in that case pathways toward the Greening of America might open up, and the prospects for the Green Party here might become as bright as they are in most other advanced democracies.

But we need to be aware of the possibility that this country, uniquely suffering from having its head in the clouds of grandiosity and dominance, will just simply fail to see the light that everyone else can see.

***

We need to keep trying even if there is a chance that that's what we face. The opening up of the electoral system in this country would be beneficial to the entire global geopolitical landscape. America is currently the great cultural trendsetter, so a breakthrough for Green politics in this country would advance our movement immeasurably worldwide.

As especially hard as it might be to accomplish our goals in this country, we also have a special responsibility to work as hard as we can to try to do so. Real hope for our country (as opposed to Obama's vacuous and now fading hope) ... real hope lies with the prospect that we might succeed in our efforts. (By "we" I don't mean just members or supporters of the Green Party ... grandiosity is the problem, certainly not the solution! By "we" I mean all those who understand, support, or work for eco-communitarian, socially just alternative politics and lifeways.)

But if it comes to pass that America goes into terminal decline while still offering only two choices on its ballots ... so be it ... our focus as Greens will have to shift toward building the new society -- locality by locality, region by region -- within the shell of the old imperial center as it crumbles away.

In fact, we can and ought to be doing both at the same time: trying to open up the electoral system, trying to grow the Green Party; and also building up alternative institutions ... constructing lifeboats ...

Clearly, there's lots of work to be done.

We need to be realistic about our situation and have a long-term perspective in regard to our prospects. We undoubtedly face our share of ups and downs ... including periodic bouts of malaise. But we need to shrug those off. Discouragement can't be an option.

We need to find ways to encourage each other, energize each other and sustain the energy of our movement. Turning to the Rev. Billy's of the world for re-spiritization - and fun - helps a lot. Events like this wonderful Green Fest help a lot. It's been a great couple of days - thanks again to the organizers - and I look forward to seeing everyone again at the next Green Fest ... maybe our breakthrough will then be at hand, or at least a couple of steps closer ...

Steve Welzer is a founder of the Green Party of New Jersey and a member of the National Committee of the Green Party of the United States. He is the editor of the GreenGram, the newsletter of Green Party of New Jersey, and is a co-editor of Green Horizon magazine. He also writes for Synthesis/Regeneration, a magazine of Green social thought. Steve was a Green Party candidate for US Congress from New Jersey in 2008, and this year he is running for State Assembly. He lives in East Windsor, New Jersey.

The Importance of Theory in Independent Progressive Politics

2009-08-17T19:39:00.002-04:00

Presentation by Darin Robbins at Green Fest, Aug. 8, 2009

We are gathered together, both here and within the Green Party overall, because we want to engage in the great political work of the day. It is a day that is truly benighted where peace, civil liberties, communities, and our own environment is threatened by a comprehensive system of power. If we are to fight this power then there is the necessity to understand its operation, how it functions and consolidates its influence to such a degree that at first blush it seems impossible to oppose it. This is where theory comes in as a supplement to political action. I will give some examples of what theory can do to enrich our work, and illustrate that theory is not only an embellishment or flavoring to action, but a vital binding agent that makes our actions sensible.

Theory can basically be defined as the way to explain how something works. In science we have various theories on how the universe operates, not only explaining how it works but why it works as opposed to another possible method. And in the larger debate concerning evolution versus creationism, we can see that the use of the word theory should not discourage one from believing that a well-formed theory that can be proven through perception can be an accurate description of reality. The same can be said of theories that apply to the social, political, cultural, and economic as well. Theory does not have to be relegated to the ethereal domain of highly abstract metaphysics that have no relationship to everyday experiences for human beings. Georg Lukacs proposed that as practice can be the objective expression of theory, theory can be the subjective understanding and consciousness of practice. In fact, since a theory can be considered an explanation, it has a structural aspect that directly impacts reality in much the same way as other structures. The system of a language as an example of a structure shows that there is a general background and particular actions. For language, humans find themselves always already within a system that has a vocabulary and grammar, but it is human speech that makes various combinations of words and sentences that is not specifically predetermined. In comparison, those who engage in progressive activism and electoral politics can take up what others have already studied in order to find new applications of theory. This theoretical background and application can work in tandem in order to promote an understanding of power, meaning, and production as well as a self-awareness of the human role in these systems. In other words, the immediate goal of theory is to advance knowledge, and that is a very important factor in political action.

It goes without saying that the old adage "knowledge is power" is as true today as it ever was. Incorporating theory into action is something that is more of a necessity for our goals than just a slight supplement to the Green Party. If we are willing to see political action as a material manifestation of what we want to achieve, then we must also conclude that political theory is the immaterial manifestation, the other side of the proverbial coin. And like a coin, it can be very difficult to observe both sides at the same time. But they are most definitely connected, with theory and practice supporting each other. The inability to readily perceive both at the same time can be problematic. The appearance of theory in itself can be too abstract for everyday comprehension, while the appearance of action in itself can be easily assimilated into the two-party system. In other words, theory can look as if it is unrelated to human needs and action can be defined as a side project within the dominant two major parties that will weaken such action and take away its significance for real change. Therefore, the relationship between theory and action must be understood as reciprocal despite the hardship of viewing them together. Theory is the general background for particular political actions. Theory is also the ability to communicate a general viewpoint that is also a worldview, and for us would be a Green perspective on reality. Political action is the ability to practice a transformation of the social, political, cultural, and economic fields of reality. A successful transformation requires the interaction of theory and practice. The vital aspect to point out is that action without a theoretical foundation can be disbursed into isolated things by the structure of power, and theory without its expression into concrete action can be seen simply as academic conversation. In either case, the transformation that we would seek would be harder to accomplish if not outright impossible. Frankly, we had elements of this phenomenon already occurring during the 1990's. The various cases of activism, and even the significant work of Ralph Nader, were ignored by both the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress as they moved forward with the neoliberal capitalist agenda. Theory was exiled to the universities under the overarching term of "Cultural Studies" where some valid critiques of the relationship between power and meaning were conducted, but in most cases it became an easy target for the conservative offensive in the culture wars. It was assumed that activists would automatically vote Democrat regardless of the collaboration on policy between the White House and Congress. The theorists were relegated to a straw man misinterpretation in order to illustrate the failings of being a "liberal" regardless of what Democrats actually did in government. In fact, these superficial accusations maintained the appearance that there was a divergence between Democrats and Republicans that obscured the reality of a convergence in terms of policy and perpetuating the status quo. Those in power were able to diminish both theory and practice by keeping them separate. And this was the political reality that the 21st century inherited. There was the possibility of a realization of theory and practice joined together in the emerging anti-globalization movement at that time. Unfortunately, September 11th of 2001 was used to weaken that movement and recalibrate the political landscape in favor of the existing structures of power. But the fact that the anti-globalization movement grew outside of the two-party system is significant. It demonstrated that theory and practice can find fertile ground, and this is a characteristic which the Green Party can handily emulate. Outside of the Democrats and Republicans, there is the presentation of the Green Party as not only new but more than what has been assumed in political parties. This presentation is the strongest way to influence modern politics at a time where business as usual has seemed to run into its inevitable dead end. And we must use theory and action together to insure our status as an alternative that, to paraphrase our 2008 Vice Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente, is also an imperative.

For the sake of clarification on what theory would look like, I will summarize the ideas of three philosophers. Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze all arise from poststructuralism. As structuralism was a school of philosophy that proposed that reality was determined by various structures, poststructuralism holds that these structures have limitations and therefore they can be taken apart and analyzed. The work of poststructuralism can be a rich resource for our political work since we as the Green Party obviously struggle against various forms of power on a daily basis. I would argue that our activities, through poststructuralism, can also look at the influence of structures of meaning and production on the lives of citizens alongside structures of power. Our struggle can make these structures apparent and immanent, rather than having them remain in an appearance of naturalness and timelessness as transcendent figures. By looking at the three examples of Foucault, Badiou, and Deleuze we will not only have a sense of how to begin theory. We will also begin to see a new definition of progressive politics as the work of immanence against transcendence in public life.

Michel Foucault's work can be seen as a development through the three stages or ideas of knowledge, power, and the self. Early in his career he looked at how knowledge was organized through various academic discourses in his book "The Order Of Things" and later "The Archeology Of Knowledge". He then transitioned into how discourses worked in conjunction with systems of power by looking at the various social institutions of the hospital, the insane asylum, and the prison in the books "The Birth Of The Clinic", "Madness And Civilization", and "Discipline and Punish" respectively. Along with numerous essays and transcribed lectures, Foucault's philosophical work came to the apex with his three volumes of "The History Of Sexuality" where he explored the possibility of an ethics to deal with knowledge and power. In this work he proposed that ethics must begin as an acknowledgement and attitude toward the self before it can be an attitude toward others. Unfortunately, his untimely death in 1984 prevented this trilogy from being completed. The flow of his work is comprehensive in nature, each stage incorporating the previous stage while also illustrating how each stage is interconnected. As his work progressed, Foucault emerged from being a mere sociologist to being someone directly engaged in the political sphere and what it entails. I contend that his work can be seen as a model of how theory can be applied to practice, and will also put forth the idea that the stages of his work can be used to organize the relevant relationship between himself and Badiou and Deleuze. In other words, the three stages of knowledge, power, and the self can be used as examples of describing how things were, how things change, and how they could be.

Since Foucault was never able to finish the articulation of his final stage, I will present his work as the description of how things were. Human knowledge is shaped by sets of discourse, and these discourses act as the determination of truth and facts. A discourse is a system of meaning used to explain reality. However, the appearance of truth as reality obscures the visibility of the system of meaning. The structure of the discourse recedes into the background as reality is explained to humans. Therefore, it seems that finding truth is just a matter of a direct perception of reality, but what actually occurs is an active exclusion of the false from the true as facts are organized within discourses. Discourses are the invisible mediation of reality that contain and limit the expression of reality. As one moves from one discourse to another, the change in emphasis can hint at how reality is actively sorted and classified by structures of meaning that build human knowledge. We might have hints as to a reality external to any human discourse, but it is never complete and we are unable to understand it. In order to understand reality, a discourse must always be there and these discourses are never completely neutral or objective. In the examination of power, one finds structures of meaning forming and operating in a simultaneous way with structures of power. Power in reality is a potential expressed by all individuals through choices and actions. But this form of power as simple force can be consolidated through institutions. Inequalities of power can develop and manifest themselves as what we usually recognize as the power of government or military might. However, the institutions that collect power do not necessarily need brute force. These institutions initiate the same process of containment and limitation that one would see in discourses. What emerges from the structures of power is discipline and regulation. The discipline of individuals creates the identity of the subject, and the regulation of groups creates the identity of the population. In this new attitude of power, the role of government becomes that of a control that is not motivated by a self interest of a ruler, but a system that preserves life to such a degree that it intercedes on the ability of individuals to make their own choices. In other words, this continuous control seeks to increase a bodily and biological productivity while decreasing any transgression or resistance from this system. With a system of control that becomes more impersonal, and some would argue scientific, the issue of ethics becomes more important as a response. Ethics is the care of the self which can be a resistance to both discourse and discipline. Tracing the history of ethics, one finds that in the ancient world there was the question of how one should live. In the early modern era the question was how one should act. There can thus follow the potential for the question of how one might live. This final question requires the need for individuals to make choices in order to shape their future and be an active participant in their own being. Here is where Foucault saw the chance to escape the expansion of power that occurred through a system of control, spreading out from the prisons, hospitals, schools, and barracks of a society. The exact details of this ethics is still open to interpretation.

Alain Badiou, in contrast, has devoted most of his career to the examination of the event. He uses this term, the event, specifically as the point of change from a structured reality to a new opportunity for truth that is free of any bindings. The event can be a revolution, and Badiou has used the French Revolution as an example of a past event, but it is not restricted solely to revolutions. Another characteristic of his work is his use of set theory from mathematics to explain being, even going so far as to say that “mathematics is ontology”. In the 1980's he wrote his master work “Being And Event” which is the starting point of his philosophy, and most recently completed his sequel “Logique Des Mondes” which has just been translated into English as “Logics Of Worlds”. Badiou begins with things as they are and he uses set theory to show how various structures organize reality. The advantage to set theory is that it is a branch of mathematics that does not require complex equations and can be visualized as things contained within boxes. How they are contained in these proverbial boxes is based on some arbitrary grouping rather than a common trait they all share. And there can be boxes within boxes as the things are subdivided into smaller groups. It should be noted that the things in these boxes can be members of different subsets simultaneously according to the multiple ways they can be organized. There are various permutations of how these things can be grouped together. Using this basic understanding of set theory can illustrate how Badiou explains reality and its structuration, as well as prepare the stage for how the event can disrupt this situation.

Reality in itself is a multiplicity of differences, where each part that exists is absolutely different from all other parts. Each attempt to fathom reality is an arbitrary grouping together within one set. This set, where reality is contained in one general term in order to understand it, is called the counting as one. Even though this set tries to unify reality, reality will always exceed the counting as one. The counting as one is a finite snapshot of an infinite reality as a starting point for an understanding of that reality. There is always a surplus or excess that will be a factor during the event later on. The structuring of reality therefore appears to be universal but is only one particular attempt among many structures. In this process, a structure can be complete and inconsistent or incomplete and consistent, but it can never be both. Each structure, as it takes on the appearance of a universal knowledge of reality, will develop internal contradictions. These internal contradictions reflect the surplus of reality that is still not contained by these various structures. This instability of structural formations allows for reality to impose itself into what is structured through the event. The relationship of structures to the event is that of an established knowledge of reality as it is ruptured by the reality that can not be included by this knowledge. For humans, this knowledge is always preexisting and ubiquitous. The mediation of structures is the inclusion and exclusion of specific parts of reality. However, the event is a sudden occurrence that can not be predicted, is unique each time it occurs, and has a universal affect. The change it enacts is total and sudden. The event, as a disruption of existing structures, is also the introduction of an infinite reality into these structures. We get a glimpse into reality as an absolute multiplicity. The event changes what is considered natural and eternal. After the event, everything is at stake and everything becomes apparent to humans. Its consequences is referred to as the fidelity to the event, which is the exploration of the truth by individuals without recourse to the structures that were taken apart by the event. Badiou would theorize that truth could be discovered through the four procedures of politics, science, art, and love. The event is the space of opportunity for this fidelity where decisions can be made that would have been limited within structures. In other words, the event allows for the full participation of freedom and its responsibilities. The event is revolutionary without being defined solely as a physical or political revolution. Since there are no longer predeterminations in the aftermath of the event, the practice of freedom directed toward truth is a decision on whether new methods for truth are created or whether new restricting structures develop. Structures that are formed after the event can either be instruments for truth and freedom or a return to the seemingly universal containment of reality where individuals are denied direct participation. How this truth is found is up to individuals as free individuals who are committed to the discovery.

Gilles Deleuze, a contemporary of both Foucault and Badiou, developed a theory of being that would later be elaborated into a precise political theory. His career began with works on various thinkers such as Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson that would interpret their theories in a direction that could produce new ideas. His own ontology began with his works “Difference And Repetition” and “Logic Of Sense” that attempted to explain how the new was produced in reality in terms of subjects, objects, and systems. He described a process where the virtual, defined as infinite possibilities within reality, was actualized into specific combinations that would produce both living and nonliving things. This perpetual construction of reality that could be experienced was the foundation for an interaction between the virtual and the actual that defined being as a process of becoming. Becoming would occur as a process starting from the virtual as the general state of existence to the actual as the particular case of being. This analysis of being and how it operates was given a new application when he collaborated with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, known respectively as “Anti-Oedipus” and “A Thousand Plateaus”. For Deleuze, political activity and theory must be based on a sense of being and existence, and his political work with Guattari expresses this sentiment clearly. In other words, how political systems are formed is similar to how any system is formed in reality, whether it is biological, economic, cultural, or mechanical.

Deleuze shares with Badiou a conceptualization of reality in itself as a multiplicity of absolute difference. For Deleuze, this is an adaptation from Spinoza, who posited reality as one single substance from which characteristics divide up reality. Deleuze's sense of being is a transition from the difference of quality in itself to a difference of quantity within distinct elements such as subjects, objects, and systems. Humans experience this difference within the repetition of time, where each repetition within a different moment in time produces something different regardless of other similar traits. For example, one chair can be built at one time period, and one hour later another chair that is a perfect copy can be built. Despite the same physical properties, the change in time determines that there can never be an exact repetition of the same chair. For Deleuze, this change in time is expressed through three dimensional space. The movement, from reality in itself with its one substance and differences in quality to various things with differences in quantity that make up experienced reality, is referred to as the movement from the virtual to the actual. Both the virtual and the actual are real and exist simultaneously to each other. The virtual as possibility becomes the actual as material and ideal reality. The virtual is all nascent combinations of parts of reality that are manifested into particular things through the formation of structures. Structures are constructed through innate difference, and difference can be seen as the engine for this construction. Structures themselves are also the products of actualization. This actualization process occurs within a human context, making it easier to be perceived by humans, but it also occurs in the world among matter independent of human intervention. For our discussion, we will concentrate on the human sphere of actualization. The question that now emerges is whether these structural formations out of the virtual are eternal or constantly changing. Because the virtual is never exhausted by the actualization process, the actual can always dissipate back into the virtual in order to be actualized again in a different way. Deleuze uses the three terms territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization when describing this process. A territorialization is a formation of a structure, deterritorialization is the breaking up of a structure into its parts, and reterritorialization is the formation of a new structure from these parts. What appears, disappears, and reappears in this transition is the relationships among parts rather than the parts themselves. The parts are reality in itself that exist in the virtual and are shaped in the actual. The political ramification is whether the movement through these three terms result in transcendence or immanence. Transcendence is the formation of absolute structures from particular formations and can be seen in a territorialization that never deterritorializes. The actualization in this case becomes static and the structure in question appears to be a universal and top-down kind of truth. On the other hand, immanence is the recognition that parts in a structure exist on the same level to each other, and the structure itself is on the same level as the reality it organizes. After a deterritorialization, the new emerging structures can either be transcendent or immanent depending on how dynamic is the actualization. In the context of the Green Party, and independent progressive politics, it is clear that immanence is the side that we are on as it resembles grassroots democracy and decentralization. In his political analysis, immanence is also the position supported by Deleuze.

As can be seen, a productive process occurs in reality. Humans participate in this process by actively creating structures alongside structures forming in nature. The slight distinction is that humans create structures for specific purposes, and the starting point is human desire. Deleuze, in his work with Guattari, rejects the common held opinion that desire is based on a lack within individual humans that motivates them to need something external to them to fulfill their need. Passive consumerism is an example of desire as lack, and this can be part of the restrictive characteristic of capitalism overall. Human desire is described as desiring-production that engages with a process of absolute deterritorialization and relative reterritorialization. Instead of having monolithic structures where humans are embedded within them and controlled by them, desiring-production is the creation of small structures that can be practical tools. Overall there is a breaking apart of large universal structures which in turn is the space for particular structures to emerge and fade away when no longer needed. These small structures are called molecular while top-down impositions of structures are referred to as molar. The importance of this large open space for small and local creativity, what Deleuze has called a body without organs, is the ability for a becoming on a molecular scale and a micropolitics within transcendent and molar reality. The small immanent structures are the organs that form for molecular uses, that serve a purpose without expanding beyond the power and control of human desire. The real stage for political action is not universal and centralized methods, that can inadvertently recreate domination, but the particular and decentralized structures which are expressions of desire. The desiring-production within a body without organs is this very expression of freedom through desire, and for Deleuze it is the epicenter of revolutionary political potential. It should be noted that the idea of desiring-production, as the creation of immanent structures, is not entirely an abstract endeavor relegated to the production of consumer goods or art. In light of what has been described as immanent structures, it is important to point out that these immanent structures can be directly applied to what Greens do on an almost daily basis. In other words, examples of immanent structures can be solar panels for home-use, a food coop in the local community, or a series of specific laws that would repeal the entire War On Drugs in favor of realistic classifications of chemical effects and consequences.

Michel Foucault delved deep into how structures shape the human experience of reality as a way to control humans. Alain Badiou explored the possibilities that would emerge from the sudden disruption of these kind of structures. Gilles Deleuze proposed the needed attitude toward recreating the world after this disruption. They are all relevant to each other as well as to the greater political implications and applications that we are interested in. The ability to be used in conjunction has demonstrated that these three philosophers are useful for an overall project of theory. We can see the close relationship between control, change, and desire through Foucault, Badiou, and Deleuze and how one moves into the other. The transition from control to change to desire is inherently a political issue, and can be one of the many ways theory illuminates as it is seriously engaged.

These three examples are not completely exclusive. There is great potential in other examples such as Giorgio Agamben, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, and Slavoj Zizek among others. I recommended all of them as a wonderful source of thought for further personal exploration. The important point to address is that theses theorists create a foundation for a cohesive political action. Because these theorists deal specifically with issues of power, meaning, and production, they are just as important in our work as running candidates in elections, staging protests, and addressing our grievances to democratically elected governments that is supposedly insured by our Constitution. It can be said that our melding of theory and action is an implementation of populism in a more progressive and radical fashion. Reform populism can be defined as people coming together to form collectives of opposition because they feel that there are elements or persons in the government and society that is going against the original purpose of a democracy. They are limited in that they feel that the system overall naturally works and can be fixed by removing specific parts. There is only so much they can do to enact change. On the other hand, our form of radical populism seeks to use these collectives of opposition to begin an analysis and transformation of not only the government, not only the society, but perhaps all of reality.

In conclusion, and in summation, the words of Foucault and Deleuze can best describe the importance of theory. In his essay "What Is Enlightenment?", Foucault states that "The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.". This quote fits in well with the following quote by Deleuze, that states “A theory is exactly like a tool-box. It must be useful, it must work. And not for itself. If there are no people to use it, including the theoretician himself who thereby ceases to be a theoretician, then either the theory is worthless or else the time is not ripe.”. Our use of theory can fulfill this function of transformation as Foucault poses it, and be a tool for political action as described by Deleuze. This transformation must begin with personal empowerment and the actions of people through real democracy, but it will always require a language. Theory can be that language in which we as the Green Party can write a new narrative for this nation and this world.

Foucault:
discourse=structure of meaning
discipline=creation and control of subjects
regulation=creation and control of populations

Badiou:
counting as one=structuring of reality
the event=disruption of structures
fidelity to the event=commitment to truth after the event

Deleuze:
body without organs=reality without structures
territorialization=formation of structures
deterritorialization=dissolution of structures
reterritorialization=reformation of structures
molecular=bottom-up resistance
molar=top-down enforcement

the virtual: x+y*y=z
actualization: 2+3*3=11, 3+2*2=7
the actual: 11, 7

http://www.michel-foucault.com/

http://www.lacan.com/frameabad.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze

Darin Robbins is a Green Party candidate for Corning City Council in 2009, and is a founder and regular contributor to the green theory blog, A Green State of Mind.

Green Fest Clips Posted

2009-08-12T20:10:00.004-04:00

Many thanks to Cris McConkey for taping Saturday morning's session on sustainable energy and climate change. Check out Cris's videos below:

Video 1: The Lucky Pluckers, Meg Krywe and Tom Persichilli, performing and Crow Weaver describing the Solar Stage, Aug. 8, 2009, at GreenFest. Video 2: Art Weaver's talk, Aug. 8, 2009, at Green Fest. Videos by Cris McConkey.

