Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
Bring Me is at Earthship Biotecture.
April 28, Taos NM.
These Sustainable Homes Are Made From Trash, But They’re Absolutely Stunning
These Sustainable Homes Are Made From Trash, But They're Absolutely Stunning
These Sustainable Homes Are Made From Trash, But They're Absolutely Stunning
Posted by Bring Me on Saturday, April 28, 2018
Matt Bai August 2, 2018
If you’re too young to have experienced the 1990’s firsthand, if you have no memory of the O.J. Simpson verdict or the night Diana died or someone named Jewel, then you’re just going to have to take my word for this, because I know it’s going to sound bizarre and kooky, kind of like the QAnon conspiracy, but I promise you it’s true.
Long ago, in his prime, Rudy Giuliani was an important and visionary politician who probably had more influence on modern American cities than anyone else, for better and for worse.
I know, you see him on TV now, appearing as the president’s lawyer, and you think, “Hey, when did Montgomery Burns become a real person, and why is he having an entire conversation with himself like he’s hearing voices?” I get it.
Twenty years is a long time in American politics. Believe it or not, we once bounced a speaker of the House from office because he sidestepped the ethics rules on a book deal. I mean, that wouldn’t even trend on Twitter now.
But back in the mid-90’s, when he was still a respected former prosecutor with a trademark comb-over, Giuliani turned around a city that a lot of people had come to think was no longer governable. To a New York brought low by crack and corruption and neglect, the new mayor brought a ruthless kind of metrics and accountability.
Don’t let these liberals who lived there in the 90’s, as I did, tell you how dark and despairing life was under the repressive Giuliani regime. They disdained Giuliani, but secretly they loved his mayoralty. They branded him heartless and trashed him at dinner parties, then slept blissfully above quiet, well-patrolled streets where the subway rumbled reliably and the garbage didn’t sit around for weeks on end.
That’s why, despite being a Republican in a city dominated by Democrats, Rudy won reelection with almost 60 percent of the vote. Mayors all over America openly copied Giuliani’s data-driven approach.
Rudy’s popularity plummeted during his second term, as allegations of excess overshadowed his achievements. I first interviewed him at the low point, in 1999, when the police shooting of an unarmed black man named Amadou Diallo had ignited the city and shaken his mayoralty. Rudy sat stone-faced in the living room of Gracie Mansion, summoning all the contrition he could muster.
But then came the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the memorable images of him stalking through the downtown dust, barking out orders. When he left office a few months later, at 57, he was as close to a national hero as a politician can get.
That would have been enough for most people — celebrity, adoration, easy ways to get rich. For a guy with Giuliani’s ambition and grand sense of destiny, however, the post-mayoralty wasn’t so easy to navigate.
He had wanted to run for Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000 — and did, for a while anyway, until he got prostate cancer and then decided to use a news conference to let his wife know he was leaving her for another woman. That was pretty much the end of that.
He remained a close ally of George W. Bush, but there just wasn’t a perfect fit in national Republican politics for an ethnic New Yorker who as mayor crashed on the couch of gay friends for a while. Giuliani was a useful guy to trot out at primetime during national conventions, but he wasn’t exactly Family Research Council material.
In 2007, Giuliani decided he could overcome all that by jumping into the Republican presidential field himself. For a long while, he led in every national poll.
But then Iowa spurned him, and so did New Hampshire, and he hung around the race for months, looking for the state that would validate him. He won zero delegates.
Eight years later, Giuliani saw another window of opportunity, casting himself as a shameless apologist for his longtime friend Donald Trump. He hoped his unflinching loyalty would land him in the running for attorney general or secretary of state. It didn’t.
Apparently, though, Rudy was unfazed. Because when Trump found himself in real trouble earlier this year, Giuliani offered himself up for the arena yet again, this time as the president’s counsel and mouthpiece.
This is what it’s come to: the sad last act of a once serious man. The final, cringey chapter of the eventual biography, as painful to read as it will be to write.
You’ve seen the calamitous routine, I’m sure. Rudy proclaiming that Trump directed a payment to a porn star to shut her up, and that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because of Russia, then having to walk back both. Rudy characterizing Michael Cohen, the president’s chief confidant for many years, as a lifelong liar — a few months after describing him as an “honest, honorable lawyer.”
