Homesteading the ocean
http://www.thespectrum.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080501/OPINION/805010334&template=printart
| Normally, we only hear about spoiled Hollywood types threatening to withdraw their illuminating presence from America’s shores if U.S. policies aren’t amended to their liking. (By the way, has Alec Baldwin left yet?) But there’s also another category of people, a bit more serious, thinking about leaving their homeland behind.Earlier this month, a California non-profit called The Seasteading Institute announced its intent to create “autonomous ocean communities,” where people of a certain mind-set can settle, sustain their own needs and govern themselves. At first blush these “seasteaders” sound a bit wacky, like a cult trying to start a maritime commune. Phrases like “the world needs a new model of politic,” and “the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level” smack of utopianism.
The idea of oceanic communities, even city-states, beyond the reach of governments isn’t new. The Principality of Sealand was founded in 1967 by a pirate radio operator on an old World War II anti-aircraft tower off the coast of England. Today, near Costa Rica, Celestopea is trying to build an eco-friendly floating community. Then there’s the Freedom Ship, a plan (still mostly on paper) for a huge ocean-going vessel housing 40,000 people. Lack of money is usually the downfall of such projects. The Freedom Ship, for example, would cost billions, and funding has been hard to find. Another snag such projects typically run into is their motivations to either save the planet or foster an ideology. Often they have a decidedly new-age outlook. On close inspection, however, the seasteaders seem to be cut from a different cloth.Instead of preaching any particular ideology, they’re interested in technologically enabling a new era of “micro-countries,” free to experiment with various political systems. That gives the institute a pragmatism other efforts have lacked. These are incrementalists, not wild-eyed revolutionaries. The technologies and construction techniques they propose are practical and affordable today. Moreover, they’re willing to start small and build from there. Visit www.seastead ing.org. Most importantly, they’re apparently getting jump-started with some big bucks. According to their press release, venture capitalist Peter Thiel is backing the institute with a half-million-dollar investment. Thiel is the guy who helped found Pay-Pal and backed the booming social networking portal FaceBook. He and his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, have a reputation for backing winners. According to Reason magazine, one of the reasons Thiel became so interested is the background of the institute’s founder and executive director, Patri Friedman. Patri, a software engineer, is a passionate advocate for free trade and libertarian ideals. His father, economist David Friedman, wrote “Machinery of Freedom,” the bible of so-called anarcho-capitalism. His grandfather (you guessed it) is Milton Friedman, champion of free-market economics and author of the classic “Capitalism and Freedom.” While I have trouble with the whole concept of abandoning society (and couldn’t stand being cooped up on a man-made island), a project with this kind of pedigree, practical ideas, workable technology and financial backing bears close watching. See more at www.thiscouldgetinterest ing.com. Tad Trueblood has more than 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and the national security community. He blogs at www.thiscouldget interesting.com.
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Author: Janet Sassi
Original Title: On God and Evil:
Philosopher-Priest Revisits an Age-Old Question
Original Publication Date: 21 Apr 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.fordham.edu/campus_resources/public_affairs/inside_fordham/april_21_2008/in_focus_faculty_and/on_god_and_evil_phil_29584.asp
Brian Davies, O.P., Ph.D., is in the unusual position of being both a scholar who ponders the nature of God and a Catholic priest who belongs to the order of preachers, the Dominicans. You might say that the professor whose specialties are medieval philosophy and analytical philosophy of religion is ripe to give an “immersion” course in God—if such a thing existed.
In his eighth and latest book, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum Press, 2006), Father Davies tackled one of the questions central to the philosophy of religion: Does the presence of evil suggest the absence of God?
“Many contemporary philosophers would say that evil disproves God’s existence,” Father Davies said. “The idea is that to say that God exists, and to accept that evil exists, is a bit like saying that some circles are square—it’s impossible; there is a logical contradiction.”
Father Davies characterized such atheistic thinking as misguided.
“I argue that a discussion on the topic of God and evil is fruitless without going back to basic questions like, ‘Why believe in God in the first place?’” he said. “If there are good philosophical reasons for believing in God, then evil doesn’t disprove God’s existence,” he said.
He further took issue with those who believe that God has a hand in promoting certain evils in the world, or that God is morally culpable for the world’s ills.
“I want to reject the theistic and nontheistic discussions of God and evil that start from the presupposition that God is the sort of thing I am, a moral agent subject to duties and obligations,” he said. “If someone said, ‘Oh well, the tsunamis prove that God isn’t doing what he ought to do,’ I am going to describe that comment as very misguided since it does not make sense to suggest that God is subject to moral obligations.”