Video 3: Dan Miner's talk, Aug. 8, 2009, at Green Fest. Video 4: Conclusion. Videos by Cris McConkey.

Additional videos from the weekend can be downloaded from the archive at www.livestream.com/greenpartyus

Doubts in the Midst of Greens

2009-08-11T10:54:00.003-04:00

The Green Man blogger at Irregular Times attended Green Fest this past weekend. GM found in the viewpoints of two other attendees opinions that GM considers "a testament to the effectiveness of corporate-funded misinformation campaigns," which GM finds surprising in "a gathering of Green Party activists." GM concludes that "environmental education efforts need to take place as much within eco-oriented groups as without." The post has generated many comments--83 to date. Click here to view the post and comments.

Miner Climate Change Presentation Slides

2009-08-10T19:35:00.003-04:00

The slides illustrating Dan Miner's Saturday morning presentation at Green Fest on Climate Change, Peak Oil and Sustainable Cities can be downloaded at http://nygreenfest.org/minerpres.ppt

Bancroft Empire to Earth Community Presentation

2009-08-10T19:27:00.003-04:00

The handout for Tim Bancroft's presentation at Green Fest on From Empire to Earth Community can be downloaded at http://nygreenfest.org/bancroftempire.pdf

Maria Kuriloff Film Clip

2009-08-10T11:40:00.002-04:00

A film clip of Maria Kuriloff's wonderful performance in her husband Ron's film, "Chats with Dr. Phinash," was mentioned Saturday night. The clip can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5CSX9ExaEs

Green Fest Livestreamed

2009-08-10T10:27:00.005-04:00

Many thanks to the team who livestreamed many of the Green Fest programs:
To the three wonderful camera persons: Doug Clarke, Don DeBar, and Barry Miller, each of whom gave great presentations and taped other presentations all weekend. Don DeBar's taping was livestreamed. Doug and Barry's videos are being readied for posting
Craig Seeman - producer
Starlene Rankin - co-producer
DJ Green Arrow - whose talk on 9/11 followed by his rapathon kept the streaming going on Friday when we had no other camera
Steve Scher - for moderating the live chat room

Additional videos from the weekend will be streamed at www.livestream.com/greenpartyus

Schedule

2009-08-05T12:19:00.000-04:00

Fri., Aug. 7, 10:00 am, Registration Opens

Fri., Aug. 7, 12:00 noon, Exhibits Open

Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm, Workshop Session 1

Growing Nut Trees Together in New York State, Tom Potts — Kanakadea 104

Earth Consciousness, Tim Bancroft— Steinheim

Gaza's Dilemma, Ismail Mehr — Nevins Theater, Powell Center

9/11 Families and 9/11 Contradictions ... What Side Are We On? DJ Green Arrow— Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

Building Local Sovereignty over Gas Drilling, Mike Bernhard, Mary Jo Long, Rachel Treichler— Kanakadea 105

Fri., Aug. 7, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Workshop Session 2

Creating a New Local Economy in an Old General Store, a panel discussion with Lois Hilton, Elizabeth Thompson, Stephanie English and Courtney Ingham from Tickletown Trust & Trade in Humphrey, NY — Kanakadea 105

Green Media Panel: David Doonan, Deborah Magone, Cyril Mychalejko, Lee Riddell— Nevins Theater, Powell Center

Sustainability in School Dining, John Dietrich, Rome Celli—Dining Room, Powell Center

Nuclear Power is Not Green, Ken Gale—Kanakadea 104

Rainwater Harvesting, Craig Taylor— Steinheim

48 hour Rap on Sustainability and Green Politics begins, DJ Green Arrow — Knight Club, Powell Center

Fri., Aug. 7, 4:15 pm — 5:15 pM, Recreation

Hatha Yoga I & II, Ann Eagan— Knight Club, Powell Center

Drumming, Steve Calkins and Bob Nape— Outdoors, meet in lobby of Powell Center

Hike of Foster Lake Nature Trail, Michele Hluchy — Outdoors, meet in lobby of Powell Center

Swimming — McLane Sports Center Pool

Fri., Aug. 7, 5:30 - 6:30, Dinner

Fri., Aug. 7, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 1

Forum on the Politics of Sustainability: Virginia Rasmussen, "Who Has the Power to Implement Sustainability?" and Cyril Mychelako, "Rights for Nature," Music: Deborah Magone — Nevins Theater, Powell Center

Sat., Aug. 8, 2009

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:00 am - 9:00 am, Showers available

McLane Sports Center

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:30 am - 8:30 am, Breakfast

Sat., Aug. 8, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 3

Organizing for Peace, Dianne Roe, Paul Zulkowitz— Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

Constructing Pollywogg Holler, Bill Castle— Nevins Theater, Powell Center

Local Food Supply Systems, Jennifer Bertron, Lyn Gerry, Tim Koegel and Peg Eisenhardt— Kanakadea 104

Natural Gas 101: Basics of the Social and Environmental Impacts of Natural Gas Extraction, Andrew Byers and Dirk Trachy— Kanakadea 105

Build Your Own Low Cost Solar Collector, Dave Fagan and Mary Joy Cady-Fagan — Steinheim

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:45 am — Exhibits Open

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:45 am — 11:00 am, Forum 2

Forum on Sustainable Energy, Presenters: Art Weaver, "Renewable Energy, the Audacity of Hope, the Reality of Change," and Dan Miner, "The Post Carbon Future," Music: Lucky Pluckers— Solar Stage weather permitting, Nevins Theater if rain

Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 pm, Workshop Session 4

Marcellus Shale Basics, Chris Burger — Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Poetry from Place Workshop, Mike Czarnecki— Steinheim

The Battle for Progressive Media, Don DeBar— Knight Club, Powell Center

Importance of Political Theory, Darin Robbins — Kenyon/Allen Room, Powell Center

Small Wind Consumer Education, Roy Butler— Kanakadea 105

Economics as a Cultural System, John Doscher— Kanakadea 104

Sat., Aug. 8, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm, Lunch

Sat., Aug. 8, 1:45 pm - 2:45pm, Workshop Session 5

Watershed Protection, with Local Examples, Stephen Lewandowski— Kanakadea 105

9/11 Truth Workshop, Sander Hicks — Knight Club, Powell Center

Traditional Feltmaking, Susannah White and Amelia McIsaac— Outdoors, meet in Powell lobby

Out of Time: Global Warming, Extinctions, and Energy, John Doscher— Kanakadea 104

In Defense of Palestinian Homes and Communities, Beth Harris— Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

Approaches to Landscape for Food Production, Joey Gates— Outdoors, meet in Powell lobby

Zero Waste Workshop, Chris Burger— Steinheim

Sat., Aug. 8, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Workshop Session 6

Build Your Own Wind Turbine Workshop, Barry Miller — Kanakadea 105

Green Media Panel: Don DeBar, Lyn Gerry, Sander Hicks, Steve Welzer— Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

From Empire to Earth Community, Tim Bancroft — Steinheim

It Ain’t Easy Being Green, Carl Romanelli—Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Bottled Water: Plastics, Shortages and Pollution, Ken Gale— Kenyon/Allen Room, Powell Center

Dynamic Conversation about Community Participation, Hydraulic Fracturing, and the Next Ten Years, Andrew Byers and Dirk Trachy — Kanakadea 104

Sat.,Aug. 8, 4:15 pm — 5:15 pm, recreation

Hatha Yoga I & II, Ann Eagan— Knight Club, Powell Center

Drumming, Steve Calkins and Bob Nape— Outdoors, meet in lobby of Powell Center

Hike of Pine Hill Nature Trail, Doug Clarke — Outdoors, meet in lobby of Powell Center

Swimming — McLane Sports Center Pool

Sat., Aug. 8, 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Dinner

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 3

Joel Kovel, "Revitalizing the Relationship between Humans and Nature," and Tony Gronowicz, "History of Rights for Nature in US",
Music: Crow Weaver—Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:00 pm — 11:00 pm, dancing

Al Mead and the Bloodthirsty Vegans — Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

Sun., Aug. 9, 2009

Sun., Aug. 9, 7:00 am - 9:00 am, Showers available

McLane Sports Center

Sun., Aug. 9, 7:30 am - 8:30 am, Breakfast

Sun., Aug. 9, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 7

Third Parties and the U.S. Experience, Tony Gronowicz—Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

"My Name is Allegany County, " Anti-Nuclear Campaign, Meg Krywe, Burton Stein, others TBA — Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Spiritual Basis for Green Living, Tim Bancroft and Joey Gates— Steinheim

What is Sustainability? Douglas Clarke — Kanakadea 105

Homeopathy Works! Cecile Lawrence— Kanakadea 104

Sun., Aug. 9, 9:45 am — Exhibits Open

Sun., Aug. 9, 9:45 am — 11:15 am, Forum 4

Forum on Sovereignty and Sustainability with Bill Kauffman, "Look Homeward, Greens: Why Localism Matters," Peter Jemison and Lyn Gerry. Poetry by Mike Czarnecki —Solar Stage weather permitting, Nevins Theater if raining

Sun., Aug. 9, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm, Workshop Session 8

Tofu Making Workshop, Sam Weinreb — Howell Hall, First Floor Kitchen

Post Carbon Cities, Dan Miner— Kanakadea 105

Green Campaigns, Lessons Learned, Joel Kovel, Carl Romanelli, Rome Celli, Don DeBar— Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Political/Environmental Comic Journalism, Tom Keough— Steinheim

Treaty of Canandaigua, Peter Jemison— Kanakadea 104

Sun., Aug. 9, 12:30 pm — 1:30 pm, Lunch

Sun., Aug. 9, 1:45 pm — 3:30 pm, Forum 5

Forum on Visioning a Green Future
Concert: Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams, Celebrating the Elie Siegmeister Centennial and Other Music Relevant for Our Time
Presentations: Steve Welzer, "What Do We Face?" and Jason Nabewaniec—Howell Hall, Second Floor

Sun., August 9, 3:30 pm, Adjourn

Sander Hicks and DJ Green Arrow on 9/11 Truth

2009-07-27T13:02:00.000-04:00

Sander Hicks and DJ Green Arrow will give presentations on 9/11 truth issues at NY Green Fest, Fri.-Sun., Aug. 7-9, 2009, in Alfred, NY. NY Green Fest, a conference on sustainable living and Green politics, will be held at the Powell Campus Center, Alfred University, Alfred, NY. DJ Green Arrow will speak about 9/11 Families and 9/11 Contingencies on Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm. Sander Hicks will give a 9/11 Truth Workshop on Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 pm.

Sander Hicks is a 9/11 truth activist and the author of The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistle Blowers, and the Cover-up (2005). He is the founder of Soft Skull Press and Vox Pop in Brooklyn. Sander has reported for Alternet, GNN, Long Island Press, New York Press, and INN World Report Television (FSTV, Dish Network). Sander will also appear on a Green media panel at Green Fest.

DJ Green Arrow is an activist and Hip Hop artist. He will perform a 48 hour rap during Green Fest and again in September at the "Real Change and Transparency" Conference in New York City, where he lives. Green will be taking pledges for every hour he raps, with proceeds benefiting 9/11 First Responders.

Gas Drilling Presentations

2009-07-27T10:31:00.001-04:00

A number of programs of interest to gas drilling activists are being offered at Green Fest:

Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm, Workshop Session 1

Building Local Sovereignty over Gas Drilling, Mary Jo Long, Mike Bernhard, Rachel Treichler— Kanakadea 105

Fri., Aug. 7, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 1

Sat., Aug. 8, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 3

Natural Gas 101: Basics of the Social and Environmental Impacts of Natural Gas Extraction, Andrew Byers and Dirk Trachy— Kanakadea 104

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:45 am — 11:00 am, Forum 2

Forum on Sustainable Energy, Presenters: Art Weaver, "Renewable Energy, the Audacity of Hope, the Reality of Change," and Dan Miner, "The Post Carbon Future," Music: Lucky Pluckers— Solar Stage

Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 am, Workshop Session 4

Marcellus Shale Basics, Chris Burger — Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Sat., Aug. 8, 1:45 pm - 2:45pm, Workshop Session 5

Watershed Protection, with Local Examples, Stephen Lewandowski— Kanakadea 104

Sat., Aug. 8, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Workshop Session 6

Dynamic Conversation about Community Participation, Hydraulic Fracturing, and the Next Ten Years, Andrew Byers and Dirk Trachy — Kanakadea 105

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 3

Forum on Politics and Nature, Joel Kovel and Tony Gronowicz,
Music: Crow Weaver—Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Sun., Aug. 9, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 7

"My Name is Allegany County, " Anti-Nuclear Campaign, Meg Krywe, Burton Stein, others TBA — Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center

Sun., Aug. 9, 9:45 am — 11:15 am, Forum 4

Forum on Sovereignty and Sustainability with Bill Kauffman, "Look Homeward, Greens: Why Localism Matters," Peter Jemison and Lyn Gerry. Poetry by Mike Czarnecki —Solar Stage

Sun., Aug. 9, 11:30 am - 12:30 am, Workshop Session 8

Post Carbon Cities, Dan Miner— Kanakadea 104

Treaty of Canandaigua, Peter Jemison— Kanakadea 105

Sun., Aug. 9, 1:45 pm — 3:30 pm, Forum 5

Forum on Visioning a Green Future
Concert: Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams, Presentations: Steve Welzer and Jason Nabewaniec—Howell Hall, Second Floor

Click here for the full Green Fest schedule.

Workshops on Palestine and Peace

2009-07-26T09:54:00.007-04:00

Three workshops at Green Fest will address issues related to Palestine and peace:

Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm, Workshop Session 1

Gaza's Dilemma, Ismail Mehr — Nevins Theater, Powell Center

Sat., Aug. 8, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 3

Organizing for Peace, Dianne Roe, Paul Zulkowitz— Knight Club, Powell Campus Center

Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 am, Workshop Session 4

In Defense of Palestinian Homes and Communities, Beth Harris— Kenyon/Allen Room, Powell Campus Center

Beth Harris is a founding member of the Central New York Campaign to End the Occupation of Palestine and professor of politics at Ithaca College. Beth lives in Ithaca, NY.

Ismail Mehr is chief of anesthesiology at Saint James Mercy Hospital in Hornell, NY. He led a team of 9 physicians and 2 non medical personnel on a relief mission to Gaza in conjuction with the Islamic Medical Association of North America just as Israel's military assault on Gaza ended early this year. Ismail lives in Hornell, NY.

Dianne Roe is a founding member of the Central New York Campaign to End the Occupation of Palestine. She has visited Hebron in Palestine a number of times with Christian Peacemaker Teams. Dianne Roe lives in Corning, NY.

zool (Paul H.) Zulkowitz is a life-long antiwar, human rights and environmental activist. Retired from a "Hollywood-on-Hudson" film production career, zool, a member of the Directors Guild of America, is a gardener, sculptor and special events producer. zool is active with many local and international groups, including, among others, the Green Party, Jews Against the Occupation, Witness Against Torture, and Code Pink Women for Peace (with whom he has recently traveled to the Middle East as a member of an Israel/Gaza peace delegation). He lives in Woodmere, NY and Washington, DC.

Workshop on Watershed Protection with Steve Lewandowski

2009-07-26T08:55:00.000-04:00

Steve Lewandowski will offer a watershed protection workshop at Green Fest on Saturday, Aug. 8 at 1:45 pm. Green Fest is being held on the campus of Alfred University. The workshop will be held in Kanakadea Hall, Room 105. Steve's watershed protection workshop will offer a basic introduction to watersheds, their characteristics, developing a problem statement, selection of remedial actions, political organization, and structural questions. He is not offering quick fixes—think in terms of decades. The workshop will outline significant issues in watershed protection and consider the examples of the watersheds of Canandaigua Lake, Hemlock and Canadice Lakes and Lake Ontario watersheds. There will be an opportunity for lots of Q&A.

Steve is the Program Director of the Lake Ontario Coastal Initiative. He is a founder of the Canandaigua Lake Watershed Alliance and the Coalition for Hemlock and Canadice Lakes. He has worked as an environmental educator and consultant in the western Finger Lakes for thirty-five years, and has worked closely with protection efforts for Cayuga, Seneca, Keuka, Canandaigua, and Honeoye Lakes. Steve has served on the Boards of the Finger Lakes Land Trust, Friends of Ganondagan State Historic Site, Pegasus Early Music, and the 1816 Quaker Meetinghouse Committee. He is a graduate of Hamilton College and did graduate work with Louis Jones in the Cooperstown Graduate Programs in American Folk Culture and with Howard Nemerov and William Gass at Washington University in St. Louis.

Learn about Home Brewing at Green Fest

2009-07-26T06:14:00.003-04:00

Peter Reynolds and Chris Romanchock, brewers and self-described "local yokels" from Hartsville Sweetwater Home Brewing in Hartsville, NY, will demonstrate the art, science, and joy of home brewing beer. Peter and Chris will show brewing, bottling, live fermentation, as well as the methods and materials therein.

Hartsville Sweetwater Home Brewing will be one of the 40 exhibitors in Green Fest's Green Fair. For information about all our exhibitors, visit http://nygreenfest.org/exhibitors09.html

Green Fest Site Location

2009-07-26T05:15:00.008-04:00

Green Fest 2009 will be held on the campus of Alfred University in Alfred, NY, 80 miles south of Rochester. Workshops and forums will be held in the Powell Campus Center (middle photo above), Kanakadea Hall (left photo) and Steinheim (right photo). Exhibits will be on the lawn in front of the Powell Campus Center and in the lobby. Outdoor performances will take place on a solar-powered stage on lawn. A live webcam of the Powell Campus Center can be viewed at http://www.alfred.edu/virtual_tour/webcam.cfm.
Click here for directions to Green Fest.

Exhibitors at Green Fest Fair

2009-07-25T20:31:00.002-04:00

A Green Fair, with exhibitors, music and performances will take place at the center of Green Fest, August 7 - 9, 2009, on the Alfred University Campus Green in Alfred, NY.

The following exhibitors are confirmed for Green Fest 2009:

ACCORD Corp/Allegany Business Center

Alfred University Bookstore

Alpaca Breeders of Western New York

Alternative fuel and electric vehicles

Autonomedia, book publishers

Beyond Oil NYC, a Sierra Club NYC project

Chelsea Green Press, book publishers

Campus Sustainability Workbook, Karen Monroe author, Joel Cera illustrator

Carol Doscher, artist

Central New York Campaign to End the Occupation of Palestine

Chenango, Delaware Otsego Gas Group, activist organization

Concerned Citizens of Cattaraugus County, activist organization

DJ Green Arrow, artist

Flowering Heart of Carapace Farm, wool, felt and toys

Foothills Publishing, poetry press

Gaia Girls Books, Lee Welles, author

Green Alfred, student organization

Green Party of New York State, activist organization

Green Party of the United States, activist organization

Hartsville Sweetwater Home Brewing, Peter Reynolds and Chris Romanchock

Home Comfort-All Star Energy, energy efficiency consultants

Hyland Woodcraft Fine Furniture, Sean Hyland, craftsman

Linda Huey, ceramic pottery sculpture

Tom Keough, artist

Barry Miller, wind engineer

Natural Medicine Books, Pat O'Brien, author

New York Nut Growers Association, activist organization

Tom Persichilli, musical instruments, sculpture and fine woodworking

Positive News, alternative newspaper

Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, activist organization

Pluto Press, book publishers

Reusable Materials Depot (RePo), student organization

Shaleshock Citizens Action Alliance, activist organization

Sierra Club Finger Lakes Group, activist organization

Solar is Hot, solar installation services

Tickletown Trust and Trade

Unwelcome Guests, alternative radio program

UpsideDownWorld, media collective

Windy Ridge Natural Farms

Click here for information about exhibiting at Green Fest 2009

Hornell Tribune: Green Fest to be held at AU this year

2009-07-19T10:23:00.004-04:00

The Alfred University campus will be swarming with crafters, artists, exhibitors, activist groups, environmentally-conscious people, Green Party members and those interested in sustainability practices Aug. 7-9 during Green Fest 2009.

This is the first time the event has taken place outside of the Ithaca area and means extra space and more accommodation options because of the new location. . . .

With 45 different workshops and forums and 77 presentors scheduled, events will delve into a variety of topics, including; Marcellus Shale gas drilling, protecting water sheds, the Treaty of Canandaigua, Global Warming and the Allegany County anti-nuclear campaign.

Whether one wants to learn how to build a small wind turbine, make tofu, beer or felt, grow nut trees, perform yoga, sit in on a presentation about the history of Belmont’s Pollywogg Holler or learn how to draw political cartoons, people will come from all over the state — and as far as New York City and central Pennsylvania — to demonstrate and discuss their personal and professional talents, interests and knowledge.

“There is something for just about everybody,” said Treichler, who admits there are too many topics to list.

She said a solar-powered photovoltaic stage will be showcased with musical performances spanning over the weekend. There will also be an alternative vehicle show Saturday afternoon with the possibility of a parade.

Click here for the full article

Welzer and Nabewaniec Speak on Visioning a Green Future

2009-07-07T22:31:00.005-04:00

Steve Welzer and Jason Nabewaniec will be the speakers for Green Fest's concluding plenary session on visioning a truly sustainable future, Sunday, August 9, 1:45 pm — 3:30 pm in Howell Hall, Alfred University, Alfred, NY. Steve Welzer will speak about the future of Green politics, and Jason Nabewaniec will speak on joining our personal odysseys into a movement. Leonard Lehrman's and Helene Williams' concert, Celebrating the Elie Siegmeister Centennial and Other Music Relevant for Our Time, will open the program.

Steve Welzer was the co- editor of the Green Horizon Quarterly from 2003 to 2008. He is a founder of the Green Party of New Jersey and a member of the National Committee of the Green Party of the United States. He is the editor of The GreenGram, the newsletter of Green Party of New Jersey and writes for Synthesis/Regeneration, a magazine of Green social thought. He was a Green Party candidate for congress from New Jersey in 2008. Steve lives in Hightstown, New Jersey.

Jason Nabewaniec is a Co-Chair of the Green Party US. He works as a design engineer in the public sector and is finishing his Master's thesis in Environmental, Health and Safety Management at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Campus Map

2009-07-07T20:56:00.001-04:00

The Powell Campus Center on the Alfred University campus will be the central location for Green Fest 2009. Workshops and presentations will also be held in Kanakadea Hall, Steinheim, and Howell Hall and outdoors on our solar stage and the lawns. The Green Fair will be located on the campus green. The Green Book Fair will be located in the lobby of the Powell Campus Center. Dormitory accommodations are in the Brick Residence Hall.

