Citizen Reporter

Lost Knowledge Needs Finding

Potato — Holy Scrap Springs photo by Mikeysklar

This week Im working on a series of podcasts as well as an article for United Academics Magazine which focuses on people who have created their own home and work spaces. Those who left cities and suburbs, left houses and apartments, left conventional jobs, and moved to a rural or undeveloped place. In their new environments they have built or rebuilt their homes using a mix of traditional, proven techniques and new, innovative features. They do things like grow/raise their own food, collect their own water, generate their own power, and create their own kinds of income-generating work.

This phenomenon, at first glance, is nothing new; people have been leaving cities for the country periodically for decades. (though statistically more people do the opposite) But this generation is the unique above all for the techniques and knowledge it brings to these remote locations. Knowledge that is not only their own, but the never-ending collective knowledge one can consult via the internet. Installing a solar power system? Never built a barn before? Canned your own preserves? Check youtube, the step-by-step instructions are there waiting for you.

Of course the internet is not the only source of knowledge, the offline community that one joins when moving to a rural area also has its own experience and skills which might be called upon. Between the depth of the internet and the generations of experience in your town, whatever it is you don’t yet know how to do on your own, you can learn. And this is exactly what is happening.

Back in the urban-suburban world that so many in the western hemisphere see as the only two choices, such life changes are probably still seen as odd or undesirable. They might lose sleep over barely tenable costs of living and work stress, but they’ve grown up with the idea that this is all normal and simply “life”. Need something for the kids or for the house? Go to Walmart. Need heat? Turn up the thermostat. All needs are met by some external service or source, all of which come at a monetary cost. Again, at some point this may seem like the only way life works. But this group of people has proven otherwise, and their will to take action in this manner has inspired more people to do the same.

In the coming series of podcasts you will hear from this special group of people. They’re explain how they used to live and what led them to make a radical change. They’ll also explain the details about why this way of life not only works better for them, but why they are better prepared for the foreseeable future where the value of money decays further and the ability to grow or make things becomes more rare and necessary.

Power and Uprising in Angola

This month saw one of the first major uprisings against the government in Angola in recent memory. It was organized, you guessed it- with the help of social media. After Gaddafi, President José Eduardo dos Santos is the longest running leader of an African state (32 years). And just like with the now-fugitive Muammar, many are saying this presidency has gone on for too long. But can change finally come to Angola?

Joining me for a podcast conversation about the reports that have come out of Angola this month is citizen of the world and Global Voices contributor Janet Gunter. Together we try to understand and explain where the country stands when it comes to politics, economy, human rights, and prospects for the future.

My Talk on Mobile Phone Minerals at CCC2011

At this year’s Chaos Communication Camp I decided to talk about what i’ve learned regarding how the minerals in our mobile devices are mined. The infamous process including all the middle players and related groups is increasingly being looked at as people around the world wake up to the reality of what this thing is that we carry with us everywhere everyday. In waking up, more and more people are demanding transparency and a real standard of ethics when it comes to how phones are made. One such group of people here in the Netherlands came together under the name Fairphone. In my talk I get into the activities and discoveries made by fairphone in the past year during a fact finding mission in Congo (DRC).

(full credit to the documentation team and everyone who made it possible to have this video and share it online)

Heroes Often Turn Villans

Lots of random artifacts come out in the mainstream media that once belonged to Gaddafi. Today I watched a home video where he sits on a couch and kids around with his grand children. There he is, grandpa Muammar who clearly loves his grandchildren, same guy who ordered the mass murder of political prisoners, same guy who thought it was a good idea to start the African Union. The Dutch newspaper ran a series of photos of the Colonel, from his rise to power as a young charismatic military man to his last few years looking like the political Michael Jackson. This is was no monster. Yet he did monstrous things.

José dos Santos in Angola has been president for 32 years. He is, behind all the political pageantry, a dictator. But once upon a time, his party was the voice of reason under the brutal Portuguese colonial system. They helped liberate the country and went on to fight a civil war against what may or may not have been a madman (Jonas Savimbi). But here they are, 2011, the enemy of human rights and the antithesis of a party that was supposed to improve the quality of life for all Angolans.