Father Davies’ own beliefs are rooted in the teachings of classical Christian philosophers, such as St. Augustine, St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas. As the eternal creator of the universe, God is “omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, perfectly actual,” he said. God is the cause of the existence of everything for as long as it exists, Father Davies explained.
“If we ask, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there anything at all?’ fundamentally, that’s the God question,” he said. “Some philosophers reject that question. I have spent quite a lot of time defending that question, and I have tried to explain what could be true and false when it comes to what makes the difference between there being something and nothing.”
In a world that is created by God, what is evil? And is it something created by God, as, for example, cats are?
Father Davies described evil as the “absence of due good.” Due good is good that we as human beings expect to be there, but is missing, much like light is missing from a black hole. An indiscriminate murderer cannot be pure evil because, Father Davies pointed out, there is some good in the simple act of existence: To be at all is to be good. According to Father Davies, even the Devil is not all bad.
What makes someone or something evil or bad is the standard by which that person or thing is being judged—the context.
“You might say of Mother Theresa versus Anton Chigurth (the emotionless assassin in the 2008 Academy Award-winning movie, No Country For Old Men): good her, bad him. What’s the difference?” he asked.
“In the case of a really vicious human being, what you have is simply a human being like you and me who is not meeting a standard [of behavior]. If I suddenly embark on genocide, I won’t turn into something different. I’d just be a bad example of the kind of thing I am.”
“What you have is a really bad case of injustice, a behavior which offends against what we take to be essential to living well together.”
If, indeed, the existence of the universe and all souls in it is proof of the existence of God, and if evil is the “absence of good,” how does the average churchgoing person conceptualize a divinity that has been depicted over the ages in many forms—a man in a white robe, a hand reaching across a universal chasm, or even a face on a tortilla?
“You can’t envision God,” Father Davies said. The anthropomorphizing of God and the hypostatizing of evil are both philosophical mistakes and theological mistakes, he said. “According to Catholic thinkers from St. Augustine to the present, God is entirely simple. There are no metaphysical components to God. God is not an individual of a kind; he is not a member of a class; in fact, he is not part of any world. He’s the creator of the world in which we distinguish between things of kinds.”
Having edited more than 29 volumes of Outstanding Christian Thinkers for Continuum Press and other books on theology, Father Davies is no stranger to scholarly recognition. (He is, in fact, among a handful of Fordham professors listed in the online people’s resource, Wikipedia, with W. Norris Clarke, S.J. and Daniel Berrigan, S.J.) Additionally, Father Davies is the recipient of a 2007 Distinguished Teaching Award from his peers for his work in the classroom. Currently he teaches an introductory course on St. Thomas Aquinas.
Churchspeak: Missional
May 2, 2008
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Author: Rebecca Barnes
Original Title: What are missional churches?
Original Publication Date: 08 Apr 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.churchcentral.com/nw/s/template/Article.html/id/24659
Ten years of describing the latest in church trends as missional and yet we still don’t know what that means. Maybe the term is intended to function that way. Perhaps the mystery is part of the charm.
J. Todd Billings, assistant professor of Reformed theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich., admitted the vagueness of the term, then took a stab at defining “missional” recently for Christianity Today.
“Some use missional to describe a church that rejects treating the gospel like a commodity for spiritual consumers; others frame it as a strategy for marketing the church and stimulating church growth. Some see the missional church as a refocusing on God’s action in the world rather than obsessing over individuals’ needs; others see it as an opportunity to ‘meet people where they are’ and reinvent the church for postmodern culture.” Billings writes.
Whatever the meaning, the term is plied with multiple definitions by people who prefer it to describe either their own church or the way their church should be.
Billings‘ broad definition of missional is, “… a sense that the church is not primarily about us, but about God’s mission.” In this definition he concurs with the work of Craig Van Gelder, whose book “Ministry of the Missional Church” I reviewed recently for Church Central.
Van Gelder is also a professor—currently of congregational mission at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., and a former professor at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Mich., and holds degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the University of Texas at Arlington. Maybe you’re beginning to think as I am that higher degrees are a requirement for comprehending this term missional.
Van Gelder categorizes churches as: corporate, established or missional. He further defines missional as a spiritual social community called to God’s mission in the world.
That seems as vague as ever.