Click here to download an AU campus map

Click here for a map showing how to get from Alfred to the Foster Lake campground

77 Presenters Confirmed

2009-07-07T20:17:00.020-04:00

77 presenters are confirmed for Green Fest 2009:

Tim Bancroft
Jennifer Bertron
Bloodthirsty Vegans
Chris Burger
Roy Butler
Andrew Byers
Steve Calkins
Bill Castle
Rome Celli
C. Douglas Clarke
Mary Joy Cody-Fagan
Michael Czarnecki
Don DeBar
John Dietrich
David Doonan
John Doscher
Ann Eagan
Stephanie English
Dave Fagan
Joey Gates
Lyn Gerry
DJ Green Arrow
Tony Gronowicz
Ken Harris
Sander Hicks
Lois Hilton
Michele Hluchy
Bill Huston
Courtney Ingham
G. Peter Jemison
Jerry Kann
Bill Kauffman
Tom Keough
Joel Kovel
Meg Krywe
Ron Kuriloff
Peter LaVenia
Cecile Lawrence

Stephen Lewandowski
Ann Link
Tony and Mary Lipnicki
Carl Lundgren
Lucky Pluckers
Deborah Magone
Amelia McIsaac
Alex Mead
Ismail Mehr
Barry Miller
Dan Miner
Cyril Mychalejko
Jason Nabewaniec
Bob Nape
Steve Nicholson
Jane Pearson
Tom Persichilli
Tom Potts
Virginia Rasmussen
Lee Riddell
Darin Robbins
Dianne Roe
Carl Romanelli
Rafter T. Sass
Gudrun Scott
Burton Stein
Craig Taylor
Elizabeth Thompson
Dirk Trachy
Rachel Treichler
Art Weaver
Crow Weaver
Sam Weinreb
Lee Welles
Steve Welzer
Susannah White
Helene Williams
Zool (Paul H.) Zulkowitz

Leonard Lehrman

Where to Stay and What to Eat

2009-07-07T20:11:00.005-04:00

The registration fee for the entire Green Fest weekend is only $85. This includes all plenary sessions, workshops and activities. Meals and lodging are additional, but very reasonable. If you would like to reserve a camping space, dorm room or meals, you may do so online at http://nygreenfest.org/registration.html, or by printing out and mailing in our registration form.

Dorm rooms and the Saxon Inn are available for lodging on campus. Camping is available at a beautiful lake 2 miles from campus. Transportation will be provided from the campus to the campground. Local bed and breakfasts are also available. Meals prepared from locally-grown food will be served at the Alfred University dining hall. Meals may also be obtained from area restaurants and grocery stores.

Dormitory lodging is available on campus in the Brick Residence Hall, across the campus green from the Powell Campus Center for $25 per person per night. Kids 4-12 are $11.00 per night. Kids 3 and under are free. Bring your own sheets, blankets and towels. Bed linens are available for $10. Apartment suites on campus are also available for $35 per person per night. Each suite has 3 doubles, 1 bath, 1 kitchen, and A/C . There is a maximum of 2 adults and 2 children per room, 6 adults and 6 children per suite. On campus lodging must be reserved before August 3, 2009.

CAMPING: Tent camping is available for $10 per person at Foster Lake, a 25-acre lake 5 min. from the Alfred University campus. Children 12 and under camp for free. Fires are allowed in the grills. Boating is available. Swimming is not allowed in 2009 due to water quality concerns. Transportation will be provided to and from the lake upon request. Showers for campers are available on campus in the McLane Athletic Center. Campers and RV's may stay at Foster Lake or in assigned parking lot on campus (no hook-ups). Camping must be reserved before August 3, 2009.

Getting to Green Fest

2009-07-07T20:07:00.002-04:00

Green Fest 2009 will be held on the campus of Alfred University in Alfred, NY. Alfred is in rural Allegany County, 80 miles south of Rochester near the Pennsylvania border. The Short
Line Bus runs several buses daily between Alfred, Westchester, New York City and Long Island. The bus stop in Alfred is just a couple of blocks from the Green Fest location. Click here for driving directions to Alfred. Offers and requests for rides may be posted on the Green Fest ride board.

Kovel and Gronowicz to Speak on Politics and Nature

2009-07-07T08:36:00.006-04:00

Joel Kovel and Tony Gronowicz will be the speakers for a plenary session on politics and nature, Saturday, August 8, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm in Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center, Alfred University, Alfred, NY. Joel Kovel will speak about revitalizing the relationship between humanity and nature and Tony Gronowicz will speak about the history of political efforts to protect and give rights to nature in the US. Crow Weaver's musical performance will open the program and a musical performance of the Tom Persichilli and Meg Krywe will close the program.

Joel Kovel is the editor of the quarterly journal, Capitalism Nature Socialism. From 1988 to 2009, he was Professor of Social Studies at Bard College. Joel has published nine books and over a hundred articles and reviews. His books include White Racism, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972; Against the State of Nuclear Terror; In Nicaragua; The Radical Spirit; History and Spirit (1991); Red Hunting in the Promised Land (1994), a study of anticommunist repression in America; The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or The End of the World (Zed, 2002); and Overcoming Zionism (2007). As an activist, Joel has been engaged in struggles for peace and justice since the Vietnam War era. He has worked within the antiwar and antinuclear movements, the solidarity movements in Central America and the Caribbean, the movements for democratic media, and, increasingly, for ecological transformation. Joel joined the Green Party since 1990. In 1998, he was the Green Party candidate for US Senator from New York, and in 2000 sought the party's Presidential nomination.

Tony Gronowicz teaches U.S. history, global civilization, political science and human geography at the City University of New York. He edited Oswald Garrison Villard: The Dilemmas of the Absolute Pacifist in Two World Wars (1983); and authored Race and Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (1998) and Last Western Empire: A History of the United States from Spring to its Fall (2006). Tony was the 2005 Green Party candidate for Mayor of New York City and a 1996 Green Party candidate for State Assembly. He serves on the International Committee of the Green Party of the United States.

Crow Weaver is the founder of the Native Earthling Band in Ithaca. He was born in Virginia and grew up listening to blues, deep southern rock, and rockin' gospel. He started playing guitar when he was 13 and later picked up silver and Native American flutes. He has explored his Native American and Celtic ancestry to create a blend of spiritually-minded, earthy and edgy rock-and-roll. He calls his music Tribal Rock, as it transcends all race and creed to bring people together as one.

Tom Persichilli and Meg Krywe are members of the Lucky Pluckers, a band that performs folk/rock/old-timey music on mostly acoustic instruments built by Tom. Meg will speak at Green Fest about her work in the fight against a nuclear waste dump in Allegany County.

Kauffman, Jemison and Gerry to Speak on Sovereignty and Sustainability

2009-07-06T20:01:00.005-04:00

Bill Kauffman, Peter Jemison and Lyn Gerry will be the speakers for a plenary session on sovereignty and sustainability, Sunday, August 9, 2009, 9:45 am — 11:15 am , on the solar stage on the Alfred University Campus Green, Alfred, NY. Bill Kauffman's talk is titled "Look Homeward, Greens: Why Localism Matters." Poetry readings by Michael Czarnecki will open and close the program.

Bill Kauffman is the author of eight books, including With Good Intentions? Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America (1998), Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive (2003), Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (2006), which the American Library Association named one of the best books of 2006 and which won the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award, Ain’t My America: The Long Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism (Henry Holt/ Metropolitan/2008), which Barnes & Noble named one of the best books of 2008; and Forgotten Founder: Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (2008). Bill is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the American Conservative, the Independent, Counterpunch and Orion. Bill is a critic of development, writes approvingly of distributism and agrarianism, and is strongly anti-corporate. He has described his politics as "a blend of Catholic Worker, Old Right libertarian, Yorker transcendentalist, and delirious localist."

G. Peter Jemison is the manager of Ganondagan State Historic Site, a recreation of a 17th-century Seneca village, located in Victor, New York. He is the editor of Treaty of Canandaigua 1794: 200 Years of Treaty Relations between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States (2002), and the director of the film, Hanondagonyes 'Town Destroyer,' in which Seneca tribe members re-enact events of the 18th-century colonial wars and the campaign against them. Peter represents the Seneca Nation on repatriation issues, and serves on the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and formerly served on the board of directors of the American Association of Museums. He is also an artist whose work has been widely shown for more than two decades. His paintings and drawings have shown in solo exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. He was the founding director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City.

Lyn Gerry is the host and producer of the Unwelcome Guests radio program about wealth, power, and peoples' resistance to the corporate world order. Unwelcome Guests is broadcast on 20 radio stations across the US, including WEOS Geneva, WXXE-FM Syracuse and Ithaca Community Radio. Lyn is a founder and collective member of the A-Infos Radio Project, and a founder of the revived Watkins Glen Farmers Market.

Michael Czarnecki is a poet and a poetry publisher from Wheeler, NY. Mike, his wife Carolyn, and their sons Grayson and Chapin operate Foothills Publishing, now in its 24th year publishing poetry.

Weaver and Miner to Speak on Sustainable Energy

2009-07-06T19:43:00.005-04:00

Art Weaver and Dan Miner will be the speakers for the plenary session, Saturday, August 8, 9:45 am — 11:00 am, on the solar stage on the Alfred University Campus Green, Alfred, NY. Art will speak about "Renewable Energy, the Audacity of Hope, the Reality of Change." Dan Miner will speak about how to create a post-carbon economy. Carl Lundgren's musical performances will open and close the program.

Art Weaver is President of Renovus Energy, a renewable energy systems design and installation company in Ithaca, NY. Prior to founding Renovus Energy, Art was a staff scientist at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron, conducting research in x-ray biophysics and proteomics. The accelerating pace of environmental degradation and social upheaval caused by increasing global population, in conjunction with a diminishing global petroleum resource, motivated Art to establish Renovus Energy.

Dan Miner is the chair of the Sierra Club NYC Group, and founded its Beyond Oil NYC campaign. He is the organizer of the Peak Oil NYC Meetup, the NYC affiliate of Post Carbon Institute. Dan, an attorney, is Senior Vice President of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation.

Carl Lundgren is the Chair of the Bronx County Green Party and a member of the best (and possibly the only) country band in the Bronx, Troy Willy.

Celebrating the Elie Siegmeister Centennial

2009-07-06T19:37:00.003-04:00

Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams will open the concluding session of Green Fest Sunday, August 9, 2009, at 1:45 pm in Alfred University's Howell Hall, Alfred, NY, with a program Celebrating the Elie Siegmeister Centennial and Other Music Relevant for Our Time. Their concert is dedicated to the memory of Susan Blake and
Maria Kuriloff.

Program (the music is by Elie Siegmeister unless otherwise noted):
A Song to Begin - by Gerhard Bronner (Helene Williams-Leonard Lehrman)
Johnny Appleseed (Rosemary Benet,)
Two Songs of the City (Langston Hughes):
Chalk Marks on the Sidewalk
Childhood Memories
A Dream Deferred - by Leonard Lehrman (Langston Hughes)
Abraham Lincoln (Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Benet, ed. Leonard Lehrman)
Conspiritor Reality - from ALGER by Leonard Lehrman & Kim Rich
Guns Don't Kill People - by So-Hee Youn (Jamie Jackson)
Harvest Time
Conscience - by Leonard Lehrman (Abel Meeropol)
John Reed (Abel Meeropol)
Why Am I Painting the Living Room - by Lou & Peter Berryman
Where Do I Belong? - If I Can't Dance from E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman - by Leonard Lehrman & Karen Ruoff Kramer
Elie Siegmeister (Leonard Lehrman)

Leonard Lehrman, the former Assistant Chorus Master of the Metropolitan Opera, founded and directs the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus. He is also the Co-Director of the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case, and Co-Author of the forthcoming bio-bibliography of Elie Siegmeister (1909-91), one of America's most prolific and socially-conscious composers. Leonard was Siegmeister's youngest and longest composition student (he also studied at Harvard, Cornell, Indiana, and with Nadia Boulanger in France), and has organized 23 of the 36 concerts honoring the Siegmeister Centennial this year, throughout the US and Europe, including this one. With Helene Williams, Leonard co-founded the Elie Siegmeister Society and Court Street Music in Valley Stream, Long Island. Leonard's own works (192 to date, including 10 operas) have been heard in 24 US States, 9 European countries, Russia, Israel, Australia, at the UN, and at the annual Northeast Naturist Festival in Moravia each August since2003. His current project is the opera ALGER, on Alger Hiss.

Helene Williams is co-founder of the Bronx Opera Company, Court Street Music, and the Elie Siegmeister Society. A faculty member at Queensborough Community College, she majored in Drama at CCNY and appeared Off-Off-Broadway and in summer stock, as well as on TV and in films. A professional concert, theater and opera singer, she has performed throughout Latin America, Australia, Israel; and all across Europe and North America in Leonard Lehrman's E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman, New World, and Superspy!: The S-e-c-r-e-t Musical. Since beginning to work with Leonard in January 1987, she has performed together with him over 400 times; they were married July 14, 2002. They have recorded for Opus One, Premier, Capstone, Albany, and Original Cast Records. A Bronx Council on the Arts Career Development winner, Helene founded and directs Accent Reduction in English Speech.

Rasmussen and Mychelako to speak on the Politics of Sustainability

2009-07-06T18:37:00.016-04:00

Virginia Rasmussen and Cyril Mychelako are the speakers for the opening plenary session of Green Fest, Friday, August 7, 2009, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm in Nevins Theater in the Powell Campus Center at Alfred University, Alfred, NY. Virginia will discuss who has the power to implement sustainability and the political changes that need to be made if we are to achieve real sustainability. Cyril will talk about rights for nature, including the rights to nature clauses in Ecuador's new Constitution, the challenges Ecuadorians face in seeing them upheld, and the lessons for activists here in the United States. Deborah Magone's musical performances will open and close the evening.

Virginia Rasmussen is a principal with POCLAD, the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy and co-founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Corporations v. Democracy campaign. She previously directed the Education Program at the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod and headed the Environmental Studies Program at Alfred University, Alfred, New York. Virginia lives in Alfred and is a trustee of the village of Alfred.

Cyril Mychelako is an editor at www.UpsideDownWorld.org, an online magazine covering politics and activism in Latin America. He won two Project Censored awards this year for his critical coverage of the "Rights to Nature" clauses in Ecuador's constitution and for an article about the Bush Administration withholding lifesaving aid from Haiti. His writing and analysis has appeared in publications such as the BBC, The New York Times Online, The Miami Herald, New Politics, www.CommonDreams.org, NACLA online, and Z Magazine. In 2006, he worked as an Intag Solidarity Network human rights observer - working in solidarity with communities resisting mining in Ecuador. Cyril worked in the Southern Tier in the summer of 2007 to end the war in Iraq. He serves on the board of the Canary Institute, a transnational collective of individuals engaged in research, writing, teaching, solidarity, and action that address the problem of catastrophic systemic collapse.

Deborah performs solo and with her rock band, The Deborah Magone Band. Deborah's CD, "Blues, Boogie & More......", was chosen as "2004 Best Blues CD" by Walkin' Willie of WDYN 90.1 in Rochester. Her television show "Greenline" aired on Greece, NY Cable Access Channel 12 and Rochester RCTV Channel 15. Her show, Iraq: War of Choice, can be viewed on Google Video.

Maria Kuriloff

2009-05-29T11:41:00.009-04:00

The Green Fest planning committee and the Green community lost a key member on Wednesday. Our deepest sympathies to Ron.

I always enjoyed working on projects with Maria, but it took a few years of working with her for me to realize how well Maria worked with everyone. In her good-natured way, she treated everyone in a friendly, respectful manner and got everyone to work together and get things done. Maria made things happen. She contributed tremendously to the Green Party at every level. Just one example: It was Maria who convinced Malachy McCourt to be our gubernatorial candidate in 2006.

We will have a tribute to Maria at Green Fest in August. Please bring your remembrances to share and post them now on the website set up by her son Matthew, http://www.mariakuriloff.com/.

Green Fest will Use Solar Stage

2009-05-10T12:06:00.004-04:00

Many of the programs and performances at Green Fest will take place on an outdoor stage with amplification provided by the portable solar sound system created by Crow Weaver and the Native Earthling Band in affiliation with the Center for Environmental Sustainability in Ithaca.

The solar sound system collects sunlight via three photovoltaic panels. Each SunWize SW115 panel outputs 115 watts of power, for a total of 345 watts. The panels provide direct current at 16.7 volts. The SunWize panels have a "rated" working life of about 50 years, at which point the cells will still put out 85% of their design power.

The solar panels are wired into a charge controller that regulates the current supplied to the battery. This is the heart of the Solar Stage. The charge controller keeps the battery topped up while protecting it from being damaged by overcharging. The life of the battery is directly impacted by the quality of the charge controller. The Solar Stage uses the Solar Boost 2000E from Blue Sky Energy.

For more information about the solar stage, visit http://nygreenfest.org/solarstage.html

SEEDS Festival at Earthdance Community

2009-05-03T17:05:00.006-04:00

Rafter Sass, who is doing a Liberation Ecology workshop at Green Fest 2009, will be participating in the SEEDS Festival Sunday, June 14 - Thursday, June 18 at Earthdance Community, Plainfield MA. Rafter's workshop in June will combine the participatory exploration and design studio of the Liberation Ecology workshop, with the mushroom-centric permaculture of Mycoscaping.

We'll weave back and forth between tools for designing healthy, abundant landscapes, and strategies for creating the vibrant and just society that can care for those landscapes. Social design and ecosystem design will enrich and empower each other.

This four-day participatory workshop gives participants the tools to start reclaiming ecological and social health - from specific techniques to broad strategies. Come prepared for a hands-on experience - we’ll be wrestling with hard questions, and going outside and getting our hands dirty!

In the Mycoscaping stream, we'll be learning about - and implementing - a variety of mushroom species and cultivation techniques in the landscape. We'll be looking at growing food and medicine everywhere, enriching the health of our veggie gardens and perennial plantings with fungal polyculture, bioremediation, wild mushrooms and forest ecology, and more.

In the Liberation Ecology stream, we'll be learning how to design collaborative projects that support the health of vibrant, whole communities. We'll map our relationships with natural and human communities, and create strategies to methodically connect our own desires for change with large scale transformation.

We'll all be collaborating to discover the emergent patterns and principles that arise from this hybrid workshop.

Introductions to Permaculture, to edible forest gardening, and related topics, will be incorporated along the way.

For more information, visit http://earthdance.net/seedsfest.htm

Workshops and Panels

2009-05-02T14:00:00.002-04:00

As of today, we have about 30 workshops and panels scheduled for Green Fest. This schedule is likely to change, so please check back.

Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm, Session 1

48 hour Rap on Sustainability and Green Politics, Chris Defendorf
Gas Drilling and Local Sovereignty, Rachel Treichler
Earth Oven Building Workshop

Fri., Aug. 7, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Session 2

Progressive Video Workshop, Wilton Vought
Green Media Panel: Deborah Magone, David Doonan
My Name is Allegany County discussion, Gudrun Scott

Sat., Aug. 8, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Session 3

Nut Tree Workshop, Tom Potts
Activism for Social Change, Paul Zulkowitz
Learning from Abandoned Houses, Jane Pearson

Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 am, Session 4

Zero Waste Workshop, Chris Burger
Liberation Ecology, Rafter Sass
Poetry Workshop, Mike Czarnecki
Economics as a Cultural System, John Doscher

Sat., Aug. 8, 1:45 pm - 2:45pm, Session 5

Green Media Panel: Sander Hicks, Ann Link, Lyn Gerry, Steve Welzer
Tickletown Sustainability Projects, Lois Hilton
Out of Time: Global Warming, Extinctions and Energy, John Doscher
Importance of Political Theory, Darin Robbins

Sat., Aug. 8, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Session 6

Build Your Own Wind Turbine Workshop, Barry Miller
From Empire to Earth Community, Tim Bancroft
Sustainable Gardening, Carol Doscher
It Ain't Easy Being Green, Carl Romanelli

Sun., Aug. 9, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Session 7

Tofu Making Workshop, Sam Weinreb
Building Local Community, Tony and Mary Lipnicki
Third parties and the U.S. experience, Tony Gronowicz
What is Sustainability? Douglas Clarke
The Spiritual Basis for Green Living, Bill Huston

Sun., Aug. 9, 11:15 am - 12:15 am, Session 8

Pollitical Organizing on Campus, Peter LaVenia, Jane Pearson
Living off Grid, Steve Nicholson
Panel on Third Party Barriers: Carl Romanelli, Rome Celli and Jerry Kahn
Sustainable Cities, Dan Miner, Carl Lundgren, Bob Kehoe

Draft Schedule for Green Fest 2009

2009-05-02T12:44:00.002-04:00

Here is our draft schedule for Green Fest 2009. As of today, we have 46 confirmed presenters.

Friday, August 7, 2009

10:00 am — Registration opens
12:00 noon — Exhibits open
1:45 pm — Workshops and Panels, Session 1
3:00 pm — Workshops and Panels, Session 2
4:15 pm — Swimming, hiking, yoga
5:30-6:30 pm — Dinner in Dining Hall
7:00 pm — Forum on the Politics of Sustainability

Saturday, August 8, 2009

7:30-8:30 am — Breakfast in Dining Hall
8:30 am — Workshops and Panels, Session 3
9:45 am — Forum on Sustainable Energy
11:15 am — Workshops and Panels, Session 4
12:30-1:30 pm – Lunch in Dining Hall
1:45 pm — Workshops and Panels, Session 5
3:00 pm — Workshops and Panels, Session 6
4:15 pm — Swimming, hiking, yoga
5:30-6:30 pm — Dinner in Dining Hall
7:00 pm — Forum on Politics and Nature
9:30 pm — Music and Dancing

Sunday, August 9, 2009

8:30 am — Workshops and Panels, Session 7
9:45 am — Forum on Regionalism and Sustainability
11:15 am — Workshops and Panels, Session 8
12:30-1:30 pm – Lunch in Dining Hall
1:45 pm — Forum on Visioning a Green Future
3:30 pm — Adjourn

For more information, visit http://nygreenfest.org/

Green Fest 2009 will use a Solar Stage

2009-04-29T23:03:00.002-04:00

Green Fest will use the portable solar sound system created by Crow Weaver and the Native Earthling Band.

The Band's solar sound system collects sunlight via three photovoltaic panels. Each SunWize SW115 panel outputs 115 watts of power, for a total of 345 watts. The panels provide direct current at 16.7 volts. The SunWize panels have a "rated" working life of about 50 years, at which point the cells will still put out 85% of their design power.

The solar panels are wired into a charge controller that regulates the current supplied to the battery. This is the heart of the Solar Stage. The charge controller keeps the battery topped up while protecting it from being damaged by overcharging. The life of the battery is directly impacted by the quality of the charge controller, so this is not a place to skimp. The Solar Boost 2000E from Blue Sky Energy is a pretty good one.

The inverter takes 12 volt direct current from the battery and converts it into standard 120V alternating current to run our gear. The band has considered running directly off 12V DC, but has found it difficult to find gear that can do that without major modifications to the power supplies. Their inexpensive Whistler PP300AC inverter does a pretty good job. It will shut down automatically if the battery voltage drops too low, preventing the batteries from being discharged completely.

The two batteries are sealed lead-acid gel cell batteries (Type 8G8D) with a capacity of 265 Amp-hours at a nominal 12 volts. These batteries are designed for deep discharge cycles, unlike the battery in a car, which are optimized for the big surge of power needed to start it.

Even on an overcast day, diffuse sunlight is enough to charge the system's battery.

New Blog for Progressive Video Workshop

2009-04-26T07:03:00.001-04:00

Wilton Vought has created a blog for the Progressive Video workshop he will give at Green Fest. Wilton's workshop, How to Produce Videos for Public Access TV and the Internet, will be held Friday, August 7 at 3:30 pm.

Surviving — and Thriving in — the Green Future

2009-02-04T13:40:00.012-05:00

Paul Glover, who was a Green Fest presenter in 2003 and the Green Party candidate for mayor of Ithaca in 2005, has a great new article in the Philadelphia City Paper about surviving — and thriving in — the green future. Glover now teaches metropolitan ecology and green jobs at Temple University. He is founder of the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), Ithaca HOURS local currency, Citizen Planners of Los Angeles and other groups. He is the author of Green Jobs Philly, Health Democracy and Hometown Money. More information about Glover's projects is available at paulglover.org.

