Back to the Land

During this past Thanksgiving, an aunt told me that there had been a "back to the land" movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and that my grandmother, unhappy in her role as a mother and housewife
in the Texas community where my grandfather was teaching, caught the fever and convinced my grandfather to pick up the family, move back to New England and buy a farm.

There was nothing romantic about the reality of farm living for my grandparents or their children. They did not have a lot of money, and the farm was old and needed lots of work. It was drafty and poorly heated in the wintertime, and in the summer, a small pond would form in the back if the stream that runs through the cellar was not kept clear of debris.

Still, preserving the farm and the land around it became my grandmother's passion after my grandfather died. She was a reader and must have been very well-informed about not only the geological history of the land and the non-human life forms that thrive there, but the story of the people and the land, as well.

Products of the Land

William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, his decades-long account of the Pilgrims in New England, described the land the Pilgrims encountered as "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." In fact, however, the Indians of coastal New England, though decimated in population by European diseases by the time the Pilgrims arrived, had built numerous villages surrounded by cultivated fields and had burned the forests and fields elsewhere to make game hunting easier. In addition, "wild strawberries carpeted many of the burned-over glades. In the spring, 'herrings come up in such abundance into their brooks and fords to spawn that it is almost impossible to ride through without treading on them.' Huge turkeys ran in flocks of four and five hundred. Migrating ducks blotted out the sun when they rose from a pond ..."* Recent settlers would have also found abundant wood for construction and heat -- the forests in England, by this time, had been largely felled to build ships (2,500 per vessel) and to turn into charcoal to stoke furnaces.

I have never found wild strawberries growing on the farm, but blueberries, elderberries, and wild grapes are common. My grandmother gathered all of those and turned them into jams, or, in the case of the grapes, wine as well.

Every February, my grandmother also tapped the silver maples on the land for maple syrup -- a tradition that my aunt continues. It's easy to tap maple syrup -- just hammer a nail into the trunk of tree and hang an empty plastic milk carton from the nail. But the process of rendering the thin, clear sap into a dark, viscous, and flavorful syrup is time consuming and requires lots of stove-top space and ongoing heat. Above, you can see a bottle of my aunt's maple syrup (and the winter stockpile of wood in the garage, with a clearing for the trap door to the cellar through which the stream runs).

As to wild game birds, I see few ducks on the farm, but there are plenty of geese. In the photograph to the right, my aunt had wandered off to get a stick for her dog during a walk this past summer. But her dog had his own idea. The second my aunt's back was turned, he stepped right into the water of this artificial pond -- two fields over from the farm -- in hot pursuit of fun. The Canada geese stayed in the water, swimming away from him as much as they could, and then finally took off and flew over to the next pond. In the photograph to the left, you can see a roasted goose. My hosts on December 25, back here in San Francisco, served this goose. Geese were traditionally served for Christmas dinner until replaced in popularity by domesticated turkeys, according to my Joy of Cooking. Presumably my grandfather would have hunted wild geese during his years growing up on a Maine farm and during his years on the Massachusetts farm, but I don't know.

* Everyday Life in Early America, by David Freeman Hawke, 1988, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, p. 13

Keeping Up With the Car Bailout Talk

Ok, as of today, the 2008 Winter Solstice, the auto industry is still teetering on the brink of insolvency, though lame duck President George W. Bush threw it a lifeline recently. That lifeline is a grant of $13.4 billion now, with another $4 billion to come in February if necessary. Bush is tapping the TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, more colloquially known as the bailout of Wall Street and the financial institutions, which Congress approved in October, to fund the auto industry.

Meantime, Newsweek has done a story on the link between Republican congressmen and women (especially southern ones) and the their resistance to bailing out Detroit-based auto design and manufacturing companies. What's the basis of their resistance? Why, foreign auto companies, especially Toyota, have a number of factories in southern states that employ tens of thousands of workers, NON-UNION workers, mind you ...

And yet, Toyota's sales are also down ...

Folks, are we screwed or what?

Last night I went to a winter solstice celebration (we do that kind of thing in San Francisco, a refuge for the unconventional, the pentagonal pegs among us who just do not fit into round holes and celebrate the holidays the way the rest of the world does). At one point the hostess made sure we all had unlit candles, turned off the lights, and the music, and started a lovely ritual to usher in the increasing daylight in the days, weeks, and months to come. One at a time, she invited us all to say what we wished for in the coming year. She lit her candle first and started, taking my own wish: to be able to travel nearly anywhere in the country via public transportation.

