Category Archives: Community/Interconnectedness

Today walking up sleety, icy College Avenue, I saw an older woman coming in the opposite direction slip and fall maybe 20 feet from me.

“Are you okay?” I asked as we walked closer together.

She brushed off her pants. “Some of these people,” she said, her voice trailing off. She looked behind her to the spot where she’d fallen—right in front of a church.

I nodded in sympathy, then showed off my YakTrax. Still smarting, still angry, she was not impressed. That she could buy something that would allow her NOT to be victimized by poorly maintained sidewalks wasn’t appealing; she wanted some one to pay!

Mentally acknowledging her anger—heh, such homeowner neglect makes me furious, too—I shifted gears: “Do you live in this neighborhood?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Then why don’t you call 311 and complain? You can tell the operator what happened to you. And give the exact address.”

She smiled.

I have a feeling she’ll call.

Today, walking down a slushy, snowy, side street, I walked past a guy in his car trying to get out of his driveway. But he was stuck. What did he do? He kept gunning his engine—literally, spinning his wheels. And even though it was obvious that his just-overpower-the-problem approach was not working, he continued to push his foot on the accelerator. Like maybe something magic would happen the two-hundred-twelfth time he tried it that hadn’t happened before?

Where does such stubborn inability to accept the obvious come from? My guess is that guy—middle-aged, white, flabby—doesn’t  have much experience with problem-solving without some machine being involved. Something comes up, something needs to be fixed or changed, he uses a computer, grabs a power tool. And, I’m also guessing, that means of problem-solving works for him so much of the time, the idea that he should give up on the mighty power of his car engine and do something low-tech like shoveling or throwing sand under his tires simply doesn’t occur to him.

Or maybe he just loves the smell of burning rubber.

So,  a housebound friend, in between reading good books today, has been listening to the news. She reports that because of the unrest in Egypt et al, oil supplies might be compromised and global markets are already reacting, shall we say skittishly?

“I’m telling you this because I know you’re interested in peak oil,” she told me.

This is NOT the scenario the “We must prepare for the end of cheap oil!” Cassandras have envisioned (Big surprise.).

Given the potential scariness, here, let me offer a prayer: Should, indeed, the violent unrest in so much of the Mideast seriously disrupt oil production and supply, let this momentous moment be a teaching moment for this planet. A dress rehearsal without bloodshed.

Oh. And this: May this moment, when a resource we have so heavily relied upon may be at risk for God knows how long, allow us to think deeply about all the resources we have been blessed with. To think long and hard about, as Buckminster Fuller enjoined us, how “to do more with less.” Let us look at the ways we squander resources. And, yes, certainly, may war-waging be the first thing we look at.

So today I was invited on a tour of possible locations for  T stations when the extension to the existing Green Line subway comes through Somerville. What an enormous project! Standing on a couple of different bridges spanning the existing commuter rail lines—the light rail subway will eventually run alongside these tracks—everything covered with a couple of feet of snow, the enormity of the project, the complexity of meeting the needs of so many different and worthwhile groups and concerns seemed overwhelming.

I was there because, as a member of Somerville Climate Action, I’m supposed to raise the “What about. . . ?” questions re sustainability, open space, permeability, planning from a permaculture point of view. (Other partners on this ambitious Green Line Extension project include, for example, Somerville anti-poverty agencies who are looking at issues like gentrification: what happens to existing, low-income neighborhoods when, ohmygod, suddenly they become enormously attractive due to easy access to public transportation?)

Frankly, before this tour, I honestly didn’t think I knew enough to be able to put my 2 cents in. But I am slowly being schooled to think of systems, of patterns, of visioning what the world’s going to be like when we can’t simply hop into our cars anymore. I’m slowly thinking about linkage and neighborhoods and, this is my favorite, about the fact that this planning needs to take into consideration living things besides ourselves.