Glover says, "Imagine . . . that, 20 years from now, Philadelphia's green economy enables everyone to work a few hours creatively daily, then relax with family and friends to enjoy top-quality local, healthy food. To enjoy clean low-cost warm housing, clean and safe transport, high-quality handcrafted clothes and household goods. To enjoy creating and playing together, growing up and growing old in supportive neighborhoods where everyone is valuable. And to do this while replenishing rather than depleting the planet. Pretty wild, right?"

From "Yes We Can" to "Now We Do"

FOOD: Grow it here

Challenges: Like an army camped far from its sources of supply, Philadelphia trucks food from hundreds and thousands of miles away, especially in winter. Costs of harvest, processing and distribution rise, raising prices. Fertile soils were scraped bare. Thousands are hungry here. Relax, though, we're not riding a spoon to the mouth of doom. An urban food army is marching.

Next steps: Philadelphia has 40,000 vacant lots. Their best use is now for growing fruits, berries and veggies. Same with many of our 700 abandoned factories: These are prime sites for vertical and roof farms, hydroponics, aquaculture, mushrooms. Plant the parks, too. Greenhouses extend seasons. Land breathes again when abandoned parking lots are depaved. Edible landscaping blooms meals. Edible community centers process neighborhood yields. Fallen leaves stay in neighborhoods to become new soil. Feeding kitchen scraps to worms (vermiculture) builds the food of food.

Local heroes: Mill Creek Urban Farm, Greensgrow, Weaver's Way Co-Op Farm, City Harvest, Youth 4 Good, Philadelphia Orchard Project, Neighborhood Gardens Association, Philadelphia Urban Farm Network, Farm to City, edible landscapers, Philadelphia School and Community IPM Partnership, Henry George School, Philadelphia's greenhouses, Community Supported Agriculture.

World champions: Beijing grows all its vegetables within 60 miles. TerraCycle manufactures organic soil. Guerrilla Gardeners throw seed bombs. Sites: cityfarmer.org, urbanagriculture-news.com, spinfarming.com. Books: Food Not Lawns, The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping. Keywords: depaving, urban land reform, solar envelope zoning.

Big picture: Philadelphia can become a giant orchard and year-round garden, housing and reliably feeding more people than live here today.

FUEL: Who lights your fire?

Challenges: Within 20 years Philadelphia businesses, homes and agencies that waste energy will close. Philadelphia Gas Works CEO Thomas Knudson recently declared that natural gas is a "transitional fuel" beyond which this city must evolve. The price of coal tripled last year. PECO rates will leap within two years. Electric shut-offs rise. So we'll rebuild Philadelphia rather than fade.

Next steps: Establish independent neighborhood utilities with wind, passive solar and micro-geothermal. Employ thousands to build and install these. Employ multitudes more to manufacture and install insulation made with newsprint and fly ash (a residue of coal combustion). We'll get free winter warmth from 500,000 solar windowbox heaters. District heating and cogeneration reduce fuel need. Municipal utilities reduce grid costs. Tree shade reduces cooling costs: Plant a million.

Local heroes: Energy Coordinating Agency, Bio-Neighbors Sustainable Homes, Roofscapes, Philadelphia Green, Philly Tree People, Urban Tree Connection, green contractors. Harold Finegan's gym needs no fossil fuel for heating and cooling.

World champions: American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Rocky Mountain Institute, Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Book: Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It Ourselves Guide.

Big picture: Philadelphia can function even better with one-tenth the fossil fuel. Our lives will be more secure.

HOUSING: Stand your ground

Challenges: Absentee ownership and unemployment discourage repair and foster blight. Gentrification, foreclosure and taxes pressure humble homes. More middle class become homeless daily. Whether rowhouse or condo, homes won't be affordable unless massively insulated. And hey, river wards, both ocean and sewage, are rising. '

Next steps: Renters become homeowners through right-of-first-refusal (landlords offer sale first to renters) and sweat equity credits (renters swap community work for houses). Enforce law requiring absentee owners to have local agents. Shift to Land Value Taxation, which places tax burden on land rather than homes. Equitable development is a legal movement that' prevents gentrification through restraints and incentives. Enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires lending in low-income neighborhoods (not sub-prime) and prohibits racial lending. Cease evictions based on dishonest loans. Evict shady lenders. As heating bills rise we'll move underground, because deep dirt is the best insulation. Not just elites to bunkers (Bill Gates lives inside a hillside), but all of us into pleasant, sunlit ecolonies. Big solar windows catch winter heat. Amend building codes for green innovation.

Local heroes: Hundreds of local organizations fight for and finance affordable neighborhoods. Women's Opportunity Resource Center, Women's Community Revitalization Project, Philadelphia Housing Task Force, Community Land Trust Corp., Project H.O.M.E., People's Emergency Center, African-American Business & Residents Association, Henry George School, Habitat for Humanity, Green Roof Philadelphia, Ray of Hope Project, churches. Major underground buildings in Philadelphia include Franklin Court Museum, Wilma Theater, Penn Center shops.

World champions: Germany requires R70 insulation — three times tighter than the typical U.S. home — in new buildings. National Community Reinvestment Coalition, United for a Fair Economy, Earthships, Boston City Life/Vida Urbana, Equitable Development Toolkit, Shelterforce. Book: The Earth-Sheltered House: An Architect's Sketchbook.

Big picture: Everyone living in Philadelphia in 50 years will be living in earth shelters. Green means we'll all be comfortable. No behind left chill.

HEALTH CARE: Healthy rebellion

Challenges: Corporate insurers raise costs, limit choices, resist paying. They block reform legislation. Premiums rise beyond the reach of millions. ' Taxes rise to cover city employee benefits and indigent care. Thousands of Philadelphians are stuck in jobs they dislike, to keep insurance. ' Philadelphia's 140,000 uninsured avoid care and die earlier, or go bankrupt paying more. Medicaid's waiting list grows. Hospitals close; free clinics lose staff. Toxic air and chemicals, junk food and lack of exercise cause much disease. Grassroots action will heal city and citizens.

Next steps: While pushing for universal health care (less bureaucracy, lower cost, free choice), gaps can be filled by genuinely nonprofit regional self-financing systems. Fraternal benefit societies and member-owned co-op health plans create independent safety nets and preventive care clinics. Medical centers can barter, accept Philadelphia MediCash.

Local heroes: Thousands of holistic and allopathic healers, Health Care for All Philadelphia, Catholic Worker Free Clinic, Esperanza Health Center, Congreso de Latinos Unidos, Planned Parenthood, Philadelphia Urban Solutions, Philadelphia Community Acupuncture, Philadelphia FIGHT, Philadelphia Health Care Center, PhilaHealthia, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Shriners Hospital for Children. Dozens more at philllyhealthinfo.org.

World champions: Mutual Health Organizations, Ugandan Health Cooperative, Ithaca Health Alliance, Dr. Patch Adams, Healthcare-NOW!, Book: Health Democracy.

Big picture: When sickness is big business, free healing requires insurrection.
MONEY: Give yourselves credit

► Challenges: Extreme capitalism and extreme socialism trample humanity. Lack of cash and credit kills businesses, jobs and homes. Some folks still have lots of money, but most of us have less. Dollar power dwindles because dollars are backed by less than nothing: rusting industry and $10 trillion debt. So we'll print real money — neighborhood currencies — backed by real people.

Next steps: Mutual enterprise systems (neither Wall Street nor Red Square) celebrate the spirit of regional enterprise when it serves community and nature. They applaud innovations — public and private and personal — that meet real needs. Local trading credits based on local land, skills, time and tools refresh the economy. Poverty is lack of networks more than lack of dollars, and Philadelphia has thousands of networks — business, professional, technical, fraternal, neighborhood, church, union, electoral, senior, youth, racial, sexual, athletic, hobby, family, friends. Woven together they're a powerful base of regional trust, trade and wealth. Take your pick of neighborhood and sector currencies. Cities may not issue them but may accept them for taxes.

Local heroes: Philadelphia's 83 credit unions, Valley Green Bank, e3bank, Equal Dollars, barter exchanges and gift economy, Philadelphia Regional and Independent Stock Exchange, Philadelphia Fund for Ecological Living (PhilaFEL).

World champions: Ithaca HOURS, Berkshares, LETS, Time Banking, National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, Permaculture Credit Union, Grameen Bank microlending, Kiva, Robin Hood Ventures.

Big picture: Dollars control people; local currency connects people.

WATER: Go with the low flow

Challenges: Millions are spent to sanitize polluted river water and pump it to homes. Then we poop into it. Storm drains carry sewage and garbage back to rivers. Sewage treatment does not remove all pharmaceuticals. Old chemical tanks poison groundwater. Sinkholes undermine houses. Bottled-water scam drains local economy. Climate change brings frequent flood and/or drought. ' But new technologies will protect our liquid assets.

Next steps: Amend code to permit filtered graywater yard use, and waterless compost toilets. Install watersaving devices. Collect rainwater in rooftop tanks, barrels and swales. Plant xeriscapes. Depave driveways and abandoned parking lots. Start Progressive Street Reclamation, converting least-used streets and alleys to playgrounds and gardens.

Local heroes: Philadelphia Water Department taxes pavement, rewards depaving, distributes rain barrels. Friends of the Wissahickon installs compost toilets in the park. These convert turds into clean, sweet-smelling garden soil.

World champions: Swedes collect urine from apartment houses, store it six months, then use as fertilizer (EcoSanRes). Mexicans collect urine from city hall and schools to fertilize fields (TepozEco). Zimbabweans plant fruit trees atop privy muck (ArborLoo). Book: The Humanure Handbook.

Big picture: Clean water is becoming more valuable than gold. Nobody shits on gold.

TRANSPORT: Be here now

Challenges: Philadelphia's rail system was ripped out for cars, which clog streets and slow emergency response. Cars smash, kill, maim. They inhale paychecks and taxes, exhale rotten air. They compel war for oil. We'll become stronger and sexier as pedaling bipeds.

Next steps: To risk your life for your country, ride a bike. Hop on the bus. Revive street rail with ultralight passenger cars. Restore regional freight routes. Raise transit funds with local gasoline tax. Make pathways for bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, Segways, scooters and wheelchairs. Restore canals. Zone for mixed use, to reduce travel needs. Live near your work. Employ multitudes making mosaic sidewalks. Convert paving to playgrounds.

Local heroes: PhillyCarShare, Bike Share Philadelphia, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Neighborhood Bike Works and Bike Church, Critical Mass bike rides, bike shops, Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, Pennsylvania Transit Coalition, PenTrans. Even SEPTA: Trains are clunky and late, but they're there.

World champions: Carfree Cities conferences, carfree.com, World Naked Bike Ride, Urban Ecology.

Big picture: The first cities rebuilt for proximity rather than speed will win this race.

JOBS: The full employment economy

Challenges: Philadelphia has lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs in 50 years. Now we import stuff once made here. Today, millions of American jobs depend on servicing bad things rather than good things. Car crashes are 8 percent of the GDP. How many jobs would end if criminals went on strike? What jobs would be lost if people ate healthy fresh food and exercised? What if we were content with what we owned?' We'll advance from jobs managing damage to jobs creating a beautiful city worthy of beautiful children.

Next steps: All skills can rotate greenward. Philadelphia needs at least 100,000 green-collar jobs to rebuild, retrofit, plant, harvest, manufacture and repair the homes and tools of the future. Arts and healing arts are green jobs, too.

Local heroes: Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, American Cities Foundation, Penn Future, Ray of Hope Project. Green Jobs Philly, Neighborhood Environmental Action Team, Green Labor Administration, several City Council members.

World champions: Blue Green Alliance (enviros and unions united), Green for All, Apollo Alliance, D.C. Greenworks, Sustainable South Bronx.

Big picture: We'll develop new definitions of career, success; build green safety nets.

BUSINESS & INDUSTRY: Luxuriate in the Necessities

Challenges: America has been outstanding at pouring concrete, going fast and throwing things away. But high costs of raw materials, manufacture and trucking are causing consumers to quit consuming for the sake of consumption. Our Next Great Economy will sell more of durable value. We'll all have enough.

Next steps: Regional manufacture will resume as transport costs grow. Top niches will be basics: housing, energy, clothing, housewares. Orchards and gardens and food processing. Holistic healing will grow. Likewise, handcrafts. Everything energy-efficient.

Local heroes: Sustainable Business Network, Buy Local Philly, White Dog Café, Provenance Architecturals, Re-Store, flea markets, farmers markets, materials exchanges, repair shops, recycling.

World champions: Socially Responsible Investing. 'Magazines: Green Business Journal, Adbusters.

Site: storyofstuff.org.

Big picture: Smart money invests to raise all boats.

GOVERNMENT: The land is the law of the land

Challenges: Many bureaucrats trained in obsolete systems resist change, defend their turf. City's health insurers and pensions drag city down.

Next steps: Government welcomes grassroots innovators by passing laws facilitating greening of economy and neighborhoods: urban land reform, urban agriculture, sanitation and water codes, building codes. When urgent change is resisted, citizens underthrow the government.

Local heroes: Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, PWD, streets guys who dig on rainy nights.

World champions: City of Curitiba, Brazil, encourages experimentation and welcomes mistakes. Magazines: Governing, Planners Network.

Big picture: Good government takes risks, makes change easy. "Make no little plans" —Daniel Burnham.

PUBLIC SAFETY: Just be sure to let that happen again

Challenges: Whenever people are hungry, cold or fearful due to unemployment, crime rises. Isolated resentment becomes street protest or riot. Racism flares. Taxpayers cannot hire enough police to escape chaos. Public safety is secured by creating safety nets for food, fuel, housing and health care.

Next steps: Jobs fight crime. Decriminalize marijuana locally. Hire ex-offenders. Neighborhood watch instead of neighborhood watch TV.

Local heroes: Block captains, Men United for a Better Philadelphia, Ray of Hope Project, City Harvest, People Against Recidivism.

World champions: Time Dollar Youth Court, Rainbow Police. Book: Defensible Space.

Big picture: People who are respected, loved and secure do not kill. '

EDUCATION: Keep it real

Challenges: Curriculums are less relevant to getting jobs or fixing society. Forty-five percent of Philadelphia high-schoolers drop out. Students are graded like eggs.

Next steps: Respectfully teaching skills of neighborhood management will make learning fun. Teach creativity rather than consumerism.

Local heroes: Thousands of dedicated teachers, Neighborhood Enterprise Schoolteachers, magnet schools, Waldorf School. Newspaper: The Notebook.

World champions: Paolo Freire; free university education in Europe.

Big picture: Loving learning is the first lesson.

CULTURE: Life gets highest ratings

Challenges: Media that's cynical about grassroots power features crime and celebrities.

Next steps: Empower average people to make music, art, dance, theater. Revive street-corner singing. Bring back vaudeville. Parachute clowns into parks.

Local heroes: Mural Arts Program, Raices Culturales Latinoamericanas, Spiral Q Puppet Theater, 373 groups listed at philaculture.org. Locally made homecrafts. Philadelphia's 2,800 murals feature children, heroes, nature.

Whether you're a student, job seeker, employee or retiree, there are thousands of ways to connect to Philadelphia's green movement. You're the one we've been waiting for. Check the ever-growing list of local green-jobs Web sites (start with greenjobsphilly.org/future.html). Visit local green businesses and groups. Time to bring those murals to life.

Green Fest 2009

2009-01-06T10:06:00.002-05:00

Plans are shaping up for Green Fest 2009. This will be our third Green Fest. For 2009, we are moving to the campus of Alfred University in the picturesque, small village of Alfred. Alfred is in rural Allegany County, 80 miles south of Rochester. The Short Line Bus runs several buses daily between Alfred, Westchester, New York City and Long Island.

For more information about Green Fest 2009, visit our website http://nygreenfest.org/.

Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams in Upstate New York, Aug. 3-8

2008-06-25T07:54:00.021-04:00

Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams, who gave us a wonderful performance of songs from Leonard's musical The Booby Trap at Green Fest 2007, are performing again in upstate New York this August. Sunday, Aug. 3, 2008, Leonard and Helene will perform together with national treasure Helen Boatwright at 3pm in a program of music by Charles Ives, Howard Boatwright, and Leonard Lehrman at Helen Boatwright's home in Fayetteville, co-sponsored by the Society for New Music. Admission by invitation only. Please contact Leonard and Helene by email at ljlehrman@gmail.com.

Later that week, Helene and Leonard will be leading "Free Your Voice" workshops Wednesday and Thursday Aug. 6 & 7 at 3, and performing in concert Friday evening Aug. 8 at 7 with Cary Bair in the Opera/Musical Theatre Special Interest Group of The Naturist Society, as part of the Northeast Naturist Festival at Empire Haven in Moravia, NY. For details, call (315) 497-0135 or go to the festival website.

Helene and Leonard rehearsing.

Leonard and Helene have had a busy spring. On Saturday, May 17, 2008, the first performance of The Booby Trap since Susan Blake's death, took place in her memory, at Womanspace at the Great Neck Senior Center, co-sponsored by Huntington Breast Cancer Action Coalition's "Prevention Is the Cure" Week. Performing were Helene Williams, Kathryn Wieckhorst (taking Susan's part and also playing the cello), and Cary Bair and Leonard Lehrman, who alternated at the grand piano. In attendance were 50 people, mostly women, mostly retired. Professor Scott Carlin of Long Island University gave an illuminating lecture, and led a lively discussion afterwards.

Helene and Leonard with Kathryn Wieckhorst.

Prof. Scott Carlin, Michael and Cindy Rosenbaum, Cary Bair, Ann Mayer-Kristiansen, Helene, Gladys Roth, and Leonard at Womanspace on May 17, 2008.

On Saturday, June 7, 2008, a full-to-capacity Court Street Music in Valley Stream hosted their 7th annual recital by and for students of Helene Williams & Leonard Lehrman, and their friends & families, this year dedicated to the memory of Susan Blake. The major work premiered on the program was Leonard's new song cycle "Long Island Songs of Seasoned Women," settings of 10 poems by 9 Long Island women poets, all of whom are represented in the anthology, "Songs of Seasoned Women" (Quadrasoul, 2007), edited by Patti Tana. Helene sang settings of poems by Tana (opening and closing the cycle), Sally Ann Drucker, Susan Astor, Lynn Green, Pat Falk, Margaret Dinzler Shaw, and Muriel Lilker. Helene's student Ijeoma Merenini sang settings of poems by Marcia McNair and Lorraine Mund. McNair, Green, and Lilker all attended.

Leonard, Helene, Lynn Green, Marcia McNair, Muriel Lilker and Ijeoma Merenini at Court Street Music on June 7, 2008.

Tana, whose mother passed away that evening, sent copies of the book for all in the grateful audience to follow the texts. Musical references quoted in the cycle, which was introduced and accompanied by the composer, include two Christina Rossetti settings of Leonard's, Trouble in Tahiti, La Bohème, Hair, "Dayenu" from the Passover Seder (which Susan attended in Valley Stream regularly), Schubert's "Ave Maria," the anti-war song "Study War No More," which was sung at Susan's burial October 8, 2007, led by Lisa Fishbein, who herself passed away January 29, 2008 at age 51, and two duets from The Booby Trap that had been written for, and performed by Susan: "Bras, Not Genes," and "Pusher Bra." Nassau County People's Poet Max Wheat and his wife Virginia attended the run-thru the day before, and spoke glowingly of the poems and their settings, promising to try to help enable the booking of other performances.

The People's Poet Laureate of Nassau County, Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr. and his wife Virginia.

On Thursday, June 19, 2008, the 55th anniversary of the death of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case held its annual memorial meeting, this year for the second time at NYU's Tamiment Library, which houses the Committee's papers. Messages of solidarity from Robert and Michael Meeropol and the Association pour le réxamen de l'affaire Rosenberg in France. Audience members numbered 132. $1515 was collected. Tributes were paid to members of the Committee who recently passed away: Helene Williams sang Edith Segal's "My Loved One" and "Underneath the Spanish Stars," the latter in memory of Moe Fishman (whose widow Georgia Wever spoke and mounted a beautiful photo exhibit of him) and Muriel Goldring, whose papers, left to the Tamiment, are still being processed, and who also left considerable sums of money to, among others, the Committee, the Tamiment Library, and the Rosenberg Fund for Children. Muriel's late husband Ben, and Moe Fishman, both fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Following Richard Corey's and Julie Eigenberg's singing of Richard's setting of "Ethel's Last Letter," 92-year-old Miriam Moskowitz, who had been imprisoned on the testimony of the same Harry Gold who was a star witness against the Rosenbergs, and who spent considerable time with Ethel in jail, movingly read the chapter on Ethel from her memoirs.

Morton Sobell, the Rosenbergs' co-defendant, Tamiment Director Michael Nash at the podium, "Professor" Irwin Corey and Leonard at the Tamiment Library, June 19, 2008.

Also featured as speakers were this year's National Lawyers Guild award recipient Margaret Ratner Kunstler (Helene performed Leonard's setting of Bill Kunstler's sonnet on Corliss Lamont, in tribute to her); Carol Jochnowitz, author of an eye-opening article in the latest Jewish Currents; and the Rosenbergs' co-defendant Morton Sobell--for whom Helene performed an excerpt from Leonard's & Kim Rich's new opera in progress, Alger: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of a conspiracy... to make life better for other people...?" Fifteen members of The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus performed three works on texts by Abel Meeropol, the man who adopted the Rosenbergs' orphaned sons: "Lost Forever" (melody by Meeeropol, arranged by Leonard Lehrman); "Conscience" (music by Leonard Lehrman, performed in memory of "the social conscience of Long Island" who had spoken at the last several meetings, Susan Blake); and concluding with "The House I Live In" (music by Earl Robinson, arranged by Leonard Lehrman).

The photo of Susan Blake at the beach on Fire Island, first posted on this blog, is included in the tribute to Susan on the website of The New Music Connoisseur.

Great American Healthy Food Festival!

2008-06-20T10:29:00.000-04:00

If you are in Brooklyn on June 28, be sure and visit the Great American Healthy Food Festival sponsored by the East New York Food Co-op. The festival will take place on New Jersey Avenue between New Lots & Riverdale Avenues, Saturday, June 28, 2008, 11am-7pm. Michele Danels, the secretary and one of the founders of ENYFC, spoke on our local foods panel at Green Fest 2007.

Visit Green Fest at Clearwater

2008-06-19T19:56:00.001-04:00

Visit our Green Fest booth at the Clearwater Festival this weekend, June 21 & 22 from 10am to Dusk on the Shores of the Hudson River at Croton Point Park. Below is our team at Clearwater 2007.

New York Green Fest 2009

2008-06-19T07:34:00.000-04:00

Fri.-Sun. Aug. 7-9, 2009
Howell Hall, Alfred University, Alfred, NY

Spend a weekend sharing skills for sustainable living and sustainable politics on the Alfred University campus in rural upstate New York. Learn how to build a small wind turbine, bake in an earth oven, set up a CSA, live job free, build new media outlets, run a third party political campaign and much more at NY Green Fest 2009, Fri.-Sun., Aug. 7-9, 2009. Green Fest is a benefit for the Green Party of New York. The festival is open to all who are interested in sustainable living and sustainable politics.

The $65 fee for the weekend includes all workshops, tours and keynote addresses, exhibitors, swimming, yoga and hiking. Lodging and meals are additional. Dorm rooms, camping and the Saxon Inn are available on campus. Local bed and breakfasts are also available. Meals prepared from locally-grown food will be served at the Alfred University dining hall.

