Friday, Jul. 11, 2003 - 8:42 p.m.

Fair View

On Wednesday, I traveled out to F*airview. A Green Party member turned Dennis Kucinich supporter gave me a ride up there. She told me about her activist work on campaign finance reform, and her drive to vote out Bush. I told her that personally, I think a better strategy to counter the Bush Administration would be to influence a cultural shift in which people started believing it was silly to obey authority figures even (especially) when threatened, and stopped believing in the existence of giant abstract institutions like the United States. Then, would-be dictators would have no power, and Bush would be no problem. She asked if I was an anarchist. I told her that I used to use that word, but found that it confuses much more than it clarifies, especially since it states what it is against rather than what it is for. She asked what I was for, so I did my best to explain the philosophical foundations of Nonviolent Communication to her. Had we more time, I would have explained to her that since, fundamentally, all government is institutionalized violence, as a pacifist, it goes against my conscience to vote, even against Bush.

She had also attended Starhawk’s speech, and had been disappointed by it too.

F*airview was just as amazing as it was when I saw it for the first time a year ago. Imagine a medium-sized university campus in a rural location, completely abandoned except for a couple of security guards. 60 large buildings (780,000 square feet) on 275 acres. I saw 3 deer grazing on the lawn. This used to be a mental institution until it was closed 15 years ago, and all the loonies cast out into the street. Now an economics professor-turned-eco-developer wants to make this into, “the model sustainable development in the United States, perhaps the world,” that would be, “walkable, alien to the automobile.” He opposes the idea that sustainability is a luxury that can only be enjoyed by rich do-gooders. He says that while individually, it’s more expensive to implement sustainable things than their unsustainable counterparts, when you use full systems thinking, sustainable development can be cheaper. As an example, he said that using cisterns and water-saving measures while getting all their water on-site for the planned 1000 housing units would save the community land trust 9 million dollars compared to continuing to get their water from the city of Salem.

I was there because this guy wants to work in partnership with the A*merican H>ydrogen Associatio*n N!orthwest Chapxter to provide hydrogen fuel to the community. In exchange, F*airview is going to provide industrial space for AHAN*W to manufacture an environmentally friendly replacement for PVC pipe, made from the carbon in corn stalks. I talked with the Buddha-like AH*A president about how Gaia theory helped me understand the necessity of having carbon industry use agricultural waste as its raw material in order to sequester carbon from the carbon cycle to reverse global warming. He said he was familiar with this idea, and then told me about how carbon industry can improve soil quality by making a material with the same sponge-like qualities as vermiculite. “Soil is like a bank account,” he said, “if you keep taking nutrients out of it without putting any back in, you go broke.”

Hydrogen Man was exuberent and kept running at, jumping and slamming his body against the walls of the buildings. I asked the A*HA president, "but can it cure Hydrogen Man?"

We took a look inside the building our factory would be located in. It used to be the mental institution’s laundry facility. Giant washers, giant dryers, huge industrial ironing presses. Can you say, “immense”?

Hydrogen Man insisted we all go up to the highest hill and take in the scenery. I could see two distant snow-capped mountains from up there, Mount Hood, and Mount Jefferson. I think one of them is a volcano. A fair view indeed.

I caught a ride back with some guys who suddenly started drinking beer and smoking marijuana as we drove. I had my head by the open window trying to suck up as much drug-free air as I could. I shared the back seat with a guy who downed 3 beers during our one-hour journey. He took the opportunity to vent about all the ecological destruction which made him very angry. “Hemp fiber is lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel. If you don’t support hemp, then fuck you!” he informed me. They congratulated the driver (who had been drinking some of the beer as well) on getting us back to Eugene safely. I had them let me out early, and I walked a long way home just so I could get out of that vehicle sooner.

I came home to see that Anarchy Man had returned from his week in Seattle, of course with a stack of new radical literature which he enthusiastically shoved under my nose. We went to T*iny T*avern to hang with local anarchists who were there to watch C*ascadia A*live, the insurrectionary green anarchist public access cable TV show. I was pretty bored. While a hippy jam band in the bar played a heavily improvised version of “We Don’t Need No Education”, I sat around listening to Anarchy Man talking about the global anarchist milieu with local anarcho bad-boy, Johnny Z. John-Boy was really inspired by the anarchists in Greece who attack cops with great numbers of Molotov cocktails so regularly and dependably, that some neighborhoods of Athens are effectively autonomous zones because the cops are afraid to go there. I don’t take much inspiration from that because I see those anarchists as merely reproducing the cultural thought patterns endemic in the dominator culture: encouraging dehumanized images of the “enemy”, and a practice of might-makes-right.

Last night, Anarchy Man and I greatly enjoyed our first time at the anarchist book discussion group. The text for this week was the Unabomber Manifesto. I found the discussion to be really intelligent and thoughtful. Most agreed that the manifesto was absolutist and self-contradictory, to name but a few of the problems with it. We spent at least half the time (inevitably) talking about Ted Kaczinski himself. No one present supported his choice of tactics.

Talking with anarcho-primitivists about the evils of industrialism, I had to ponder my work in AHAN*W towards creating new factories. I still think I’m on the right path for the following reason: stupidly, our entire civilization has become dependent on the automobile. We can reduce that dependence, but not fast, and not completely in the near term. If all automobiles disappeared suddenly, most people would starve. Since I value human life, I have to support the continued use of automobiles, at least until we can change our means of growing and distributing food. Hydrogen can keep all the existing automobilies going without contributing to global warming. And these factories I’m helping to realize will enable us to convert to hydrogen.

Hopefully that transition will include turning lawns into gardens such as these which are not uncommon in Eugene:

After the book club, Anarchy Man and I had a nice chat with Flag Burner, including the tale of his flag-burning, arrest, week in jail, and pending trial.

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