Enter pastor and church consultant Barry Winders, whose self-published work entitled, “Finding the Missional Path,” may clarify missional by what it is not. Winders provides a concise and informative chart illustrating all the various ways churches can become distracted from their original mission—making disciples. See if any of these are familiar, either in your own institution, your house church, or in the congregations where you consult:
Missionary church – sees leaders as fundraisers and members as givers
Maintenance church – sees leaders as recruiters and members as clubbers
Seeker-sensitive church – sees leaders as presenters and motivators and members as seekers
Consumer church – sees leaders as producers and members as consumers
Church growth church – sees leaders as programmers, assimilators, analysts and members as participants
Activist church – sees leaders as catalysts and members as activists
I wish Winders had a correlative prescriptive chart for churches that are models to follow. I wish Van Gelder or Billings had more of a definition. Billings can only conclude by warning Christians that missional means about as many things as evangelical.
“With so many variant views, the term missional church now needs something like an FDA label: Warning: Contradictory and conflicting views of the church inside,” Billings writes.
Van Gelder ends up defining missional as differing from other church growth and health trends such as purpose-driven or emergent, because it is more than a strategy to help struggling churches. Instead, he writes that missional is a community led by the Spirit of God. While that definition includes more types of churches than it excludes, it informs clearly on why this term missional is so nebulous and yet so attractive at the same time. I mean every healthy church wants to be a part of the Spirit of God’s work in the world. And the Spirit is notoriously difficult to pin down in something as small as a working definition.
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Author: Amanda Gefteris, an editor for New Scientist magazine
Original Title: A paradigm shift in genetics
Original Publication Date: Sun, Apr. 13, 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20080413_A_paradigm_shift_in_genetics.html
Every day, it seems, we read about the discovery of a gene for this or a gene for that. “Researchers identify the fat gene!” the headlines scream. “Scientists pin down intelligence gene!” “Alcoholism gene found!” Even though the path from gene (a string of nucleotides) to phenotype (fat, intelligent, lush) is rarely straightforward, genetic determinism – the idea that our physical and behavioral traits are governed by the twisted sequences of DNA lurking inside our cells – permeates popular culture. From Watson and Crick’s 1953 discovery of the DNA double helix to the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, the idea that our genes inform who we are and what we do has become integral to our understanding of what it is to be human.
This populist kind of genetic determinism is appealing because it undermines what seem to be unfair social judgments. Alcoholism is now a disease, and obesity is now chalked up to a chromosomal raw deal. At the same time, it lifts a certain burden of moral responsibility. You can’t blame a criminal for his actions; it’s “in his genes.”
The struggle between determinism and free will is an ancient one, but genetics seems to have settled the score: “You can’t be blamed for your faults,” it seems (to some people) to say, “but you’re also stuck with the cards you were dealt.” Accountability is avoidable, but DNA is destiny.
Well, don’t surrender yourself to your genome just yet. The more scientists learn about the complex relationships among genes, environment, disease and phenotype, the more they are realizing how restrictive the old biological paradigm is.
“Our understanding of genetics is currently undergoing a paradigm shift,” says Melanie Ehrlich, a molecular biologist at the Tulane Cancer Center. “It is now commonly acknowledged among scientists that it is not enough to look to DNA as the sole determinant of heredity.”
Ehrlich is referring to the emerging field known as epigenetics. The epigenome is the elaborate chemical switchboard that can turn genes on and off like flipping a light switch. Our genes encode instructions for the building of proteins. On its own, DNA is nothing but an inert biological handbook, but chemicals in each cell actively read and transcribe the instructions, then use them to build our bodies cell by cell. Every cell in your body contains an identical genome, and yet a brain cell is quite different from a skin cell.
How do the differences arise? Because different genes are expressed from one cell to the next. How does a cell know which genes to implement and which to ignore? That set of instructions is contained in the cell’s epigenome. Whereas the genome is static – its sequence of base pairs unchanging except in the rare and often detrimental case of a mutation – the epigenome is dynamic, busily deciding which genetic instructions should be put into action and which should be chemically strangled into silence.
Scientists are now learning that the epigenome is highly sensitive to its environment. The food you eat, the air you breathe, and the stress or happiness you feel can actually alter your genetic makeup – not by changing the sequence of your DNA, but by deciding which genes are expressed.
Biologists have long known that our bodies and behaviors are shaped in part by nature and in part by nurture, but the exact link between gene and environment had always been fuzzy. Now, it is coming into focus: The link is the epigenome.
Epigenetics is opening up a whole new window on the nature of disease. Many cancers, for instance, are not genetic in origin – caused by one or more mutations to our DNA – but epigenetic. “We finally understand that abnormal epigenetic changes are just as important for cancer formation and development as are genetic mutations,” Ehrlich says. “Without epigenetic changes, human cancers would probably be rare.” The same is believed to be true for autoimmune diseases, diabetes and depression.