Our workshop schedule is being developed. We invite Green friendly activists from across New York State to offer workshops on sustainable topics. We also invite Green friendly exhibitors to set up tents and sell their own crafts, local food items, books and renewable energy systems outdoors on the Alfred campus green next to Howell Hall.

New York Green Fest is a biennial event. Green Fest 2009 is our third Green Fest. For 2009, Green Fest is moving to the campus of Alfred University in the picturesque, small village of Alfred. Alfred is in rural Allegany County, 80 miles south of Rochester. The Short Line Bus runs several buses daily between Alfred, Westchester, New York City and Long Island. Green Fest will arrange buses from Rochester for attendees.

For more information, visit our new website, http://nygreenfest.com.

Gay Nicholson earns award for outstanding community service

2008-04-15T08:55:00.000-04:00

Gay Nicholson, who gave us a great presentation on community organizing for sustainability at Green Fest 2007, will be the recipient of The Cornell Tradition’s seventh annual Debra S. Newman ’02 Community Recognition Award for her volunteer efforts. Nicholson will receive her award at the National Volunteer Week Day of Service at Cornell. The event will begin at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 26 at the Women’s Community Building, and is designed to be community-wide celebration of volunteerism in the greater Ithaca community.

Nicholson received the Newman award as a result of her strong commitment to community service and leadership, including her work with Sustainable Tompkins, a coalition she helped create in 2004. Nicholson has served as program coordinator for the organization at its founding, and continues to further the organization’s mission by facilitating workshops and study circles, convening the Cayuga Sustainability Council, and much more. More information about Sustainable Tompkins can be found at www.sustainabletompkins.org.

Planning Green Fest 2009

2008-03-17T11:02:00.000-04:00

The planning committee has decided to make New York Green Fest a biennial event, and is considering Fri.-Sun., Aug. 7-9, 2009, on the campus of Alfred University in Alfred, NY for the dates and location of Green Fest 2009.

Susan Blake Tribute, 2/2/08

2008-02-05T20:07:00.000-05:00

From Leonard and Helene Williams Lehrman comes this report on the tribute to Susan Blake held Feb. 2, 2008, at Court Street Music in Valley Stream. The tribute included showing a video of last summer's performance of the Booby Trap at Green Fest. The purpose of Green Fest is to build recognition for the work of wonderful activists like Susan, Leonard and Helene. We are glad to post this tribute to Susan, whose work at PeaceSmiths has been an inspiration to us all.

"Fifteen of Susan's closest friends came and together watched & listened to more than an hour of video and audio recordings of her, including but not limited to the 9 minutes played at the Jan. 20 Shelter Rock celebration of her life that had been attended by (by our count) c. 135 people. We began with the July 22, 2004 "Return the Light" Fundraiser (at which Susan spoke briefly, and enjoyed watching Lisa Fishbein singing her own new words to "Which Side Are You On?" Lisa passed away last Monday, age 51, so our event was in her memory as well as Susan's. (On Sunday morning, Feb. 3, at United Methodist Church of Huntington & Cold Spring Harbor, the choir sang "A New Wind A-Blowin'" by Langston Hughes & Elie Siegmeister. Siegmeister shared the same Jan. 15 birthday with Martin Luther King and Lisa. We dedicated the singing of the anthem to her memory.)

"Then we watched Susan's speech on Bob Goldberg's video of the June 24, 2007 Cedarmere ceremony at which Max Wheat became, in her words, "the People's Poet Laureate of Nassau County." It was one of the best prepared and best delivered speeches she ever gave. I was proud to be with her, sharing a blanket, that day. Richard Barnhart then read his own delightful verse tribute to Max, a copy of which we're looking forward to receiving, having previously received and posted here his tribute to Susan and her bicycle.

"Next we watched Susan deliver a 2-minute question at a June 23, 2005 Nassau/Suffolk panel discussion on the death penalty, in which she brilliantly summed up the interconnectedness of the death penalty issue with so many other issues today. Max remarked immediately that her words ought to be transcribed and made available. And so they shall be - perhaps we'll have them posted together with her Cedarmere speech, and Richard Barnhart's poem.

"Susan first came into our lives, attending our April 3, 2005 Long Beach Library concert, at which she distributed flyers promoting that June meeting. Two months and a day later, June 4, 2005, she sang in her only concert with the Oceanside Chorale, which I conducted, and which my wife Helene Williams captured on videotape. Watching her quick-change set-up stage managing (for which she got applause) and then getting into the screamingly funny character of Eileen in "Ohio," the Comden-Green-Bernstein Wonderful Town duet with Dorothy Martin, was simply priceless.

"Our first appearance at PeaceSmiths, a recital-cum-party Feb. 17, 2006 for my book, Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography (Praeger, 2005) was filmed by Bob Goldberg, and contained a few nuggets we watched of Susan introducing us: She talked about the social significance of Blitzstein's work, thanked the Maldeb and Edgar Lehrman Memorial foundations for their support, and described her own identification with the autobiographical aspects of Blitzstein's radio song play about a composer seeking and finding a social purpose for his work, "I've Got the Tune," reading Elie Siegmeister's vivid description of it, quoted in my book. Our recording of that work, released on Original Cast Records (also in 2005), has been played (by Bill Propp) on WBAI. Copies of the CD were handed out yesterday as party gifts to all attendees, including one member of the PeaceSmiths board.

"After that came the Russian Scene from my & Karen Ruoff Kramer's E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman, filmed by Bob Goldberg Mar. 25, 2007 at the Long Beach Library, in which Susan shouted out the line "So why don't you go back to Russia?" and then played the simultaneous interpreter into English of Emma's confrontation with Lenin on the question of human rights (in Russian, which he insisted that they speak). Then came two numbers performed by Susan at NY Green Fest on the Ithaca Commons, videotaped by Craig Seeman, Aug. 12, 2007: first was Leah Fichandler's & Joel Mandelbaum's "The Causes Are Waiting for You," from the 1983 musical As You Dislike It, slightly updated by me (for Susan), in which she was joined at the end by Helene; second was "The Pusher Bra" from The Booby Trap by Sydney Ross Singer & me, which I wrote for Susan while sitting with her in the drip room at Dr. Michael Schachter's office in Suffern Oct. 4, 2006, almost one year to the day before she died. Cary Bair sang this with her in all other performances to date, but since he couldn't make it Aug. 12 I got to sing it with her. "Don't ever leave me... It must be love..." we sang to each other, with so many levels of both irony and affection such as I shall never forget. One-minute speeches by Susan on the importance of support groups and social activism concluded the NY Green Fest segments shown.

"Then we watched excerpts from the Aug. 10, 2007 performance of the Opera/Musical Theatre Special Interest Group of The Naturist Society at Empire Haven in Moravia, NY. Susan began and was part of the quartet in "A Song to Begin," with music by Gerhard Bronner, who also passed away just last year. Then she launched into the anthropologist's solo, "Where Is the Tribe for Me?" a comic tour de force, followed by the duet, with me, "Words, Words, Words" from Walter Marks's 1964 Broadway show Bajour. Max said in reaction: "I never knew she could be so entertaining!" Nobody did. But maybe if we can get these videos up on YouTube, more people will. A short solo from Capitol Steps preceded 13 selections from The Booby Trap, with Susan's joie de vivre and spirited, singing, acting and dancing holding us all mesmerized.

"The first performance of The Booby Trap in Susan's memory will be held Sat. May 17 at 2pm at Womanspace, at the Great Neck Sr. Center, 80 Grace Ave. in Great Neck. On Sat. June 7, at 3pm, we'll have our annual Court Street Music student recital & house concert, at which Helene will sing the first complete performance of my song cycle in memory of Susan, "Long Island Songs of Seasoned Women," based on 10 poems by 9 poets in the collection, "Songs of Seasoned Women," edited by Patti Tana. We had a preview yesterday of one of those songs, "Long Island Just Isn't Long Enough," on a poem by Marcia McNair, sung by our student IJ Merenini, who will also be singing it (among other things) at the Feb. 10, 2008 United Methodist Church of Huntington & Cold Spring Harbor talent show, and at the Suffolk Peace Concert at Cinema Arts Center in Huntington Mar. 2, 2008.

"The last recording we played was a phone message of Susan coyly telling us that she had unexpectedly become available to join our Seder (which she did attend) last spring; and we immediately invited all present to attend our Seder this spring. We're not sure yet whether it will be Sat. Apr. 19 or Sun. Apr. 20, and we're not sure how many people will be able to come, nor how many we can accommodate, but in the spirit of the Obama campaign, let's all think as positively as possible: 'Yes, we can.' "

Susan Blake's Bike

2008-01-06T22:29:00.000-05:00

A sonnet in memory of Susan Blake was read at PeaceSmiths on Dec. 7, 2007, by the author, Richard Barnhart.

SUSAN BLAKE'S BIKE

In Memory of Susan Blake

In college, Susan vowed no more to drive
When, at the wheel, she hit a cat upstate
"It had the right to live and stay alive,"
She countered when her biking I'd berate.

Two times I saw the bicycle she'd ride.
The first was on a cold, bleak winter day.
The snow came down and covered it outside
The nursing home where her mom Betty lay.

The second time was only this past spring,
Deep in a hallway of First Methodist,
Its basket filled with plant sale wares to bring
To her small garden. Lord, how she'll be missed!

Her bike was old and worn, not worth the steal,
But, oh, what tender thoughts those times reveal!

--Richard Barnhart
10/8/07, 11/27/07

What do you find hopeful in the world today?

2007-12-10T10:16:00.000-05:00

The fall issue of Positive News US Edition features three of our speakers at Green Fest 2007 answering the question, "What do you find hopeful in the world today?" Here are their answers:

"Young people. Young people don't see the lines that divide us. The ones 'we' over forty were raised with. They see only humans....not ism's. That gives me hope that a better world is possible." SKCM Curry (Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry), Candidate for Green Party Vice Presidential nomination.

"In little pieces things are moving towards overall good. Little things keep adding up. And everything has a voice in this movement." Dan Hill, Cayuga Nation flute performer and storyteller.

"People are taking their right of self-governance seriously. They are engaging the struggle for real democracy and rewriting laws in service to their communities and public authority,. not property and corporate authority." Virginia Rasmussen, Co-founder of Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD).

The issue also features two articles by Steve Gabriel from Finger Lakes Permaculture, another speaker. Ilonka Wloch, the editor of Positive News was also one of our speakers.

On the Occasion of Remembering Susan Blake

2007-12-10T10:10:00.000-05:00

A celebration of Susan Blake's life has been scheduled for Sun., Jan. 20 at 2pm at the Unitarian Fellowship in Shelter Rock, Long Island.

On the Occasion of Remembering Susan Blake
by Jean Wilkins Dember

In the time of white Jesus & other fables -
in the time of white out
of the "rich in hue" & sable
in the time of police killings
& the daily grind of T.V. gutless thrillings
in the time of the same superficiality,
proper & improper etiquette & banality
In the time of the crises
of poverty, racial inequity & genocide,
death still catches us by surprise
& we are reminded that some things are real
& no matter how some of us may feel
in this time we pause...
Did I know Susan Blake
I think most of would agree
she was not plastic & she was not fake!
Did I ever help her with lugging & hauling,
yard sales &
demonstrations that were her calling
Some of the old timers may recall
she had a humongous vision for someone so small -
she believed in the Peace
she worked for indefatiguably,
stretching small donations
to plant the seeds of change
on L.I. where the Indigenous reservations
are still out of range
of justice & equality
where 20% of the population
makes up 60% of the jail -
How could each one of us evolve?
when there are so many gritty issues to solve -
only by speaking truth to each other
as Susan & I did on each account
can we ever hope to really build
the love of the "Sermon on the Mount"

Jean Wilkins Dember, M.H. S.
Dec 7, 2007

Liberation Ecology Project

2007-10-25T15:37:00.000-04:00

The Liberation Ecology Project has a new website, http://www.liberationecology.org/. Rafter T. Sass outlined liberation ecology in his inspiring presentation at Green Fest. The website describes the Radical Urban Sustainability Training Rafter attended in Albany in September. The event was produced by Scott Kellog and Stacey Pettigrew, co-founders of the Austin, TX Rhizome Collective. Topics included alternative energy - solar, wind, methane harvesting - compost and compost tea, natural plasters and paints, bioremediation of polluted soils, catching and using rainwater, small-scale mushroom production, and the NYC community gardens movement More Gardens! Photo by Rafter T. Sass.

Susan Blake's life a song for peace and justice and love!

2007-10-23T14:39:00.000-04:00

Learning from Susan Blake in Interview
by Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr.
People's Poet Laureate of Nassau County,

Poem based on an interview with Susan Blake in June 2007. Poem completed the morning of her burial, Oct. 8, 2007, and read there by the poet.

Third Grade, Lutheran school's
only African American child is enrolled.
Betty Blake, Susan's mother, hears on the phone,
"We want your daughter to make her comfortable."
Susan shepherds Debbie for first days at school.

Truly, Betty Blake's daughter.
"Got a lot of my social conscience from my mother."
Betty fixed on Nixon hearings. "We shared these."

"What is Sunday school telling us?
Wicked to tell kids to be afraid of doing wrong thing
And telling us we will be found out.
At five I rejected concept of sin."

At eight leaves the church.
"I am interested in all cultures."

Later-
"Jesus, great revolutionary.
Luther had guts to nail those theses on door."

High school,
coordinator for activism,
"not just politics,
but to allow learning in the community,
get credit for music,
apply knowledge to real life.

"Almost leading the teachers.
They knew we were the smart kids. . .
We were breaking cultural barriers down.
Mother 'hanging with us.' "

University of Rochester (1971-75).
"Knew exactly what I wanted."
Designs her major:
Performing Arts in Education and Social Change.
"Lots of spontaneous theatre actions that had a message."

First year lived in dormitory.
Down the hall Black students.
"They played music loud."
Comes 'round petition "telling them to be quiet.
I wouldn't sign. Let them get it out. . . their rage.
Clear moment for me."

My proudest moment!
Psychology 101.
Professor shows film explaining electric shock treatment.
I stood up. . .
"How can you show this?"

Back on Long Island.
Drama and music for Rotary summer camp.
Recreation therapist, Brunswick Hospital, 1975-77.
"Got people not just playing banjo and games.
Challenged them, demanded more.
Fired for too good a job."

Shoreham -- Organizes first anti-nuclear demonstration
Beginning full-effort activism--everything else second.

"Made mistakes with relationships," she says at 54.
"I regret not having focused on finding a partner
To have a child with.

I was trying desperately to keep PeaceSmiths going."

PeaceSmiths, founded 1978.
Office, 90 Pennsylvania Avenue, Bellmore,
Home of near 100-year old activist Catherine Smith.
"Catherine loved what I was doing."

Coffee house idea
sprung from South Shore visit of Pete Seeger's "Clearwater."
Monthly in Catherine Smith's living room,
Hearth, old comfortable chairs . . .
1985 in Margie's basement, then George Ciproni's home.
Thirteen locations
Finally, First United Methodist Church, Amityville,
"Topical A-Typical Folk Music, Poetry and Whatever Coffee-house"

"Definitely a Pacifist!" she said of herself.
1978 started using term.
"You have to be what you are.
not push against other people,
Don't use words like 'anti-imperialist.'
But do not let them repress your energy."

Stage 4 breast cancer:
"I'm supposedly in terminal stage. . .
tumor has eaten away my breast.
I've done my own breast mastectomy..
Now trick is to downgrade it to stage 3. . .
or maybe live healthfully with it. . .
Nothing is really terminal. . . . . .
I'm still able to be a full person.

I want PeaceSmiths to be a stable organization.
I fear I will not live long enough."

A singer. . .
Susan Blake's life a song for peace and justice and love!

Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr. (c) 2007

Susan Blake (June 18, 1953-Oct. 2, 2007)

2007-10-23T13:50:00.000-04:00

Susan Blake in our lives, 2005-07
by Leonard & Helene (Williams) Lehrman

2005

Susan Blake first phoned us Mar. 28, 2005, following a Janet Coleman interview on WBAI with Leonard Lehrman. She asked if she could bring flyers for New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty to our Blitzstein/Bernstein concert, including excerpts from SACCO AND VANZETTI, at the Long Beach Library Apr. 3. After clearing it with the library, we said: "Sure." She later went out to dinner with us, Long Beach composer Jay Gach and his wife Ellen (with whom Susan had gone to college) and WBAI producer Bill Propp (who turned out to be a relative of a relative of Leonard's).

That month, Susan joined the Oceanside Chorale, which Leonard conducted, 2003-05, and soloed along with Dorothy Martin in the "Ohio" duet from WONDERFUL TOWN in their June 4 concert of Bernstein & Blitzstein. The video, shot by Helene, is a precious souvenir. On Aug. 11, Susan co-starred with Helene & Leonard in excerpts from THE BOOBY TRAP or OFF OUR CHESTS, Leonard's & Sydney Ross Singer's musical revue on the link between bras and breast cancer, at the Northeast Naturist Festival in Moravia, NY.
On Aug. 28 she co-produced, with Brian O'Haire, "The Bush Vacation Ruination Celebration: Long Island Support for Cindy Sheehan Benefit Concert" at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. Helene premiered Leonard's "Threescore Years Ago," written for the occasion.
On Nov. 1 she attended a performance of two short works of Leonard's presented by Vox Novus at Collective Unconscious in Manhattan, where she met John & Estela Eaton, whom she invited to read at PeaceSmiths. She would attend numerous performances with Leonard in the future, including those of New Music New York, Composers Concordance, and John Eaton's opera at Symphony Space. With Leonard, Helene, and other friends, she also attended Shakespeare in the Park productions of TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA (where she handed out anti-war leaflets) and MOTHER COURAGE (for which she & Leonard braved torrential rains, waiting on line for hours for tickets).
On Nov. 2 she attended Leonard's Blitzstein Piano Recital at the Bryant Library, where she was photographed among members of his family. Later that month she became a regular at family Thanksgiving dinners, and Seders in the spring.

2006

In Jan. 2006 Susan joined the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus

and performed with them, under Leonard's direction, with Helene as soloist, in a program honoring Mozart, Dr. King, Lincoln, Hale Smith, and Elie Siegmeister: Jan. 15 at Long Beach Public Library,

and again on Feb. 26 (postponed from Feb. 12 due to the snowstorm that day) at Great Neck House. There is a fine recording by Jeffrey Latocke of the latter, which includes photos from the former. In between those two concerts, on Feb. 17, Susan hosted a book party at PeaceSmiths for Leonard's "Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography" --Leonard & Helene performed their "Blitzstein Cabaret" (videotaped by Bob Goldberg).
On May 19, Susan co-produced and co-starred with Leonard, Helene & Cary Bair in THE BOOBY TRAP at PeaceSmiths, as part of "Prevention Is the Cure" Week. The night before she also participated in an on-the-air discussion with Leonard, Helene & Bill Propp over WBAI. The production was telecast on Woodbury area cable TV Oct. 12 & 19.
On June 19, Susan participated in and spoke at the annual meeting (at the Brecht Forum) of the National Committee to Re-open the Rosenberg Case, of which Leonard & Richard Corey became Co-Directors.

On Oct. 22, she came all the way from Amityville--on public transportation--to Canarsie to hear Leonard's & Helene's Yiddish program at Temple Emanuel.
And on Nov. 12, she produced a birthday program (complete with cake) honoring the birthday of composer Joel Mandelbaum, whose "The Causes Are Waiting for You" she performed as an encore. The program was telecast the following Jan. 18 & 25.

2007

Jan. 21 she attended "Songs of Love & War" presented by Leonard & Helene, together with tenor Gregory Mercer, at the Jericho Library, and videotaped by Bob Goldberg. Then she ran the slide projector and portrayed the interpreter in the Russian scene of Leonard's & Karen Ruoff Kramer's E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman, starring Helene, Mar. 9 at the Puffin Room in Manhattan, Mar. 11 at Great Neck House,

Mar. 16 at PeaceSmiths (videotaped by Bob Goldberg, telecast June 1 & 8), Mar. 25 at Long Beach Library (videotaped by Bob Goldberg), Apr. 29 at Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, and May 1 at The Living Theatre in Manhattan (the best of the performances--videotaped by Bill Castleman). May 6 she reprised "The Causes Are Waiting for You" at a Queens College program honoring the centenary of the late Jewish Currents Editor Morris U. Schappes.

She also participated in a similar program at NYU May 10. (Both were videotaped by Carol Jochnowitz.)

June 13, again at NYU's Tamiment Library, she again participated in the annual meeting of the National Committee to Re-open the Rosenberg Case.

Meanwhile, THE BOOBY TRAP continued to grow, to its present size of 17 numbers. Photographed in rehearsal Apr. 14 at Cindy & Michael Rosenbaum's house in Goldens Bridge (where she died Oct 2),

Susan co-produced and performed in the work four more times:
May 19, again as part of "Prevention Is the Cure" Week at Islip United Methodist Church (videotaped by Bob Goldberg; audio excerpts broadcast on WBAI Oct. 5 after midnight); Aug. 10, again as part of the Eastern Naturist Festival in Moravia, NY, along with excerpts from the musical BAJOUR (in which she was hysterically funny) and Samuel Barber's "Sure on this shining night"--she also gave two workshops on alternative cancer treatments and support groups Aug. 11; Aug. 12, as part of NY Green Fest on the Ithaca Commons; and Aug. 25 at the Custer Institute in Southold. (The July 5 photo is from a rehearsal there.)

All these performances were videotaped. The Moravia one, videotaped by Stephen Van Eck, came out especially well. But the Ithaca one, shot by Craig Seeman, is also very valuable, as it includes Susan's best performance ever of Joel Mandelbaum's "Causes," as well as an eloquent speech she gave on the difficulties of getting the medical establishment to accept alternative treatments. Photographs taken at the beach on Fire Island included July 1 publicity shots for NY Green Fest,

and the July 21 celebration of Cary Bair's birthday. (The previous Aug. 20, Susan had organized a similar birthday suit party & cake on the beach for Leonard's birthday.)

The day after the Southold performance, Helene & Susan toured the North Fork: Helene took our final photos of Susan, by the water.

Best Wishes to Kelly Dietz and Michael Burns on the Occasion of their Wedding

2007-10-08T14:06:00.000-04:00

Best wishes for a long and happy life together to Kelly Dietz and Michael Burns. Kelly and Mike, our hosts for Green Fest 2007, were married this past Saturday, Oct. 6, 2007, in their beautiful woods at Cayuta Sun.

Pledge NOW to Support Ithaca Community Radio

2007-10-08T13:45:00.000-04:00

Ithaca Community Radio needs your PLEDGES OF FUTURE FUNDING now to help support their application for an FCC license. For the first time since Ithaca Community Radio was formed, the Federal Communications Commission is accepting applications for new non-commercial FM radio licenses. The window to apply is Oct 12-19 . The FCC has a list of qualifications that applicants must meet. One of these is financial - the FCC requires that the applicant already have on hand, or have commitments of funds, to cover purchasing and setting up the station facilities and operating it for 3 months. Even though an applicant has three years to build a station from the time the FCC approves the application, which is plenty of time of raise money based on a reality, the FCC requires that the funds be in hand at the time of the application.

ICR is trying to raise 250K in pledges before October 19. These pledges can be: (1) A pledge to make an outright donation of any amount (the more the better) in the eventuality we are awarded a license; OR (2) A pledge to loan ICR some amount for the purpose of building the station. This can include the use of a credit card or equity line; OR (3) A pledge by your organization to hold a fundraiser that will raise xxx dollars; OR (4) The donation of an item worth xxx to be auctioned; OR (5) The donation of necessary pieces of broadcast/audio equipment, new or used. Make pledges by filling out the pledge form at http://www.ithacaradio.org Click on the "make a pledge" button and fill out your details.

