New Clear Vision

A Message of Possibility for the New Year, and Beyond

by Jan Lundberg

Please join me in greeting the fall of the U.S. Empire, a healthy way to begin a new year. It is a positive sentiment among some thoughtful Americans. Their ungiddy feeling flows from observation of world developments and the state of the U.S. political system and economy. The timetable is fuzzy, but trends are clear. It’s not pretty, but there is a thin silver lining.

These days are for many of us the winter of our discontent. Weird and dangerous weather on the rise, persistent fossil-fuel dominance, never-ending wars, unraveling of the social fabric, looming shortages of food and water, and lack of money for basic needs aren’t just some unpatriotic ravings of those who want to put America down. Rather, the growing uncertainty of our survival, individually and for our families, has everyone’s skull in a vice tightened by unseen or unknown hands. Those hands are actually of our own making: our dominant culture has been building up to a colossal, spectacular, global failure. (more…)

Food Justice as a Pathway to Sustainability and Community

by ISE (Institute for Social Ecology)

Please introduce yourself (what kind of work you do, where you live, etc.).

My name is Erin Lingo. I live in Prescott, Arizona, and am the coordinator of the Prescott College CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and the Prescott Farmers Market. My passion is food and all things related: nutrition, cooking, food justice, sustainable agriculture, farmworker rights, and local food systems. I am a graduate student in the Prescott College/ISE program with an emphasis in Community Food Systems.

How did you become introduced to the ideas of social ecology? How do yo define social ecology when asked about it?

I became interested in Social Ecology because I wanted to continue my education with a study that addresses the relationship between society and nature, particularly how it relates to food. I already lived in Prescott and worked for Prescott College, so the PC/ISE program resonated with me. (more…)

Remembering King as an Antiwar Icon

by Randall Amster

Martin Luther King, Jr., obviously is recalled as a champion of racial justice and civil rights. Equally fervent, yet less invoked, was King’s focus on economic justice and ending poverty. King understood the multi-layered relationship among these issues, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Still, despite a peace award, even far less remembered today is King’s deeply-held belief that “war is not the answer” and his outspoken opposition to the conflict in Vietnam. In retrospect, he appears as a sophisticated antiwar crusader, and had been so throughout much of the 1960s. He didn’t come late to the issue, either, after public support for the war eroded and it became safe to stand against it; and as the war escalated so too did his critical rhetoric, often to the consternation of some of his civil rights allies.

Looking back at excerpts from King’s key anti-war speeches, they remain equally relevant today, beginning with his Nobel acceptance speech in December 1964: (more…)

What It’s Really Like to Live in Arizona

by Joel Olson

With the passage of the notorious anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 last spring, the outlawing of ethnic studies as of January 1st, the gutting of the school and university systems, the collapsed housing market, the high unemployment rates, and now the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, you might be wondering what it’s like to actually live in Arizona right about now.

In short: it ain’t easy. But it helps to put Giffords’s shooting in historical perspective, which is defined by two things in Arizona: corruption and class struggle.  And ironically, this perspective gives me hope about the radically democratic future of my home state.

Arizona’s economy was founded on the Five Cs: copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism). These Cs were controlled by big mining and agricultural interests and real estate developers. Corruption was commonplace as they manipulated the political system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want. If the names Don Bowles, Evan Mecham, AZscam, Fife Symington, or the Keating 5 (which included Senator John McCain) mean anything to you, then you know that corruption is as plentiful as the parking here. And I haven’t even mentioned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or State Senator Russell Pearce, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum of racist nativism. (more…)

Undoing Neoliberalism through Solidarity Economics

by Devon G. Peña

Preparing for the start of a new semester at the University of Washington, I am pondering what to emphasize to students during the first day of classes. I am teaching two seminars, one focused on the study of food sovereignty movements, and the other a ‘theory’ course on the contributions of anthropology to the comparative study of social movements in the Mesoamerican Diaspora.

I already see numerous connections between the two themes: food sovereignty and theories of social movements. The first problem that occurs to me may not be at all obvious, namely the dilemma posed by the advent of what Christian Marazzi and others have called cognitive capitalism. This is the idea of a cyberspace-based realm of ‘high finance’ that profits from the construction of complicated credit default obligations, collateralized debt obligations, and other financial instruments that basically allow for the extraction of surplus value out of speculative thin air through the commodification of ‘risk.’ This development, Marazzi argues, has altered everything — including the prospects and methods needed for the multitude to escape hunger, malnutrition, and structural violence. (more…)

Support the Dominant Paradigm

by Randall Amster

There’s a bumper sticker still clinging to the back of my old camper, bearing a phrase you’ve probably heard before or perhaps even uttered: “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.” At the time I’d placed this on the tailgate for display, it made perfect sense to me. The Dominant Paradigm was the one manufactured by the warmongers, corporateers, securitizers, and mediamen. The rest of us were living in a Subordinate Paradigm, and the path to our salvation lay in tearing down the one imposing itself upon us. Since those halcyon bumper-sticker days, however, I’ve come to see that this logic is actually inverted, and that in fact WE are the Dominant Paradigm while those ostensibly in charge are the ones who continually attempt to subvert it. (more…)