Category Archives: Politics

Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Politics

Hard Rock Mining and Minnesota

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Lughnasa                            Waning Harvest Moon

Up for a bit then out of the house to chase down the wandering puppies.  Again.  Sigh.  This is a problem still in search of a solution.  Harnesses help but the one who needs them most, Rigel, slips out of hers with the ease of a banana escaping its peel.  We have other solutions on tap:  fence, microchip, tags, better harnesses, conversations with our vet and the breeder, but until we come up with something that works we have to alternate them inside and out.  That’s a pain and still requires surveillance.  Oh, well.  We wanted puppies.

Today is a forum on non-ferrous mining in Minnesota.  In other parts of the country like Colorado, Montana and Nevada for example it’s called hard-rock mining.  The degradation caused by this mining includes sulfuric acid drainage into the watershed along with heavy metals.  There is no need to wonder about the devastation caused by this kind of mining.  All you have to do is visit sites in Colorado and Montana.  The question now is whether this kind of mining can be made safe and is the risk to Minnesota waters worth testing such a claim.

This issue has a lot of complicated vectors:  geological, industrial, metallurgical, chemical, hydrological, environmental, political and economic.  My learning curve about it is still pretty steep so I’m looking forward to this forum as a place to advance my knowledge.

Politics

Politics in Minnesota

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon

I’ve now done a good bit of reading for the lay of the land meeting today at the Minneapolis Foundation. Sponsored by the Minnesota Environmental Partnership it will, as I said the other day, try to establish the real world contours influencing the legislature this year.  Politics In Minnesota (their page handicapping the 2010 Governor’s race) is a great resource for up to the minute inside political news.  It has a free newsletter distributed daily and a pay subscription to a weekly digest that goes deeper and does analysis.

There are also twitter aggregators and blog aggregators for Minnesota politics.  I’ll post links to them later in case you have an interest.

Should be a fun day, except I’ll miss my nap.

Politics

Impacts on 2010 Legislature. First Draft. Notes.

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Lughnasa                           Waning Harvest Moon

Just a few notes so I don’t forget.

Context for this coming session of the legislature:

1.  2010 Governor’s race.

2. Deficit will become larger and impact state budgeting more.  Possibly drive tax increases.

3.  1&2 will make caucus politics chaotic.

4. Legacy $.  Could produce a they got there’s already attitude for env. issues

5. Employment picking up on the range.  Might take some pressure off the mining issue.

6.  Unemployment generally remains high.   Blue-Green Alliance has opportunity.

Bees, Family, permaculture, Politics

Water and Politics

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Lughnasa                             Waning Harvest Moon

Kate took her ailing sewing machine up to St. Cloud.  She bought it there.  On the way home she brought maid-rites, a taste of Iowa burger.  Maid-rites have a crumbly hamburger instead of a patty, a little bit like sloppy joes without barbecue sauce.  Kate had not been far from home for several days with this illness.  She’s on the mend now.

The new plantings, shrubs and trees, need water these next few weeks, before it gets cold.  Their roots will uncurl and extend into the soil, go deeper and wider.  By next spring they should need no extra care.  That’s part of the idea behind permaculture, a maintenance free or low maintenance landscape.  Permaculture achieves this in several ways.  Plant guilds, plants that complement each other planted together, and plants native to the eco-system are two primary strategies for achieving this goal.  Productive plants, aided by plant guilds, and native to the region make them naturally disease resistant and adapted to the particular moisture and soil requirements of your site.

Even so, they still need to get established, just like all those college freshmen throughout the land, uprooted from home and having to become part of a new place.

All this meant really long hoses since we have now begun to plant beyond the range our irrigation system.  Since these plants won’t require additional water in the future, it doesn’t make sense to provide new irrigation.

A few limbs and one tree also had to come down to make sure some of the new plants thrive.

I checked the bees today, too.  Still little honey.  I’ve provided the hive and the bees have worked all season, so I’m not unhappy.  Even so, I hope next year I can get some honey.  Don’t know right now what I need to do differently, if anything.

