(I'm trying to publish this in Do It Green! Minnesota)
Whether canoeing on the lake or using the hot tub on the top floor of the cabin, residents relaxing at Rainbow Lake Cabin are still productive. It’s one of only a few green-certified homes in northern Wisconsin, producing much of its own power with 500 Watt solar shingles.
When ingenuity and a commitment to using recycled and on-site materials combine, you get grant-winning architecture like this cabin by the Minneapolis-based Archithesis firm. By developing land in rural Wisconsin, the firm got a rebate on its flexible photovoltaic shingles through the state’s Focus On Energy program, participating in the national One Million Solar Roofs project. The cabin is a candidate for the cap and trade program proposed under the Wisconsin Safe Climate Act. The state is now 5th in the nation in commitments to energy efficency, according to a study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
We can learn a lot from Wisconsin. Just visiting for a weekend at an affordable green cabin can teach the virtues of resourceful, on-site construction, like with Rainbow Lake Cabin’s native oak floors and stone foundation and redwood trim recycled from Napa Valley wine tanks.
The small and wild Rainbow Lake fills the view from the second-story living room’s expansive south-facing windows at tree-house-level. The slate floor on the ground level is warm in the morning, radiating the heat stored in the large thermal mass below the building, which also gives off autumn’s heat throughout the winter. This radiant slab utilizes cheap off-peak energy in the night to circulate hot water from the boiler throughout pipes in the ground floor. With the wood stove and vertical ventilation along the vintage spiral staircase, it’s easy to heat and cool the home without electricity, even if that’s not what you’re used to.
The green revolution can extend to every part of modern life, including Minnesotans’ hobby of getting away from it all “up north.” Vacationers who don’t want to “rough it” can still comfortably experience wild prairie and lake habitats without being rough on the environment. Architect Jim Widder thinks that this is part of America’s sustainability revolution: living in balance with nature—even in vacation homes with wireless Internet access.
The fourth annual Expressions of the Feminine Psyche exhibit opened this May 2 with food, music, and many friends of the artists. It's open until June 30, 2009.
At the Van Brabson Gallery in Minneapolis, a nondescript, gray, square building set back from the road, a celebration of spring and Mother Earth inside enlivened the white rooms full of framed photography, glittering cases of jewelry, and impressive oil paintings. Visitors were greeted by Bonnie Brabson's dark abstracts, and welcomed to scribble their thoughts in the guestbook next to handmade cards and mixed media art by Pam Cox. According to the gallery owner, who video taped the reception to show her mom on Mother's Day, anything that women artists thought of in relation to 'the feminine psyche' could become that theme. The feminine mystique is shifting and broad, and could include anything as its art-- even her video of crowds mingling and browsing the artwork. Beneath a row of Untitleds, Marcia Soderman-Olson's strong, abstract oils with their energetic centers, Marcia and a couple of her fellow exhibited artists chatted and snacked. Her paintings' blue-green to black strokes seem to structure colored business within-- or, perhaps, frame the scraped color strokes of attempted paintings past, beneath them. Perhaps they are the structures of the present scratched away in their construction to reveal layers of past adventures, each color a layer. Lines where thumbnails had lifted up fresh paint from the middle of broad strokes made the audience conscious of their creation. On an adjacent wall, Corean Komarec's clear, realistic photos provided contrast and focus for the show. Nature, balance, and representations of women in sculpture were the themes of her prints, reminding people that the feminine in art is everywhere; it is a major part of perceptions of beauty. Besides Komarec's prints and Cox's cute cards for sale, Dragon Treasures bracelets and necklaces by Kelly Frampton, worth hundreds of dollars, are for sale at the gallery. Her materials are found and recycled treasures as well as semiprecious stones, which charmed the gallery space from each display case. Frampton spent enough time with each piece to describe the sort of energy boost coming from her jewelry's different sets of stones. From malachite to bloodstone, the whole variety had been cleansed by the four elements in the process of turning found parts into art.
Nancy Schwartz, with paint left over from home projects, created abstract portraits in her series, A Woman Becoming. Her paintings use balance, subdued colors full of the textures of many days of experiments: scraping, thinning, texturing, layering paint in representations of women with blurry faces that fill their frames. Everything about these works requires interpretation of colors, as shadows or flesh or clothes-- and then it seems to ask, 'Why do you think of me as that?' Everything requires sympathetic interpretation, and that's part of the feminine psyche.