The Booby Trap or Off Our Chests

2007-10-08T13:32:00.000-04:00

A correction sent by Leonard Lehrman to Newsday:

"Carl MacGowan's beautiful write-up in the Oct. 5, 2007 Newsday on the late Susan Blake, whom many called The Social Conscience of Long Island, is not quite accurate in saying that the show in which she performed, THE BOOBY TRAP or OFF OUR CHESTS--a musical revue on the link between bras and breast cancer, by myself & Sydney Ross Singer, a founder of the Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease, "poked fun at breast cancer." The piece ironically and even sometimes wryly and amusingly points out the hypocrisies of the culture in which breast cancer flourishes and millions are made and spent by "chemical, cosmetic and drug corporations," with little or no funding available for environmental and nutritional education. That's why the piece was performed, with Susan, as part of "Prevention Is the Cure" Week May 19, 2006 at PeaceSmiths in Amityville, and May 19, 2007 at Islip Methodist Church, and will be performed again in Susan's memory May 18, 2008 at Great Neck House."

Susan Blake, 54, Amityville singer, activist

2007-10-06T11:56:00.000-04:00

New York Newsday, October 5, 2007
by Carl McGowan

Susan Blake, a singer and activist considered by some the heart and soul of the Long Island peace and justice community, died Tuesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 54.

Blake, of Amityville, died at a friend's house in the Westchester County town of Goldens Bridge, said her sister, Nancy Jane Blake, of Peekskill.

For more than 30 years, Blake fought the Shoreham nuclear power plant and protested wars from Vietnam to Iraq through the Amityville activist group PeaceSmiths. Blake organized coffeehouse concerts and discussion forums on topics such as environmental issues and affordable housing.

"Susan has been one of those people who have steadfastly kept the focus on peace and justice issues on Long Island," said Catherine Green, of Sayville, a friend of Blake's since both demonstrated against the opening of Shoreham in the 1970s and 1980s.

"She was persistent and even dogged in trying to move forward a truly compassionate and just approach to things. She was inspiring, she was funny, she could be irascible....It's such a loss for the community."

Blake worked with other activist groups to organize peace vigils and demonstrations outside of congressional offices on Long Island and in New York City, said Dennis Urlaub, of Patchogue, co-chairman of the South Country Peace Group in Bellport.

Her protests often were set to music as she sang at rallies.

"She was the kind of person who swept you along with her enthusiasm, very into music and theater and dance and always planning some kind of an event that combined all of these things into one," said Cindy Rosenbaum, of Goldens Bridge, who befriended Blake when they attended the University of Rochester. "For her, everything was connected: the politics, the art. Everything was an opportunity to further her ideals."

Blake even protested her illness, singing in a show that poked fun at breast cancer. She rejected chemotherapy and radiation, opting instead for holistic medicine treatments.

"Susan, more than anyone I have ever known, tried to live her life consistently with her values," said Green, spokeswoman for Islip Supervisor Phil Nolan.

Blake learned activism while growing up in Wantagh. Legend has it that Blake and her mother, Betty Jane Blake, who died in 2005, chained themselves to a tree to block development of a housing project.

"I can't attest to that, but it sounds very likely," Nancy Blake said. "We were brought up to be citizens of the world and taught that you need to take some responsibility for taking care of this world."

Funeral arrangements and plans for a memorial service were incomplete yesterday.

Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.

Poem for Susan Blake

2007-10-06T11:00:00.000-04:00

PeaceSmiths House

Winter evening
mugs of hot cider
guitar music glowing

"Puff the Magic Dragon lives by the sea. . ."

Hearth flames flickering
near sofa
where girl makes a cave under arm
of boy with red hair

"If I had a hammer. . ."

Young woman on frayed brown chair
cushions her man's head
on long lavender dress

Black cherry log crackles

The professor, streaming fingers
through his wife's graying black hair
looks up

"For all we know this may be only a dream. . ."

Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr. (c)2007

Susan June Blake, 1953-2007

2007-10-06T08:36:00.000-04:00

b. 6/18/53, d. 10/2/07, beloved sister of Nancy Jane, daughter of the late Betty Jane and William A. Blake, "the Social Conscience of Long Island." Coordinator, PeaceSmiths, Inc. Indefatigable fighter against war, capital punishment, nuclear power; advocate for peace & social justice, environmental health & historic preservation. Tireless coffeehouse & forum organizer; presenter of countless poets, folk & concert musicians; singer/actor, oboist, naturelover. Crafter of the written and spoken word, teacher of the interconnectedness of all things. Burial: Friends, Westbury. Public celebration of Susan's life TBA. PeaceSmiths will continue with your contributions: POB 134 Massapequa NY 11758.

We Miss You, Susan

2007-10-05T08:22:00.001-04:00

A tribute to Susan Blake by Leonard Lehrman

We miss you, Susan.
We miss your calling and saying "How did you know it was me?"
Who else would call us at 11:30, 12:30, 1:30 in the morning even!?
Occasionally we'd be asleep, but usually we weren't,
and were always happy to hear from you.
Of course you almost always had something for us to do.
But that's ok. If no one else could do it, you knew you could ask us.
You were our conscience, the Social Conscience of Long Island,
and we treasured knowing and working with you.
In the two and a half years we've known you,
since you phoned us in response to Janet Coleman's WBAI interview with me,
you became a member of our family,
at least as close to me as my own brother and sister.
Could it have been mere coincidence
your having been born on my parents' anniversary?
and my having been born on your parents' anniversary?
After Karen, my first wife, died on Christmas 2005,
it was you who helped me pack and sort the clothes she left.
You were just her size, and age - 9 days older to be exact.
Those you chose looked good on you.
The closeness we had never extended beyond hugs and occasional
meaningful hand-holding.
But who else was eager, and welcome, to attend a concert or come
skinnydipping with me? -
the joy you took in those renewing, cleansing ocean baths!
And how many wonderful things you, my dear wife Helene, and I did together -
birthdays at the beach in our birthday suits
A Blitzstein Cabaret
E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman
THE BOOBY TRAP
the Berrymans
Shakespeare & Mother Courage in the Park (waiting for hours for
tickets in the torrential rains)
the Puffins in Manhattan and Teaneck
the Living Theatre
tributes to Mozart, Dr. King, Elie Siegmeister, Joel Mandelbaum,
Morris Schappes, the Rosenbergs,
BAJOUR, Barber, Naturism, Cindy Sheehan, The Green Party...
and perhaps above all: Conscience.

Conscience is not a leaf in the wind to be shaken at a gust
but a deep root holding fast because it must.

That was you, Susan.

We miss you, Susan.
But we know what you'd say:
Don't mourn, organize.
And don't just organize, be peacesmiths - get involved.
Think before you do, but then do it.
No one can do everything.
But everyone can do something.
There's always so much to be done - and always will be -
for each other, for others, and for ourselves -
but not just for ourselves.

If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?
If we are only for ourselves, what are we?
And if not now, then when?

Sometimes some issues have to be prioritized over others.
But that doesn't mean they are to be forgotten.
And you Susan, as long as there are people
with souls on fire to do justice and struggle for peace
As long as there are people who care
or can be brought to care
about war
and capital punishment
Sacco & Vanzetti
Ethel & Julius Rosenberg,
Alger Hiss
Mumia Abu Jamal
about immigrants' rights
women's rights
human rights
about health care and alternatives
about folk and concert music
laughing and dancing - If I Can't Dance, It's Not My Revolution!
then you, Susan, you who goaded and prodded,
facilitated and coordinated,
and led by your example,
You will never be forgotten.

We've Lost a Fighter for Peace and Justice

2007-10-03T13:54:00.000-04:00

Terribly sad news from Leonard Lehrman. Many of us had the privilege of meeting Susan at Green Fest when she performed with Leonard and Helene Williams in "The Booby Trap." Leonard writes:

"Susan Blake died this evening, Oct. 2, after a 4-year struggle with breast cancer which had just recently spread to her liver. We've only known her since April 2005, yet during that time we've spoken and/or met with her at least several times a week every week, and sometimes every day. How often have we been astonished at the breadth and depth of her energy and the scope of her interests and activities.

"A tireless organizer for so many good causes, against injustice, against capital punishment, against war, for the appreciation of folk and concert music and poetry, for immigrants' rights, women's rights, human rights--yet she could also laugh at herself, memorably putting across Joel Mandelbaum's satirical song "The Causes Are Waiting for You!"

"And despite losing one breast to the cancer that ultimately killed her, she uninhibitedly joined us repeatedly - whenever we could drive her there - for nude sun- and ocean-bathing at Lighthouse Beach on Fire Island. I've attached a photo Helene took of her presenting a card to Cary Bair there July 21, 2007 on his birthday - in his birthday suit.

"She was a featured performer in - in fact the motor behind - the production of THE BOOBY TRAP or OFF OUR CHESTS, the musical on the connection between breast cancer and bras - which, she believed, may well have been at least a partial cause of her own breast cancer. (WBAI 99.5 FM & wbai.org will broadcast some of her singing of that show Thursday evening Oct. 4 after midnight.)

"She leaves behind a loyal following of activist friends, all of whom have been prodded into consciousness more than once by her persistent urging that there is always something more that can be done to help those who need it.

"No six people could do all she did over so many years as Coordinator of PeaceSmiths in Amityville, with its monthly forum and monthly coffeehouse.

"But working together, inspired by her memory, the organization will, hopefully, continue."

Green Buildings Open House, Oct. 6

2007-10-03T11:04:00.000-04:00

12th Annual ASES National Solar Tour is this weekend, Saturday October 6th. Join 100,000 people across 46 states to see how your neighbors are using clean energy sources and decrease energy bills -- and how you can too. Find locations on google maps: http://nesea.org/buildings/openhouse/

In Tompkins County it should be a perfect sunny day to visit some of the 25 homes in the area.

GREEN BUILDINGS OPEN HOUSE -- SAT, OCT 6, 2006
Open House: 10 am-4 pm
Guided Van Tours: 12-4:30 pm
Guided Bike Tours: Details TBA

See firsthand how renewable energy and green building practices are at work in our area. Homeowners and building managers will be on site to answer questions and describe their green building features - such as passive solar design, photovoltaics, wind power, salvaged and non-toxic building materials, straw bale construction, timber framing, masonry stoves, and more.

Members of the public can do a self-guided tour between 10 am and 4 pm. Visit the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association website at www.nesea.org/buildings/openhouse AFTER SEPT. 6 for building features and directions or call 607-272-2292 AFTER SEP 7 to request a brochure with rough map. Details on routes, registration, and fees for van tours and bike tours coming soon. Watch for future announcements!

Organized by the Ithaca Green Building Alliance and Cornell Cooperative Extension in conjunction with NESEA's Green Buildings Open House and the American Solar Energy Society's National Solar Tour.

For more information, contact:

Tania Schusler
Environmental Issues Educator
Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County
615 Willow Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: 607-272-2292
Fax: 607-272-7088

Healthy Environment, Healthy Economy, Albany, Dec. 5-6

2007-10-03T10:44:00.001-04:00

Join the Citizens Environmental Coalition for the second Healthy Environment, Healthy Economy, a two day symposium on building a safe and sustainable economy for New York State. December 5th and 6th 2007 at the NYS Legislative Office Building in Albany. For more information, visit www.cectoxic.org or call 518-462-5527,x13. Many of us enjoyed meeting CEC staffer Linda Ochs and learning more about the CEC at the CEC's Green Fest table in the Ithaca Commons.

South Bronx Food Cooperative

2007-09-19T21:07:00.000-04:00

Bronx Green Zena Nelson has initiated the South Bronx Food Cooperative. Check out their great website at http://www.sbxfc.org/. SBFC is a green shopping alternative to what is generally offered in the Bronx. Founded and operated by committed local residents, the SBFC is dedicated to making a difference in the community by working together to provide healthy and affordable food available to all who want it.

SBFC is selling on-line and at a distribution center, and is seeking a retail location. SBFC will carry a wide variety of products including local, organic and conventionally grown produce; pasture-raised and grass-fed meat; free-range, organic poultry; fair-traded chocolate and coffee; wild and farmed fish; supplements and vitamins; vegetarian & vegan alternatives; bulk grains and spices; environmentally safe cleaning supplies and much more. In addition, the coop will stock a selection of familiar and common supermarket items making the SBFC a one-stop shopping destination.

Members will share ownership of the coop with fellow coop members. Members have a voice in the decision-making process and can participate in planning and discussions of the organization's future. Equally important, shoppers learn where their food choices come from. Members have access to fresh foods at low prices and learn about local farmers and vendors.

Philly Orchard Project

2007-09-04T14:16:00.000-04:00

Paul Glover, the founder of Ithaca Hours, a candidate for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2004, and a speaker at our first Green Fest in 2003, moved from Ithaca to Philadelphia several years ago. Ithaca's loss is Philly's gain. Paul's latest project is the Philly Orchard Project, to plant orchards within the city of Philadelphia, in order to provide healthy food free or at low cost, create jobs, stimulate related business, reduce crime, increase summer cooling, make space for beauty and play. The project was featured in The New York Times , September 2, 2007, Replacing Neglect With Peach Trees, by Virginia McGuire:

ON a sweltering summer afternoon in August, Paul Glover rode his bicycle 12 miles to spread mulch around peach trees in a fledgling orchard — in South Philadelphia.

Mr. Glover is founder of the Philly Orchard Project, a nonprofit organization established earlier this year with the goal of planting fruit trees on Philadelphia’s vacant lots, creating “edible community centers,” Mr. Glover said.

Building on Philadelphia’s tradition of community gardens and urban farms, Philly Orchard Project’s leaders are hoping to emulate the success of longstanding urban orchard projects in Boston, Los Angeles and Austin, Tex.

Scott Harris, the executive director of TreeFolks, based in Austin, said his group’s Urban Orchard Program has changed the culture of the city. The increase in residential food gardens has drawn children outside, away from television and video games, he said, and because people are outside more, there is less vandalism and crime.

In Philadelphia, where the population has declined by more than 25 percent over the last half-century, there is no shortage of vacant land.

Domenic Vitiello, an assistant professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, is president of the Philly Orchard Project’s board. He said the population decline had occurred because the city lost nearly all of its industrial economy.

While everyone agrees that the city’s thousands of vacant lots could serve a better purpose, there is no consensus on what should be done with them.

Most tracts make up the small footprint of a row house and are interspersed in a line of occupied homes, their small size making them unattractive to developers.

The lots are also located in less desirable neighborhoods like South Philadelphia and New Kensington, where gentrification has been slow to take hold. Developers are more attracted to Center City, said Joanne Davidow, a vice president at Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors, where they are “building on every little inch of ground.”

It is these less-desired lots that the Philly Orchard Project is targeting. And environmentalists would like to see the vacant lots preserved as green space. Philadelphia Green, a program of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, began to “clean and green” many of these lots in 1974. “The city didn’t have a land management program in place to take care of those parcels,” said Michael Groman, the organization’s senior director. When vacant land is neglected, the resulting blight “exacerbates the downward spiral in the neighborhood,” he said.

Susan M. Wachter, a professor of real estate finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, set out to quantify the impact of vacant land on the housing market in a 2005 study. Her study examined New Kensington, an industrial neighborhood hit especially hard by the deindustrialization of the city. She found that cleaning up vacant land raised the value of adjacent homes by 20 percent.

And in a 2006 study, Ms. Wachter and Grace Wong, an assistant professor of real estate at the Wharton School, found that planting trees on residential blocks citywide raised property values on the block by almost 10 percent. The increased market values are attributable to a “combination of landscape changing dramatically, and also a signal that someone is reinvesting in the neighborhood,” Ms. Wachter said.

Real estate professionals in the city know that green space sells houses. Heather A. Petrone, associate broker for Joseph D. Petrone Real Estate and president of the Greater Philadelphia Association of Realtors, said she regularly includes proximity to community gardens in property descriptions. People who may be moving back to the city from suburban areas, where “everybody has an acre,” are especially interested in the gardens, Ms. Petrone said.

As the population in Philadelphia and other cities continues to decline, city officials and urban planners are eager to retain existing city residents and attract new ones.

“Philadelphia will not prosper by merely refilling with people,” said Mr. Glover of the Philly Orchard Project. “Real progress requires that agriculture becomes a prominent part of the structure, economy and culture of the city.” He sees urban agriculture as a way to combat poverty by creating jobs and inexpensive food, while reducing the environmental impact of food production.

A veteran activist, Mr. Glover is best known for founding Ithaca Hours in 1991, an alternative currency designed to strengthen the local economy in Ithaca, N.Y.

Mr. Glover and his organization already have two orchards under way in Philadelphia, and they are planning several more to be planted this fall, when fruit trees can tolerate transplanting.

They expect to plant primarily on land acquired through transfers of development rights, where owners retain the title but give up the right to develop the land. The project also plans to help existing neighborhood groups, like schools and community centers, plant their own orchards.

In South Philadelphia, for example, the group provided peach trees and expertise to a group of youth interns who had started a community garden on land owned by United Communities Southeast Philadelphia, a community development agency that provides educational and leadership opportunities.

Laura Smoot, a youth development specialist who works with the volunteers who planted that garden, said the project had been welcomed by area residents. “Litter and vandalism have drastically reduced since we started planting gardens and fruit trees,” she said.

For 35 years, Sharon Robinson has lived opposite the lot where the new orchard planted this spring is already producing peaches. She remembers when an apartment building on the lot was abandoned. After the city tore it down, the lot sat empty for years, accumulating debris.

Ms. Robinson used to go to a park across town when she wanted to be outside. But since Ms. Smoot and her interns began cleaning up the lot, Ms. Robinson said, she spends time outside on her front porch and contributes to the garden by watering it on weekends.

The group is in the process of finding more sites appropriate for fruit trees, and the city is a possible source of land. Darlene Messina, Philadelphia’s coordinator for environmental and urban sustainability initiatives, said that the city may consider allocating land for orchards or other urban agriculture initiatives, but “it has to make economic sense.”

The city has started a new initiative, GreenPlan Philadelphia, to preserve open space and reduce greenhouse gas emissions citywide. “Orchards are part of that plan,” Ms. Messina said.

In the meantime, volunteers recently gathered to plant perennials around the young trees and layer wet newspaper and compost to keep the weeds down. They lined the beds with broken bricks salvaged from the apartment building that stood in the empty lot before the city tore it down.

“Beauty in cities is not a luxury,” Ms. Wachter said. “It’s a necessary public good.”

Tony Gronowicz on American Democracy

2007-08-16T08:12:00.000-04:00

Tony Gronowicz, one of our speakers Sunday on electoral politics and social change is the author of a new book, Grand Illusion: American Democracy from its Roots to the Present. Here is the prologue to his excellent book.

Grand Illusion: American Democracy from Its Roots to the Present
By Anthony Gronowicz

PROLOGUE

This is the story of how the United States rapidly evolved from royally chartered mercantile corporations that serviced British aristocracy into industrial corporations whose political arm is a federal government that grants citizens only those freedoms corporate lawyers deem necessary. During this historical evolution, rights to a living wage, affordable housing, health care, and education were denied the public.

From the first permanent English settlement in 1607, citizen fate has been directed by an upper class whose thickest roots straddle the English-speaking Atlantic. By the Civil War in 1861, immense profits had accrued to a thriving Anglo-American financial marriage, based upon a labor force disciplined through a uniquely cruel chattel slavery for transported Africans, and an indentured servitude that most European immigrants shared until the nineteenth century.

The states were forged to reflect the mastery of a class whose collective national self emerges in 1884 with the annual publication of a Social Register that lists those whom this upper class seeks to include. Ironically, the very richest and most powerful among them, like a David or Nelson Rockefeller, have no need for such self-designation as their immense power is recognized in the context of the prevailing ideology of corporate-managed democracy.

Two world wars allowed this upper class to shape consumption patterns that polluted the very pores of the planet as an oily film penetrated air, water, and earth. Each of these global holocausts generated revolutions in Russia and China respectively. They snapped the shackles of Anglo-American capital and became great powers in their own right.

Upper-class failures to gauge the strength of Red Armies led to unanticipated military outcomes. Rockefeller interests then instigated a costly arms race. It was calculated to undermine the psychological incentive for socialism that the expansion of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Communist China had upon the world’s peoples. To facilitate the task of bringing down the Soviet Union while the U.S. national deficit soared due to record military expenditure, CIA and Saudi Arabia in 1979 began to fund and supply Sunni Muslim religious extremists as part of the largest covert operation in history. That this occurred in a region that produced 80% of the world’s oil, made the stakes very high for an upper class whose assets rested upon hegemonic control of a carcinogen.

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia’s extreme brand of Islam, Wahhabism, soon took on a life of its own. Into the new millennium, the Saud dynasty poured almost one trillion dollars into Fortune 500 companies. The cash infusion bought the complicity of the U.S. upper class to the machinations of a cutthroat regime unique for being the only sovereign state on the planet not to possess even a fig leaf of a national legislature.

This unholy alliance was formalized in 1979. It was emboldened by the collapse of the Soviet Union whose loss of 50 million people and 2/3 of its industry at the hands of upper-class supported Nazis in World War II posed an insurmountable obstacle to the establishment of socialism, especially when it faced a United States that had sacrificed the least and gained the most from the two world wars.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union presented the Saud and corresponding U.S. dynasties with the opportunity to liquidate the neighboring Iraqi regime and privatize its oil. Saddam Hussein had been propped up in 1979 by Washington as a counterweight to the Shiite revolution in Iran that overthrew the CIA-installed Shah dictatorship and resulted in the sudden deprivation of extravagant profits for the Anglo-American upper class. In the immediate aftermath, record interest rates and oil price spikes more than recouped their losses.

A pretext was required, one that would shock and awe the average American into supporting an invasion of Iraq and the seizure of its oil through the installation of puppet surrogates like the Shah. That pretext occurred on September 11, 2001. Even though the destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center was triggered by mainly Saudi hijackers funded by members of the Saud royal family, many people were hoodwinked into believing that Iraq was involved—even though it was a secular dictatorship at bitter odds with the divine monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The Houses of Bush, Rockefeller, and Saud—and their minions—stood to gain the most.

Besides, time was of the essence since Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, planned to sell his nation’s oil to the French and Germans for euros, a financial exchange that would strain a dollar weakened by a half century of Cold War, and wars against Korea and Vietnam.

First, the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2002 as part of President Bush Junior’s “crusade” to get the American public accustomed to “endless war.” Then came the blitzkrieg against Iraq in 2003.

Iraq could not, thanks to popular insurgency, increase its oil production to pay for the costs of the war as Washington had maintained. In less than two years, it dropped out of the top 10 oil producers after having been # 4 before the U.S. invasion. By 2005, Russia had rebounded from the collapse of c ommunism to become the world’s second largest oil producer. And China for the first time consumed more raw materials than the United States.

If these developments did not pose sufficient threat to the U.S. plutocracy, Venezuela under the charismatic leadership of Hugo Chavez, used its vast oil resources to effect (in Chavez’s words) “a revolution of the poor,” in alliance with Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and a communist Cuba that is first in education, health care, and life span in Latin America.

Currently, with 5% of the world’s population, the United States consumes 25% of the world’s resources—hardly a globally democratic use. With military expenditures that exceed the rest of the world combined, the American upper class continues to demand more and more privations from the American people that point to economic collapse, revolution, and the establishment of genuine democracy and environmental concern.

