March 2005
Ecotopia Noir
San Francisco, 2157. The proverbial eco-deluge has come to pass. Skyscrapers poke out of a submerged downtown and a biotech bestiary populates the Bay, yet the Folsom Street Fair is more ribald than ever. A great die-off has dissolved the last coherent government, and the anarchists have inherited the earth. Local control is the rule: community gardens, neighborhood councils, and bikes instead of cars.
Thus spaketh Chris Carlsson, local writer and author of After the Deluge, a vision of San Francisco’s bawdy, homegrown “culture of creative dissent” projected into a waterlogged future. Life in pacifistic San Francisco is good. Everyone does a little drudge work, but most spend time on creative pursuits like crafts, flower cultivation, and underwater clubbing: there’s no particular hierarchy of desire. But all is not well: Cooperating with nature, instead of domination, has bred a surfeit of inner placidity in residents. Too much water on the brain?
A Chicago transplant named Eric joins the city’s post-police crime-solving agency to pursue Nwin, a sex-addled pyromaniac who has hooked up with a cabal of discontents captained by a dominatrix descended from the Unabomber. From their ship, The Republic of Texas, they plot to return moral order and social discipline.
Back in 2005, while we’re face-to-face with global economic apartheid and imperial war, isn’t this all a bit escapist? No, insists Carlsson. Clarifying our vision is the first step to putting it into practice. We don’t hold all the cards, and can’t bring about our ideal world through some act of supreme will, but there will come a moment when “the larger edifice of oppression and stupidity that organizes the planet today will crumble and a new world will burst forth.”
As the compiler of Shaping San Francisco, an interactive CD-ROM (published in book form by City Lights) that preserves a dazzling swath of local history, Carlsson is the city’s intrepid docent. He is also a key member of the Processed World, a local editorial collective that has been denouncing the cultural impact of the profit motive for a quarter of a century. In his most activist guise, Carlsson is a founding member of Critical Mass, the bicycle confabulation that’s been reclaiming public space and disrupting downtown commuter traffic since 1992. A prophet speaks:
The water is rising... — Daniel Burton-Rose
Printed on recycled paper, After the Deluge is available from Full Enjoyment Books and can also be downloaded as a PDF, free of charge, at: www.fullenjoymentbooks.com
It’s a Mad, Mad World
When the White House labels a scheme to chop trees the “Healthy Forests Act,” a certain Orwellian alarm should greet a program dubbed the “New Freedom Initiative.” Set to debut in July, NFI will be packaged as a compassionate response to the crisis of mental health care. In fact, it is the bipolar opposite: a plan for mandatory, nationwide testing to identify “consumers of all ages” whose mental states would benefit from costly mood-altering drugs. The first targets will be the country’s 65 million school kids (including pre-schoolers). The NFI will then test six million teachers for psychosis.
NFI is modeled on a Texas program hatched when George W. Bush was governor. A Pennsylvania whistleblower named Allen Jones lost his job for warning the New York Times that the same “political/pharmaceutical alliance” behind the Texas scheme was also behind the NFI. Its goal, Jones alleged, was to require the use of “patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab.”
This is socialized medicine Bush-style. If the government can privatize our forests, schools, and social security, why not invite Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline to fuel our moods and modify our brain waves? Get ready for W’s dystopia: Pax America abroad; Paxil America at home. — Gar Smith
Tea by Two
Reem and Ahmed Rahim, founders of Emeryville’s Numi tea company, open a black bamboo box like a treasure chest, pick a hand-sewn organic bundle of white tea and orange lily and plunge it into hot water. The small ball quickly blossoms like a flower and sways like a sea anemone in the glass pot. Lipton it’s not.
Reem and Ahmed are siblings who share a tale of 1,000 lives. The Iraqi-born pair grew up drinking dry desert lime tea, the Iraqi equivalent of lemonade. They landed in Cleveland after their family fled Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War. In the past decade, they have traveled worldwide, learning eight languages between them, and found time to make films, art and friends — all the while collecting creative ideas that would distinguish their innovative East Bay tea business.
Numi, which opened in 1999, is one of the few fully organic, fair-trade tea companies in the US. “If it’s good for the farm, it’s good for us,” Ahmed said. An artist trained in Italy and South Africa, she designed the dreamy scenes on the 100% post-consumer recycled packaging. Ahmed, the alchemist who blends the teas like words of a poet, once owned teahouses in the Czech Republic. Prior to his Czech tea-making chapter, he worked as a photographer. Once, while in Morocco, Ahmed snapped an image of an old man. Years later, he found the negative and printed it. Reem drew the scene onto paper and the Numi look was born.
Now, the company distributes teas gathered from the Chinese countryside and from farms in India, Japan and Africa. In addition to their bagged infusions, they introduced a line of flowering teas stitched together with fine thread.
“We wanted an artful experience,” said Reem.
That said, Ahmed meandered through the sweetly scented warehouse to the vats of schizandra berries and chrysanthemum flowers. He opened a container of earl grey scented with bergamot, an orange-shaped fruit found in Calabria, and explained that most tea companies synthesize the aroma or use oils to flavor the tea. Numi uses only whole leaves, organic fruit and flowers.