What does it mean to vote 'Present?' It's got to be better for a Congressman to vote 'Present' than to ditch work, or to submit themselves as 'Not Voting' because of emotional attachment or other concerns. But isn't it better to take a stand on something than just to vote 'Present?' My representative in the U.S. House was faced with a Resolution about Israel and Palestine early this year, and he chose not to take a stand. On January 9, 390 Representatives passed this Congressional position saying that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks from the Gaza Strip-- implying that this ally should send rockets back at the impoverished, sanctioned people trapped in the Strip-- and Rep. Ellison from Minnesota merely said 'Present.' As the only Muslim in the House, why could he not say NO to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people for their religion, their ethnicity, and their claim to the land? Is our well-armed ally, Israel, really so threatened by bottle rockets from little reservations, shooting over the 20-foot wall that separates these peoples?
A young woman at my workplace shared her insight about Rep. Ellison, as one of his former Muslim Minneapolitan campaign workers. She and fellow ex-campaigners visited Ellison at his office in the Minneapolis Urban League, asking simple questions about policy towards Palestine-- he yelled at them in response and ended their meeting. According to this angry young woman, he yelled, "DON'T PUT WORDS IN MY MOUTH! DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO SAY!"
He's our representative in the government, and that's all we can hope to do.
I also hoped to visit Rep. Ellison at his local office, concerning funding for green jobs. Along with some very concerned constituents and both MoveOn.org & H.I.R.E. organizers, we filed into his office in February and gave our petition to a staff member. She heard us out, but the Representative was not 'present.'
Perhaps when the numbers of dead and displaced in Palestine match the numbers killed and displaced in Darfur by Sudan, Ellison will step forward. In the middle of April, Ellison was arrested for protesting for the first time-- outside the Sudanese embassy in D.C. He and four other Congressmen and women thought that genocide in Darfur was worth crossing a police line and paying a $100 fine for. According to WCCO: "I have never done this before and its not the kind of thing I plan on doing in the near future. But given the gravity of the situation, the massive numbers of people whose lives were at risk, I thought it necessary to take this action," said Ellison after his release.http://wcco.com/national/keith.ellison.arrested.2.995458.html
Published in the Twin Cities Daily Planet: http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/article/2009/05/24/urban-farming-needs-you.html
One day a fastidious gardener and homemaker noticed that his well-groomed shrubs on the boulevard were cut down. He noticed-- when the City of Minneapolis sent him a bill for trimming his shrubs on the boulevard outside his house, though they weren’t in the way of the sidewalk.
A pattern had emerged in the City’s visits to his property, where he poured his heart and soul into raised bed gardens, a greenhouse, and custom heating and cooling for optimum energy efficiency. When the Housing Inspector cited him for having a treated wood foundation for his house, sturdy but seldom employed in American homes, the City regarded it unstable just because it was different. When police ticketed him for the inoperable vehicle left in his neighbor’s driveway, they didn’t bother to correct their error following his complaints. Since he first put an anti-war sign up in his yard, the Housing Inspector routinely bothered him—perhaps that’s where it all began. Activism can put someone on the City’s bad side, even when he or she just wants to grow herbs and vegetables to support his or herself—for activism is often wound up with community gardening, and vice versa. The UrbanFarm in Southeast Como neighborhood has been a home for sage, spinach, collard greens, chives, and sustainable construction projects, as a dynamic community garden for the past ten years. Its resident farmer and food deliverer, Roger Peterson, now needs volunteers’ help more than ever. Organic farming in the city is drawing a lot of interest, but unless the City steps in, it can’t pay any interest—or fees or back-taxes, for that matter. This summer back-taxes are due, and though weekly fundraisers have brought people to UrbanFarm this spring, the garage sales and plant sales haven’t raised enough to save the farm. The City may send police to block Peterson from his house as it decides what to do with his property in the middle of a middle-income neighborhood full of young families. Who will step up to water the compost pile and weed the beds that span three back lawns, while Peterson is kept away? Who will continue the tradition of carrying buckets of fresh produce on a bike trailer around town, to donate to the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center and other charities? As Peterson appeals the property taxes, neighbors and volunteers will likely decide the fate of UrbanFarm, by meeting up at its monthly bonfire and open house this June.
