POSSIBLE PLAGUE IN THE COMMUNITY GARDENS
"When evening comes, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,' and in the morning, 'Today will be stormy; it is red and overcast.' You know how to interpret the face of the earth, sea and sky, yet you do not discern the signs of the times."
-- Jesus, Matthew 16, 2-3
June 17, 2007
Dear Friends:
I sat in at the Sustainable Communities Summit at the Sustainable Commons of the Fremont Solstice Festival held here in Seattle at Gas Works Park on Saturday, June 16, 2007. I came late and sat in the back; I was the tall brunette clad in black and white patterns and a white hat sitting silently in a folding quad chair near the back of the circle.
I was impressed by the many chapters of Sustainable Communities All Over Puget Sound (SCALLOPS) that had sprung up, like many beautiful and bountiful community gardens, within so short a time in so wide a space; I was likewise impressed by the dedicated energy shown by the representatives of these chapters, who spoke concerning the many aspects of their efforts to grow sustainability in their respective communities.
One aspect that I did not hear directly addressed much concerns me, as I feel it should concern you as core coordinators of this much-needed movement: that what you are doing, whether you are aware of it or not, is extremely subversive to the dark forces of empire presently controlling the government of the United States and most of the governments of the planet. I had with me a sign of the times that I did not raise at the meeting, not wishing to appear like the Christian fundamentalists who had brandished threatening Bible quotes at prominent places along the Solstice Parade route; this sign said simply, "Ask me about 9/11 Truth."
It should be a warning to the community sustainability movement that Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and present top-tier neoconservative presidential candidate, has not only been implicated in the terrorist attacks on his city of September 11, 2001; he has also been the well-documented national leader of terrorist attacks on the community sustainability movement in many cities, first as the mayor of New York, then as an exorbitantly compensated "urban consultant" imported by developers in many metropolitan areas for this destructive purpose. Most of the other mainstream presidential candidates of both parties are largely sponsored by corporate forces hostile to community sustainability.
The Supreme Court of the United States, that also appointed George Bush as our ruler in 2000, two years ago gave sanction to the practice of municipalities using eminent domain to appropriate community property, as well as that of individual citizens and small businesses, for corporate development -- the practice pioneered by Giuliani in New York a decade earlier when he evicted urban homesteaders and community gardeners from abandoned property, subsequently selling it to upscale developers for the gentrification of affordable neighborhoods. He has recently influenced the minority mayor of Los Angeles and to launch such efforts against his own people, displacing them from city property on which were located community gardens, farmers' markets and affordable housing.
I came to Seattle three years ago from another ecoparadise with a vital sustainability movement: Asheville, the jewel of the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina, where I originally went with my then-partner, a master builder/gardener, to join the Earth Haven Ecovillage. By an unexpected series of events, I ended up one of the lead activists in several community sustainability action networks that stopped/mitigated nine major assaults against this our movement within an intense three-year period. I am now here in Seattle partly because I was blacklisted for my successful efforts to halt these assaults against sustainable communities, and could not any more find remunerative work in that already economically distressed bioregion. Virtually all public record of my work there has since been erased from newspaper and video archives.
These assaults included: an attempt to build three SuperWalmarts, one for each major municipal district in this town of 100,000 people; an effort to widen I-26 to eight lanes through the historic heart of this scenic city so that nuclear waste could be transported over narrow mountain passes from Oakridge National Nuclear Laboratory in Tennessee to the Savannah River Reactor in South Carolina; an attempt to build an unnecessary construction waste dump in the viewshed of the Blue Ridge Parkway; an attempt to criminalize homelessness and legitimate use by citizens of public parks; an attempt to completely gentrify the river warehouse district to eliminate affordable live/work spaces for artists; an attempt to criminalize natural healthcare through stealth legislation in the state legislature; and an attempt to privatize the public square with breath-taking views of the surrounding mountains to profitably prohibit the free speech being so vigorously practiced there.
Though often not explicitly political, a vital sustainable communities movement is in fact extremely threatening to the global corporate elite -- the ones who actually hate our freedom and seek to systematically destroy it in all of its forms -- including energy-, healthcare- and food-, economically-independent, politically empowered sustainable communities of citizens whom they cannot control.
It is therefore of urgent importance that those who seek to grow the community sustainability movement in America organize in such a manner as to address the underlying evils that the Amercian Empire has inflicted on the peoples of the planet, including the American people, which the state-sponsored terrorist attacks of September 11th represent. This includes actively and proactively joining with political activists seeking to directly address systemic issues, to pull out forever at its root the warfare-based economy that has driven such abominations against our planet and its peoples since the dawn of recorded history. The efforts of the sustainable communities movement will otherwise be like that of planting community gardens on an unremediated Superfund site -- self-deceptive, shallow plantings whose fruits will be ultimately toxic not only to our own bodies and souls, but to our existence as a movement.
Most sincerely,
Rebecca Em Campbell
Whole-Systems Writer/Thinker/Activist
rebeccaphb@yahoo.com