Thanks, Terry!

Her wish will not be the answer to all our economic and environmental woes. But it will certainly be a beginning.

I'm thinking now of two major, 20th century public works projects in the so-called free world that supposedly began the process of lifting nations out of periods of economic malaise -- the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. I know that president-elect Barack Obama is thinking along the lines of the New Deal now, thinking really big. But as he moves forward, I hope he brings back that campaign word of his -- change -- and starts getting the nation ready for huge changes, necessary changes in the way we live. That's because change is going to be necessary if we're going to save the planet and the principals so vital to democratic society -- transparent government, and political and artistic freedom of expression. In fact, a December 21, 2008 editorial in The Huffington Post suggests that Obama may in fact be contemplating change, planning to commit "industrial policy," though schizophrenically at best.

Coming soon: Steven Chu and Ray LaHood ...

Beavers Return

Photos:
1) The Big Pond
2) The beaver home
3) A beaver dam
4) The beaver "kitchen"
5) A paw print

Years ago the big pond in the woods was shallow and nearly dry. But that began to change in the 1980s and 1990s when beavers returned and successfully reestablished themselves, building homes and dams, and restoring the pond. Their return has been centuries in the making.

According to William Cronon, in his study of colonial New England land use practices, Changes in the Land, Native American practice, prior to the arrival of Europeans, had been to trap only as many beavers as were needed for personal use and for trade with tribes that lived south of the southern-most area of beaver habitation. But that changed when Europeans arrived. Early towns that were established along rivers such as the Connecticut (Hartford and Springfield) and Merrimack (Chelmsford) had originally been trading posts where Europeans transacted with Indian trappers – now in possession of firearms – for beaver pelts to feed the European continent where beaver caps had become a fad. Within a few decades of the founding of these trading posts, by the mid-1600s, the beaver population had been so severely decimated that the trade in beaver pelts dropped considerably. Other animals, such as turkeys, deer, elk, and bears, were also overhunted and went into decline. The drop in the deer population was so precipitous, in fact, that in 1694, Massachusetts enforced its first closed hunting season, and in 1718 it banned deer hunting for three years.

Now, however, with the current increase in the depth of the water, other wildlife has come. For a few years during the 1990s, Great Blue Herons built huge nests in the branches of dead trees that stuck out of the pond, and when I was wandering through the woods this past summer, a White-Tailed Deer and I encountered each other, not 30 feet apart. The deer, a doe, was still as a statue for a moment, and then she turned in a flash and bounded through the trees, to where I don’t know. These woods are small, just a few acres, but I suspect that deer, coyotes, mink, fisher cats, weasels, and other creatures are right around me every time I walk through them.

In fact, I have heard coyotes at night, my aunt has seen fisher cats, and my uncle stumbled upon a nesting mother turkey and her newly hatched young when he was out haying this past summer. I also took a photograph of my foot next to a large paw print in the woods, not far from where the deer and I had an encountered each other. Perhaps a black bear print – as a mother bear and her two cubs had been sited near these woods not too long ago.

Cronon discusses the decline in numbers of animals in a chapter called “Commodities of the Hunt.” It’s in the middle of his book. In other chapters, he goes on to discuss the felling of the forests and fencing of the land. His last chapter is called “The Wilderness Should Turn a Mart.” In this chapter, he starts to confront the contradiction in sustainable living and capitalism, and concludes that “the colonists’ economic relations of production were ecologically self-destructive.”

Our current relations to production are probably also self-destructive – but humankind has been able to artificially extend the human population carrying capacity of the planet, probably temporarily, through fossil fuel inputs into the soil, among other means. It's nice to imagine that the farm that my aunt and uncle are now working can become a role model for more sustainable living, but I'm not sure that's possible unless massive numbers of people voluntarily agree to change the way they are living on the planet -- and to accept declines in their standards of living.

The Ongoing Saga of the Auto Bailout

Yesterday the House of Representatives approved a $14 billion bailout of the domestic auto industry, largely along party lines. The original bill had some good stuff in it, especially a provision that would prevent the auto makers from suing states that have passed laws to limit greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. It also had some kind of unrelated rider that had to do with the original $700 billion bank bailout that was passed earlier in the fall ("As an amendment to the auto rescue plan, the House approved a measure that would require banks receiving assistance from the Treasury’s $700 billion economic stabilization program to detail new lending activity each quarter." -- The New York Times. See story here.)

But the part about the lawsuits got struck as a part of a compromise, and then the whole thing got trounced today by Senate Republicans.