Tony & Mary Lipnicki: Building Grassroots Community

2007-08-15T13:56:00.000-04:00

Here is the excellent presentation Tony and Mary Lipnicki gave us on Saturday:

Building Grassroots Community and First Fridays:
Ways to Encourage Participation in Local Community
Anthony and Mary Lipnicki, August 11, 2007

We would like to welcome all of you to the panel discussion on Building Grassroots Community and to the New York State Green Party “Green Fest.”

Community is defined as people sharing an environment. In communities, the degree of adhesion of community members is based upon everyone participating in something bigger than each other. In this talk, we hope to throw out some ideas that we have tried to help build community through First Fridays, a monthly discussion group.

Several years ago my wife Mary and I began a journey to simplify our lives and to disengage ourselves from the fast pace, draining, market economy that we found ourselves living in. We had been sold the idea that success in career through competition and performance would bring happiness. We learned – at least for ourselves – that this was the wrong way to go. There came a time when honesty, personalization, and human dignity, came to be what really mattered to us. We read Joe Dominguez book, ‘Your Money or Your Life’, and began cashing in our so called ‘security’, paid off our indebtedness, and began living our lives which meant - contributing to making the community we lived – a little more like what we thought it should be.

After quitting my job in NYC, we sold our house, and moved to rural Western New York State. We bought an old house in Andover New York, used the windfall from the sale to renovate it, and opened up the Mustard Seed Inn and Bed & Breakfast, a platform for us to build grassroots community. It was through the idea of ‘hospitality,’ that we would initiate a response to dealing with the problems we saw in our culture - problems which limited us and enslaved us it seemed.

In the book, ‘The Coming Anarchy – Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War,’ Robert D. Kaplan describes a coming world of scarcity and violence as the peoples of the world fight for their share of the limited resources needed to survive. Kaplan says, “The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning. Volatile new democracies in Eastern Europe, fierce tribalism in Africa, civil war and ethnic violence in the Near East, and widespread famine and disease, and the brutal rift developing as wealthy nations reap the benefits of seemingly boundless technology, while other parts of the world slide into chaos, are logical extensions of what to expect in the near future.” If this isn’t a reason to build local community, we don’t know what is.

We decided to focus on abundance rather than fear and scarcity, and went down the path of community – a practice of age old security – to rediscover ourselves, and the place where we lived.

Living amidst the poverty of Allegany County, we saw people who had once participated in the local economy, becoming more isolated and dependent on grants and the welfare state to survive at the very basic level of existence. The rural self-sufficient agricultural economy had left for more profitable greener pastures. Replacing community interdependence with government programs, deregulated monopoly based electricity, natural gas and water, state controlled education, and the effects of globalization on the local economy, stacked the cards against the people in our community.

We launched First Fridays in August 2006. First Fridays is a “community oriented group of people interesting in learning about issues that are close to their hearts, and concern them, but need to be better understood, so a response could be initiated in the community.” First Fridays is open to all and meets the first Friday of the month from 7:30 – 9:00 pm at the Mustard Seed Inn and B&B in Andover, New York. The makeup of the group is relatively diverse, including women and men, young and old, and people from different political parties and religious persuasions. There are no dues or other costs associated with participation, though participants are encouraged to assist in the planning of the programs. We encourage people to bring a non-perishable food item for donation to the village food pantry on behalf of the First Fridays group. We have used the food pantry to help members of the community in need – a member of the group was helped while out of work recovering from surgery. We made a donation of mittens and hats to the Andover Central School nurse during the winter for the school children too!

We get the word out on First Fridays by writing up a news article every month on the last meeting, and submit it to the local newspapers. We have the cooperation of the local press. We announce the next month’s topic at the end of the article. We have upcoming First Fridays programs announced on the local radio station. Down the road, we want to have the topic leaders do interviews with the local radio station. Word of mouth helps too. We may do seminars and workshops on topics too.

First Fridays, therefore, was a culmination of what we thought would be the initial step in building community. In the last year we have discussed:

1. the corporation and its influence in our lives, and the work of POCLAD;

2. peace through direct non-violent service to others;

3. the restorative justice movement;

4. the Catholic Worker movement;

5. sustainability and community;

6. the Baker Hamilton Alternate Peace Plan for Iraq;

7. healing inner violence through centering prayer;

8. understanding violence in the scriptures of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism;

9. breaking our dependence of foreign oil through renewable energy;

10. Genesee Valley Habitat for Humanity; a way for the working poor to afford owning a home with a zero interest mortgage;

11. Oasis of Peace – an Israeli Palestinian village of peaceful coexistence;

12. the Canticle Farm CSA; a way of supporting the local agricultural economy

We are now reaping some of the benefits of our discussions at First Fridays. First of all we have developed a sense of honesty and trust between each of us who have participated; a sort of interconnectedness has developed between us and people outside the group as well, and the idea that we are all in this thing together, and the realization that we can make a difference.

We have fundraised for Habitat for Humanity, and may be doing a Habitat project in our village; one of our members ran for school board; we are putting together a resource guide of local agriculture producers; we bought a share in Canticle Farm; participated in the Wellsville Balloon Rally Parade with a group against Iraq Troop Escalation; attend monthly village board meetings to learn about issues affecting the community; volunteer with the Quaker Prison Ministry to Attica Prison; volunteer with the local hospice; worked with some Iraqi war veterans on adapting to community life; and as I mentioned the donations to the local food pantry and school, and visits to members of the group who were in need.

To build grassroots community at the local level, I have outlined the following which you may want to keep in mind:

1. Begin by simplifying your life, if you haven’t already done so, particularly in the area of your personal finances. Live at the most basic level possible. I mentioned a great book by Joe Dominguez, “Your Money or Your Life – How to Achieve Financial Independence through Simplification.”

2. Access the needs of your community, and determine what depletes and affirms life in the place where you live. Get to know the people that you live with, and get them to know you and to trust you, by listening and understanding their concerns and needs.

3. Join organizations that support your value system! Learn how they meet a community need. Don’t reinvent the wheel. We attend our local church. I joined the Andover Lions Club, became a hospice volunteer, and board member on the Andover Free Public Library, and the Andover Historical Preservation Corporation, which meets housing needs for the poor. I also joined the community choir.

4. Work with others in small groups! Participate in study groups and issues groups and meet the people who are out there participating in community events.

5. Find a spiritual center! Deal with your fears. Find a spiritual advisor to hear you out and bounce ideas off. Look one up at a retreat house or on the web. Work on developing your conscience.

6. Visit with other organization and meet like minded people! We connect with St. Joseph’s CW House of Hospitality in Rochester, NY, the Olean Area Coalition for Peace and Justice, the Friends Service Committee Attica Prison Ministry, Canticle Farm CSA (community supported agriculture) in Allegany, NY, and the Genesee Valley Habitat for Humanity.

7. Get involved in local politics! Participate in community life. Speak out on issues that concern you. Find out what the local government’s position is on issues, who are the people making the decisions and what are the public and private interest groups shaping community life. Access if these organizations are meeting the needs of the community. Go to village and town and school board meetings. Join the Green Party and participate in communication the political issues that affect the community through political activism. Get involved. Give a talk on an issue that is close to your heart!

8. Put you shingle on your heart! Don’t be afraid to be yourself. Be human! Initiate a community platform, either through a church organization, volunteer and community service organization, or business; to give your community organization authority, presence and respect that supports your meaning and purpose. We began the Mustard Seed Inn and B&B. You could run for political office, or the school board, or join a peace and justice organization, or a group with an affinity toward community and social justice issues (Franciscans, the Catholic Worker, the Canticle Farm CSA or POCLAD.

9. Motivate people to help them realize their interdependence! Start a small community group and network with like minded people, and learn through them how to refine your value system. We began a weekly Short Story Reading and Discussion Group at our house after a course we enjoyed on short stories. We also began First Fridays. There are Book Groups at the local public library. All these ideas help engage oneself with our common humanity, and help each of us better understand each other and the world we live in, and what really is important.

10. Take some risks! Encourage everyone to participate in community life. Help identify people’s interests and skills, and support them unconditionally in their passions. Learn from people who have special abilities and are different from you. Buy local! Support family run businesses.

11. Provide vision and purpose to the group and to the community! Get the group to participate in a community oriented-civic minded project. We are considering as I mentioned, working on a local Habitat project, and studying the feasibility of beginning a community farm share farm in our area.

12. Think outside the box! Take courses at the local university and continue to learn. We have taken humanities and history courses at Alfred University, and Alfred State College (SUNY), our local colleges, and are considering courses in agriculture and community economics. These courses teach us about alternatives we never quite imagined in our lives. There is a great book called ‘Deep Economy’ which gives other ideas on alternative community economics.

In summary, First Fridays uses a variety of programs to achieve its goals: speakers on community oriented topics, letters to the editor, communication with elected officials, radio interviews with First Friday speakers on topics addressed at meetings, prayer vigils, protest events, study groups on topics to better understand the market based global economy, and the dominate pervasive presence of the corporation in our lives, participation in village and town meetings, articles in the newspapers on First Friday topics, support of local grassroots community oriented organizations, i.e. Habitat for Humanity, Canticle Farm CSA, development of alternatives to the global market based economy, like renewable energy, alternatives to the justice system in defusing disputes and disagreements and bringing about peace through direct non-violent service to others.

We encourage all of you to find your inner self through participating with others to help build local community, and in so doing turn the course of history to a more amenable place to coexist and enjoy the beauty, goodness and kindness available at the grassroots level of community. We encourage you to open your consciousness, develop you conscience and participate in community life at a new level. We are not meant to live in isolation nor in fear nor as individuals. We are designed to live with others at a basic level of interdependence and understanding. We are designed to participate in community!

Virginia Rasmussen: The Politics of Sustainability

2007-08-13T16:18:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to Virginia Rasmussen for the wonderful talk she gave Friday evening!

Comments on "The Politics of Sustainability"
Presented at Green Fest, Ithaca, NY, August 10, 2007
Virginia Rasmussen, Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy

I appreciate the invitation to be with you tonight and, in particular, to have had an opportunity to explore, deliberately, the matter of sustainability politics. Surely, this will be at the root of our capacity to live sustainably. The suggestions I offer tonight are quite grand in sound and vision, yet must become, I believe, a very practical part of our work in the years ahead. If it is our intention:

* to adopt ecological technologies,
* to recognize and live within the limits of a finite planet,
* to bring the fairness, justice, restraint, and community as well as citizen rights, all essential to sustainability, then a new kind of political process is required, one we've barely begun to consider.

Common sense tells us that a systemic, FUNDAMENTAL response is needed to address the ecological and social breakdown enveloping us. Yet many struggling in environmental and social change work continue doing what we have always done:
* dealing with an issue here and an issue there;
* confident we know the nature of the problem, we work hard and yet harder on a playing field we did not build, using rules we did not write -- rules that are solidly stacked against us;
* we've gone on ad nauseum at times, describing in fuller and fuller detail the old problems and then the new problems and then the newest problems...

Not that it's easy getting to these roots! Daily we face forces of denial more brazen, more militant than ever.
(1) insidious religious doctrines that foster dangerous ignorance and superstition
(2) ever-growing corporate rule that denies us any access to the power of decision-making and governance.
(3) and a virulent patriotic ideology that makes one shudder.

This is a tough reality to try to change. Bill Moyers pointed out that when "ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." And getting the blind to change directions is even tougher than getting the bad to do so!

So, how might a sustainable politics break into this seemingly vicious downward spiral?

I'm going to suggest four basic aspects of our cultural-political lives that I think require great focus and evolution if this search for a sustainable politics is to reward us. They are, each one, about RELATIONSHIP within the work of GOVERNING OURSELVES. We'll have to address each of them, because the one we do not address will undo any gains in the other three. Each is politically fundamental to the creation of sustainable communities and the sustainable lives of those who dwell in them.

None is new to you. Some effort in each has already begun. But there is great need to bring these basic aspects of political life up front, provoke rethinking and a dedication to these four tightly connected, determining aspects of any sustainable future.

Let me state them briefly at the outset:

First, can we bring up front, include in our work and conversation, the fact of our present dominator, patriarchal, industrial worldview that drives us inevitably toward inequality, violence, war, and earth destruction. Only a tireless commitment to comprehend, counter and change it will stand us a chance.

Second, an alternative world view is inadequate in itself to the task of evolving a sustainable politics. That worldview must find its expression in REAL democratic processes. Is it possible that through our work and conversation, the fraud that is our current so-called "democracy" can be made clear to an entrenched, indifferent middle class, along with a will to build the real thing, a radical democracy?

Third, what good will establishing a radical democracy do us if we can't sustain it through our capacity to DO democracy? Might we bring up front in our work, our teachings, a valuing and learning of the arts and skills of DOING democracy?

And fourth... What good will our capacity to make skillful democratic decisions within a people-centered democracy do us, if we have no AUTHORITY as We the People, to put those decisions into policy, law, governance?

In the time we have, let me elaborate briefly on each of these fundamental aspects of the work ahead.

A sustainable politics calls on us, in the words of Adrienne Rich, "to understand the assumptions in which we are drenched." This is prerequisite to knowing ourselves and being able to change ourselves. The present dominator, patriarchal (industrial, anti-ecological, war-culture, anti-democratic) worldview, too long with us, and too little acknowledged, will block and then annihilate every sustainable measure and attitude we place in its ferocious grip.

We have to pull this conversation into the forefront of most every issue we take on, government and corporate, community and even personal . That wrong-headed worldview defines who we believe WE are, it TELLS us what OUR nature is, who we think we CAN be with one another and the earth. As long as we do not hit head-on this limiting, frankly terminal, dominant worldview, we will continue to see human beings as what that worldview assumes us to be: primarily individualistic, acquisitive, selfish, competitive, and generally quite nasty. Of course, that serves those who want to rule over us; if we're that crummy, we BETTER have strong and powerful rulers to keep everyone sufficiently at bay from everyone else.

I share the resolute view of Anne Scales, in her book "The Emergence of a Feminist Jurisprudence," when she says: "It is insane at the end of the 20th Century to adhere to the belief that people are innately horrid and can do no better. Rather we must recognize that our fears -- of contingency, of dependency, of unimportance -- have put us on a suicidal path."
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* But what good will this nearly opposite worldview and assumptions about ourselves do us in regard to sustainability politics unless we apply it within a very different understanding of democracy. Many minds in this country have been falsely, intentionally colonized with untruths about democracy.

In "The Populist Moment, a work by Lawrence Goodwyn, he claims that "we are culturally confused and cannot even imagine our confusion. ...we are culturally organized by our society not to rebel... not to understand protest..." and most importantly, "not to understand the prerequisites of democracy itself."

Might we be able to help ourselves and others decolonize our minds and promote an understanding of and commitment to radical democracy, which means nothing more than the REAL thing, people REALLY ruling themselves.

Democracy, according to C. Douglas Lummis in his book Radical Democracy, is not a kind of government, but an end of government. It's an ideal, a project, "the art of the possible," a "performance art." He sees radical democracy as "an adventure of human beings creating with their own hands the conditions for their own freedom... it's a way in which people order their lives together, through discussion and common action, on principles of equality and justice."

Democracy is NOT what so many have come to believe in this country:
* It is "not handing your power over to people in exchange for promises." Political parties have a role in education, but they do not make the people's decisions.
* it's not "just rulers looking out for people's welfare," it's about people ruling themselves;
* it's not "economic development or a stage of development;" it's a form of political rule
* it's not the "free" market or "free trade," deceptive language for global corporate rights law that divides society into rich and poor and is utterly inappropriate to democracy;
* it's not the U.S. Constitutional system which was opposed by radical democrats of the time as putting too much power at the center and giving too much power to the rich;
* it's not free elections, although that can play a democratic role;
* it's not allowing the people to have their say; the "right to dissent is not power, it is not the right to decide."

Can we bring these wrong, even dangerous perceptions of democracy up front for people, and begin to shape the REAL thing for ourselves?

Establishing radical democracy is not "some leap of consciousness into an uncharted future" assures Lummis. "Rather it only means returning to a natural attitude. Our challenge is to break the ideological bonds that prevent us from assuming that natural attitude of democratic common sense."

Democracy IS in our nature, says Lummis. We CAN be a primarily community-based, cooperative, less material and radically democratic species.
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* Since a sustainable politics requires that radical democracy be made real, then the skills necessary to DO Democracy, to DO the "art of the possible," must also be made real, become part of our teaching and learning. This rarely happens...

We hear about the value of diversity, the importance of inclusion and participation. But how often do we hear these values presented in the context of doing democracy, of governing ourselves successfully?

When do we learn how to set an agenda and facilitate a meeting that people are glad they attended; are eager to return to in order to continue the conversation and mutual learning that can lead to smart decision-making?

When do we learn the skills of communication necessary to share knowledge and opinion with one another in a way that can be heard, that works for the group and truly adds to the social learning essential to self-governance?

When do we learn the skills of decision-making without losers, where everyone gets to participate and be a part of the outcome? How long will we settle for Robert's Rules of Patriarchal Order????

--And conflicts? We need them. They're natural. Dealing with them usefully teaches us new things and brings us to a better, wiser place. How many people learn conflict resolution as part of the art of conducting our lives, much less governing ourselves? Without an appreciation of conflict and some skills to make the most of conflict, many stifle their voices and others prevail by aggressively filling the void. This disempowers individuals, the group, the society.

Organizing and planning skills -- who learns them? How do we form a group? Set goals? Determine priorities. Hold an event? Address accountability? Learn how to evaluate our work along the way and on its completion? Gain support from others for our efforts? How can we ever do democracy and govern ourselves if we never learn organizing for self-governance 101?

All of this must be learned and practiced and called what it MOST IMPORTANTLY IS -- the art of self and mutual governing. Do some of us have natural gifts in these skills and arts? Of course. Does that mean we hand our power over to the people with "the gifts?" Whose agenda will we then be subject to? Yes, those people get to use their gifts on our behalf. All the more important that we stay involved and participate where and how we can?

Every educational setting -- classrooms, organizations, municipal boards, etc. should be a forum for learning and respecting the art and skills of democracy.

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* And lastly, a sustainable politics requires that those decisions we make with our democratic skills and mutual work be implemented through a governing system that puts the people in charge. That is, We the People must have the AUTHORITY to govern ourselves.

And let's be clear... from the days of the Constitution on, we have NOT had that authority, despite all the mind control and colonization that sends the message -- that this is a democracy and we people rule. Of course, not everyone continues to fall for the standard "line" about our so-called "democracy:" A friend recently caught sight of a bumpersticker... "Watch Out or We'll Bring Democracy to Your Country!"

Nonetheless, our Constitution hangs on to its unchallenged, unquestioned place of reverence; most people know little about those passages written by its authors to keep democracy OUT of the picture!
There is positive content in that Constitution. We must know of it, use it and build on it:< >--- never before was a nation established on a set of agreements...
--- the system of checks and balances is brilliant and intended to serve vital objectives in a democratic set up, .... CURRENTLY BEING THROWN RIGHT OUT THE WINDOW!
--- every state was guaranteed a Republican form of government...

BUT, where legal authority over economic and political life is concerned, the framers wrote a Constitution that protected the propertied few from the many with ease. the Constitution's principal author, James Madison, saw to it that political and economic structures "would protect the opulent minority against the majority."

So the "Founding Fathers" designed a plan of governance that sanctified the individual and the rights and protections of property; not the community and the rights and protections of persons.

Even though there was no mention of corporations in the C'n, the propertied class used the property bias of the Constitution to hone the corporate form as its vehicle to concentrate wealth and legal power, a scheme generously assisted by judges and courts over the 19th and 20th century. Whatever business wanted, business got; business practice and malpractice simply turned into law.

Property's legal protections turned into all kinds of legal POWER OVER people, communities and the earth.

These rights of property gave to the corporate form control over production, investment, the organization of work and the development and diffusion of technology. This is control over our economic life and whoever controls economic life also controls political life.

Not content with that, corporate boards realized that the designation of the corporation as a person under the law would gain them legal PROTECTIONS FROM the people through the Bill of Rights, intended to protect REAL people from denials of free speech, assembly, search and seizure rights, etc.

So we arrive at today's corporations, able to do most anything they wish, and it's ALL PERFECTLY LEGAL, because they saw to the writing of the law, the shaping of policy, the defining of every debate, the election, in so many instances, of THEIR FAVORITE candidates:

What they do is the stuff of governing, it represents historical takings of powers that belong to people. But here's some good news: because this crisis is systemic, the problems are being driven right down to the local level, where the way is open for the development of NEW approaches.

People in their communities are beginning to take their right to govern themselves seriously. They are waging the struggle to shift the cultures of their communities and rewrite law to serve people and PUBLIC authority, not property and CORPORATE authority.

They are changing the law by challenging existing law, recognizing that democracy is without meaning when corporations have constitutional powers to deny to people the democratic process.

More and more communities are no longer exhausting themselves in the regulatory maze. Instead they are educating themselves, organizing, making decisions together and passing their own laws that ban corporations from owning farmland, from dumping sludge on farmland, from giving money to candidates or referenda within their jurisdictions, from planting GE crops, from placing any more BIG BOX stores in their jurisdictions; communities are extending rights and protections to nature, and denying them to corporations.

These people are reframing their issues in terms of democracy and rights, no longer in terms of regulating corporate harms and haggling over permits to pollute. They are building a movement to drive self-governance into communities all over the country and eventually, into the Constitution itself.

While it's true that sustainable politics requires our possessing the rights and the law to govern ourselves, all the good law in service to people and public authority, should we acquire it, will not survive without attaining a level of success in the other three fundamentals of a sustainable politics: a new partnership or post-patriarchal worldview and accompanying assumptions; a deeper understanding of democracy as radical democracy; and the capacity to DO democracy by respecting, learning and practicing its arts and skills.

It's a tall order, but all of this work is underway. Let's be deliberate in joining it at every opportunity.

Award for Protecting Old Growth White Pines

2007-08-13T15:24:00.000-04:00

Ranger Michael Liu of the Finger Lakes National Forest received an award at Green Fest from Gudrun Scott on behalf of "We the People" for his decision last fall to preserve a grove of ancient white pines in the forest. Above, Ranger Liu discusses white pine ecology.