A good part of the afternoon I’ve spent reading Politics In Minnesota weekly reports, a subscription service focused on the ins and outs of Minnesota politics, especially at the state level.  On Monday I’ll attend a Minnesota Environmental Partnership meeting that will try to assess the political context for environmental issues at the legislature next year.  I’m reading ahead.  The context is critical when considering electoral and legislative politics.  Not so much when pushing issue campaigns, at least not in the early stages.  To win, though, requires sensitivity to the political context in which the issue must be resolved.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Still No Rigel

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Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

The second night with no Rigel.  I took fliers to filling stations, veterinary offices, grocery stores and the local humane society.  Tomorrow I plan to distribute a few more at baseball fields, the town rec center, those sorts of places.  After that, we call back to various places and wait.

The driveway has a nice fresh black coat on it; we have a woodland edge to balance our orchard and few trees planted out in the prairie grass.  My neighbor (not the suicidal one) came over and noted we’d planted a couple of hawthorns on his property.  He said he didn’t care and I said I didn’t either.  They’ll have the same affect there and at that point the properties run into each other on an open field.

Kate’s home.  She looks better, but still ragged.  We see the surgeon on Thursday morning.  Could be some big changes here after that.

The second in my series:  Liberalism in Our Time has gotten hold of me, it’s now the filter through which I read articles, think about politics and  our common life.  I just learned about a guy named Herbert Crowley today.  He was the architect (and an architect) of what some call the welfare state.  His thought has some interesting resonance for me, since I’m struggling in this series with my radical critique of liberal thought.  When I get to the Future of Liberalism, I’m going to have come down somewhere on that question, which I’ve  sort of neatly side-stepped so far.

Great Wheel, Poetry, Politics

Machado, The Pathmaker

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Lughnasa                                Full Harvest Moon

At about 8:00/8:30 pm I drove over to Than Do to pick up some take out.  At the end of our cul de sac, a bit above the tree tops, was a golden harvest moon.  It stopped me.  The moon always catches me, draws my breath  up from deep within, a rush of exspiration.  Many of us have it, a mystical connection to the lesser light, its waxing and waning, the crescent moon with venus nearby, the full red moon of a lunar eclipse, the outsized floating golden orb of an October full moon, even the dark sky of the new moon, pregnant.

Many of my friends in the Woolly Mammoths devour poetry books.  I’m not a regular reader of poetry, more episodic, sometimes in binges.  I get onto poets through odd routes, like Antonio Machado whose poem, Pathmaker, now occupies the upper left of this webpage.  Paul Strickland has a mentioned Machado many times.  Machado is one of many non-English language poets Robert Bly has translated.

Machado, whom I had not read, appeared in an article I read about attempts to name the crimes of the Franco era in Spain and the strange reluctance of Spaniards to talk about the Spanish Republic which Franco overthrew, then destroyed with brutal force.

Machado is a poet/saint of the Republicans, buried in exile across the northern Spanish border in France where many of the Republicans fled when Franco defeated them in Spain.  The author of this article, a resident of  Barcelona, wrote of a moving celebration at Machado’s grave, a remembrance for those who fought and died, lost forever to their loved ones by burial in mass graves.

A single woman began chanting this poem, the Pathmaker, and all the others joined in, there at Machado’s tomb.

When I read it, I realized it was the perfect poem for Ancientrails.

Pathmaker, the path is your tracks,
nothing else.

Pathmaker, there in no path,
The path is made by walking.

And turning the gaze back,
Look on the trail that never will be
Walked again.

Pathmaker, there no path,
Only the wake on the sea.

Aging, Politics

Still Thinking Out Loud

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Lughnasa                         Waxing Harvest Moon

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

Einstein’s notion reminds me of the definition of insanity:  trying the same thing over and over expecting different results.  Of course, any one familiar with computers knows that sometimes this works just fine.

It also gives me some pause before I write my liberalism series.  An article in this month’s Dissent asked, “Does liberalism have enough resources to re-energize itself?”  I like this question because it focuses my thinking.  This is why I’m interested in pursuing liberalism.  Does it have enough historical and philosophical oomph to make a difference in this and tomorrow’s world?

10 years ago I would have said no.  Absolutely no.  As a card carrying member of the New Left, liberalism was as much the problem as conservatism, perhaps even more since it was liberals who got us into the war in Vietnam, who ran corporate america and the government, aka the System and, BTW, Ike Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.  Hard to recall a time when the liberals were in power at this point in recent American history, but I grew up under a liberal hegemony.

