Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Where have I been? Where am I going?

Well, thesis work and the trip to New York have taken up a good deal of my time. I have a story to write up about my visit to Zucotti Park/Liberty Plaza, but in the meantime, I am rewriting my thesis proposal. What follows is what I hashed together yesterday. Ideally, this is more organic than what friends and my committee have read and more likely to be researched successfully. This is also iffy depending on how it may or may not fit in with complimentary projects.

Wish me luck as the semester tidies up. I have two events this weekend, two papers due at the end of net weekend, a shindig I'm putting together next Saturday, and a month-long stay in Lincoln when the semester ends. Whew. Good luck to everyone else dealing with end-of-semester madness.

Addition: If you haven't noticed, I guess I am a "twit" or something now that I tweet. You can find me @HaikuBaker, and I have the widget here on the blog.

...

I have an idea. It is a little crazy and somewhat silly, but I have it and I can't get it out of my head. My idea has to do with housing ourselves. In short, I argue that housing cooperatives—also known as cohousing—are a better way to shelter ourselves than our current dominant resources. The reasons are many, more than I will hear touch on, but they are enough to act creatively and a little strangely.

We are not adequately served by our current housing. By “we” I mean we graduate students at Northern Arizona University; abundant overworked people in Flagstaff, Arizona; the clever and resourceful—though increasingly broke—youth across the United States; the people who have been swindled by an unjust banking system; and a nation of people struggling to create the homes they want. This service is not strictly economical. This economic disenfranchisement arose with political marginalization. The two are interlinked: Insecurity of residence prevents a political, environmental, or interpersonal appreciation and understanding of place. Before people can engage with where they are, they require a security and connection to that place.

This is the problem: If our communities are to be sustainable, economically independent, or resilient (all related terms), then the people of that community must be able to stay and invest in those places. This provides us with a definition of community: A group of people set in a particular place over a period of overlapping time in secure ways. People constitute meaning; collaborative work of those people—in active, generally nonconscious ways—builds culture in the form of shared experience. This experience is a function of shared time and shared space; collective experience produces stories that constitute culture. Security in this sense means that community members have legitimate claim to this place and time and will be able to continue participating there.

Housing in Flagstaff—and more generally—is inadequate in various ways relating to this elementary extrapolation of community. First, the people of Flagstaff are prone to transience for three immediate reasons: access to affordable housing, access to gainful employment, and a resulting “culture” of impermanence. Cost is affected by an abundance of second homes that inflate property values which encourages higher than average renting; both of which are non-resident ownership which do not support longevity in staying. Employment and savings are limited by too few jobs, a lower than living wage standard, specialized skills amongst the well-paying businesses available, and little accessible capital to fund novel enterprises. These conditions produce a “culture” in a contradictory way: the exception are those who can stay and the stories that propagate suggest staying is out of reach. These stories are built on the experiences of those who are capable of staying—who act as witnesses to others' departures—and undermine an imaginary that staying is possible or likely. In this way, the “culture” of Flagstaff is based on an absence of culture, it is an unculture where building reflective, generative community is restricted if not denied.

My research is interested in clarifying a vision of housing that allows Flagstaff to develop a more generative culture. Clearly, this enterprise is unwieldy. I bring to this project my own experience (graduate student), my own expectation (staying in Flagstaff), and my own aspirations (cohousing). I recognize that I am party with many other conspirators interested in more responsive housing in Flagstaff. Others have worked at great length on housing. With that in mind, I define my focus: What is the vision for Flagstaff's housing amongst its organizers, planners, and activists specifically engaged with this question?

With this question, I want to learn 1) what has been done and what is underway, 2) what barriers have limited success, 3) what can be done to encourage success, and 4) what is the vision of these individuals. To learn these, I must network with existing movers-and-shakers to learn, and hopefully embed myself within, this network. This is the preliminary work of my research. Then, with these key figures, I am interested in hosting an “envisioning” session modeled on the work of the Transition Movement. This exercise creates an imaginative space for encountering a future Flagstaff in which these projects have come to fruition. Participants create useful fictions around people and places that they believe will benefit the community. For the Transition Movement, this is about building a vision toward resilience, an ecological term relating to an ecosystem's ability to bounce back from trauma. This exercise reveals narratives around a positive future state, an aspiration and potential route to achieving that state.

My own vision is part of this, but it is part of a larger landscape of ideas. Assuming that my own project moves forward, it can be informed by others' experience, deal with similar obstacles, for which I ought to be prepared (even if that means first modifying or playing with the rules, codes, and laws). In addition, this can inform the party of conspirators of one another, of difficulties experienced, and develop strategic responses. This constitutes a second phase of research in which we develop tactics for realizing these fictions.