And thus nothing has changed. The issue remains one of Democrats versus Republicans and some other stuff, or something like this: Democrats support maintaining a suicidal way of life/industry, but they disguise the issue as one about jobs; Republicans support union busting disguised as industry restructuring.

In the meantime, the sales of hybrid vehicles are plunging along with gasoline prices, and that is not good for the planet or any of the life on the planet.

People do need jobs and people also need benefits. But the kinds of jobs we have and the way we become entitled to benefits need to change.

Tim Redmond, the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, suggests that now is the moment for a public works project on the lines of the New Deal, except MUCH bigger. The New Deal, was a drop in the bucket compared to what was needed during the Depression -- we all learned that in history classes when we got to World War II and realized how absolutely effective our collective efforts (in the form of government) could be at pulling the nation out of economic malaise. This current nationwide, from-coast-to-coast, public works project needs to start with a comprehensive study to determine the best ways to produce and distribute healthy food, create truly livable communities, and transport people and goods -- with less energy. And if it is determined that certain sectors of our economy need to be bailed out -- for example, our public transportation sectors -- then by all means, let's bail them out.

Changes in the Land

My grandparents left Texas in 1950 and bought a farm in New England where both of them had centuries old roots. We know that the farmhouse and barn, built in a marshy wetland, were started before the American Revolution and completed afterwards.

My grandfather died in 1978. At that time, other farm families that had been in the area for generations could no longer farm profitably or chose to sell out and make what money they could by selling to developers. My grandmother, however, a biologist by training and naturalist by practice, decided to take advantage of state law and turn her land into a conservation trust. She did this in cooperation with other local farmers, and by the time she passed away in 1997, she had put the land into a conservation easement that would exist in perpetuity.

The photograph on the left is of one nearby subdivision within walking distance of the farm. The photograph on the right is of the path through the woods that Eagle Scouts created sometime in the 1990s after the conservation trust had been created.

According to the peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia, subdivisions such as the one on the left are going to be the slums of the future as they are energy intensive and unsustainable. However, my uncle, a retired biologist who now works the farm with one of my mother's sisters, is the first to admit that the farm, as it is currently run, is not sustainable either.

Do I Detect Collusion?

We all know about the CEOs of the Big Three auto companies flying on their corporate jets to Washington, DC to beg Congress for a bailout of $25 billion. Congress sent them back empty-handed. So what did they do next? They came back (driving hybrid cars) with a plan and asked for more -- now they want $34 billion!

I object. For one thing, it seems to me that the three companies are colluding, which strikes me as bordering on a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) and other laws that outlaw conspiracies in restraint of trade. Second, they messed up.

Here's a link to a New York Times editorial with a list of recommendations:

... For starters, [Congress] must demand that the three companies’ top executives resign. Only new management can enforce the deep cultural change needed to overhaul the industry. And, it must impose real, enforceable environmental rules. The European Union is aiming for a fleetwide fuel-economy of 50 miles per gallon in 2015. In the United States, Congress last year enacted a target of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

Experts say that Detroit’s automakers could achieve 43 m.p.g. by then even without technological breakthroughs. If the companies were willing to make smaller cars, they could achieve 50 m.p.g. Congress could consider demanding that Detroit simply phase out S.U.V.’s and vans by a certain date. ...

But I hardly think this New York Times editorial is going far enough. The auto companies have failed to adjust to realities of peak oil, global climate change, war for oil, and habitat destruction. They have failed to start producing more environmentally sound products (like buses and bikes). Any "bailout" plan should actually be part of a much larger plan -- a New Deal for Economic Recovery and the Environmental Health of the Planet -- that addresses the destructiveness of our current way of life. Such a plan would include revenue for the construction of affordable and appealing housing in whole, livable communities near transit, complete with parks, schools, retail, services, community gardens, and jobs. It would also include funds for nearby farmers to cultivate homegrown healthy produce. (Sorry, small farmers just can't do this on their own right now -- the competition from big agribusiness is too fierce.)

And the term "bailout"? Personally, I agree with the calls for the nationalization of the transportation industry at the same time that we nationalize the health care industry and move to a single payer system (hey, if you want to maintain your own, private health insurance, no one will stop you).

Here's Democracy Now! coverage of the bailout matter from December 5, 2008.

Here's a Common Dreams story on bailing out of the fossil fuel economy from December 3, 2008.

