Make Me Do It

Dave Snyder, Newest Appointee to the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District

The past week and a half, San Francisco's progressive political junkies, a group of fiercely intense -- or intensely fierce -- addicts of the drama that unfolds in San Francisco's City Hall were justly rewarded for their addiction.

Dave Snyder is a well-known bicycle advocate and transportation wiz. He did not found the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, but in the 1990s he started to revive it and, as executive director, eventually turned it into a 2,000 member political advocacy group. It now numbers 10,000, about same membership as the local Sierra Club. Snyder left the SFBC to found Transportation for a Livable City (now Livable City), and then got a job as Transportation Policy Director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).

All the while, he has never owned a car in his life ...

In February or March, at the suggestion of some anonymous person, he nominated himself for an opening on the GGBHTD, a regional commission with 19 members from six California counties. San Francisco has nine commissioners: the mayor gets to appoint one; the 11 members of our Board of Supervisors get to appoint four; and four of San Francisco's commissioners are actually supervisors as well. Commissioners vote on tolls and other matters relating to the operation, maintenance, and funding of the bridge and some roads and transit systems connected to it.

Candidates wishing to represent San Francisco must apply through the Rules Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. That's what Snyder did. But the seat Snyder was applying for has traditionally been a "labor" seat, and there was another candidate, Larry Mazzola, of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry Local 38, who also applied. Mazzola was considered in no way qualified for the position compared to Snyder by many observers, but when Snyder realized his seat was traditionally held by someone in labor, he agreed to withdraw his nomination -- if a qualified candidate from labor could be found.

Some weeks went by. Or some days. I can't remember.

Then one Friday, Supervisor Chris Daly, chair of the SF Board of Supervisors Rules Committee, called up Snyder and said, hey, you know what Mazzola's allies are doing? They (four conservative members of the board who are allies of the mayor) are pulling some parliamentary maneuver and forwarding his name on to the full board of supervisors as the only candidate for the commission.

Daly is kind of the bad boy of the Board, passionate and principled, though sometimes stretching the definition of "principled". Labor in SF can be a bit of a racket, a reliable pro-development lobby for the moneyed interests that would tear down as much of our rent-controlled buildings as possible and replace them with market-rate and luxury condominiums if they could. Mazzola worked hard to defeat Daly when he was up for reelection in 2006 -- but Daly squeaked to a win anyway.

Local Bloggers

Anyway, at this point, Hope Johnson and Luke Thomas, of Fog City Journal and Stay Tuned SF, got to work ...

Stay Tuned: Newsom Allies Maneuver to Appoint ...

Hope Johnson of Stayed Tuned SF

And perhaps in part because of the coverage that these two intrepid and fired up freelancers gave the matter, six members of the Board of Supervisors, four of them newly-elected as part of a "progressive bloc" in November 2008, thwarted the four more conservative members and voted to appoint Snyder:

Snyder Wins Appointment ...

Stay Tuned: That's Just the Way It Isn't

But now Labor is having a hissy fit:

Stayed Tuned: United We Stand, Divided We Sit

I'm all for unions and jobs, but union workers don't get to have just any old construction project because it will bring jobs. The environment (and historic preservation) has to be taken into consideration.

I ran into Snyder recently and we got to talking about the kerfuffle. I posed this question to him: if you were willing to withdraw your name from consideration in favor of a qualified Labor candidate, then why didn't Labor put forth a qualified candidate? He didn't know the answer.

Here's more coverage:

Uncivil Union

Behind the Democratic Party Lunch Picket
(Pay special attention to the remarks of marcos ...)

Make Him Do It

When Snyder and I were talking, I brought up the issue of tolls. Tying direct costs to driving is a big item on the wish lists of environmentalists and transit advocates like myself. I told him I wanted him to work to raise tolls on the Golden Gate Bridge.

His response? His words were the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Make me do it." In other words, write a letter and more than that, organize a movement to demand that the cost of driving be directly tied to the act of driving.

I'm game, and have high hopes for Snyder's tenure on the commission. (They're going to have to raise tolls, especially to pay for that $75 million that bridge district has agreed to donate to the rebuild of the viaduct that connects the bridge -- and all of northern California -- to the rest of San Francisco).

Make BHO Do It

But here's what I'm more worried about: BHO, you know, Barack Hussein Obama. He, too, is repeating the refrain of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: I agree with you, but make me do it. In recent days, BHO has released torture memos from the Bush administration and on Tuesday, April 21 the New York Times even reported that he had begun to talk about the possibility of prosecuting the lawyers who reinterpreted the law so as to give cover to the practice of torture in order to extract information from detained terror suspects.