For example: Here’s this densely populated city, 79% paved over, and, from its earliest, earliest days, a city swayed by the needs of developers and business owners. (Translation: almost NO open space.)  But, as I recently learned, Somerville has a secret wilderness! It’s the neglected, no-man’s land alongside the two commuter rail lines running through our fair city. All kinds of wildlife live there.

So, on our tour, I mentioned that. In fact, I couldn’t shut up! I talked about construction along those tracks not happening when birds are nesting (Oy. ) And, mindful that post-cheap-oil, we need to be rethinking transportation BIG TIME,  I reminded my tour-mates that, indeed, a river does run through Somerville: the Mystic River. Why aren’t we also thinking about linkage with a really, really easy way to get from Somerville to downtown Boston? By boat! (Frankly, I think my ritual of reading a Dickens novel every winter is really helping me vision. There’s nothing like early 19th century England-—including industrialized, coal-burning, nightmarish London—to clarify the mind.)

As I sit here, I realize  there was so much more I could have been wondering aloud about: like where will the energy for these shiny new subway trains come from? Nuclear power? Coal?

“Hose that woman down,” my tour mates probably thought from time to time. (It’s been said before.) And I wouldn’t blame them.

But I am also deeply committed to the concept of synergy. So although I am way too effusive and mouthy, sometimes, I’m going to trust that the energy I’m bringing to a laudable project like this Green Line extension is easily matched by other passionate folks and that, together, we’re going to create something freakin’ awesome!

Like every other writer in America this week, I have something to say about Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Well, to be precise, I have something to say about Chua and about Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece re “America’s Top Parent” in this week’s New Yorker. It’s not Chua’s stringent, some say abusive parenting  Kolbert first discusses. No. The New Yorker writer is worried that “Western mothers” just might be aiding and abetting our nation’s decline, pointing to international test scores as an alarming indicator that our self-esteem-focused child-rearing means our kids are being “out-educated.” (That’s Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education’s, characterization.)

No matter what their ethnicity, parents’ responsibility, I think, is to imagine the sort of world their children will be living in and to prepare their children, as best they can, to survive in that future. A wise parent these days, then, needs to spend some time wondering: what traits, what skills will my children need to thrive in the post-cheap-energy world they’re inheriting—poor darlings.

So I would advise Ms. Chua, who insisted her daughters receive only As in everything except gym and drama, to rethink that position. For the brave, new world her children will inhabit will rely heavily on collaboration and community-building and, no doubt, physical strength—skills taught in gym and drama. After a strenuous day of lifting and carrying and shlepping, of working in a garden, perhaps, or working with neighbors on some project, maybe knowing how to work as a team and Tiger Balm will be more to the point than test scores?

[*The heat of today’s post]

Waiting for my tenant to respond re the Mass Save Home Energy Assessment. Meanwhile, will continue to bang the drum re gun control. Check out this link to Mayors Against Illegal Guns re a fascinating poll. Seems our fellow Americans are more in favor of gun control than you or I might have imagined.

This afternoon I joined my friend Lynne  at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall for A Day of Service and Celebration in Honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d thought I’d gone so as to spend some time with Lynne—whose wise counsel re writing is always helpful—and because Nikki Giovanni was to be the keynote speaker.  But when I teared up singing “Lift Every Voice,” I realized, “Patricia, you’ve been hungering and thirsting after this kind of righteousness.”

So, yes, it was teary afternoon, a powerful afternoon: seeing and listening to those beautiful, talented young people of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. Nikki Giovanni’s passionate and wry enlargement of the Rosa Parks story.  Listening to Dr. King’s words read aloud. And how wonderful to hear the crowd roar when Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland, MA’s first African American Chief Justice—and one of the readers—was introduced!

AND, if that weren’t enough, I had a personal satori, as Lynne would say: A couple of days ago another Friend/friend who’s interested in leadings, asked me: “Civil rights, the criminal justice system and climate change? How do those fit together?”

