Thoughts on plastic

A material that everything can be made out of. It has largely replaced all other materials. It is made from a non-renewable resource. We are taking a valuable, limited resource –oil - and turning it into temporarily useful (and often not all that useful) objects that quickly become trash. We are wasting something precious. Also, we are damaging the environment by turning something that is within nature's many finely tuned and highly evolved cycles - oil - into something that is outside of most of these cycles, and therefore highly destructive of them - plastic.

Who's responsible for this? Well, no one. There is no one making the decisions on the scale of the world, which is the scale of oil. When there is no one else in charge, the fall back is the free market, the invisible hand. The free market is supposed to be a logical way of distributing resources. But what's logical about this? Plastic, in and of itself, is not bad, but for god sake, save the plastic for what it's really good for. Things that it's really the only good material for. Like...the space program. Greenhouses. Maybe galoshes. And make it recyclable. Make recycling it mandatory. What we need is some form of world government that is able to make logical choices about our resources in the long-term interests of humanity in general. In the mean time…

Here's how I deal with plastic: I try to act like it doesn't exist. First of all, I avoid buying anything plastic or packaged in plastic at all costs. And if I am at the store and want to buy something unpackaged but didn’t bring a container with me, I don’t buy it. If I’m out and about and I want a coffee to go, but I don’t have a container, I don’t have coffee. Or I make the time to sit down and drink it there in a reusable container. I find that if I take advantage of the convenience of plastic and tell myself I’ll remember my container next time, I never do. But if I go without once or twice, I sure do remember then. Also, I try to imagine that there is no dump. On a large scale, that’s true. We’re all living with our trash. But I try to imagine it on a personal scale. What if I couldn’t rid myself of all the things I want to throw away? I would buy a lot less, and be more careful about what I bought – will it last? Will it decompose once I’m done with it? I would be more careful about what I threw away. Can I use this longer? Can I find another use for it? I try to act like that’s the case. I may put it into actual practice once I have my own land. Rather than throwing things away, I’ll have a long-term compost pile.

Waldo County Homesteaders' Community Land Trust

WALDO COUNTY BACK-TO-THE LAND TRUST MANIFESTO:

Here are some thoughts on this land trust thing I've been mulling over...

I want to homestead. By homestead, I mean build a small off-grid cabin and garden. I would need 1-2 acres to do this, plus some wild areas to bang around in and forage.

I am having trouble finding a place to do that. The most traditional method would be to buy a piece of land. I can afford a down payment for a small parcel and handle the mortgage. But I wouldn’t have much money left to build anything. And I don’t want a small parcel in the midst of a bunch of other small parcels, which might not agree with or develop in a way conducive with my way of life. I also can’t afford to buy anything big enough to own my own wild space.

The problem is this. Back-to-the-landers came to the Belfast area back in the 70s and 80s. Their presence made this area cool. Waldo County is a great place to homestead. MOFGA, Unity College, the Belfast Co-op, Fedco. But this is changing. There is pressure for more corporate development, along the lines of MBNA, the hospital, Job Lots, etc. As these kinds of “amenities” come to this area, land prices will likely escalate. This will price out the young, the artistic, the eccentric, and those who simply are unwilling or unable to do what it takes to make money in our present system. They will be replaced with the old, the well-off, the main stream. And the character of this place will be lost.

We need to take control of what is being done with the land. Without some sort of intervention, the private real estate market dictates our development, in the above way. We can wait around or agitate for government to intervene and do something, though the likelihood of that seems slight. Government occasionally sets aside land for a park, but there is little or no government intervention having to do with how people are able to obtain and live on the land.

The alternative is to organize and do it ourselves. The way that private citizens can obtain land and then dedicate it to a higher purpose is through the mechanism of community land trusts. Community land trusts are non-profit organizations. CLTs obtain land to use for a mission in perpetuity, thereby permanently removing it from the private real estate market. CLTs are well established and wide spread mechanisms for obtaining and using land for higher purposes. For instance, there are a number of CLTs in the area that obtain land for wilderness preservation – Coastal Mountains Land Trust for example. Maine Farmland Trust’s mission is to encourage agriculture as a viable economic pursuit in Maine, and they obtain land for that purpose. It is sold or leased to would-be farmers at below market rates. They remove land from the private market and distribute it in ways that further their mission. In many urban areas CLTs are used to provide affordable housing.

My hope is that there is a place in Waldo County for another kind of land trust, between wilderness preservation and commercial farming. The mission of this trust would be to obtain land and make it affordably available to (low-income?) people for sustainable living. The parcels could be single lots, or big parcels that are split up into separate leaseholds. The basic framework would look like this: People can rent anywhere from 1-5 acres from the trust, for a low, per acre amount ($100 an acre for example). They can have a simple small homestead, or rent more for small scale farming, etc. With large enough parcels, a portion could be set aside as wild space for recreation, foraging, sustainable wood harvesting, etc. There is no down payment, no big up-front cash requirement. The reason for this is that people can then save their capital for setting up their homestead. The leases are long-term and basically permanent (99 year), as long as they live within a set of rules that ensures sustainable development. I imagine the rules to look something like this:

- a square footage limitation on dwelling size (maybe 1 person = 600 square feet, 100 square feet per additional person

- off grid (people can provide their own power through solar, wind, etc.)