But then on April 23 the NYT announced he opposes the creation of a commission to do a broad investigation into the Bush administration.

And what about those terror suspects who have been subjected to extraordinary rendition, detained without charges, and tortured? His Department of Justice lawyers are continuing to argue that their cases cannot be litigated because of state secrets, and now they are even using that argument to prevent cases going forward against AT&T and other telecommunications companies for warrantless wiretapping.

I guess we're going to have to make him change his position on those matters.

My next entry: extraordinary rendition, torture, and warrantless wiretapping cases in San Francisco federal courts.

Story of a Garden

Ed Dierauf, San Francisco community gardener

Sometime in 1975, Ed Dierauf, pictured above, was taking a jog down 15th Avenue in San Francisco's Richmond District. Passing what had long been a sandy lot adjacent to a San Francisco Unified School district child development center -- filled only with the garbage that passersby had left there -- he noticed a small group of people diligently at work with shovels and other equipment. When he inquired, someone said they were creating a community garden.

He turned around, went to his home a block away, changed his clothes and returned to join their efforts. In a sense, he has never left.

Fava beans and kale

Since that time 34 years ago, Dierauf and his fellow community gardeners have transformed the lot from sand dunes covered with non-native ice plant into roughly 75 plots and two tiny apple and pear orchards. Working the same small patch that he took up in 1975, above, he grows fava beans, scarlet runner beans, and kale, and combined with the food he harvests from his and his wife's back yard -- lettuce, Swiss chard, and apples from four apples trees -- he has been able to save up to about $300 annually in food costs.

Letter from Massachusetts

Gardening has long ranked at or near the top of surveys about favorite American pastimes, but in recent months, in response to the double whammies of the oil price spike in 2008 and the current economic downturn, gardening is coming back into vogue in full force, as many people realize the cheapest way to eat is to grow their own food. Even the suburban Boston town where my sister lives has recently caught the collective gardening fever -- in a recent letter (yes, an actual LETTER, not an email), my sister wrote that her town has recently bought land to turn into a community garden.

Genesis of a San Francisco Movement
While Ed Dierauf, 80, was not there to break ground for the Argonne Community Garden in April 1975 (he came a few months later), he can at least say he was there as a part of the first year of San Francisco's community garden movement.

The beginning of Argonne Community garden started with a federal job training program that no longer exists -- CETA, or the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, passed by Congress in 1973. Part of the function of CETA was to fund arts programs in the schools. San Francisco sculptor Ruth Osawa, whose intricate wire sculptures now hang from the ceilings of the de Young Museum, believed that gardens were an expression of artistic sentiment. She was influential in convincing the Alvarado Arts Workshop, which administered a share of CETA funds in San Francisco, to dedicate money to the recruitment of 19 gardeners to start organic community gardens. In April 1975, the workshop hired then Richmond District resident Mary Ann Crandall to find a location for and start a Richmond District garden.

Crandall’s Southern California family had had a victory garden during World War II but she was otherwise new to gardening. She scouted the Richmond for a suitable spot and eventually was able to get permission from the San Francisco Unified School District to transform the land around the childcare center into a garden. Coincidentally, according to an old neighbor, that very site had been the site of a victory garden during World War II.

“We started with five people, and we were naïve,” says Crandall, 74, who now gardens in Santa Rosa. “We only had compost bins, and we made manure runs to the stables in Golden Gate Park.”


Because there was only one faucet for a hose on the outside of the childcare center, they attached five hoses together in order to reach distant plots. They stored the hoses in a neighbor’s garage. Soon after that first year, gardeners installed an irrigation system, still in place, with the help of city government.

Susan Sibbett, pictured above, and her husband David, joined the garden in 1978. Susan Sibbett and Dierauf built the 15th Avenue fence, behind her in the photo, together.

The Greenhouse

Flora of the Fog Belt
When Dierauf and his fellow gardeners were starting, they didn’t know what would grow in the sandy soil under the Richmond District fog.

“There was one far out group in the early years who tried to cultivate a circle of wheat, but they failed, “ says Crandall. They had made that attempt in the part of the garden where there is now a geodesic dome greenhouse.