How do we give people incentives to stop driving and get on board with the changes that are necessary? Here's an idea from a Sierra Club activist: tax everyone at the gas pump steeply (like 10 percent for starters and then go up) and then give everyone (even people who do not have cars) something like a $600 annual rebate. This rewards people for not driving.

Summer 2008 -- a New England Farm

Re-Localization?

For many decades, this farm was a dairy farm. By the time the farm came into my mother's family, there may have been on average 20 dairy cows -- Holsteins, Jerseys, and Guernseys, among other types -- named after the places where they had originally been bred. Every morning, they would gather at a fence across the street and wait for my grandfather -- who had been born and raised on a farm in Maine -- to escort them into the back of the long end of the barn. Once inside each cow would dutifully take her place at her designated stall. My grandfather fed and milked the cows and then transferred the milk into large steel casks that were lowered into a cooler in the milk room. (The milk room is the small, stone addition to the right of the original red barn.) A distributor would pick up the milk and take it to a local dairy processor.

Running this farm was a very labor intensive venture for my grandfather and the rest of the family. I don't know if my grandfather ever hired helpers, but I doubt that he ever took a vacation during the nearly 20 years that it was an active farm. In the late 1960s, he sold the cows -- I remember when some of them were being herded onto a truck taken away -- and went back to his first profession, teaching.

Richard Heinberg, among others, has suggested that in response to peak oil (the end of cheap petroleum upon which our way of life now depends), that food production will hopefully go through a process of decentralization and re-localization. In his November 2008 MuseLetter, he addresses the issue of food and farming.

This farm is on typically rocky New England soil, and I don't know too much about its history prior to the arrival of my mother's family in 1950. I doubt that it was ever self-sustaining, but if current practices are any indication, the people who farmed it over the years probably brought it close to a self-sustaining operation -- with the help of neighbors.

I also do not know about its future, and whether or not it will be a center for the re-localization of food production, as these are matters that are not under my control.

Summer 2008 -- This Old House

Revolutionary Era Farm House
These rooms are part of a Massachusetts farm house. Construction on the house was started before the American Revolution and completed afterwards. It would have been at one time an all purpose home where the occupants would have raised their own chickens and cows, and perhaps pigs and sheep. Over one hundred acres of rocky fields, woods, and wetlands are a part of the farm also. The fields have been used, over the years, for a combination of growing hay to feed cattle and for sale to other farmers, and for grazing livestock.

Before central heating was installed, fireplaces and iron stoves would have provided all the heat. Fireplaces and stoves are still part of the heating system. An annual project every summer and fall is collecting firewood from the woods, chopping it up, and stacking it for the winter.

One hundred and fifty years ago, most Americans were agrarian, farmers working the land for a living. With the advent of mechanized farming, made largely possible by the utilization of fossil fuels for agriculture, only a small percentage of Americans still farm. It's been suggested, that as supplies of fossil fuels diminish, more and more people will return to farming. That may be so, but it leaves me with some worries -- the vast majority of us have lost the farming skills that humankind has carried around with it for thousands of years.

Lowell, Massachusetts -- Water Works and Women's Labor

Scenes from Lowell

The system under which young, farm women were recruited into the Lowell Mills was called the "Waltham System," based on the first center to consolidate all aspects of the transformation of cotton into cloth in nearby Waltham, Massachusetts. While work beyond the home was not conventional for most New England women of the era, it was acceptable for young women to leave their farm families for several years before settling into marriage. The labor of young men, on the other hand, was needed on the farms.

Some of the women who went to the mills for work produced a paper trail of their experiences. Perhaps the most famous chronicler of the lives of the mill girls was Harriet Robinson, who published Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls, in 1898, and who, in 1836 at the age of 11, was a leader in a strike at the mills. Here she writes:


... In 1831 Lowell was little more than a factory village. Several corporations were started, and the cotton mills belonging to them were building. Help was in great demand; and stories were told all over the country of the new factory town, and the high wages that were offered to all classes of work-people -- stories that reached the ears of mechanics' and farmers' sons, and gave new life to lonely and dependent women in distant towns and farmhouses. ... The stagecoach and the canal boat came every day, always filled with new recruits for this army of useful people. ... The widow came with her little flock and scanty housekeeping goods to open a boarding house or variety store ... Many farmers' daughters came to earn money to complete their wedding outfit, or buy the bride's share of housekeeping articles. ...

She goes on and adds that women with past histories came to start their lives anew in anonymity and that the daughters of urban privilege came for the adventure, as well as women with children who sought to disappear behind the machines they operated and thus escape abusive marriages.