- no pesticide use – strictly organic gardening and farming

- no septic systems – gray water and composting toilet systems only

The major hurdling blocks to going back to a simple way of life are the usual requirement in the private market of a big down payment and high overhead, depending on the price of the land and the resulting mortgage. The land trust with long-term lease scenario eliminates both of these. There is no down-payment, and rents are kept as low as possible (how to determine rent is a question – enough to cover taxes/maintenance? What about money for the land trust to acquire more land? Is there a way to determine an amount that allows for some profit to go back towards the mission without defeating the mission?...). People may actually pay more over their lifetime, since there is nothing to “pay off” as with a mortgage, just an ongoing rent. But this a pretty good trade considering the benefit: people are enabled to live a homesteading lifestyle immediately, without a years-long delay to acquire the capital for a down payment and then many more years of full time work to pay off a mortgage.

This trust would basically be a form of “affordable housing” – but instead it’s affordable land for sustainable living.

Long overdue thoughts on the Maine gubernatorial election.

I wish people would accept that we currently have a two party system. Not permanently, not be resigned to it, just accept the facts as they stand right now. Rather than putting our energies into doomed third party campaigns that result in a minority extremist wielding dangerous amounts of power, those of us who would like to see a multi-party system should be putting our energies into changing the political system into a multi-party system. Easy no-brainer reform: Instant Runoff Voting. Or any other number of variations on that theme. While I've heard the refrain that no major party will ever pass such a thing because they stand to lose prominence, I really doubt that. Most Democrats I talk to strongly support IRV. At any rate, we'd have a much better shot at it with Dems than with conservatives I'd wager.

Which brings me to another favorite political point of mine - while fighting for reform such as IRV, work within the current system by shifting the debate left. What I mean by that, is the lesser of two evils IS better. Much better. Keep fighting hard to get the Democrats in, until Democrats are the norm, and then the Greens can become the other major party while the Republicans fade into obscurity. This happens in real life all the time - there are lots of cities where the two major parties are Democrats and Greens. Portland, for example.

I guess the overriding theme is that we need to take a realist approach to reaching our progressive goals. Wishful thinking and "voting your conscience" (i.e. voting for long-shot third party progressives) is going to result in right wing victories and terrible costs to people and the environment. I think it's pretty selfish to close one's eyes to that reality in return for a momentary feeling of elation and moral superiority in the voting booth.

The case of Maine's recent election is somewhat different from the "starry-eyed third party progressive with a single-digit fraction of support" scenario. Here we had two progressive candidates running neck and neck for much of the campaign. In this situation, my anger lay not so much with the voters, who were understandably confused, as with the Eliot Cutler campaign. Why Eliot Cutler and not Libby Mitchell? Because Libby Mitchell WON the Democratic primary. In our current system, we need to get behind one candidate in order to win. The process in place for choosing that candidate, is the party primary. Like it or not, that's the reality.Eliot Cutler is a Democrat in all but name. He works for Democrats, he has basically progressive values on most issues. Yet he chose not to compete in the Democratic primary, and enter the race as an independent, thereby endangering and ultimately dooming a progressive victory. I really can see little other reason for his candidacy than either hubris or secretly working for the LePage campaign. IF Eliot Cutler had won the Democratic primary, I absolutely would have supported and voted for him. The overriding imperative here, folks, is to have a progressive, any progressive, in power, rather than a conservative.

Which brings me to another point. Individuals matter very little. I would sooner send a progressive drug addled high school student to the Blane House than a genius seasoned political conservative. What matters is political philosophy. That's all. Not age, not experience, not their private life, not a checkered past, not whose jet they fly on, or how much their clothes cost - just their politics. I could vote given no other information than party affiliation. In some European countries that's how it's done - people vote for their party (aka belief system) and the party picks the representative. I suppose a lot of Americans who are used to the media circus craziness of picking apart everything about candidates other than um, what they believe and how that will translate into public policy, will find this idea abhorrent. I think it's utterly ridiculous and arrogant to think you can know anything about a person's character through a political campaign. Or anything about their ability to govern through their private life. Come on. It takes years, decades, for most of us to even know our own character, or that of those closest to us. I think the whole character judgment thing is just another way for people to feel superior. And to avoid actually doing some serious reflective thinking about what their political beliefs are.

Which brings me to my final point. I have no respect for the swing voter. Anyone with any minimal amount of self awareness and intelligence is capable of sitting down and figuring out their political belief system. It's not that hard. If you don't have a political affiliation, you haven't thought about it enough, that's all. No one with real values would be capable of voting both Republican and Democrat. They're opposites. If you're voting for both, you're confused. Pandering to these people is demeaning. And cheapens our political debate. Progressive would be better of being progressives and talking progressive values rather than pandering to the confused and lazy.

Well, I know the tone of all this might be a tad abrasive. It comes from a place of being deeply saddened and disgusted with the minority vote victory of the dangerous extremist, Paul LePage, and the suffering and destruction he will no doubt cause.