Rudy saying collusion isn’t a crime, and casually referring to a secret campaign meeting, before contradicting himself and claiming it never happened. Rudy confidently telling us that Melania Trump has accepted her husband’s explanation of the Stormy Daniels fiasco, only to have the first lady’s office issue a statement saying Melania has never talked to him about anything.
It’s pretty clear by now that Trump could have hired an appellate lawyer out of the Leavenworth library and he’d have had a more coherent defense than this.
I can’t tell you what’s going on with Giuliani, who turned 74 in May. The Rudy I knew over the years was as clever an intellectual jouster as you could find; once, in Iowa in 2007, he filibustered me amiably for a full 20 minutes, knowing damn well what he was doing, because he didn’t like the question I was trying to ask.
More recently, though, he’s been known to personally call a newsroom and unleash a get-off-my-lawn tirade about something he’s just read about himself. That’s not a great sign.
But I can tell you what Giuliani’s problem has always been. As I’ve written before, in politics, as in life, your greatest strength always turns out to be your greatest weakness, and Rudy’s strength was always his relentlessness.
Bill Bratton, the police chief who devised and implemented Giuliani’s community-policing agenda in New York, once told me that Rudy’s reforms took a dark turn during his second term because he didn’t know when to let up. Aggressive policing was supposed to be the first phase of the program, Bratton said, but for Giuliani, no amount of order was ever orderly enough.
And so it is in politics, where America’s mayor has never known when to stop. He hung around the primaries way too long in 2008. He debased himself in 2016, defending Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape when even Mike Pence was cowering under a desk.
And now here he is, charging ahead on a mission for which he’s clearly not well suited, because maybe, in a second term, there’s the promise of restoration, the hope of a powerful portfolio he will probably never get.
Say what you will, but this much I swear is true: Rudy Giuliani was a towering political figure at the end of the 20th century and a powerful force in reshaping urban America.
Maybe when this is all over, if he’s lucky, someone will still remember.
via Climate Facts
Record-breaking heat waves are rippling across the planet, bringing death and destruction in their wake. via Climate Facts
Posted by EcoWatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2018
By Jack Holmes July 31, 2018
YouTube
Monday was the first day of school for hundreds of children in Akron, Ohio. They will attend a brand new academy, the I Promise School, which was built by Akron native LeBron James through his LeBron James Family Foundation. The world’s greatest basketball player launched the school to give at-risk youth in the area, as he once was, the opportunity to thrive—academically, athletically, and otherwise—despite sometimes perilous circumstances. In an endearing touch, James will give each student at his school a bike, “because he often credits his bicycle as a huge factor in his childhood that gave him an escape from dangerous parts of his neighborhood and the freedom to explore.”
To mark the occasion, James sat down with CNN’s Don Lemon for a wide-ranging conversation that often strayed into far larger issues. That included race, and the president:
CNN: LeBron James (@KingJames) says Trump’s trying to use sport to divide people, but he believes it brings people together. He sits down with @donlemon at the opening of his new elementary school for at-risk children in his hometown of Akron, Ohio. Watch 10pET https://cnn.it/2K7QBS8
Rather than embrace their displays as an opportunity to discuss the realities of racial injustice in policing, Trump called the predominantly black athletes who have chosen to protest during the national anthem “sons of bitches” from the presidential podium. He also suggested they be fired. He has repeatedly sought fights with black athletes over whether they will attend championship ceremonies at the White House. There is no question he sees political gain in ginning up resentment among his supporters for wealthy athletes of color who exercise their First Amendment right to dissent. Of course, that’s part of a larger program of racial resentment and xenophobia. Elsewhere in the interview, James said simply that Trump has given people more confidence to air their racism in public—to “throw it in your face.”
One measure of this will be the reaction to the launch of James’ school. A calling card of those who oppose the anthem protests begun by Colin Kaepernick, and athlete activism more generally, is their accusation that athletes who protest on the field are not doing anything for their communities off of it. This has never been true: Kaepernick, for instance, has now given $1 million to charities serving underprivileged communities across the country, just as he promised. But James has now embarked on a grand mission in service of the community where he was born and raised by a single mother, from which he made it out against the odds. He will now intervene in the lives of hundreds of Akron children to try to give them the best shot of making it, too. Surely we can expect the same suspects who demand athletes walk the walk off the field to applaud him now—regardless of what he says about the president.