Dierauf, Crandall, and the other gardeners also realized quickly that hot weather plants such as tomatoes, corn, peppers, eggplants and most legumes, generally would not do well. But lettuce, chard, sorrel, spinach, kale, broccoli, beets, peas, artichokes, potatoes, scarlet runner beans, and fava beans thrived – and still thrive.

Kale

Sorrel

Lettuce and chard

Peas

Rhubarb

Artichokes

Arugula

Dierauf and his wife have mostly steamed what they have grown -- or used it in salads, but Crandall reacalls making Borscht and vegetable soups with carrots, peas, and bok choy for high school interns who worked with her every summer.

Expansion
Funding from CETA ended in 1979, and Crandall sadly left San Francisco. But Deirauf and others were well on their way in expanding the urban gardening movement, anyway. By then, Dierauf had applied for a grant to get solar panels installed on the original child care center, he had helped increase the number of plots to around 80, and in 1980 he and half a dozen other city gardeners founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG).

“There were all these community gardens,” said Dierauf. “It was obvious that there was a need for some sort of umbrella organization to help gardeners to talk to each other.”

It took several years to start, but by the mid-1980s, SLUG was up and running as a non-profit. Its mission statement was to give anyone who wanted it the opportunity to garden organically in the city.

For about 15 years, Dierauf sat on the board of SLUG and helped support the growing number of community gardens. (There are now about 50.)

“We had a charismatic leader then,” said Dierauf, in reference to Mohammed Nuru who left SLUG to go to the San Francisco Department of Public Works.

Dierauf recalled Nuru with admiration, noting that he had been able to get funding for the salary for his job. Under Nuru, Dierauf, and other board members, SLUG arranged regular meetings of gardeners so they could discuss common problems. SLUG also started a kitchen industry called Urban Herbals that involved Bayview teenagers in the production of jellies and vinegars. That program is no longer extant, but another program started by SLUG, the Garden for the Environment, on 7th Avenue in the Inner Sunset, still offers gardening courses.

Apple trees, the Upper Orchard.

View of the Argonne Child Development Center with solar panels. There is a communal raspberry patch in the foreground.

Transformation

In the early 2000s, the school district considered selling the land and moving the child development center to a nearby elementary school. A friend of mine recalls a developer stopping by once when she was tending her garden and suggesting that the plot would be better off turned into condominiums. "It was as if he were straight out of central casting," she told me recently.

Dierauf has noted that all of San Francisco's community gardens exist under the constant threat of development pressures. However, the Argonne gardeners -- this time -- were able to craft a deal that saved the garden: bond money would be used to rebuild and expand the center in the same location, and in return, the garden would give up a few plots. The childcare center architects also agreed enhance the landscaping and throw in a new greenhouse, to boot.

Bench dedicated to Ed Dierauf

In June 2006, members of the Argonne Community Garden dedicated this bench to Ed Dierauf in recognition of all of his work for the benefit of city gardeners. If you sit here on a clear day, you can see the western end of Mt. Tamalpais in the distance.

A Tragedy of Auto-Centric Planning

My sister and her husband bought a house in this Boston bedroom community in late 1989 or early 1990. While there remain a few Revolutionary War-era farm houses, in the decades since World War II, it has been transformed into a thoroughly suburban community with with strip malls, and wide, tree-shaded streets with few sidewalks. Everyone drives everywhere, and during the dog days of August, some people even get in their cars and turn the air conditioners on to stay cool. When I visit, I try to walk places, but the absence of adequate sidewalks makes walking -- and riding bicycles -- really dangerous.


The first time I visited them, in March 1990, we sat down one night to watch the local evening news. There was one report that I will never forget. A woman had been walking along one of the town streets, probably a street like the streets in these photographs without adequate sidewalks -- if there were any at all.


She had been hit by a car and rushed to an emergency room. Whether she was dead on arrival or whether she died later, I can't remember. But I do remember this: her own sister was one of the emergency room nurses on duty that night at the hospital when she was wheeled in.


Unfortunately, this town has become only marginally safer for pedestrians -- I took these photographs in 2008. In the top one you can see the dirt path created by people determined to walk despite the absence of a sidewalk. In the next one you can see a sidewalk along the side of the road next to a mall parking lot but not one on the side of the road where there are homes. The last photograph shows a pedestrian signal that seems to have been attached to the wrong side of the lamp post for some reason. That seems like it would be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Gardening for the Future

This is my community garden.

I'm going to admit that in the past few years I have neglected my own plot. But this year, with the economic downturn and possible arrival of peak oil (which may in part have triggered the economic downturn), one of my New Years resolutions is to tend my garden better.