Now, I’m older and less convinced of drastic, sudden change as either possible or workable, too much risk for too little reward.  At least right now.

If we’re not gonna have a revolution, then we have to consider the hand we’ve been dealt and it’s our peculiar brand of American liberal democracy.  That means looking for all the possibilities in likely and unlikely places.

At night the trees dwarf the houses, their bulk massing up against the sky.  During the day we can pretend they are just plants, but as dark falls their true nature emerges.  We are the Lilliputians in their Brobdingnagian world.

Dogs, Politics

Free kittens. Spaded.

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Lughnasa                    Waning Green Corn Moon

Rigel and Vega have returned home, a bit foggy and uncertain.  Spayed now, they have to be on home rest for the next 10 days.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll make that.

Kate and I saw a cute poster on the bulletin board posted in the airlock going out of the Festival Grocery.  Done in crayon it said, “Free kittens.  Spaded.”

These lectures on the cycles of American political thought I’m listening to right now have prompted a considerable amount of noodling, most of  it focused right now on the central paradox of our democracy.  A solution borne of the Enlightenment, our government and in particular our Constitution and Bill of Rights makes a lot effort to protect the individual and that crucial virtue which ensures individualism, liberty.

The paradox at the core of our nation is this:  government exists to co-ordinate and organize a community, yet its chief underlying value is individualism.  Thus, the purpose of government, focused on community, stands over against the individual it exists to preserve.  This paradox, unresolvable, lies at the fulcrum of so many of our political disagreements.  I’m not any further along with this right now, but its on my mind.

Garden, Politics

Sunday Afternoon

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Lughnasa                           Waning Green Corn Moon

The peas have come down and this week the garlic will go in the ground, an experiment suggested by the former editor of Organic Gardening at the Seed Savers Exchange conference.  This is about a month plus earlier than suggested by other garlic growers, including Seed Savers Exchange.  He claims it gives greater yield.   Since my new varieties of garlic will not come until September 10th or so, I’ll have a ready comparison the same beds.

A more summer like Sunday with the temperature here 79.  I have no tours for a while (August 28) and the Sierra Club work will not pick up real steam until late September, so I have a long stretch I can devote to the garden.  Instead of trenching today Kate took the truck.  I need the truck to pick up the Ditch Witch.  The trench will get dug tomorrow morning instead.

Many people have begun to evaluate Obama’s performance so far.  The best article I’ve seen is in this month’s Rolling Stone.  It has David Gergen, Paul Krugman and Michael Moore.  All agree he’s done better than could have been expected, but the problems facing him, especially health care reform and the economy, may require better than that.  Neither one takes well to part way solutions.  Either health care reform achieves universal coverage and cost containment, at a minimum, or whatever happens may not be seen as successful.  Likewise with the economy a tepid recovery or a prolongation of the deep recession past the next few months will be seen as failures.  The economic fixes need to start gaining traction soon and they need to result in real improvement.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Yellow Moon

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

A yellowed moon hung in the sky tonight, almost full.  It made the drive back in from Minneapolis a delight as it sailed in and out of view.

In tonight for the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting.  What a dynamic group!  They are still fighting the Stillwater Bridge issue after all these years.  They also have transit oriented development on their agenda as well as a new issue called Complete Streets.  In essence Complete Streets wants street planning to have all users in mind (pedestrians, bicyclists, cars and the handicapped in particular)

A crisp meeting that ran on time.

Thunder has begun to roll in so I’m going to have shut down soon.  After the Sierra Club meeting, I drove over to the Black Forest where the Woolly’s first monday meeting had just begun to wind down.  I saw Mark and Frank and Stefan before they left.  Warren and Scott stayed and we talked about Moon, Scott’s 95 year old Cantonese mother-in-law who lives with them.  She’s having a show of her calligraphy and painting at the Marsh.  It goes up on August 16th.  There will also be a book of her work available at the show.  Amazing.

China tour tomorrow for 7-8th graders.  I added a tour this Friday of Chilean students connected with St. Johns who want a tour of American art.