2007 Green Fest Schedule

2007-08-10T07:20:00.002-04:00

Here is our updated schedule for the weekend:

Friday, August 10, 2007
2:00 — Check-in for Camping sites at Cayuta Sun
At Community School, Ithaca
6:30 — Registration
7:00 — Opening and welcome
7:15 — 9:00 pm - The Politics of Sustainability
Art Weaver, Renovus Energy, "Social Change and Its Connection to Renewable Energy", Virginia Rasmussen, Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, Dan Hill, Cayuga Nation rep to the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force

Saturday, August 11, 2007
At Cayuta Sun Permaculture Homestead
7:00 am — Sunrise Yoga with Ann Eagan, Sunnyside, NY
8:30 am — Early Bird Workshop: Baking in an Earth Oven
Lois Hilton, Tickletown Trade, Great Valley, NY
Elizabeth Thompson, Allegany, NY
10:00 am — Opening and welcome
10:15 am — Grassroots Organizing for Sustainability
Gay Nicholson, Sustainable Tompkins, Ithaca, NY
Anthony and Mary Lipnicki, First Fridays, Andover, NY
10:15 am — Cob for Kids Workshop
11:45 am — Building a Local Food Network
Lois Hilton, Tickletown Trade food coop, Great Valley, NY
Matt Glenn, Muddy Fingers CSA, Ithaca Farmers Market
Michele Danels, East New York Food Co-op, Brooklyn
Josh Dolan, EcoCity Ithaca
11:45 am — Job Free Living
Ed Haffmans and JoAnn Myers, Accord, NY
1:00 pm — Lunch, Blues by Deborah Magone
1:45 pm — Permaculture Workshop
Michael Burns and Steve Gabriel, Finger Lakes Permaculture
1:45 pm — Living off the Grid
Steve Nicholson, Ithaca
Tony Moretti, Hammondsort
3:00 pm — Make Your Own Wind Turbine
Barry Miller, Hinsdale
3:00 pm — Getting Media Access for Alternative Viewpoints
Sander Hicks, VoxPop, Brooklyn
Bill Huston, Binghamton
Carl Lawrence, Producer, Green Vision, BCAT, Brooklyn
Deborah Magone, Green Cable Producer, Rochester
4:15 pm — Native Earthling Band on Solar Stage
6:00 pm — Dinner, Ki-tun Band
7:00 pm — Liberation Ecology: Refusing to Choose Between
Social Justice and Sustainability, Rafter T. Sass
9:00 pm — Burning Hearts Band

Sunday, August 12, 2007
At Ithaca Commons, downtown Ithaca
10:00 am — Opening
10:15 am — Green Roof Demonstration
Lexie Hain, Motherplants, Ithaca NY
11:00 am — Building New Media Outlets
Ilonka Wloch, Positive News, Ithaca
Craig Seeman, Third Planet Video
Cyril Mychalejko, Upside Down World, Vermont
12:00 noon — Political Songs by Peacesmiths
1:00 pm — Creating Change through Third Party Electoral Politics
Howie Hawkins, 2006 Green Party candidate for US Senate
SKCM Curry, 2008 candidate for Green Party Vice President
Anthony Gronowicz, author Grand Illusion: American Democracy, New York, NY
Jason Nabewaniec, Co-Chair, Green Party US, Batavia, NY
2:30 pm — Campus Organizing for Sustainability
Ethan Rainwater, Cornell Sustainability
Peter LaVenia, Albany U Campus Greens
3:45 pm — Closing

Photos of Cayuta Sun

2007-08-08T11:26:00.000-04:00

Great photos of Cayuta Sun by Simon Wheeler accompanied the Ithaca Journal article on Green Fest.

Ithaca Journal Features Green Fest

2007-08-08T11:19:00.000-04:00

Green Fest to attract over 100 this weekend
Lessons on permaculture, sustainability and local food on agenda

By Jennie Daley
Journal Staff

CAYUTAVILLE — From pine grove to meeting room, such are the conversions under way at a Cayutaville homestead preparing to host this weekend's Green Fest.

Billed as a sustainability-focused weekend that also will serve as a fundraiser for the Green Party, Green Fest will span three days with two of them based in Ithaca and Saturday's happenings at the Cayuta Sun homestead.

The home of Elmira school teacher Michael Burns and his fiancée, Kelly Dietz, Cayuta Sun has been a five-year project for Burns that started as an empty lot. It now is home to the two-story, highly energy efficient house Burns built with a contractor, gardens, chickens and two geese. The newest addition is an almost finished, double outhouse for campers who will be using the homestead as a base for the weekend.
Where all these features were placed and how they are used is based on permaculture principles. Created as a set of design guidelines, permaculture aims to maximize natural efficiencies. For instance, permaculture principles would encourage someone to put their gardens between the house and where they park so they pass by it often, rather than sticking the garden in an inconvenient corner of the yard.

Yet permaculture lessons will only be one part of a busy weekend. Workshops will touch on a range of topics including cooking with a solar oven, constructing your own wind turbine, the politics of sustainability and building a local food network.

Organizers are expecting more than 100 people to attend from all areas of the state, including Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse and New York City. Already in town and helping with set up is Michele Danels, a local food organizer and community gardener in East New York, which is an impoverished edge of Brooklyn.

“When I heard about this I said ‘I'm in.' People are really depressed about what's happening in the world, and this offers hope,” Danels said.

Working along with Danels Tuesday was Rachel Treichler, a former Green Party candidate and an organizer of the 2003 Green Fest. Triechler has been spearheading this year's efforts and said they decided to be more ambitious with this summer's agenda after the positive reception they received four years ago.

This year's events begin at 6:30 p.m. Friday at The Community School of Music and Art, 330 E. State St. All events Saturday will be at Cayuta Sun, 2962 S. Swamp Road, and events Sunday will begin at 10 a.m. at the Bernie Milton Pavilion on The Commons.

The cost for Friday and Saturday is $35, including lunch and dinner Saturday. There is an added fee for camping.

With the schedule set and the sites coming together, now all the organizers have to do is figure out how to feed those 100-plus people. One menu item was easy for them to settle on, locally grown salad.

Lois Hilton's Earth Oven

2007-08-02T22:17:00.000-04:00

Lois Hilton (in orange), Elizabeth Thompson (holding child) and their fellow oven builders at last summer's Earth Oven Festival at Tickletown Trust & Trade in Humphrey, New York. Lois and Elizabeth are leading our Earth Oven Baking Workshop at Green Fest, Saturday, August 11 at 8:30 am.

Getting Around Downtown Ithaca

2007-08-02T22:06:00.000-04:00

Below is a map of downtown Ithaca showing the location of the Bernie Milton pavilion in the Ithaca Commons, the Community School at 330 East State St., and parking garages in the area. Click on the map to enlarge. Click here for driving directions to the Commons.

The Ithaca bus terminal is located in downtown Ithaca at the corner of W. State St. and N. Fulton St. (Route 13 South). It is six blocks walking east on State Street from the Ithaca Bus Station to the Ithaca Commons and nine blocks walking east on State Street (through the Commons, which is closed to vehicular traffic) to the Community School at 330 East State St. It is not possible to drive east on State St, because the street is one way the other way. Drivers should take Greene St. from the bus station to the Commons or the Community School.

Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT) buses service Ithaca and the surrounding areas. Routes 14 and 21 connect the Commons with the Ithaca bus terminal on the weekend. Click here for TCAT weekend service map.

Activists Share Sustainability Skills

2007-08-01T10:01:00.000-04:00

Activists from across the state will gather Aug 10-12 for a weekend sharing sustainability skills and visions at NY Green Fest. Workshops at locations in Ithaca and Cayutaville will address how to build a small wind turbine, bake in an earth oven, build a green roof, live off the grid, practice permaculture, live job free, build local food networks, practice liberation ecology, build new media outlets, and use third party politics to effect social change. Green Fest has been organized by an ad-hoc group to promote sustainability and is a benefit for the Green Party of New York. The festival is open to all who are interested in sustainable living and sustainable politics.

Exhibitors include VoxPop, the Climate Change Action Group of Central New York, Democracy School, Farm Sanctuary, SOA Watch, Cures not Wars, the Citizens Environmental Coalition, Eco Books, the Shopping Bag Action group, Sustainable Tompkins, Community Energy, Indigo Summer, MyshellaZ Art, Joey Gates henna body art, a veggie car and a small wind turbine. Musicians include the Native Earthling Band playing on their solar-powered stage, Deborah Magone, Dan Hill, the Peacesmiths and Burnin' Hearts.

The weekend offers many opportunities for sharing visions of sustainability.

Green Fest begins Friday evening, August 10, with a program on the politics of sustainability at the Community School auditorium, 330 E. State St., Ithaca from 6:30 to 9:30 pm. Three speakers will address the power relationships that promote sustainability. Art Weaver from Renovus Energy in Ithaca, will speak on social change and its connection to renewable energy, Virginia Rasmussen from Alfred, a founder of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, will speak on the politics of sustainability, and Dan Hill, the Cayuga Nation representative to the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, will speak on sustainability for the long term. Dan will open and close the program with native flute music.

Saturday’s programs take place at Cayuta Sun, an off-the-grid permaculture homestead at 2962 Swamp Rd. in Cayutaville, 15 miles southwest of Ithaca. The workshops begin at 8:30 am with a bread baking workshop in the earth oven at Cayuta Sun lead by Lois Hilton from Tickletown Trust & Trade in Humphrey. Lois will also join Saturday’s panel on building a local food network, along with Matthew Glenn from Muddy Fingers Farm in Hector, editor of Southern Tier Farm to You Local Food Directory, Gwen Quigley from Keuka Cookin’ in Bath, Josh Dolan from EcoCity Ithaca and Michele Danels from East New York Farms in Brooklyn.

Living job free living and minimizing the need for money with ecological frugality and resourcefulness will be presented by Ed Haffmans and JoAnn Myers from the Catskills. A permaculture workshop will be conducted by Michael Burns and Steve Gabriel from the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute. Grassroots organizing for sustainability is the topic discussed by Gay Nicholson from Sustainable Tompkins, Mike Sellars, Mayor of Cobleskill, from Sustainable Cobleskill, and Tony and Mary Lipnicki, the founders of a monthly discussion group in Andover, NY. Two off-grid pioneers, Steve Nicholson from Ithaca and Tony Moretti from Hammondsport will offer advice on living off-the-grid.

How to build a small wind turbine will be demonstrated Saturday afternoon by Barry Miller, a mechanical engineer from Hinsdale, New York. Barry has spent 20 years in the wind energy business. For nine years he operated a wind farm in Altamont Pass west of San Franciso. Four media activists, Sander Hicks from Brooklyn, Carl Lawrence from Brooklyn, Bill Huston from Binghamton and Deborah Magone from Rochester will discuss getting media access for alternative viewpoints. Carl, Bill and Deborah produce cable access television programs. Sander is editor, publisher and reporter of New York Megaphone, the founder of Soft Skull Press and the proprietor of Vox Pop bookstore.

Saturday evening Rafter Sass will present ideas for a Liberation Ecology. His topic is refusing to choose between social justice and sustainability. Rafter lives and works at the Germantown Community Farm, a collectively-run community food security project in the Hudson River Valley.

A Cob for Kids workshop will run throughout the day on Saturday. Lunch and dinner including local foods will be served on Saturday. Sunrise yoga at 7:00 am with Ann Eagan from Sunnyside, Queens begins the day. Deborah Magone will perform gutsy blues at 1:00 pm. The Native Earthling Band will perform from 4:30 to 6:00 pm, and Burnin' Hearts will perform in the evening.

On Sunday, August 12, Green Fest moves to the Ithaca Commons in downtown Ithaca with a series of speakers and musicians at the Bernie Milton Pavilion in the center of the Commons. Lexie Hain from Motherplants will show how to make a green roof. Ilonka Wloch, the editor of Positive News in Ithaca, Craig Seeman from Third Planet Video in Brooklyn, and Cyril Mychalejko from Upside Down World in Vermont will discuss building new media outlets that address sustainability issues. Helene Williams, Susan Blake and Leonard Lehrman from Peacesmiths will perform political songs.

Using third party electoral activism to foster social change and challenge the underpinnings of corporate power will be discussed by Howie Hawkins, SKCM Curry, Tony Gronowicz and Jason Nabewaniec. Howie was the 2006 Green Party candidate for US Senate from New York and is a current candidate for Syracuse Common Council. Tony Gronowicz, the 2005 Green Party candidate for Mayor of New York City, teaches at the City University of New York. His most recent book is Grand Illusion: American Democracy from its Roots to the Present. Jason Nabewaniec from Batavia is a Co-Chair of the Green Party US. Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry from Los Angeles is a Green Party candidate for Vice President of the US.

Sunday’s program concludes with a discussion of campus organizing for sustainability led by Ethan Rainwater, Sustainability Intern at Cornell University, Peter LaVenia from the Albany University Campus Greens, and Krista Carlson, a student at Alfred University.

$35 admission for Friday and Saturday, includes Saturday lunch and dinner, Sunday free. Camping available for an additional charge. Green Fest is a benefit for the Green Party of New York. For a detailed schedule, directions, registration forms and more information, visit http://nygreenfest.blogspot.com or call 607-569-2114.

Art Weaver on Social Change and Its Connection to Renewable Energy

2007-07-30T10:47:00.000-04:00

Art Weaver will open Green Fest on Friday evening, Aug. 10 with a talk on Social Change and Its Connection to Renewable Energy. Art is a founder of Renovus Energy, a renewable energy systems design-build firm based in Ithaca. The Renovus Energy building, shown below, is the first zero-energy commercial building in Ithaca. The building produces and exports more energy to the utility grid than it consumes in its day-to-day operation including the energy used by its radiant floor heating system. Passive solar design and superinsulation in conjuction with active solar technologies - a 10kW photovoltaic system on the roof make this possible.

Michele Danels from East New York Farms

2007-07-30T10:02:00.000-04:00

Michele Danels, a farmer in the Hands and Hearts Garden, a project of East New York Farms in Brooklyn, is a panelist on building a local food network at Green Fest on Saturday at Cayuta Sun. Articles about East New York Farms recently appeared in Plenty Magazine and the Nation. Below, a young farmer sells at the East New York Farm Market.

Native Earthling Band on their Solar Stage

2007-07-28T16:07:00.000-04:00

Native Earthling Band, Crow Weaver, Paul Kimball and Frank Giambrone, will perform at Green Fest on Saturday, Aug. 11 from 4:15 to 6:00 pm, with a break for an Old Growth Award Ceremony at 5:15. Below is a photo of the band performing on their solar stage.

Cayuta Sun Work Parties, Aug. 2, 3, 4

2007-07-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

Our next work parties at the Cayuta Sun Festival site will be Aug. 2, 3, and 4. It would be great to have your help:
1. Clearing campsites
2. Making signs
3. Collecting firewood for the bread oven and campfire
If you can help, call Michael at 607-227-0316. Much of the work on the compost toilet building has been completed. Below are Bob Nape, Bill Rogers and Michael Burns after they finished putting the roof on the building today.

Green Fest Media Release

2007-07-18T09:27:00.000-04:00

For Immediate Release: July 18, 2007

Build A Small Wind Turbine, Local Food Networks and Liberation Ecology at NY Green Fest, Aug. 10-12, Ithaca and Cayutaville

July 18, 2007. NY Green Fest, a festival of sustainability with programs and exhibitors on how to build a small wind turbine, bake in an earth oven, practice liberation ecology, live off the grid, build local food networks and much more will take place Fri.-Sun., Aug. 10-12 in Ithaca and Cayutaville. The weekend festival has been organized by an ad-hoc group interested in promoting sustainability. The festival is a benefit for the Green Party of New York and is open to all who are interested in sustainable living and sustainable politics.

NY Green Fest kicks off Friday evening, August 10, with a program on the politics of sustainability at the Community School auditorium, 330 E. State St., Ithaca from 6:30 to 9:00 pm. The speakers are Art Weaver from Renovus Energy in Ithaca who will speak on social change and its connection to renewable energy, Virginia Rasmussen, a founder of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy from Alfred, who will speak on the politics of sustainability, and Dan Hill, the Cayuga Nation representative to the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, who will speak on sustainability for the long term.

Saturday’s programs take place at Cayuta Sun, an off-the-grid permaculture homestead in Cayutaville, 15 miles southwest of Ithaca. Saturday starts with a bread baking workshop in the earth oven at Cayuta Sun lead by Lois Hilton from Tickletown Trust & Trade in Humphrey, New York. Lois will also participate in Saturday’s panel on building a local food network, along with Matthew Glenn from Muddy Fingers Farm in Hector, editor of Southern Tier Farm to You Local Food Directory and Gwen Quigley from Keuka Cookin’ in Bath.

Michael Burns and Steve Gabriel from the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute will lead an introduction to permaculture workshop. A discussion on grass roots organizing for sustainability will be lead by Gay Nicholson who has led Sustainable Tompkins since 2003, Mike Sellars, the Mayor of Cobleskill and a founder of Sustainable Cobleskill, and Tony and Mary Lipnicki, the founders of a monthly discussion group on sustainability issues in Andover, NY. Two off-grid pioneers, Steve Nicholson from Ithaca and Tony Moretti from Hammondsport will offer advice on living off-the-grid.

Saturday afternoon Barry Miller from Hinsdale, New York will show how to build a small wind turbine. Barry is a mechanical engineer and has spent 20 years in the wind energy business. For nine years he operated a wind farm in Altamont Pass west of San Franciso. Barry recently taught a class at Olean BOCES on how to build your own small wind turbine. Three experienced cable access TV producers will discuss getting media access for alternative viewpoints, Bill Huston from Binghamton, Carl Lawrence from Brooklyn and Deborah Magone from Greece, NY.

Rafter Sass will speak Saturday evening on Liberation Ecology: Refusing to Choose between Social Justice and Sustainability. Rafter lives and works at the Germantown Community Farm, a collectively-run community food security project in the Hudson River Valley.

A Cob for Kids workshop will run throughout the day on Saturday. Lunch and dinner prepared from local foods will be served on Saturday. Sunrise yoga begins the day. Exhibitors on Saturday include renewable energy suppliers, booksellers, farmers with local produce, local craftspeople, grassroots organizations and non-profit groups.

On Sunday, August 12, Green Fest moves to the Ithaca Commons with a series of speakers and musicians at the Bernie Milton Pavilion in the center of the Commons. Peacesmiths from New York City will perform political songs. Lexie Hain from Motherplants will show how to make a green roof. Ilonka Wloch, the editor of Positive News in Ithaca, Craig Seeman from Third Planet Video in Brooklyn, and Cyril Mychalejko from Upside Down World in Vermont will discuss building new media outlets that address sustainability issues.

Howie Hawkins, SKCM Curry, Tony Gronowicz, and Jason Nabewaniec will discuss how third party electoral activism is essential in fostering social change and challenging the underpinnings of corporate power. Howie was the 2006 Green Party candidate for US Senate from New York and a current candidate for Syracuse Common Council. Tony Gronowicz, the 2005 Green Party candidate for Mayor of New York City, teaches at the City University of New York. His most recent book is Grand Illusion: American Democracy from its Roots to the Present. Jason Nabewaniec from Batavia is a Co-Chair of the Green Party US. Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry from Los Angeles is a Green Party candidate for Vice President of the US.

Sunday’s program concludes with a discussion on campus organizing for sustainability led by Peter LaVenia from the Albany University Campus Greens, and Krista Carlson from the Alfred University Campus Greens.

Exhibitors on Sunday include grassroots organizations, non-profit groups and renewable energy suppliers.

$35 admission for Friday and Saturday, includes Saturday lunch and dinner, Sunday free. Camping available for an additional charge. Green Fest is a benefit for the Green Party of New York. No fees for those who help during the festival or in advance. For a detailed schedule, directions, registration forms and more information, visit nygreenfest.blogspot.com or call 607-569-2114.

Many Busy People at Cayuta Sun

2007-07-15T15:49:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to all the people who have been helping prepare the Cayuta Sun site for Green Fest. They have cleared trails and campsites and are building a beautiful compost toilet. Steve Gabriel and Niall Fahmy are shown below.

Earth Oven Bread Baking Workshop

2007-07-13T14:46:00.001-04:00

Lois Hilton from Tickletown Trust & Trade in Humphrey, New York and Elizabeth Thompson from Allegany, NY, will conduct a bread baking workshop in the earth oven at Cayuta Sun on Sat., Aug. 11. The workshop will begin at 8:30 am. Lois hosted a workshop on building an earth oven at Tickletown in September 2006. Loaves in the earth oven at Cayuta Sun are shown below.

New York Green Fest Blog

David Korten's Keynote Presentation Now Online

Video of Protest Songs Concert by Helene Williams and Leonard Lehrman

Darin Robbins' Presentation on Courting the Anarchist Vote

Videos of the Presentations

Media Coverage

It is not enough to just say no— What's the alternative?

Green Party Nat'l Meeting in Alfred, NY, Aug. 5-7

Building A State-wide Mass Movement to Criminalize Corporate+Government Hydrofracking

Top Green Theorists Offer Political Workshops at Green Fest

Woven Green to Open Friday Plenary

Share a Ride to Green Fest

Hydrofracking Activists Join Green Party Gathering

Building Local Economies, Fri., Aug. 5, 6:45 pm — 8:45 pm

Local Sovereignty over Fossil Fuel Extraction, Sat., Aug. 6, 1:15 pm - 2:30 pm

Campaigning for Local Economies and Clean Energ, Sat., Aug. 6, 6:45 pm — 8:45 pm

The Future of Sustainable Politics, Sun., Aug. 7, 11:15 am — 12:45 pm

Ecology Workshops

Energy Workshops

Media Workshops

Political Workshops

Draft Green Fest Schedule

Swimming Available at Foster Lake

Registration Now Open for 2011

ANM Comes to Green Fest

Green Fest 2011 in Alfred, NY, Aug. 5-7, 2011

Green Fest Panel on WNED

We Demand Transparency, NYC Sept. 12-13

What Do We Face?

The Importance of Theory in Independent Progressive Politics

Green Fest Clips Posted

Doubts in the Midst of Greens

Miner Climate Change Presentation Slides

Bancroft Empire to Earth Community Presentation

Maria Kuriloff Film Clip

Green Fest Livestreamed

Schedule

Fri., Aug. 7, 10:00 am, Registration Opens

Fri., Aug. 7, 12:00 noon, Exhibits Open

Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm, Workshop Session 1

Fri., Aug. 7, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Workshop Session 2

Fri., Aug. 7, 4:15 pm — 5:15 pM, Recreation

Fri., Aug. 7, 5:30 - 6:30, Dinner

Fri., Aug. 7, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 1

Sat., Aug. 8, 2009

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:00 am - 9:00 am, Showers available

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:30 am - 8:30 am, Breakfast

Sat., Aug. 8, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 3

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:45 am — Exhibits Open

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:45 am — 11:00 am, Forum 2

Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 pm, Workshop Session 4

Sat., Aug. 8, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm, Lunch

Sat., Aug. 8, 1:45 pm - 2:45pm, Workshop Session 5

Sat., Aug. 8, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Workshop Session 6

Sat.,Aug. 8, 4:15 pm — 5:15 pm, recreation

Sat., Aug. 8, 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Dinner

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 3

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:00 pm — 11:00 pm, dancing

Sun., Aug. 9, 2009

Sun., Aug. 9, 7:00 am - 9:00 am, Showers available

Sun., Aug. 9, 7:30 am - 8:30 am, Breakfast

Sun., Aug. 9, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 7

Sun., Aug. 9, 9:45 am — Exhibits Open

Sun., Aug. 9, 9:45 am — 11:15 am, Forum 4

Sun., Aug. 9, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm, Workshop Session 8

Sun., Aug. 9, 12:30 pm — 1:30 pm, Lunch

Sun., Aug. 9, 1:45 pm — 3:30 pm, Forum 5

Sun., August 9, 3:30 pm, Adjourn

Sander Hicks and DJ Green Arrow on 9/11 Truth

Gas Drilling Presentations

Fri., Aug. 7, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm, Workshop Session 1

Fri., Aug. 7, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 1

Sat., Aug. 8, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 3

Sat., Aug. 8, 9:45 am — 11:00 am, Forum 2

Sat., Aug. 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 am, Workshop Session 4

Sat., Aug. 8, 1:45 pm - 2:45pm, Workshop Session 5

Sat., Aug. 8, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Workshop Session 6

Sat., Aug. 8, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Forum 3

Sun., Aug. 9, 8:30 am - 9:30 am, Workshop Session 7

Sun., Aug. 9, 9:45 am — 11:15 am, Forum 4