Fidel Castro. Robert Mugabe. The ANC in South Africa. Bad comparisons? Perhaps. But the list of leaders and movements that started as heroes and later became something other than good to their fellow citizens is long. Whats more, it is often not possible for these leaders to recognize what they have become. They honestly seem to believe they are still doing what is right and fighting the good fight. Later some of these people are called monsters for the crimes they commit during their reign. But in reality, monsters are just people. Grandpa Muammar was Colonel murderer, and everything in between.

What we the observers of this world and the reporters that try to explain it all need to do, is not turn everything into some easy to swallow version of the truth. The truth is not black and white, it is grey. And by pretending it isn’t, we make it more possible for the same scenarios to keep playing themselves out. Yes, you might be the hero today, and that is wonderful. But remember, years later when you still think you’re the hero, you probably aren’t.

The Encroaching Police State in Canada

When the city of Vancouver made the push to get the Winter Olympics, Joe Bowser and citizens throughout BC were opposed. Through the ballot box and demonstrations they expressed their disapproval. As a result, they were spied on, targeted, and to this day followed by a Canadian government that knows no limits and sees opposition as terrorism.

I caught up with Joe at CCC2011, just a few weeks ago. He had presented his experience as the target of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that has left him with little doubt that the present and future of Canada is dark. In this interview we discuss:

The Winter Olympics Proposal
The B.C. budget crisis
First Nations People of BC
Anti-Olympics Network
Annecy Olympics
The Harper Government
The future

Joe on Twitter

Vancouver Media Collective

Incapable

The images from my home state of New Jersey the days following hurricane Irene featured flooding like few had ever seen before. The images also showed one re-occurring theme: Infrastructure collapse. Chunks of highway collapsing, a struggling power grid, and rivers rising up and swallowing entire communities. Things growing up in the suburbs of New York City, even to this day, many people never imagined could happen. But this lack of imagination is no excuse for ignorance regarding a looming crisis. There is no shortage of research and reports, as well as examples over the past decade, all of which point to the fact that all over the United States (theyre not alone of course) infrastructure is stretched and strained to its limits. The glorious promise of privatization leading to improved services has resulted in just the opposite. Lack of significant investment under a whole list of economic and social excuses has left millions of people on the edge of a crisis, many of whom don’t even know about it. Or perhaps, they don’t want to know or will never understand.

There is a phenomenon that didn’t start with this generation or this era, but has very much been perfected in our time: the art of knowing but not wanting to know. That mobile phone we all carry can poison your body – but how could we be without our phones? The computer we type on is made from toxic chemicals and will one day poison our soil – but how can we not have these essential machines? Cod Fish is on the verge of extinction – but it tastes so good! And of course on the macro scale – our global way of life is destroying the earth at a dangerous rate – but how can we not live the way we live?!

Eddie Izzard, the great comedian and life philosopher, used to do a bit about mass murderers and genocidal maniacs. He said something to the effect of “When you murder someone, we know what to do with you, we put you in prison… but over 10 or 20 people.. we can’t deal with that, we invent things like house arrest and hope no one ever goes in that house.” Though he was joking I find a great deal of observational wisdom that I apply in present day situations like the crumbling of our infrastructure. Like having to deal with genocidal maniacs, we are once again in a situation that is too hard for many to process. You can present facts and even wait for terrible things to happen which confirm the problem, and still people find a way to ignore it. Perhaps it is simply a mass coping mechanism. Otherwise everyone would so into either a deep depression or a dangerous panic. That or, they might try finding solutions and taking action to better prepare for the future. Regardless of what the economists or the politicians say.

Meanwhile many keep telling themselves that its only a few roads and a few parts of the country that had problems. Keep repeating that line about how these events are rare. Whatever it takes, I suppose, for us to collectively cope and keep doing (or not doing) the same things we always have.