My answer was something about being open to Spirit and believing that working on climate change was what was being asked of me right now. (And, oh, yeah, while keepin’ on keepin’ on re criminal justice, too.)

But, hey, what did MLK have to say about interconnectedness, huh? That concept that’s so much at the heart of the climate change movement? Dr. King said this from the Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

So that’s why the Transition Towns movement/permaculture/working on global warming issues so powerfully speaks to me, huh?

Nice to know.

. . . and it’s the middle of the winter and all you want to do is get warm, who has time to research the best deal? (Twice, today, I happened to be with people in that dire situation.) So maybe that’s what I’ll do? Starting tomorrow?

So, yes, the blizzard did hit and, lo, we lost power from about 6 until 9:30 am. Since we’d been out late last night—to see “Ruined,” a brutal yet redemptive play at the Huntington—it was very easy to simply curl up next to the warm body sharing my bed (Yes. Yesterday’s blog re body heat was on my mind) and go back to sleep. Eventually, however, the wonder of the hushed, whitened world outside drew me out of bed around nine.

First challenge: How to make coffee. Happily, I discovered that I could light the hi-tech gas stove with a match. Arright! I even remembered, sleepy as I was, to add extra water to the pot so that when I heated it for coffee I was also heating the kitchen.  Slightly.

In those first few minutes of being awake, fortified by coffee and in my warmest robe, pajamas, socks and slippers, I thought: “Well, this isn’t so bad.” But with no cars on School Street, no refrigerator noise, no rattling radiators, no children walking by on their way to school; in utter, utter quiet, I could actually hear this old house start to gently creak. It was cooling down.

That’s when it hit me: This could really, really suck.

I’m not going to claim that in those, literally, chilling minutes before the power came back on and the radiators began cheerfully clunking again that I had an entire mind-meld/totally empathetic Ah HA understanding of what it feels like to be poor and cold and helpless.

But I was pretty close.

An old New England expression, buttonin’ up means preparing for winter: Putting up the storms, stacking the fire wood close to the house, checking food supplies, candles, lanterns, etc. Another winter storm approaching, I find myself caulking a few more windows and—locating my seldom-used cross-country skis. Yup. This storm, I’m gonna do a little skiin’.

I grew up skiing, or so it seems, old-style skiing, “baggy knees skiing.” When the sport got way too chichi for old-style me, I quit. But was delighted in the early 70s to discover cross-country skiing. Definitely a good fit.

So tomorrow I’ll be generating another form of heat as I glide over snowy sidewalks for a spell (I’m still not used to that dull thud when my ski poles hit asphalt or concrete.). I’ll be buttonin’ up my body to go outside, then, after a few vigorous, cardiovascular minutes, unzipping my jacket, removing my scarf.

Sunday night, when the group of people I was with visited the JP Green House, we collectively caused the temperature of that super-insulated home to go up 2 degrees.

Body heat. Hmm.

Today’s Boston Globe had a disturbing article in the business section: Evergreen Solar, a local biz, “has struggled against aggressive competition in China, a poor economy, and increasingly lackluster government support for the country’s solar industry.”

This is, of course, outrageous.

And worthy of a mini-rant. Are you ready? Here goes:

[Historical reference: In the sixties and seventies, many a rant began: “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t . . . ]

We can spend billions of dollars on war but we can’t support subsidize companies like Evergreen? (China, on the other hand has “ramped up manufacturing, using massive government subsidies to produce the world’s cheapest solar panels.”)

This is outrageous.

Here’s how I plan to cope with my outrage and my sense of powerlessness; I share this because it’s helpful.

When I read maddening articles like this in my morning paper, I remind myself that I’m reading, you know, The Boston Globe. Does the Globe know much about the countless visionary individuals and small neighborhood efforts and initiatives and small businesses who, indeed, recognize what’s imperative? Like Slow Money for example?

What do you think?

And I am comforted by the very last words of George Eliot’s Middlemarch—which I just finished last night.

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.