A final phase is project-based. It is about taking these insights, strategies, connections, and other resources into a generative phase. At present, this is the most vague and speculative. It will be informed by the first two phases. I bring my own conceptualizing of cohousing in the form of Resident-Owned Green Urban Equitable Housing, or ROGUE Housing; but I recognize that if I cling too tightly to such a vision, it will restrict the potential outcomes of the research process. I have considered ROGUE Housing a model for cooperatives, but if it survives in some form, it may be about changing the field and providing resources for others' aspirations. In a deliberate and necessary way, I must leave behind my own expectations to research wisely.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Votes are not Found on Supermarket Shelves: My Occupy Statement

This is following reading Ethan Miller's "Occupy Connect Create," but also comes from research I did last fall for a paper on planning and community food security.

...

“First and foremost, ['the economy'] is a story. A story designed to stop politics, to shut down ethics, and to stifle our imaginations. 'The economy' is a way of thinking and experiencing the world in which our power and agency is robbed from us. In this story, the economy is portrayed as a massive, unified system, a thing that we’re inside of that is animated by specific 'laws' and 'logics.' It is for others to deal with, manage, or fix, and we are to simply follow their commands. We’ll vote in the next election for someone to tell us, after consulting with the experts, what we must sacrifice, change, or accept in order for the economy to get growing again. 'Democracy' is the name for all the minor tinkering we’re allowed to do inside the space in which this economy has us locked.”

- Ethan Miller, Occupy Connect Create



A few weeks ago, NAU's Philosophy in the Public Interest held a conversation on Occupy Wall Street. A comment was made--one often published in various forms by various people--that whatever occupiers are protesting against, whatever they are occupying for is something that we have all bought into, all participate in. From my socks and underwear, to my hat or school books, to my truck (for those who don't know, I have a truck) and my bicycles, my television and computer and Hulu and furniture andandand are all elements of my own participation in an economic system. This system is often referred to as "the economy" or The Economy. Everything that you put money into is a vote for something. This position is most apparent in the organic/sustainable/local/just/slow food movement, that you "vote three times a day" or "vote with your dollars."

I disagree.

Not only do I disagree, I heartily disagree.

A profound misunderstanding takes place when someone thinks that where their dollars go is the same as expressing support. My roommate is eating a dinner of Ramen noodles. Tim is an intelligent (and pretty healthy) young man. What he worries about is his wallet, his debt, and his upcoming expenses; he is more concerned with money than his health. Of course, he is not alone in this concern. I've met enough young people who would be happy to trade in all future packets of Ramen noodles for adequate whole grains, fresh fruits and veggies, hearty beans and nuts, (for some) rich cheese and yogurt, fresh eggs, and (some others) lean cuts of meat. The problem is not that these are unavailable on supermarket shelves--which is the case for those in "food deserts"--but that they are unaffordable.

Now, many of the recent food documentaries are happy to highlight that on a calorie-per-dollar ratio, Americans get a big bang for our buck. King Corn goes so far to interview the architect of this "abundance," Earl Butz. Unfortunately, these foods are like Ramen noodles in that they are cheap energy packed in with plenty of additives, especially salt and sweeteners, and devoid of nutrients. In short, when we eat this food product (a Michael Pollan term) we aren't getting what we are supposed to from food: vitamins, minerals, and micro-nutrients; community, connection, and gustatory satisfaction generally stay clear as well.

If we want a just and healthy food system, we can't start with a supermarket. Democratic change cannot be bought at Safeway and definitely isn't found on aisle 13 at Super Target. I can find cheaper baking soda at Target, but I won't find a participatory economy or politics in the cereal aisle. And you know what, I still don't care that General Mills has changed the shape of Hamburger Helper noodles and reduced packaging and therefore saved money on shipping to boot. That's greenwashing and worse, I think it is bull shit. These are company and institutions that have no interest in fostering a polis where your vote counts more than their dollars.

And while I'm on a tirade I'm not interested in another "wave of progressive politics." What I want is a serious political discourse that is based on the interests of an informed and invested populace. Yes we disagree and yes there are climate change deniers and yes there are far too many people in this country that think "the end is extremely fucking nigh," or putting a bullet in a doctor is sometimes okay, or think loving someone just might be worth complete and utter condemnation. Yes I am deathly concerned about those people and those positions. I have to hope that those are niches. What I'm really concerned with is that there are people in power who think it is a pretty good idea to drive most of this country head first into an environmental, economic, and political cesspool. I do mean an environmental and an economic and a political cesspool because the degradation of our supporting landscape goes hand in hand with the recreation of the Great Depression as well as the institution of an enriched political elite. And those "elites" aren't teaching in universities, working in publishing, or doing climate and ecological science.

