Reclaim the Commons has begun, our extremely ambitious
mobilization here on our own home ground in San
Francisco. Tonight will be the first evening of
the teach-in. Yesterday, Wednesday, we began moving
into our convergence center, after many cliff-hanging
dramas. As of Monday, we were still trying to get
an agreement signed for a different space that had
many problematic features, not least that we were
subleasing and the owner ran a business upstairs.
As time grew shorter, the guys we were renting from
grew more and more nervous, and more and more restrictions
slipped into the agreement. Then, at 4:30 in the
afternoon on Memorial Day, I got a call from one
of our group who is a realtor, that a new place
was available. It's huge. It's beautiful. And it's
two blocks from Moscone Center, where the big biotech
convention will be. It has a front room 40' by 40'
that we will fill with plants, seating circles,
a bubbling fountain and a couple of ponds: our permaculture
garden lounge. We have space for meetings, big spokescouncils,
trainings, for the medics and the media team and
Food Not Bombs and artmaking and a kids' space,
all under one roof.
We're nesting, washing the floors, collecting old
chairs, couches, tables, and rugs, and filling the
place with plants. Next door to us is a junk shop
and some of us have been happily shopping. I've
pulled off what has to be some ultimate Sustainability
Coup by bringing down all the cardboard that covered
the solar panels we had installed on our house last
winter, to be recycled into puppets and signs. I'm
setting up tubs to define seating areas and filling
them with sample plant guilds, feeling that somehow
I've swapped karmas with Martha Stewart--she's in
trouble with the law, and I'm arranging flowers.
I have a really, really comfortable bed, so high
you have to hop onto it, with a mattress thick and
firm. And I actually get to sleep in it this time.
I'm working with friends that I've done political
work with for twenty-five years, in a town where
I don't have to study the map and learn the streets
because I already know them.
And yet so much of San Francisco feels strange to
me. I normally spend very little time downtown,
or in the warehouse district south of Market where
I've been searching for space. Yerba Buena, the
park and arts complex that sits atop Moscone Center
where the biotech convention will be held, is a
big, public project that displaced a Filipino neighborhood
and a lot of poor elders when it was built. I've
taken my Goddess daughters to movies at the Metreon
and to Zeum, the wonderful, interactive youth museum
in the park. They've ridden on the carousel and
performed in plays at the Arts Center. I've never
before done a ritual there, under the gaze of high-rises
in the heart of downtown, but two nights ago we
chanted for the full moon and planted crystals in
the grass. Downtown at night is almost empty, a
few passersby strolled on the paths, but we were
mostly alone in an eerie quiet as the moon rose
and the waterfall fountain that border the park
sang behind us. The action has begun.
Friday, June 4
It's astonishing how many people in San Francisco
seem to be abandoning their couches just at this
moment. We keep getting calls from someone scanning
Craig's List on the internet to go pick up a couch
here, a refrigerator there. I achieve my main ambition
of the day, and get my hair cut. After that, it's
just directing traffic, answering calls, planning
the trainings, thinking about who might facilitate
the meetings, and then finally rushing off to the
teach-in at the Unitarian Church.
Brian has been nervous all day, worried about the
turn out for the teach-in. It's been hard organizing
it because this one had virtually no funding, and
the money that did come came late. We printed up
a great broadsheet months ago and then had no money
for weeks and weeks to print more. We're so late
getting the convergence space partly because no
one believed we had money to rent it until a few
weeks ago. It seems like all the progressive funding
in the country is being sucked into efforts to defeat
Bush. A worthy cause, certainly, but just another
example of how the current administration is sucking
the lifeblood out of anything that truly feeds and
nurtures the spirit.
Still, with almost no resources we've accomplished
a lot. The space is up and running, the calendar
is on the walls. Erik arrives in late afternoon
with a U-Haul truck filled with plants, wine barrels,
and eager permaculturalists, and we begin setting
up the Garden Lounge. We place the barrels to define
seating circles and traffic flow, and start to fill
them with plants. We arrange the plants in guilds,
which, I explain to our eager helpers, are plant
affinity groups. In permaculture, we try to group
plants that support each other and fulfill different
functions--nitrogen fixers that take nitrogen out
of the air and change it into a form that plants
can take up in their roots for fertility; insectaries
that attract beneficial insects; dynamic accumulators
that take up minerals in their roots. We're grouping
those things that grow together: a barrel of berries,
elderberry and a small maple, all forest edge plants.
I've made another that's a moon garden, all white
and silver-gray plants that are also drought tolerant
insectaries. By tomorrow's press conference, we'll
have a bubbling fountain and a pond in the center.
I pull a few out for the kids' room, velvety lamb's
ears, scented geraniums, a strong smelling native
sage We also have hundreds of tomato plants to give
away at the Really, Really Free Market.
Many of these plants were propagated months ago,
in a day up at our ranch in the Cazadero Hills when
all the neighbors came by to snip cuttings and pot
up wild seedlings. I have to say a special thanks
to Mer, who kept those starts watered in our greenhouse
for months, all through the heat waves of March.
When I arrive at the teach-in, there are only a
few people there, and my heart sinks. But I'm early,
and as time goes on more and more arrive, until
finally the hall is filled and overflowing. I give
an overview of the mobilization, and then we hear
from a panel on GMOs and food. The facts are alarming,
but we are also on a rising tide of victory. Just
a couple of key facts:
Monsanto's stock is down 40%.
Although biotech companies claim to be feeding the
world, 85% of GMO crops are herbicide resistant
varieties of corn, canola, and soy that contribute
to an enormously increased use of chemicals that
kill the life of the soil. The other main crop is
BT cotton, which is supposed to produce its own
natural pesticide, and which has been a big failure.
Anuradha Mittal talked about how the governments
of a number of Indian states had to bail out farmers
who planted it.
Biotech claims to be cutting edge science, but actually
it is stifling science. Ignacio Chapela, the UC
Berkeley biologist whose lab discovered the genetic
contamination of original races of corn in Puebla
and Chiapas, told how the graduate student who did
the fieldwork was branded a "bioterrorist"
and blacklisted, and how many other scientists who
investigate the dangers of GMOs are cut out of grants,
jobs, and professional support.
The FDA waived safety trials for GMO foods.
And much more. But as usual, no more time
to write this morning. Check the website at
www.reclaimthecommons.net
for more, and check the Indymedia page for interviews.
And if you're in the Bay Area, come down to 960
Howard. Plan to march with us on Saturday--meet
at UN Plaza at 11 AM in the peace march. And come
to the other activities, especially the action day,
June 8. Greenbloc and Pagan clusters will be at
4th and Howard at 6:30 AM--bring plants to create
the garden in the streets!
Copyright (c) 2004 by Starhawk. All rights reserved.
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