We can’t, of course, because none of this is about the practicalities. It’s not about Respect For The Anthem, which plenty of fans angry about the protests spend at the concession stand buying beer. It’s not about The Troops, whom so many people are so eager to speak on behalf of. (I spoke to four members of our armed forces, and they had a diverse array of viewpoints on the anthem protests. You know, like any group of Americans might.) And it’s not about “Chicago,” or “black-on-black crime,” or “doing something for the community,” as you might hear in the conservative infotainment sphere. It’s about telling a group of primarily black athletes to “shut up and dribble,” as Fox News’ Laura Ingraham once told LeBron James.
James himself is under no illusions about all that, as reflected in his answer to Lemon’s question on what he’d say to Donald Trump, American president, if he were sitting across from him:
Don Lemon asks LeBron what he would say to Trump if he were seated with them during today’s interview.
LeBron: “I would never sit across from him.”
This is reminiscent of an all-time James tweet: his response to Trump’s Mean Girls White House un-invitation to Steph Curry:
The whole interview is worth your time:
The farm manager at the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, Reyes approaches agricultural systems from a justice lens.
Anthony Reyes found his calling working at the intersection of farming and social justice with organizations such as the Tilth Alliance in Seattle, the youth education program Common Threads Farm in Bellingham, and now with the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz. Reyes credits his college days at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for his passion for sustainable agriculture with a food justice focus. Reyes, a biracial Millennial with Mexican-American roots, always wanted to return to the area, a hub for farming with a mission. In 2017, he returned to the community where he first learned to grow food and view agricultural systems through a justice lens.
In his first year at the Homeless Garden Project, Anthony Reyes says he was asked about every stereotype imaginable when working with this marginalized population. Chief among them: Do homeless people really work? There’s a lot of stigma associated with this population, he says. “For the record, the crews here are some of the most hardworking people I’ve ever met,” says Reyes of the participants in the non-profit’s year-long employment-training program at Natural Bridges Farm.
The project serves people in Santa Cruz County who are homeless or formerly homeless, who have experienced barriers to employment, and who want to maintain a stable productive place in society. “The crew tackles every task seriously with passion and heart.”
Reyes spends his days on the farm bouncing between different posts—whether the field, greenhouse, farm stand, or kitchen—helping crews with their tasks on the 3.5-acre farm, which grows row crops and flowers. He’s also in charge of the organization’s three-pronged Community Supported Agriculture program. CSAs, an alternative marketing model that features a direct relationship between farmer and consumer, accounts for about 10 percent of the 25-year-old institution’s income.
The program includes a traditional CSA, a U-pick version, and a scholarship fund, where people can donate to a CSA program for 10 local organizations serving the needy. Flowers go to a local hospice program and the program includes a value-added enterprise making and selling jams, dried herbs, and floral wreaths, which are sold at their downtown store, in a new shop in nearby Capitola, and online.
Relationships are central to Reyes’s job, he says, and inform every aspect of work on the farm, which is slated to expand to a 9-acre permanent site expected to be fully operational in 2020. The 28-year-old strives to treat each crew member with care, compassion, and respect. He says he learns as much from his 17-member crew as they learn from him. “Every single day they inspire me. The farm itself is such a place of radical inclusivity. Everyone is embraced and welcomed,” he says. “And that is reflected in the pride people take in the work and the collaboration on the farm. It’s really a beautiful thing to witness on a day-to-day basis.”
Reyes has farming in his blood: Wisconsin dairy farmers make up his mother’s side of the family. His father is of Mexican heritage and his paternal grandfather ran a “mow and blow” business in Los Angeles. The smell of grass and a four-stroke engine is embedded in childhood memories, he says, and he looked up to his grandfather, a gentle soul. In college, Reyes says his studies helped him begin to see agriculture and outside work though a social justice lens. A key mentor on campus: a UC Santa Cruz lead groundskeeper whom he worked with, Jose Sanchez.
His “juiciest” days, Reyes says, are whenever he can get his hands in the earth. “I make some of the deepest connections with our crew members simply working alongside them,” he says. “Working the soil creates a safe space for people to be seen and heard for who they are.”
Reyes has seen first-hand what a difference growing food can make in someone’s life. “There’s something very restorative and transformative about planting a seed and watering it and watching it grow into a flourishing plant that can provide sustenance,” he says. “From a little speck in your hand to the harvest for your lunch: That has a calming, therapeutic effect.”
Crew members see the fruits of their labor and the value that it brings. “There are very real, tangible benefits at the end of the day, whether someone has spent it building a bed, weeding, or picking. You can see the difference you’ve made,” says Reyes. “There’s ownership and a sense of accomplishment.”