They too can appeal to the City-- for example, for the gardens’ adoption into one of many new ‘green’ initiatives under the umbrella of Homegrown Minneapolis. As part of the Department of Health and Family Support, the initiative’s four subcommittees could provide for proposed projects like small enterprise urban agriculture, locally grown foods in schools, and backyard gardening learning opportunities for youth. They could even integrate these aims—as Peterson did over the years at UrbanFarm. It has been a place where neighborhood children and Dinkytown youth alike visit and help with the shoveling; where amateur musicians jam on Open House days and college students browse the numerous stacks of science books; where Peterson’s black Labradors greet new volunteers; where kindred spirits in the city meet each other and share produce they help to harvest. It still can be this way. The super-insulated structures’ solar panels, circulation system, underground water storage and thermal mass stood as examples of innovative architecture for neighbors interested in sustainable living. Peterson himself has been an example of humble activism with his actions, teaching others how to continue the routines at UrbanFarm.
Here's some fairly old news I wrote, to remind us all to wake up to our surroundings.
The Human Face on War
How will Minnesotans acknowledge Iraq war veterans? At every gathering that recognizes those coming back from the war, there is likely to be a mix of people that are grateful, concerned, and critical.
One grandmother retired from the Army Reserves, and came home to Minnesota and a grateful church and group of friends, a concerned family, and a public very critical of her work at Abu Ghraib prison. Readers from human rights groups like Tackling Torture at the Top and sympathetic peers with military experience alike heard what Deanna Germain had to say at her book reading.
On Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007, Army nurse and author Deanna Germain publicly read from her memoir, Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib, at McKawber's bookstore. The reading was hosted by St. Paul Public Libraries.
Deanna Germain served as an army nurse reservist in Abu Ghraib and Kuwait. Connie Lounsbury had approached Deanna about writing the book on her military service in the prison hospital, after she heard about it from Germain's sisters. Germain agreed to expand on the emails to her sisters that she'd written, hoping, as she said at her book reading, to “put a human face on war.” The proceeds of her memoir's sales go to the Fisher House Foundation. The national private-public foundation builds and keeps 'comfort homes' on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers, for family members to be close to a loved one in the military during hospitalization for an unexpected illness, disease, or injury.
She worked not in “the hard district” of the prison, but in a hospital, separated by an arm's length of razor-wire from about 4,000 detainees. Her patients came in from Fallujah and Ramadi and nearby villages. They were often injured in combat against US forces, according to Germain. Some prisoners didn't want to describe their injuries, perhaps because their past activities could have endangered their families if they had confessed them.
“I knew some detainees were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Germain said. She described the example of Sami, 15 years old, who was on a bus as “insurgents” blew it up-- and became one of her patients. “We tried to sort people, but it couldn't be done fast enough-- frustrating on all sides-- so a lot more ended up behind the wire,” she said, implying that there were a lot more there who shouldn't have been.
Reaching Past The Wire mostly details her relationships with coworkers, translators, and what she learned from the Iraqi prisoners and civilians she treated. The only section she read aloud atMcKawber's was about her daily discomforts and weekly inconveniences: wearing armor all the time, seeing rats crawl over her feet as she tried to make a phone call, and having a cell of the prison for a bedroom. “War is hell,” she read.
Before publishing their book, Germain and Lounsbury sent it to the Judge Advocate General, in case they wanted to look it over. The office gave no response.
The small, crowded bookstore was full of questioning listeners. Germain grimaced as audience members bluntly brought the question of the Abu Ghraib prisoner maltreatment scandals up, just as they had been brought up to her so many times before.
She said that she knew no one at “the hard site,” and could find out nothing about it. Germain said, “I found out about the instance of abuse from my sister who emailed me, who said, 'WHAT IS HAPPENING OVER THERE?'
“We were watching BBC and any channel we could get, to find some information.
When we did have the reporters people coming through, it was obvious to the patients. We could not tell any of the prisoners or detainees what was happening, but it was pretty obvious that life had pretty quickly changed in our hospital.”
After piecing together snippets of information from whatever television and Internet time thy could afford, Germain and her coworkers reacted to the prisoner abuse with uncertainty and anger. “I haven't known soldiers who would do things like that!” Germain told the audience. “We did a lot of self-evaluation: What are we doing here? If we can change one heart or mind, that'll be our goal.”
Germain wrote one short chapter about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, in the middle of her memoir: “When I came to Abu Ghraib, I realized that the soldiers here seemed of a different breed, a little independent of the whole, because we had to be, for survival...We just hoped the leaders would keep things in control....If I asked about anything outside the hospital or had questions about who else was in the camp and what they did, I got vague answers.”
She wrote of the possibility that the hospital distracted the International Red Cross, and other organizations that visited and checked on it, from torture interrogations not too far away: “I have wondered if the hospital where I served was set up as a response, a way to counterbalance it by providing better care for detainees.” This profound line of reason on page 79 was not revisited anywhere else in the book.