Even more surprising has been the discovery that, like genes themselves, epigenetic effects can be passed down from generation to generation. That was first demonstrated in mammals by Randy Jirtle and colleagues in a groundbreaking experiment in 2000. Jirtle took mice that carried a gene called the agouti gene, which made their fur yellow and rendered them susceptible to particular diseases, and fed them a diet containing so-called methyl groups – molecules that can attach to a gene and block it from being used. The methyl molecules, commonly found in foods such as soy and leafy vegetables, attached to the agouti gene and switched it off.
The real surprise came when the mice became parents. Their offspring were born with the agouti gene still in their DNA but silenced. They had brown fur and were no longer susceptible to the same diseases. The parent mice had passed on not only their DNA, but also the epigenetic switches attached to it.
The moral of the story? What you eat today could affect your children’s genes . . . even your grandchildren’s.
“What you do now won’t affect only you,” Jirtle says. “That’s not trivial.”
Makes you rethink that doughnut, now doesn’t it?
The National Institutes of Health recently announced that as part of their Roadmap Initiative they will commit more than $190 million in the next five years to epigenomics research. One of the goals is to develop a series of publicly available reference epigenome maps: a Human Epigenome Project analogous to the Human Genome Project. It’s an ambitious undertaking, since every different type of cell has its own epigenome. Jirtle, however, is optimistic. “I don’t think it will be as complicated as people think,” he says. “It’s a lot of data, but it’s doable.”
“The human epigenome remains largely uncharted scientific territory,” says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. “Recent advances in tools and technologies make a human epigenome project a next logical step. It is likely that a human epigenome project . . . may be invaluable in enhancing our understanding of the epigenetic basis of human disease.” It could even pave the way for novel cures. “Understanding the human epigenome at a deep level,” Volkow says, “provides us with the incredibly exciting potential of learning new ways to ‘debug’ the epigenetic software regulating our DNA to reverse particular disease pathways.”
The epigenetics revolution is in its infancy, but it promises big things – cures for disease, a better understanding of stem cells, even antidotes to aging. From a cultural perspective, it promises to shift the way we think about our own role in our health. Suddenly, free will can be heard shouting over the murmur of genetic determinism. Maybe we aren’t stuck with the cards we were dealt after all. You can’t un-mutate a gene, but you can potentially reverse an epigenetic effect. “Epigenetic effects are more flexible and less deterministic, but they require taking more responsibility for the health of your epigenome, for you and for your offspring, even for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Jirtle says. “Responsibility is the downside of free will.”
To see the “Epigenomics” part of the NIH Roadmap Initiative:
Homesteading in the City
May 2, 2008
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Author: Laura Thomas, Chronicle Staff Writer
Original Title: Urban back-to-the-land movement
Gardening, animal husbandry find devotees in backyards, lots
Original Publication Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/HOA81082E2.DTL
After years as a sculptor, ceramicist, puppeteer and teacher, her newest venture is to teach the lost arts of gardening, beekeeping, canning and making such things as wine, cheese, lotions and medicines to people like herself, who desire to be more self-sufficient.
The daughter of Berkeley activists, Ruby is a leader in a movement that recalls the back-to-the-land idealism of the 1960s and ’70s. But this time, the land is in the city and may be as minimal as pots on a windowsill.
“I am conserving my personal resources and the world’s resources by staying home and tending to my garden,” Ruby said. “We can all benefit from slowing down and spending time doing something that’s right in front of us.”
Her North Oakland backyard, wedged between stark apartment buildings and old houses divided into rental units, is only 3 1/2 years old, but it’s a testament to her efforts.
Starting with a single apple tree, she improved the soil using sheet mulching, and now she has a lush, productive vegetable garden that includes nine kinds of heirloom garlic, artichoke plants that grow over her head and a beehive.
This month she began the Institute of Urban Homesteading to teach what she has learned to other city dwellers.
“I’m from New York City, where food always came from the grocery store,” said Marc Shulman, a student in one of the institute’s first classes on herbal tinctures. “I am interested in the concept. It can’t hurt to know a few things, even if it’s just raising a few tomatoes or sprouts.”
Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has tipped the bucket and caused a flood of interest in local solutions to global environmental issues, Ruby said.
The new homesteading
Thus, her notion of homesteading, minus its pioneer references to taking land in newly acquired territories, means “resourcefulness, and taking whatever space you have and using it as sustainably as possible,” she said.
“You can be in an apartment and create a graywater system on a small scale by collecting bathwater and pouring it down your toilet.”