As Reyes points out, homelessness and joblessness go hand in hand. Lack of job skills, a spotty work history, an absent social support network, and low self-esteem can all make the transition out of homelessness more difficult. The Homeless Garden Project’s program is designed to address these concerns, in addition to the challenges that come with substance abuse, mental health issues, physical or developmental disability, and the unique problems faced by veterans—all obstacles that disproportionately impact the homeless community.
Housing is one of the most immediate problems. Some of the Homeless Garden Project’s clientele live in shelters, while others camp outside or in cars, or reside in tenuous subsidized housing situations. A team of social work interns help garden crew members find stable employment and housing. The interns also help the crew find resources to address other obstacles like transportation, substance abuse, and mental health problems.
“Every single person on the crew has personal challenges they’re trying to work through. We very much meet people where they are,” says Reyes. In a region known for exorbitant rents and real estate, Reyes is well aware that many residents of the greater community—including some farm project volunteers—are just a paycheck or two away from homelessness themselves.
Measuring success comes in multiple ways. More than 90 percent of participants in the program find stable housing and employment at the end of their garden project tenure. There’s also the less quantifiable personal growth that Reyes observes in his crews over time: “I watch people try new things and come out of their shell.”
His own on-the-job goals? “I remind myself constantly to show up, and what it means to be present. I’ve learned so much about myself in this line of work,” he says. “It’s also given me more confidence and allowed me to be okay with, and find strength in, vulnerability. It’s not just me. Every single person who steps onto the farm is changed by it.”
Reprinted with permission from Hungry for Change, a publication of the Berkeley Food Institute. Read about other California emerging food systems changemakers here.
Photos: Fabián Aguirre and Maya Pisciotto, The Understory.
Related Articles
Aviva Paley is Cooking Up Second Chances with Kitchens for Good
For the Homeless, There’s More to Eating than Food
How Food Helps Homeless People Get Back on Their Feet
Food Waste Becomes Delicious Meals with an Agenda at Rooster Soup
Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.
Sandwiched among dairy farms and fields of conventionally grown corn and soybeans outside Spring Valley, Wisconsin, Thao’s Garden, is the only immigrant-owned, certified organic farm for miles.
“We grow all kinds of vegetables,” says Phua Yang Thao, who owns the farm with her husband, Blia Tou Thao. Phua corrects herself with a laugh, “mostly Caucasian vegetables.” She says vegetables common to cooking in the Thaos’ community of Hmong Americans, like bok choy and Asian bitter melon, are not as popular in the Upper Midwest as crops like asparagus and rhubarb.
The 28-acre farm has been the Thaos’ full-time occupation since 2007, building on more than 40 years of farming experience in the United States. They grow a diverse complement of garden vegetables, including peas, carrots, potatoes, beets, and peppers, and raise 400 chickens for eggs and meat. Phua says they don’t use pesticides and have no need for irrigation—though sometimes, after a wet spring, they must wait for the soil to dry out before planting.
The “organic farm” sign outside of Thao’s Garden.
Consistent with the farming practices used in the Hmong culture, Phua and Blia weed and harvest exclusively by hand. That’s why, for the past several seasons, they’ve kept less than half their land under active cultivation, farming on the same 13 acres each year.
This hands-on approach leads to a farm powered by many hands. They have assistance from extended family members, many of whom live nearby in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and they sometimes hire local people to help out. Their son Boun, who lives with them, works on the farm most summer mornings before making a one-hour commute to Minneapolis for his job in the Hennepin County library system.
Phua’s highest concern as a farmer is growing food without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. “Organic foods must be the future,” she says. “The conventional American farmer uses too many chemicals.”
Back in Laos, she says, many of her friends and neighbors lived long lives and died in their sleep. But after more than 40 years in the United States, she has seen members of the Hmong community face health issues unheard-of in Laos. “Now we have heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, strokes,” she says. “Is this from the food?”
The Thaos were invited to give the keynote address at The Food Group’s Emerging Farmers Conference in Minnesota earlier this year. But their journey to this green patch of farmland in the Upper Midwest started thousands of miles away and decades ago.
In 1961, Blia was 21 years old when he left Laos for a year of military training in Thailand led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the years that followed, he joined the 30,000 men who were to serve as CIA guerilla fighters during the Vietnam War. Their covert military operations are now referred to as the Secret War.