Gardening comes as naturally to humanity as salmon fishing comes to Alaskan Brown Bears. In fact, it routinely scores at the top in surveys of favorite hobbies. In the near future, however, gardening will probably become much more than a hobby for many people, maybe even most, as the cost of fuel goes up and drives up the cost of grocery market food which has been shipped in from all over the nation and world.

James Howard Kunstler, peak oil author, addresses the link between the economic collapse and food security in a recent column called What Next? He critiques the efforts of President Barack Obama and Congress to shore up the old capitalistic financial system and recommends redesigning communities in such a way as to make them more sustainable within themselves. Here's an excerpt:

My guess is that the disorder in agriculture will be pretty severe this year, especially since some of the world's most productive places -- California, northern China, Argentina, the Australian grain belt -- are caught in extremes of drought on top of capital shortages. If the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections.

Free At Last and Other Updates

The case of Binyam Mohamed:

Binyam Mohamed, the lead plaintiff in the case Mohamed v. Jeppesen, was released from Guantanamo today, and is probably on his way to Great Britain right now -- even though he no longer has family there and his residency status has expired.

Through his lawyers, he made this statement:

"Before this ordeal torture was an abstract word to me ... It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next and tortured in medieval ways all orchestrated by the United States government."

Read the story here.

The case of the bike lane at Market Street and the on-ramp to the Central Freeway:

On January 22, 2009, Judge Busch, of the San Francisco Superior Court, ruled that he could not approve the Municipal Transportation Agency commissioners unanimous vote to remove the bike lane. He said he could not approve the removal because of a previous injunction barring all bicycle plan improvements -- or changes -- due to the absence of environmental impact reviews (EIR) to ensure that the bike lanes and other bicycle improvements or changes complied with the California Environmental Quality Act.

That injunction is expected to be lifted in the coming months. We'll see whether or not the MTA goes back to court to get the bike lane removed.

In the meantime, this bicyclist and local photojournalist offers words of caution:

Cyclists Beware ...

Oil Price Fluctuations and the Economic Downturn

The refinery in Richmond, California; taken from the Amtrak train on August 8, 2008

There is a group of people in San Francisco who are preparing the city's official Peak Oil Preparedness Report. The report is now in its draft form and available for public comment. In the introduction, there is one paragraph that references a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The San Francisco report extrapolates from that report as follows:

The leading edge of peak oil will be its economic impact. When the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia did a comprehensive study of the effect of oil price changes on the economy, it found a profoundly negative relationship. According to its report, the 2008 doubling of oil prices will reduce 2009 US economic output by 11% from what it otherwise would have been. It doesn’t even matter that the price spike was temporary; the damage to the economy will be long-lasting.

The reasons for the current economic collapse are complex, but the commentaries that I have read so far emphasize the absence of adequate regulation of the financial and housing sectors. It's hard to imagine, however, that the rise in the price of a barrel of oil last year has not played into the current economic havoc as well.

Sacrificed for I Don't Know What

The following excerpt is from Common Dreams:

'My Silence Cannot Be Bought'

On Thursday night, Beverly Eckert, whose husband died on 9/11, died herself in the Buffalo plane crash. From our archives we wanted to share a piece Beverly wrote over 5 years ago:

By suing, I've forfeited the "$1.8 million average award" for a death claim I could have collected under the fund. Nor do I have any illusions about winning money in my suit. What I do know is I owe it to my husband, whose death I believe could have been avoided, to see that all of those responsible are held accountable. If we don't get answers to what went wrong, there will be a next time. And instead of 3,000 dead, it will be 10,000. What will Congress do then?

So I say to Congress, big business and everyone who conspired to divert attention from government and private-sector failures: My husband's life was priceless, and I will not let his death be meaningless. My silence cannot be bought.

Thank you Common Dreams.

The photograph above is of the location where I saw the search-and-rescue dog when I emerged from the woods, sometime in mid-August 2001, a few weeks before the owner of the woods died in a plane on September 11, 2001. I didn't know him well, and I cannot represent the family or anyone who did. All I can represent are the values upon which this nation was founded that have been sacrificed for I don't know what. We need to investigate that "I don't know what."

Hope for Change Is Dashed in San Francisco?