Across town in the San Antonio neighborhood, another experiment in urban sustainability has been going on for five years. Sustaining Ourselves Locally (SOL) is a collective of nine young people who maintain a 5,000-square-foot garden behind a commercial building a stone’s throw from the BART tracks.
In 2003, four teachers at the Slide Ranch environmental agriculture project in Marin County moved to the spot after deciding it would be more beneficial for city children to learn about farming, nature and the environment if they saw “how it could happen in their neighborhood,” said Andrea Parker, who joined the group in 2004, adding that they also saw it “as a demonstration project for other people who want to live sustainably in the city.”
Every type of greens, more
SOL rents three upstairs apartments and one storefront space on the street. Luckily, the soil had minimal amounts of lead and no arsenic, but it did require hours of sifting for glass and debris. Now it yields greens, tomatoes, garlic, beets and carrots as well as berries and a small orchard, including citrus trees. Beehives are tended by an on-call beekeeper.
“This whole area used to be fruit orchards, and when you get out the trash, it’s really good soil,” Parker said.
A languishing plum and a peach tree sprang back to life immediately. A loquat – ubiquitous in East Oakland backyards – that the collective planted in one corner now bears fruit and serves as a yardstick for the garden’s progress.
Collective members take things in stride. The chickens they were raising were eaten by raccoons eight months ago, and a new wired-in pen is just being completed. A pond has mosquito fish and tadpoles, but they aren’t sure whether the fish, which should be killing mosquitoes, won’t also eat the tadpoles.
Raising animals is not high on SOL’s agenda because “we want to keep everything here for food and education,” said Kevin Fingerman, a graduate student in environmental resources at UC Berkeley and member of the collective.
SOL has worked with nearby organizations to bring students into the garden, including offering paid summer internships and a regular cooking and gardening class for Southeast Asian girls.
Along with scheduled school trips, SOL welcomes visitors to the garden on its volunteer work day the second Sunday of the month. It will also be open this Sunday on the Bay-Friendly Garden Tour, which showcases sustainable gardens across Alameda County.
A veteran of the first tour in 2004 and a model for others is the Berkeley backyard farm of Jim Montgomery and Mateo Rutherford, who bought their place on Bancroft Way in 1995.
“We knew we wanted to raise food,” said Montgomery, a math teacher who grew up in a family of seven in El Cerrito that raised chickens, ducks and rabbits in the backyard.
Assisted by Rutherford’s partner, Roy Rojas, and various roommates over the years, they have developed a farm that would be called small scale, but, in many ways, is comparable to those of the past, productive enough to support a family, with a vegetable patch, fruit trees, a goat pen and milking station, a chicken coop and a rabbit hutch.
“We have been building up the topsoil,” Rutherford said. “It’s 2 feet deeper than when we got here. It was heavy with clay.”
On a double lot that encompasses about 6,000 square feet, its bounty includes vegetables and fruit, which are canned and frozen, but also milk, cheese, eggs and meat, because the animals are slaughtered when it’s their time.
Montgomery kills the chickens and rabbits himself, saying it’s not alienating nor inhumane if the animals “have the pleasure of having families, raising their babies,” he said.
The goats even take walks in the neighborhood, which, he said, is good for their mental and physical health.
Convinced of the future of urban farming, Montgomery said the sagging economy and rising food prices will push more urbanites to farm and relearn many skills “we don’t have in our heads like our grandparents did.”
People want to learn
“People come to us and want to learn all the time,” he said. “We have several goat apprentices.”
Montgomery and Rutherford’s farm, as well as SOL, will be among 30 gardens on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour that seeks to show the many ways to use one’s patch of dirt in a dynamic, fruitful manner while conserving the region’s resources.
It’s part of an effort by Alameda County’s Stopwaste.org program to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in the landfill 75 percent by 2010.
Jeanne Nader, manager of the residential aspect of the Bay-friendly program, said that since 2004, the push has gone beyond merely composting kitchen scraps to include teaching the public how to garden and grow food.
“For us it’s the triangle of waste, water and food shed, and they are all inextricably linked,” she said.
“Protecting the water and waste shed of San Francisco Bay means reducing the amount of garbage, and fossil fuel it takes to haul it away. It means growing your own food to reduce the miles your food travels.”
She noted that the most recent biointensive-gardening class attracted 70 people, and there’s a long waiting list for the class, which offers certification for Bay-friendly landscapers.
“We have started seeing a lot of excitement around the issue of food security,” she said, and a big thrust from couples in their 30s who have left San Francisco to start families all over the East Bay and want to grow their own food and even raise farm animals.
“Chickens,” she said. “They are really huge right now.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/HOA81082E2.DTL