Over the decades, however, with increased immigration, due in part to the potato famine in Ireland and revolutionary turmoil in Central Europe, labor became more and more expendable, and the practice of hiring primarily Yankee farm girls and other women died down.

Summer 2008 -- Lowell, Massachusetts

My mother’s roots are in the northeast, mostly New England. She was born in Connecticut, and in 1950, after some years in Texas, her parents bought a farm in Massachusetts and moved the family there. The farm is still in the family, close to historic downtown Lowell.

This city is famous as one of the places where the American Industrial Revolution began. It was there that Francis Cabot Lowell and some fellow entrepreneurs decided to experiment with the consolidation of all aspects of the manufacture of cloth in one center. They pooled their talent and capital and started building water-powered factories along the Merrimack River. They oversaw the construction of canals for transportation (the Merrimack is rapid and rocky at some points), and started the practice of hiring young farm women who would be housed in dormitories and overseen by older women until they left, usually for marriage.

Lowell as an industrial center began to decline over a century ago, as industrialists moved their centers of production to places of cheaper labor.

Now, many of the Lowell Mills have been restored as museums or retails shops and incorporated into the National Park Service system.

Electric Cars Do Not A Game-Changer Make

Wow. People still just don't get it.

Ok, I'll admit, I'm about to head back to the East Coast for the grand Thanksgiving get-together at my extended family's farm in New England. But I know that I need to reduce my carbon footprint and restrict my movement (I'm getting there: I live in San Francisco and call anything on the other side of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge "California" at best, and the equivalent of different universe at worst).

But here's a Reuters story quoting San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom about how he feels badly driving a hybrid. The point is, he wants to switch to an all-electric vehicle.

To me people switching from regular ICEs or hybrids to electric cars is like George W. Bush giving up golf during times of war.

Electric vehicles may be good as a transition to NO vehicles at all (or more realitistically FEWER vehicles). But how much coal would we need to extract from the planet, how many new nuclear plants would we need to commission (money-losing investments -- they would be public works projects at best), and how many LNG plants would we need to erect to transition from over 200 million vehicles in the United States alone now powered by gasoline to electric vehicles? And given the warnings about global climate change, how much time would we have to get there?

Here's a link to one of my favorite articles, one that I have posted in this blog before, The Road to Nowhere, about the fallacy of alternative-fuel vehicles (and electric vehicles ARE alternative-fuel vehicles, as long as the electricity plants are powered by anything other than petroleum).

Electric cars just do not a game-changer make. We need people to accept the reality that there are limitations to what they can have and where they can go. I know that's hard. It's hard for me, for goodness sake. But I know it.

What might be a real game-changer? Following the advice of expert planners who are telling us we need to create affordable -- and appealing -- housing where the jobs, parks, transit, schools, and retail already exist. And that ex-urban communities need to stop including wide streets and bountiful parking in their zoning regulations.

The Revolution Will Be on the Streets

A New Transportation Deal for the Nation?

I participate in an email discussion group in San Francisco called "Car Free Living." Most of the participants are transportation wonks who ride bicycles and/or walk and then gather on the first Wednesday of every month at popular local watering hole to discuss transportation policy.

Right now, people are talking about the auto bailout, Barack Obama's choice of transportation appointees, and the fact that Henry Waxman (D-California) usurped John Dingell (D-Michigan) as chair of an important house committee that oversees energy matters.

Here's a link to President-Elect Obama's "Change" webpage regarding transportation:

http://www.change.gov/learn/transportation_team_leads

If I were serious about change, I'd be thinking of nationalizing the auto industry (or at the very least, putting it into a receivership, as Michael Moore, below, suggests), and creating a New Transportation Deal for the nation with the very serious goal of reducing our energy use and sprawl. Moore, a child of auto manufacturing country himself, says the following:

"We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reigns on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline.

"We're facing a national crisis, not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of the polar ice caps melting. There's only so much oil left under the Earth. We're going to run out of that, if not in our children's time, our grandchildren's time."

Does Henry Waxman's replacement of John Dingell as the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee signal revolutionary change (because that's what we need)? Let's hope so. We all know that newspapers run stories about the demise of the auto industry alongside stories about global warming -- and yet rarely, does the content of the stories overlap. The story on Henry Waxman in today's San Francisco Chronicle is an exception, as the environment and clean air do get mention.