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Ben Wizner; February 9, 2009; San Francisco, California

On February 9, 2009, three judges with the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard a arguments in a motion to appeal the decision of a lower court. The case is Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. Mohamed is one of five suspected terrorists who were subjected to extraordinary rendition either by the US government or on behalf of the US government -- they were abducted and transported to prisons in Egypt and elsewhere where they were interrogated aggressively. (Oh, aggressive interrogation, for the purposes of this blog, is a euphemism for things that are against domestic and international law, including torture.)

Attorney Ben Wizner, above, represented the five plaintiffs in their civil case against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary that they accuse of arranging the rendition flights.

The hearing took place in this courtroom, in front of three judges: Judge William Canby, Jr., Judge Mary Murphy Schroeder, and Judge Michael Daly Hawkins. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyer, representing Jeppesen (go figure -- couldn't that company hire its own lawyer?), was Douglas Letter.

The case was a test of the Obama administration: would it break from the practice of the Bush administration, which argued that the case (in a lower US District court in February 2008) could not be litigated because of "state secrets"? Or would it perpetuate the status quo?

The case was watched carefully -- I knew about it because I heard a report on NPR the evening before, and decided I was going to set my alarm early and get up and go.

To the great disappointment of civil libertarians, the DoJ did not change tack. Letter, the DoJ lawyer, argued that the case should not be litigated because of "state secrets."

It was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and other news outlets, including one story by me that ran in Fog City Journal. My story got a response from a well-respected legal analyst in San Francisco who suggested that Obama was buying time and creating space for a new policy on terror suspects to evolve. I hope the legal analyst is right, by the way.

You can read these stories and more here:

Fog City Journal
The San Francisco Chronicle
The New York Times

Unfortunately, on the night of February 12, 2009, the Obama administration went back into court in San Francisco to argue for the protection of "state secrets" again. I missed that case.

Here is commentary from AlterNet, Salon.com, and Mother Jones on what Obama could be up to and how there might eventually be some kind of accounting for members of the Bush administration who may have violated the law. And following is a story in from the February 10, 2009 San Francisco Chronicle about efforts by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) to launch a truth commission into possible misdeeds by the previous administration: Sen. Leahy proposes truth panel on Bush policies.

Throwing Shoes Is Not Enough

A small "d" democrat throws a shoe at a likeness of George W. Bush, getting everything out of his system, on January 20, 2009, at UN Plaza in San Francisco just after the inauguration.

On June 22, 2004, a few weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal had broken, then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, then General Counsel to the Secretary of Defense Jim Haynes, and then Deputy General Counsel Dan Dell’Orto, held a press conference. Unbeknownst to the general public, the apparent purpose of the press conference was to deflect any blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere from themselves and to turn underlings below them into fall men and women for what might well be violations of the law, violations as serious as war crimes.

There have been, however, many independent investigations into their arguments and no small number of books and articles that have been produced. Philippe Sands, a British lawyer, interviewed individuals who played roles on the ground in Guantanamo and in the Pentagon itself and published his findings in Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, in May 2008. He draws a direct line between aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo and lawyers at the highest levels of the Bush administration, even going so far as to compare the Bush lawyers to Nazi lawyers who interpreted German and international law in ways that would hopefully protect themselves and higher ups from future charges.

New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer has written The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, also published in mid-2008. Her book investigates the Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition scandals, as well as aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay. “Seven years after Al Qaeda’s attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history,” she concludes on page 327, “it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America’s security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country’s soul.”

Glenn Greenwald, a former Constitutional law and civil rights litigator, has written continually for Salon.com and elsewhere about the possible commission of war crimes by members of the Bush administration.

In response to these exposes, the editorial staff of the New York Times and others have gotten on board calling for some kind of accounting and restoration of respect for the rule of law.

Now, finally, Congressman John Conyers, D-Detroit, and his colleague Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), are both indicating an interest in investigations into the past administration and its possible abuse of powers and commission of war crimes.

This is good, but if there are investigations, I hope they are not just about specific abuses by specific individuals within the Bush administration. If there are any investigations, I hope they become sort of “Truth and Reconciliation” investigations in which the American people can engage in a close examination of their lifestyles and attitudes and the role these lifestyles and attitudes had in letting themselves be led so far astray from what should be the core values of our democracy – transparent government, fairness, and the common good.

I think we've lost site of these values -- especially the common good -- and really, that's what this blog is all about.

(But don't confuse me with those free-market "common gooders" at the Wall Street Journal who take good words and use them obfuscate their bad intentions: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very small number of people.)

