Most of the people that are in our jails and prisons throughout the country are there because they're poor. They're there because they've sold and used drugs. Unfortunately, they're there because they're people of color.
1999 Spring
Restoring the People with the Healing Garden
1999 Spring | Cathrine Sneed
Cathrine Sneed founded the Garden Project as a horticultural training program for convicts in the San Francisco County Jail. The foods grown by the inmates are sold to Bay Area restaurants as well as given free to the needy and poor. She has also instituted a tree-planting program in ravaged communities in the city. The following is a transcript of portions of her keynote address at the 1998 Bioneers Conference, held October 23-25 in San Francisco, CA. (For more information, check the Bioneers website at www.bioneers.org or call 1-877-BIONEER.)
Enlarging Our Circle of Community
1999 Spring | Joanne Lauck "Man cannot long separate himself from nature without withering as a cut rose in a vase." -Howard Thurman
I think of community as a circle. When we draw the circle too small, excluding others on the basis of race, nationality, or religious preference, our attempts to build community suffer. Our efforts also fall short when we exclude others on the basis of species or divide the Earth community into good and bad species and include only those we deem as good. Those divisions violate the fundamental unity of life and create artificial barriers that can only impede community-making.
The Ecology of Community
1999 Spring | Jesse Wolf Hardin (Lone Wolf Circles) Ecology is the study of interdependency among the innumerable elements of a beautifully interwoven whole. Impacting any single part will have unforeseeable effects on the rest, and one cannot understand any of the constituent parts outside of their greater context. Similarly, an ecology of communities looks at the ways in which human societies interact with, are influenced by and dependent on the non-human world. Nature serves as the context for any sustainable community--whether a grouping of people, or of other species. A spiritually, emotionally, and physically healthy human society is impossible without an awareness of, and a reciprocal relationship with the larger, more than human tribe.
You're likely familiar with those wooden Russian dolls that nest one inside the other. Take the top off one, and you reveal yet another doll inside, again and again until uncovering the final, tiny seed doll. We can think of the smallest doll as the self: the community of one's cooperative parts: organs, skills, experiences, needs, and desires. Each part interacts with the rest according to its evolved purpose. This self-doll is nested in the larger human community, which resides in and is linked to the fate of greater Nature. Nature exists within a community of planets and stars, all of which are contained by the forms and intentions of inclusive Spirit.
The Dark Side of Lost Valley
1999 Spring | Larry Kaplowitz Here's the rub: while everything Chris says about Lost Valley [in "Lost Valley: A Closer Look"] is true, and on my good days I, too, can be found waxing poetic about our idyllic life here, I also have my bad days. Sometimes I have a whole string of bad days. In fact it's a rare day when at least one of us here isn't having a bad day.
What does a bad day look like for me?
It's been raining non-stop for a week in a month that has seen only three dry days. My family are all irritable and edgy from having spent the whole weekend cooped up in our one-room house. I am frustrated because my "variety in work" has left me with uncompleted projects wherever I look, and my backlog of phone messages and correspondence waiting to be answered has grown to an absurd level, causing me a continual, low-grade sense of guilt. The food orderer has been on vacation and we're out of fruit, vegetables, and bread. Our recent deep freeze, in addition to bursting many pipes, killed most of our overwintering crops in the gardens. Several community members are sick, in the throes of yet another microbial onslaught, delivered by one of our continual stream of visitors, apprentices, and conference guests who have partaken in our touchy feely lifestyle. Consequently, every pre-meal circle now ends with a frenzied flight to the washrooms, where we queue up for the anti-bacterial soap to disinfect ourselves from our hygienically corrupt handholding. The phones are malfunctioning, causing every other incoming call to get cut off, and our computers all have viruses.
Today's Buzzword: Community
1999 Spring Everybody's hot about the idea of "community" today: we hear about community development, community organizing, community building workshops, Art of Community conferences, communities of interest, intentional communities, sustainable communities, the need for a sense of community in your neighborhood or church, and "it takes a community to raise a child." Bill Clinton even used the "c" word a couple of times in his 1992 presidential victory speech.
Are we all talking the same language here?
Yes and no. Yes, in that each term conjures up an image of togetherness and cooperation--having a sense of belonging and mutual support and looking after each other. No, in that rarely do the same images and cultural assumptions come to mind when people start talking about what "community" looks like in its physical form.