When asked about the conditions that prompted and allowed prisoner abuse, Germain said, “When strong...leadership presence isn't there, that can happen.” She added that a lot of medics were 19 or 20 years old, on their first job, “and a lot of young people need supervision-- people to guide them. And they didn't have that.”
Germain enlisted when she was young, in 1970. She provided care for soldiers in Vietnam, and then in America, in the Individual Ready Reserve during Desert Storm. “Thirty days before my retirement, I was called into active duty,” she said. She was called to Abu Ghraib, outside of Fallujah, Iraq, to serve 540 more days in the army than she meant to.
Germain expressed little regret, however. “I think I'm much more aware of what service and sacrifice [are], than before I went on this mission... The next chapter: we're a very rich country; we need to share more with those who have less.”
After giving many copies of her book personal autographs, Germain expanded on this idea of a new chapter for the soldiers, whom she looks on not as fighters, but as protectors. She “joined to protect and serve.” When asked what the military protects, she said, “What we have.” When asked what “we have,” she took a moment.
“Democracy, safety-- I guess that's subjective now. I can't... sorry, it's not a complete thought.”
Germain didn't understand what was going on at Abu Ghraib until outside sources caught the scent of scandal and told her, just as we often don't understand what's going on in the next block down from us, until an outside perspective is brought to our attention. Like Germain, we can wake up to our surroundings-- but are not likely to understand the deeper themes that cause our present dilemmas, which are outside and above and obscured from the news of what's going on.
The other day, Minnesotans gathered outside Senator Amy Klobuchar's office demanding to meet with her, and influence her regarding the Gaza strip crisis. After they occupied a conference room at the State Capitol, Senator Klobuchar agreed to meet with them.
I will write, though it is a small influence to make on someone else who has a small influence in this matter. But we all can do this, we all can add our influence.
Dear Senator Klobuchar, Happy new year! I write so that you can add another humanitarian to the demographic of your constituency. Please also note that you can help change the US' arms deals with Israel in the Senate. This is very important as we in the US hear of more and more horrors that Israel commits against starving Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with jets and weapons imported from the US.
This week, a humanitarian relief ship called the Dignity was trying to bring international advocates and food to the Gaza Strip, when it was surrounded by the Israeli navy, rammed and damaged. Fortunately a journalist from CNN was on board.That's how I found out about it, and I hope you too will learn more, & meet with the Minnesotans outside your door who come to tell of horrible things happening in the Middle East. We CAN end our complicity in them!
Can you believe travesties of sickening proportions are happening now, are happening just as the patterns of history provide for, are happening just as prophesied and expected and yet they are not at all inevitable? Now, in our time, in our life, when we can do something about it and change it, or lose another part of our life stories to observation and complicity.
The Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are people without a country, without enough land, without internationally recognized leadership or legal power. They have few opportunities to make money, travel, to even get out of their fenced-in territories and into the country of Israel. At least in the Gaza Strip, they can access the sea. But today I woke to several real occurring, recurring nightmares of the Palestinians, happening in that world across the ocean and a sea from me, accessible only by pictures and letters and reports.
Now the people living in the Gaza Strip are running out of food, besides having been cut off from trade and all means of production.
Walled in, Bombed, Surrounded. I hardly imagined that things could get worse-- especially during and right after the holidays.
I hardly imagined that an American I care about would be in the center of this conflict's shifting storm, waking me up and making me care. (God, why do songs and celebrities pull me into the world's heartaches more than written pleas, documentaries, sermons or petitions?)
Ships and caravans and planes have headed to Gaza for many months with humanitarian relief. And today, the Dignity, a ship bearing humanitarians and journalists from many countries, was stopped on its relief mission to Gaza. Now I hear from the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the US Campaign to End the Occupation of Palestine, and a US Social Forum group that the Dignity was surrounded by Israeli warships at 5 am (US Time) today and rammed into, damaged and losing fuel. The Dignity carries journalists from Al Jazeera, CNN, doctors, and one humanitarian from the US, Cynthia McKinney, who had recently run for President as a Green. Israel wants no dignity or food to arrive at the Gaza Strip for the starving, poor, and displaced, but rather wants the Dignity to return to its launching point, Cyprus, though it doesn't have enough fuel to do so.
How did I get word of this so soon? I don't even know how word got around, but besides prayer, it is our main starting point. The main way that these battles can engage the world. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/30/gaza.aid.boat/index.html