Here's the constructive part: We aren't going to "buy" a new economy just like we aren't going to "buy" a different politics, we're going to dream and build and grow it. We're going to make it up out of the crazy creative power of being miners of the real, at excavating the future in every deliciously hardworking day of our lives. We will uncover more than we thought would ever be possible. We will see people organized in weird new constructive ways, new policies grown from strangely interconnected people that gets things going, we'll identify problems no one now alive has thought about and respond to them en masse. (I say "respond" because solutions and ignorance is for politicians, in the future none of us will be what we mean by politicians and all of us will be what we will mean by politicians).

There's more! We've got new stories to tell but they are all our stories! Our kids will wake up (that is, become enlightened) to this crazy open-ended world, a world where they want to work but no one is telling them "go get a job" because they are going to dream up livelihoods somehow hybridized between their dreams and the stories their elders will tell. Our children and our children's children will do the impossible. Every generation ought to make something made impossible by the previous. They will find rivers in the geologies of the future, burdening their banks with stories and creativity and generosity. And they will bring up earthen cups of it and we will drink and wonder why we stopped digging out the future and left it to our children. We will smile big wide old-people smiles and be glad that our children are beautiful, brilliant, healthy, adventuresome, and healthy people. They will be well and wealthy, wealthy in the world in ways too many have forgotten.

Those who want something new aren't after different politicians or fairer businesses or environmentally sensitive corporations or accurate news media. We don't need and I don't want pleasant versions of the same shit. It'll still be shit. We have been told the politicians and businesses and television personalities make the world. They don't make the world, at least not for much longer. We do. We the People make the World. We. The People. The World. These are capital realities.

The stories the People tell make the world. We are telling new stories and making new worlds out of them. Finally We are making up the worlds we want to live in. It may take some time for the politicians and the merchants and the priests/rabbis/clerics, the teachers, farmers, manufacturers, andandand the rest to catch up, to listen to the World--Our World--and to taste and smell the World, to touch it with our hands and it will touch us on our cheeks, lips, the smalls of our backs, the arches of our feet... We can't invest (either at the market or on Wall Street) in this world, we have to use our generative imaginative human capacities--building, growing, cultivating, fostering, narrating, cooperating, singing, playing, loving...--to make it and, after that, make it happen every day after.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Haiku & Time

Time is being especially elusive and peculiar. I am getting a better sense of who and where I was last year. My hard days come up and I wonder how I managed to survive last year. Everyone around me seems to feel safe enough to express how overwhelmed I was then. Strange, no one spoke up then--not loud enough, anyway--when I should have heard it. Every month is a little trying and I'm falling back on my folks more than I'd like. Life is a continuing experiment and I hope to learn a good deal from it.

Here is some data:

[10.16.2011]
The apple softens
& becomes vibrant amidst
its rot & decay.

Petrochemical
ghosts wafts & snag along
material paths.

Water runs like milk,
thick in the town's veins; tins &
bags aimlessly flutter.

[10.17.2011]
Leaves gather in our
pockets, our valleys, blessings
for the next season.

Drops of water play
rhythmically, tonally;
raining down music.

[10.18.2011]
Leaves whisper, sing their
sabbath hymnal, preparing
for Winter's repose.

Walnuts have fallen
secreted in soil & stone;
hungry, but patient.

A blanket of earth
& sawdust to warm & calm
fierce detritivores.

Shadows wake in trees,
descend & swoop, become form
in one seamless breath.

Green irridescent
fly visits, but is mute to
my ignorant ears.

A practice stirs in
autumnal sunshine, once half-
forgot, remembered.

[10.20.2011 (?)]
A soft pressure weighs
on eyelids, bones, fingertips;
forms pressed into sand.

Sunshine play on me,
with an intoxicating
syrupy sweetness.

Leaves crackle under-
foot, each a small spectacle
of fiery grace.

[10.21.2011]
Honey-colored leaves
patter one another, &
play briefly in flight.

The ground rumbles with
the weight of burdened beasts
wheeling on worn tracks.

[10.23.2011]

Iron turned blood-red,
share an odd kinship with these
hands: worn & wounded.

[11.1.2011, on Stuart Kauffman]
Kingdoms of hybrids
intermarriage makes strength from
strange, diverse richness.

A memory of
home echoes in genes; forgot
but now remembered.

Dionysus &
Apollo play discordant
songs in flute & lyre.

Breath traces a wing,
one of innumerable
improbable forms.

A voice in forum:
raised as chitter, growl, twitter,
chirp; a leaf rustles.

Revolution, names
—Kepler, Darwin, Haraway—
unhinge & refocus.

Multitudes abound
(animals, plants, fungi, cells)
from simplicity.

[11.2.2011]
Distant snow falls; I
hear echoes of the silent,
numerous descents.