In their short tenure, Ahmed and Reem have managed to introduce several exotic teas into the US market, including honey bush, rooibos, lemon myrtle and the desert lime of their childhood. They’ve even had the blessings of both the rabbi and the imam, merging Kosher and Halal law into a tiny biodegradable bag. — Andrea Blum
Heart in Darkness
Dessert went fast after Action Against Hunger’s (AAH) benefit screening of Tom Weidlinger’s documentary Heart of the Congo on January 28. San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre was packed. Many stayed for a lively, if prickly, discussion and lively, but not prickly, music performed by Samba Ngo from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nearly 4 million people have died in six years of civil war and instability in Congo. Maybe attention will be paid now that this inattention is being compared with the outpouring of support for Asian tsunami victims. The tsunami was a cataclysmic event, captured on film. Congo is constant, steady death through killing, disease and starvation in a place where no one is planning to vacation.
After moderating the discussion, Adam Hochschild (author of King Leopold’s Ghost, about the plunder of the Congo, and Bury the Chains, about the British anti-slavery movement) said, “There are peace agreements, but they always break down. You can trace the conflict by the rise and fall of commodity prices.’’
Weidlinger’s hour-long film shows AAH volunteers in remote eastern Congo as they run a feeding center, set up a health clinic and build a well; basic stuff that saves lives and leaves structure for Congolese. In frustration and triumph, kindness and impatience, the Westerners are dedicated but not saints. Absence of sentimentality in the film and the aid workers makes the faces and the plight of Congolese even more affecting.
When the filmmaker gets malaria and pneumonia, he is flown to South Africa: Congolese in the bush live or die with the medical care available.
Heart of the Congo will be shown on PBS this fall; there may be other local screenings in the interim. The website is www.heartofthecongo.com .
Ann-Sophie Fournier, Action Against Hunger-USA’s executive director, was thrilled by the turnout but during the discussion, she was frustrated by her inability to answer criticism directed at the film — and at aid organizations.
“People are expecting humanitarian aid to solve the whole problems of the world,’’ she said later. “It’s not true. We cannot do it. It’s not our purpose. We can respond a lot, but politics will prevail. They are starved on purpose; they are destroyed on purpose.
“I’ve spent eight years in the field. What strikes me is the dignity of desperate people.’’ — Lewis Dolinsky
Cancer Guides
Anyone who has ever attended to someone with cancer knows that there are many more questions than answers when making decisions on proper care. CancerGuides, a program sponsored by the Washington-D.C.-based Center for Mind-Body Medicine offers healthcare providers, cancer patients, and advocates an integrated, informed roadmap to cancer care.
On March 13, CancerGuides will present a weeklong training program at the Claremont Resort and Spa in Berkeley, covering aspects of oncology, nutrition and supplementation, psychology, psychoneuroimmunology, spirituality, traditional Chinese medicine, and energy therapies. Participants will learn how to integrate journal writing, drawing, exercise, massage, music, movement and ritual into a care program. The program also covers the biology of cancer, cutting-edge conventional therapies and the limitations of those therapies.
Led by Harvard-trained psychiatrist James Gordon, MD, founder and director of the Mind-Body Center (he formerly served as the Chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine), the seven-day course combines lectures with six two-hour small-group sessions.
The impressive faculty includes: Commonweal co-founder Michael Lerner; Integrative Medicine for Cancer Treatment VP Timothy C. Birdsal (co-author of How To Prevent and Treat Cancer With Natural Medicine ); psychotherapist Lora Matz; Ralph W. Moss, president of Cancer Communications, Inc.; medical oncologist Garrett Smith and a host of other luminaries. The course costs $1,950. Group discounts and scholarships based on need or merit are also available. For complete faculty bios and a course schedule, go to www.cmbm.org , or contact Ketzela Jacobowitz at (202) 966-7388 x222. — Tricia Cambron
Fill Up America
Fill Up America is a San Francisco nonprofit with a winning strategy to shrink the gap between the have-mores and the have-nots, one grocery bag at a time. Their plan: find needy people, collect usable about-to-be-discarded food and clothing and, as their mission statement reads: “Connect the dots.” Sound simple? Well, it is.
Since packing the first brown paper bags in founder Rob Kandell’s driveway four years ago, the organization’s methods have grown only slightly more complex. Every Friday at 9am, volunteers gather surplus from local markets (everything from broken chocolate bars to just-expired items with little chance of retail sale) and, after dividing the treasure at the CELLspace art center, they head to Mary and Martins Church in the Tenderloin. In the church parking lot, lines form, and the bags of goodies are handed away. By 1pm, the work is done and all are pleased: the famished, the donors (who earn tax deductions), and the volunteers. “We do it every Friday,” Kandell says cheerfully, “then we feel better about our weekend.”
Their giveaways have consistently grown larger, thanks to a gift for resourceful efficiency. With a four-hour cycle, no storage or refrigeration is necessary and the total cost comes to about 3 cents per redirected pound. Fifteen volunteers, ensuring that every penny is spent for the cause itself, do all tasks, from paperwork to paper bag hoarding. The non-profit website’s “Our Citizens” section offers a makeshift employment agency to assist folks like Jerry, an out-of-work painter. “He actually got a job out of it,” boasts Kandell. The Fill Up America communal band operates with a refreshing and pervasive glee. “Our food day is a party,” Kandell proclaims. “We play music, we dance around, and we flirt.” Charity never seemed so inviting or zany.
Fill Up America’s projections for 2005 are simple: more food and more volunteers, including grant writers and fundraisers. With more than 100,000 lbs. of food diverted from landfills to lifesaving in 2004, the possibilities for an expanded program in 2005 are exciting. “Food is thrown away every day of the week,” Kandell laments, “It just needs time and energy [to collect and redirect it].”
To learn more, visit www.fillupamerica.org or call (415) 497-7558. And, if you have even an hour to spare, just stop by some Friday morning. Chances are, you’ll walk in hearing music and walk out grinning. — David Sason
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