Today is the first day of a renewed America. Today I watched Barack Hussein Obama's ignauguration party as the 44th President of the United States on the tell-a-vision.

I was watching it live from a kitchen where I somtimes work, in the capital of a surviving and sovereign First American nation. I was at the distribution center for USDA Commodities Foods, in a kitchen that I had helped to renovate for their nutritional education program. This place is known as "Commods", the modern-day interpretation of food access rights in ceded territories set by treaties between Chippewa chiefs and American presidents in the 1800s. I was sitting with three Anishinaabe citizens that I have gotten to know over the past year as an AmeriCorps volunteer through organizing a youth conference/pow-wow, learning the arts of wild and industrial foods, being a part of America's only Mobile Farmer's Market, and just joking around. After the kitchen and warehouse closed for the day, I went to the border to my favorite community center on top of the ridge where I continued to watch the party in D.C. with a handful of kids and adults. We were watching for glimpses of native representatives dressed in full regalia on horseback between the marching bands and floats.

I wrote down a dream in my journal a couple years ago about being able to live off of making compost. In the past few months I have been fleshing out a modest organics processing facility to serve two rural counties and two native nations that could be financially independent within a few years. It could employ multiple people full-time year-round by making and selling topsoil, and teaching their community how to do it at home too. We would be able to reclaim tons of organics every day from landfills and the collapsing recycling industry. By saving on the public and private costs and energy impacts of current disposal practices, it can grow topsoil and sustainable jobs. Just think of what that could do for local foods. Obama could easily make this dream a reality depending on the details of his upcoming economic stimulus plan.

Enough with the economic growth, we need some economic decay to complete the cycles. Is Obama ready to wake this country up?