It was the fifth anniversary of the founding of Pedal People, a business so far out that when I first heard about it I had a struggle to get my head around it. Pedal People is Northampton's alternative trash collection service. They don't use trucks. They use bike-pulled trailers, the same kind that you sometimes see with a kid inside, only strengthened for the extra load. There's pictures on their website: http://www.pedalpeople.com/. They not only collect trash from the homes of the very environmentally concerned, since last June they have had the contract with the city to empty the 60 or so public trash barrels in the downtown shopping district. We've been using them ever since we moved in.



All their customers were invited to the party, so I went even though I had not met any of them. For potluck I brought celery sticks, carrot sticks and apple wedges in a virtuously reused rectangular plastic restaurant take-out container. It's the kind of snack that usually sits among the bags of chips and bottles of soda pop getting only occasional attention; at the end of the night it's usually between half and a quarter full. Sometimes it's the only thing on the table I can eat, which I why I bring it.



Not at this party, which took place in a modest Victorian on a quiet side street. I arrived half an hour after the announced starting time and thought I must have got the date wrong because there were so few cars parked outside it. Then I went around to the back door (as directed by a sign on the front). The yard backs on the bike trail; most of the crowd had come on two wheels. Yes, in December in Massachusetts, with snow on the ground. We're talking the environmentalist hard core here.



The interior was decorated in Late Hippie, creatively but not psychedelically painted, with things like wall-mounted shelves with one corner held up by a "leg" made from a whole tree branch with the bark still on. The living room was dominated by a huge multicolored hammock. On the food table there wasn't a bag of chips or a bottle of soda to be seen, or anything else factory-packaged or even from a bakery. Every single contribution was homemade. Most notable was the Squornbread, a combination of corn, squash, and ground acorns from a white oak about three blocks away, with a little sorghum molasses and baking soda for leavening, and I think also salt. This was made by Ruthy Woodring, one of Pedal People's founders. I ended up talking to her two or three times and making an appointment to go see this bike she rescued and fixed up (the Pedal People enjoy amazing trashpicking opportunities) and maybe buy it. Also found out about their little food co-op (mostly you have to pre-order the food but they have a cabinet in their living room full of plastic buckets of beans and raisins and millet and so forth) and the lending library, which covers the living room walls.



It was while checking out the library that I had a moment of mourning. Demi and Ky used to take in lost and confused trannies, mostly young, for spirit healing, a meal, maybe a night or two on the couch, and this house was going to be a place where they could do that more systematically, maybe have some real rehabilitation going. They had, of course, a library of potentially useful books for such people, mostly on spiritual and psychological subjects. Thinking to add an element of practicality, I had collected a few books on the subjects of money management and self-employment. (Trannies have a hard time getting hired, so self-employment seems logical.) I had really looked forward to participating in that small local do-good effort, feeding the refugees what Demi always called Food That Is Made Of Food, being a good listener and maybe giving the occasional bit of sage advice. And now none of that is going to happen. I don't have the people skills or the healing skills. Just as importantly, I'm not trans, so I don't have the necessary rapport. Maybe it'll happen somewhere else, wherever those two eventually land, but I am unlikely to be part of it.



I also experienced the greatest moment of simple-hearted delight I've had all week, maybe all month, when I tried out the hammock. Something about being more or less horizontal while swinging back and forth just made my troubles go completely away. I also gave two little kids piggy back rides, heard a little string band (partygoers gathered around the piano) play something that seemed vaguely Christmasy, perhaps because it was an old madrigal sort of thing, and heard from one of the band members that there will be a Solstice event on the 21st at the nature preserve which is only a few blocks from my house. Outdoors, with a bonfire. They'll be playing. I think I came away with five or six useful websites to check out. My potluck contribution got completely eaten. And for the first time since I've been here I'm starting to feel connected to Northampton.

...at least in the sense that art is intentional.



There's a flaw in certain Ford trucks that cause them to catch fire. There was a recall earlier this year but sidhefire, who owns one -- or used to -- didn't hear about it until too late. Too late happened last night, I think, or the night before. Happily the truck was parked and without passengers when it went up in flames so hot that it melted significant amounts of plastic off the rear of the car parked in front of it.



When the fire department had come and gone and the danger was past, well, what's the newly bereaved owner of a dramatically destroyed vehicle to do in the Age of the Internet? Why, she went out and photographed the damage and posted the pictures on her LJ, of course.



Most of them are just burned-car pictures, but this one...well, see for yourselves: http://pics.livejournal.com/sidhefire/pic/00154raw/g11.

Today is the 74th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. In honor of the occasion, I am going to rant a bit about the anti-fun wing of the environmental movement.