Meanwhile, the president-elect is keeping a low profile regarding the automobile industry's desire for a bailout, and suggesting vague job creation programs that include rebuilding roads and bridges and the manufacture of alternative-fuel cars. But there is no mention of expanding public transportation or building affordable housing in our cities or elsewhere.

Should the Auto Industry Be Bailed Out?

Subsidizing the Auto Industry v. Union Busting

The pundits on this matter seem to be torn between the Democrats who are allied with the unions representing the workers and the Republicans who, in this particular instance, are salivating at the opportunity to union bust. See former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's op-ed in the New York Times today here.

Search as I do, I can find very few people talking about the auto industry crisis as an opportunity to create a long-term transportation/community building plan for the nation that addresses environmental ills caused by our way of life. I found Mark Brenner on Democracy Now! on November 12, calling for a game changer:

MARK BRENNER: Well, look, Michigan’s lost over 350,000 manufacturing jobs in the last eight years, most of them in the last three years. Unemployment has already hit ten percent in Flint; it’s nine percent statewide. There’s no question that the impact of the free fall of the auto industry has really decimated, and it’s going to continue to decimate, the state and the region.

So, you know, from my perspective and I think from most of the perspective of the labor movement and hopefully the whole progressive community, there’s no question that something needs to be done. The question is, what do we do? And I think, here, we really need a game changer. ...

Read the transcript of this show here.

Yet I'm still waiting for someone to very specifically link the automobile industry to planetary demise, but perhaps people are afraid to go there. Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy and budding environmental justice superstar, came close to this on Sunday, November 16 at the San Francisco Green Festival, but he avoided suggesting that Americans and others divorce their cars (or at the very least get separations). Scroll down in this story to see what Van Jones had to say.

There are people weighing in on the current battle between John Dingell (D-Michigan) and Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) for chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with environmentalists siding with Waxman, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refusing to take sides. But it just feels like, three years after Katrina, no one is really tackling these issues.

July 27, 2008 -- Lowell

Scenes from the
Lowell Folk Festival

My sister and her family attend the Lowell Festival every year. This festival is as good as any in San Francisco or any other large city -- in fact, maybe it's even better because the crowds are small.

Musicians, singers, and dancers come from all over the nation and the world to perform. Two of the women in the top photograph eventually stepped down onto platform in front and danced. The people on chairs in the lower platform are actually dancing, also.

July 26, 2008 -- Out of Boston

The Lowell Commuter Train

From North Station in Boston, I took the Lowell train. Usually, I don't go all the way to Lowell, instead disembarking at an earlier stop where my sister picks me up.

Thanks, sis.

It's usually an uneventful train ride through mostly working class towns outside of Boston and through wetlands areas with ponds overlaid with water lilies -- and those are scenes that you have to imagine because I did not take pictures.

This station in the picture -- and others like it that ring Boston -- is a commuter station. People come in the morning and park their cars, pay a parking fee, and take the train to Boston's North Station to get to their jobs. This particular station is also Grand Auto Theft Central, as my sister discovered many years ago when she and her husband first moved not too far away, and someone heisted her little, used Toyota that she had bought just for the commute from their house to the station. When she filed her police report, she found out that there is a lot of auto theft at this station.

Boston has an old and well-built up system of commuter lines to outlying communities. There is a debate in the San Francisco Bay Area about whether or not to extend BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to outlying suburbs so that people can forego their personal cars in order to get to work. I think the planners with these ideas are thinking about reducing congestion on the roads leading to jobs, but others of us are thinking about the environment and social justice issues.

Because here's the thing: while it's true that many people have been forced out of San Francisco and other dense communities by the high cost of housing, the people who live in the communities that BART is being extended to tend to be middle class. BART, a rail system, is very expensive to operate, especially compared to buses. People who live in the denser communities such as San Francisco and Oakland argue that BART should not be extended to the suburbs because that will induce sprawl and because BART is so expensive to build and operate. They say that instead, BART should rely on shuttles to get people in the suburbs to BART connections and that the region as a whole should concentrate on constructing affordable infill housing in parts of the region that are already transit rich. Doing anything less, they argue, is a subsidy for the middle and upper classes at the expense of providing better public transportation for poorer people.

But the conventional wisdom is that middle class people in the suburbs have some kind of aversion to buses. So we're back to extending BART. At the very least, parking at the BART commuter lots should not be free. Parking should NEVER be free, in fact, according to Donald Shoup, UCLA professor of Urban Planning.

Back to commuter rail in the Boston area: I depend on it for my travels and am very happy that it exists. I just wished that my family members lived closer to the stations than they do.