“I had some schooling when I was young,” Blia says, “so the CIA trained me to operate radios.” The job meant he was not on the front lines, but he recalls the challenges of traversing an almost entirely roadless region of rugged mountains and dense jungle in Laos. “Sometimes they would pick us up in helicopters,” he says. “But sometimes the helicopters did not come. Then we walked for days.”
After American forces left the region and communist leadership assumed control in 1975, Blia recalls, “The CIA said we must leave.”
Phua (left) and Blia Thao at Thao’s Garden.
Blia and Phua moved to a refugee camp in Thailand with their four children, and the family’s future was unclear. Blia gave birth to their fifth and youngest child, a daughter, in the camp. After a year, they learned they could move to the U.S.
“Because of the war,” Phua says, “we never farmed in Laos.” But agriculture had long been an important part of Hmong culture, and her parents grew corn, rice, and squash. In her youth, Phua learned from them while helping to raise her younger siblings.
The Thaos stablished their first farm outside Beatrice, Nebraska, where the family moved in 1976 after leaving the refugee camp. A local Lutheran church sponsored their move, and its members also helped them take night classes to learn English. Blia took a job as a janitor and inspector with AT&T and worked for the company for 22 years.
Blia and Phua moved to western Wisconsin after one of their grown sons, a medical doctor, moved to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, 50 miles west. And for the past 11 years, they have been part of the Upper Midwest’s farm community.
The Thaos’ deep commitment to organics has helped them connect to a network of other producers in the region. According to a 2017 University of Wisconsin organic agriculture report, the state ranks second only to California in its number of organic farms, and third nationwide in organic acres.
It’s not clear how many organic farmers in Wisconsin are Hmong. But according to the 2010 U.S. Census, the state’s Hmong population of around 47,000 is the third-highest in the country, and Hmong producers are significant contributors to the area’s farmers’ markets.
Diane Mayerfield, the Wisconsin Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education state coordinator and an outreach specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, notes that many Hmong producers in Wisconsin also grow ginseng to sell into the commodity market. But she says that diversified producer growers like Phua and Blia are more visible to the general public.
For example, Hmong producers at the enormous Dane County Farmers’ Market in Madison comprise nearly 20 percent of the market’s 270 members.
MOSES headquarters in Spring Valley, Wisc.
Many Hmong growers share Blia and Phua’s commitment to chemical-free farming, Mayerfield says, but the Thaos stand out for their full organic certification. They worked with the Spring Valley-based farmer resource nonprofit Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) to go through the process in 2012. They’ve also participated in trainings at the MOSES annual conference, the largest event of its kind in the U.S.
Blia and Phua know that organic certification makes their farm unique, but they’re reluctant to consider themselves innovators in other areas. More than anything, they prize the close personal connection they their land and their produce.
While the Thaos grow their produce in Wisconsin, all their off-farm sales occur in Minnesota. In addition to the farmers’ market, they have a contract to sell bulk produce to a Twin-Cities-based food hub, The Good Acre. The Good Acre works to expand producers’ access to markets, especially among immigrant and underserved farmers, and includes the Thaos’ vegetables in multi-farm CSA boxes.
Blia and Phua’s son Boun changes the oil in Thao’s Garden’s tractor.
“Their product is always good,” says Rhys Williams, executive director of The Good Acre. “Becoming a good farmer takes time, and I respect the work they do. And it’s all by hand!”
This summer, staff from The Good Acre will work with Phua and Blia to build an unheated high tunnel greenhouse at Thao’s Garden. Also known as a hoop house, high tunnels are season-extenders, Williams explains, because they provide protection from late-spring and early-fall frosts. “And since [The Good Acre’s] whole point is helping farmers make more money, season extension is one way to do that.”
They will also host a field day this fall for other farmers who are considering building their own high tunnels. Staff at the Good Acre and MOSES will invite other immigrant and underserved farmers to learn from the Thaos.
The Thaos are grateful for the help they’ve been offered since coming to the U.S.—from Nebraska to Wisconsin. “Anything we need, we go to any neighbor,” Blia says.
Asked about the future of Thao’s Garden, Blia tells a story about Isabella, one of his 12 grandchildren, who lives in nearby Stillwater, Minnesota, and visits often to help on the farm. Recently she said, “Grandpa, someday I want to take over your farm.”
“I am 78 this year,” Blia says, a hint of concern in his voice. Then he smiles. “Isabella is 17.”
Phua (left) and Blia Thao.