If you've followed environmentalist writings at all, you've certainly read screeds like this one by Wendell Berry, pulled from an interview printed in last Summer's issue of Green Living:

Usefulness stands in opposition to the frivolous...If you ask "Is it useful?" probably you're going to have fewer things you don't need. You are useful to your family if you're bringing home the things they need. Beyond that, maybe you are useful to other people by your work. The corporate world is much inclined to obscure this usefulness by making and selling a lot of things that people don't need...I don't want to be too much of a crank, but there are many things that people own to no real benefit, such as computer games and sometimes even computers.

These are clearly the words of a man who is has so completely lost touch with his youth that he does not see any usefulness in something which is simply fun. Further, the very idea of asking whether human beings are useful implies a value system in which human life has no inherent value and we as a society can ethically abandon people who aren't economically productive. Later in the same interview he speaks in favor of people who are sick and tired of each other being stuck together through necessity:

...it is the purpose of the family to stay together. And like a community, a family doesn't stay together just out of sentiment. It is certainly more pat to stay together if the various members need one another or are in some practical way dependent on one another.

Hasn't he ever heard of domestic violence? Has it really not occurred to him that increasing economic dependency within the family will make it harder for victims to get away?



Berry is a family man but he has a lot in common with many of the monastics and former monastics who make up a disproportionately large share of well-know environmentalist writers. One of those things is a kind of blindness to the existence of bad people, never mind the possibility that bad people might rise to power. Daniel Quinn, former Trappist monk, proposed (in his famous boiling frog essay) to limit population growth by simply restricting the food supply. Not only would this policy create a totally new motive for murder ("If we kill him, we can have a kid!"), it would also be a dangerous tool in the hands of fallible human leaders in a world where racism and nationalism still exist. And that assumes it's even doable. The U.S. government, arguably the most powerful the world has ever known, can't even keep its own citizens from growing, dealing and smoking marijuana.



In a sense this anti-fun strain represents an invasion of environmentalism by what is now called the voluntary simplicity movement, which has existed in various forms, most of them religious, for thousands of years. The Christian form was articulated by C. S. Lewis in his enormously popular 1952 book Mere Christianity.

...the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them.

Now, those who know me would probably consider me something of a voluntary simplicitist myself. I buy secondhand, ignore fashion, can't be bothered with status or power or fame. But over the years I've developed what I like to think is an attitude of realism about human nature. When I was a teenager in the Sixties some of us really believed that a transformation in human nature was happening, a transformation from selfishness to compassion as our dominant motivation. Forty years on, most of us know it ain't gonna happen. When masses of people choose a simpler and less materialistic way of life, they do it because there's fun involved, a kind of fun not available through their previous way of life. That's why I keep on about the need for an environmentalist cult. Cults offer fun; that's why people join them. Building something new is fun, whether that's green buildings or local currency networks. Destroying something old is way fun. What's not fun is hobbling yourself, making yourself smaller, shrinking your life and your power, unless you are called to that sort of thing. The voluntary simplicity ethic goes no further than the Golden Rule, which assumes that, whatever you like or dislike, others will feel the same. I live pretty simply and I like it, but I know better than to assume that everyone would. The taste for fun is not going to go away any more than the sex drive is. When environmentalists come to terms with that, then we'll really begin to get somewhere.



Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a beer.

I got back Monday night after making the drive in one day! It's been years since I could do that. I could have done it on the way down, too, except that it was Thanksgiving Wednesday, well known as the awfullest driving day of the year. In some long stretches the speed on I-95 was below 40 just because of the sheer volume of traffic. What was really noteworthy about the drive down is that for the first time I did not get lost even once, so I now have a mileage number for the distance between my mom's house and mine: 431 miles.



Yesterday, maybe inspired by my accomplishment, I ran errands until the tired caught up with me. Today, slack until, well, about now. I'm off to return the camera autumnlaughing lent me so I could take photos of things housemates left behind, for Craigslist.



Later, folx.

Wandered onto the website for a PBS Frontline show, "The Persuaders", about the advertising and marketing industries. There's a page of analysis that has some fascinating insights. And if you follow the link from that page to the full interview with Douglas Atkin, you can learn how to start a cult.



Tidbit: "I think that young people actually really do care if other young people suffered to make their clothes. But if you become outraged about something but don't have the ability to act on it, it sort of wears you down. If it isn't possible to go to the mall and buy something that was produced under ethical conditions, which is actually hard if not impossible, then you get used to it. It's the same as advertising: You get desensitized to that experience. I don't think it's that people don't care." from the interview with Naomi Klein.



This illustrates what I had in mind: that the real limitation of our so-called consumer culture is the choices it doesn't offer, the information it keeps under wraps. Example of the latter: The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis, PhD. The basic idea -- that the major anti-cancer efforts are corrupt, emphasizing treatment and cure in order to distract us from questions about causes because doing something about the causes might cost rich people money -- has been known on the left for decades. This book is important because its author is a Big Name, a professor of epidemiology and National Book Award finalist, and therefore the book is getting some mainstream publicity.



I am reminded of a button that Raven owns that says "No matter how cyincal you get, it's impossible to keep up."