I started a program this year at Humboldt Elementary School, called “Songwriting and Recording with Guitar”. My students wrote a lot of profound songs. The last one they did called “A Day Like Me”, which was written by the girl on the left in the photo was selected by the funder to be this month’s highlight on their website.

Go to http://www.childrensinvestmentfund.org/ and look in the bottom right hand corner for the song title “A Day Like Me”, and enjoy.

I taught this class as well as guitar and drumming classes in the inner city public schools this year through Ethos, a nonprofit music center. These particular classes were funded by The Portland Children’s Investment Fund. Here’s a blurb on it:

“In 2002, City of Portland voters passed Measure 26-33, which created the Children’s Investment Fund. The Children’s Investment Fund provides more than $10 million a year for five years to support programs designed to help children arrive at school ready to learn, provide safe and constructive after-school alternatives for kids and prevent child abuse and neglect and family violence.”

Recorder Rock Band, Toot toot-t-toot toot.

Humming Bean lead an effort for a store front window display at a radical feminist bookstore called In Other Words to inform el publico about the ordinance.

To read the whole letter, which we highly, highly recommend, clickhere to visit the full length pdf file.

A selection from Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail:

My response:

Later on, Dr. King talks about Extremists for Love:

Joe:

Signing off,

Microcaus’em

Dear America,

There are many things I want to share with you today. I will start by saying I love you and I believe in your spirit, your will for freedom. I want to see my country vital in its pursuit for an idealistic future, for a true democracy. I hope to see a population that believes in their power rise up like a the sun and redesign the current archaic structures that have become built up like a skeleton with no meat or blood. It is the people who support the bones and feed them. The people are the blood of the nation. Currently the being that is our government is a carcass of what remains of our nation’s vision for democracy.

As pained as I am by the actions of the government, I am deeply pained by the lack of action of the people. Speaking about the moderate whites who are addicted to order, I want us as a white community to make radical choices for justice. The middle class are the greatest preservers of a lifestyle bound to crash and burn. The people in our neighborhood who grew up here and are bound by the shackles of racism. A community abandoned by the state. We have complacency, a dulling of the spirit on both sides of the disease, the side of comfort and the side of discomfort. The question is then how do we disrobe this tension, of this MLK spoke.

Will I sooner see my neighbors house fall down around them, than see them take action towards their own justice?

Will I sooner see blood on the streets, America falling apart, before I see us as a nation make a real move away from oil?

I worry about “the war against humanity” as stated by Noam Chomsky. How are we caring for the people on this planet? How can we continue to put young women behind sewing machines for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week with no end in sight for years and decades so that we get a “good deal” on a what? a pair of pants.

When you wonder why thousands of people ride their bicycles through the streets in mass once a month in NYC or SF or any other city, hear their plea to love the earth. As the death count goes higher for soldiers in Iraq, people here are riding bicycles to be seen choosing life over oil. I see this as an act of love, extremists of love.

As a country I would like people to think about what they want to change in their lifetimes and take steps.

Choose an action that is yours, consider it daily.

I like a radical approach…… I look around and I see these things, options of peacemaking things we can do.

Make a garden, make food for friends and family, make a shirt, share your talents, bake an apple pie, make music, fly a kite in the wind, sew yourself some underwear, flush the toilet with water saved from your shower, smile while you are walking, trade stuff instead of buying, make your own envelopes, write letters, and March when it is time to March, study nonviolence, meditate, give stuff away, who are your heroes? Learn about them.

I write this full of passion and desire having read the letters from Birmingham City Jail. As Dr. King wrote:

I echo how Dr. King closed his letter with these above words. I invite you to share a response by leaving a comment or emailing me.

In Peace,

Hummingbean

We want lives.   The disappeared

Alliance against the people of oaxaca.

Going to fall

Cloning creates potentially dangerous abnormalities in embryos, researchers have warned at a German conference.

UN vote urges human cloning ban

The UN has been debating human cloning for two years
The UN has voted to approve a non-binding ban on all human cloning, ending two years of wrangling.

SPIN: The New Face of Farming
SPIN-Farming is S-mall P-lot IN-tensive farming.

Wally Satzewich operates Wally’s Urban Market Garden which is a multi-locational sub-acre urban farm. It is dispersed over 25 residential backyard garden plots in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, that are rented from homeowners. The sites range in size from 500 sq. ft. to 3000 sq. ft., and the growing area totals a half acre. The produce is sold at The Saskatoon Farmers Market.

Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen initially started farming on an acre-sized plot outside of Saskatoon 20 years ago. Thinking that expanding acreage was critical to their success, they bought some farmland adjacent to the South Saskatchewan river 40 miles north of Saskatoon where they eventually grew vegetables on about 20 acres of irrigated land. “This was a site to die for,” Ms. Vandersteen said. “It was incredibly beautiful, but the pestilence was incredible too! We couldn’t believe what the bugs and deer could do. Not to mention the wind.”

“We still lived in the city where we had a couple of small plots to grow crops like radishes and salad mix, which were our most profitable crops. We could grow three crops a year on the same site, pick and process on-site and put the produce into our cooler so it would be fresh for the market.”

Farmer’s Market

After six years farming their rural site, the couple realized there was more money to be made growing multiple crops intensively in the city, so they sold the farm and became urban growers. “People don’t believe you can grow three crops a year in Saskatoon,” observes Vandersteen. “They think it’s too much work, but the truth is, this is much less work than mechanized, large-scale farming. We used to have a tractor to hill potatoes and cultivate, but we find it’s more efficient to do things by hand. Other than a rototiller, all we need is a push-type seeder and a few hand tools.”

Mr. Satzewich points out that city growing provides a more controlled environment, with fewer pests, better wind protection and a longer growing season. “We are producing 10-15 different crops and sell thousands of bunches of radishes and green onions and thousands of bags of salad greens and carrots each season. Our volumes are low compared to conventional farming, but we sell high-quality organic products at very high-end prices.” The SPIN method is based on their successful experiment in downsizing which emphasizes minimal mechanization and maximum fiscal discipline and planning.

Brian Halweil, a food issues writer and researcher at the Washington-DC-based Worldwatch Institute, interviewed Mr. Satzewich and referenced his farming approach in “Eat Here”, which documents worldwide initiatives in building a locally-based food industries.

Roxanne Christensen is co-founder and President of the Institute for Innovations in Local Farming. In partnership with the Philadelphia Water Department, the Institute operates Somerton Tanks Farm, a prototype sub-acre urban farm that serves as the U.S. test bed for the SPIN-FARMING method. The farm has received the support of the Pennsylvania Dept. Of Agriculture, the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corp., the City Commerce Department, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.

Ms. Christensen contends that the separation of country and city is a bankrupt concept. “As development erodes the rural way of life, agriculture is creeping closer and closer to metropolitan areas. SPIN-FARMING leverages this trend in a positive way – by capitalizing on limited resources and space. Creating Somerton Tanks Farm using the SPIN method required minimal upfront investment, and it keeps operating overhead low.

“For aspiring farmers, SPIN eliminates the 2 big barriers to entry – sizeable acreage and substantial startup capital. At the same time, its intensive relay growing techniques and precise revenue targeting formulas push yields to unprecedented levels and result in highly profitable income.”

In 2003, its first year of operation, Somerton Tanks Farm, located in northeast Philadelphia, the fifth largest city in the U.S, produced $26,100 in gross sales from a half-acre of growing space during a 9 month growing season. In 2005 gross sales increased to $52,200. So in just three years of operation Somerton Tanks Farm achieved a level of productivity and financial success that many agricultural professionals claimed was impossible. And it is providing a way for independent farmers to once again have a viable role in the food production system that has tipped too much in favor of large scale mass production agriculture.

The first-ever SPIN-Farming workshop is coming to Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. SPIN Cities: Farming Where We Live will equip a new generation of farmers with the know-how to farm commercially without having to own much, if any land, and without having to make a large financial investment. INSTRUCTOR: Wally Satzewich, veteran urban farmer and developer of SPIN will show others how to replicate his success using this unique sub-acre farming approach. FOR: Backyard or small lot farmers in urban and peri-urban areas. WHEN: March 22-24, 2007. WHERE: East Troy, Wisconsin Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. TO REGISTER: Contact Janet Gamble at Michael Fields Institute at 262-642-3303 or jgamble@michaelfieldsaginst.org

For more information:

http://www.spinfarming.com
http://www.somertontanksfarm.org/
http://www.marketgardening.com/wallysmarketgarden/
http://www.michaelfieldsaginst.org/news/events.html

Lisa’s grampa, Jack, passed away. We attended the memorial service in Conneticut. Met up with family in New York City.

On the same day as his death, a new child is born in the family: Opal. Lisa’s cousins Lynn and Todd who live in SE Portland had they’re second. She’s doing great. Lisa baked them an apple pie.

We got a music practice space set up in our house.

Friends come over and play. Mike is our star improv lyricist.