CARB and Cargoism

"CARB" is the California Air Resources Board. According to the January 28 East Bay Express, the CARB has backed off plans to impose strict regulations on the conversion of hybrid cars into mostly electric vehicles because of concerns about smog production when converted vehicles are plugged in to recharge batteries. A small company that converts hybrids to electric vehicles in Berkeley rallied to oppose the regulations, which it felt would put it out of business because of prohibitive costs.

Alternative vehicles such as hybrids and electric cars will probably play a role in future years. But how significant will that role be? In his book Overshoot, William Catton explained some psychological paradigms that dominate western thought. Here are two:

Age of Exhuberance: the centuries of growth and progress that followed the enlargement of habitat available to Europeans as a result of voyages of discovery: a period of expansion when a species takes exhuberant advantage of the abundant opportunities in an eminently suitable but previously inaccessible habitat.

Cargoism: faith that technolgical progress will stave off major institutional change even in a post-exhuberant world.

Many westerners are aware that people may have reached the ecological limits of their expansion, but still, they hang on to the luxurious fantasy that technological solutions will allow them maintain the current western standard of living. But how could that be when so many of the raw materials that people need to maintain their standard of living depend on extracting those resources from the planet, often at great environmental cost, and frequently from parts of the world that are hostile to American desires?

Lithium, for example, which is used in hybrid and electric vehicles, can be found in abundance in Bolivia. But under its new leader Evo Morales, Bolivia is holding on tight to lithium and its other natural resources -- and is feeling no sense of favoritism toward the United States.

Strange Encounters

Life is full of bizarre coincidences, and below I describe one that is a few years old. It is doubtful that it has any meaning other than being something unusual that should inspire people to reexamine the events that would unfold a few weeks later – and to reexamine everything that led up to those events.

Sometime in the mid- to late 1990s I was headed for a walk in the woods that are featured here, in search of an early American road. (Most of this forest has since been cut down to make way for a subdivision.) I had to walk up the street from my aunt’s home, maybe 200 yards, and down the driveway, and past a recently constructed “farm house,” which is really just another subdivision home with more land than most. The family that lives in this house had two dogs at that time, Max and Lily. When I was parallel to the house, Max left the patio where he had been guarding the home and charged me, followed by the gentle Lily. Max growled and barked and bared his teeth inches away from me until one of the subdivision daughters came out and called Max and Lily in. I think I turned around and returned to the farm at that point.

The homeowner, X, drove by me in one of his farm vehicles later that morning as I was walking down the street and kindly stopped and asked me if Max had bitten me. No, he hadn’t, I said. But a few years later, Max bit my aunt’s neighbor, M, someone whom Max should have known well, and Max, apparently to the great sorrow of X, was put down.

And then in mid-August 2001, knowing that Max was gone, I headed out for another walk in these woods, again in search of the signs of the early American road. This time I made it into the woods. I don’t recall whether or not I found indications of the old road, as my memory of that day has been overshadowed by everything that followed in subsequent weeks.

When I emerged from the corner of the woods featured in the photograph, I immediately caught site of a large dog that was perhaps part collie. I was alarmed, but soon saw a man standing a few feet away behind the dog, and called out to the man and asked him to please hold his dog. He assured me his dog would not bite, and in fact, we got into a conversation, and he told me he was training his dog in search and rescue. He may also have told me that he had come from central Massachusetts, but perhaps X told me that. I no longer recall.

To me there was nothing unusual about that explanation. X, who is deceased, was known for sharing his land – I knew then that there was a community of people from Southeast Asia who had been displaced to the Lowell area by the turmoil in Southeast Asia who had taken up gardening, at X’s invitation, on part of his land. But the next morning, X stopped into my aunt’s kitchen to chat, and when I told him my story about my experience, he said that the dog I had encountered was a “cadaver” dog. My aunt later explained that X just had a morose sense of humor.

Yet X, who was an American Airlines employee, was probably among the first to die on the morning of September 11, 2001.

I’m not one of those people who necessarily think that terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were an inside job because I don’t know enough. But here is what I’m pretty sure is accurate: the terrorist attacks of 9-11 allowed some very disreputable, malevolent people to expand their power and intensify an already dangerously imperialistic, undemocratic, and environmentally destructive national course.


And I don’t think it’s enough to just celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama ...


... and throw shoes at replicas of George W. Bush and consider ourselves done with the past eight years.

Because we aren’t talking about eight years. We need to start a self-examination that goes back to the Trail of Tears, the Second Removal, Polk’s War, the Spanish-American War, and right up through to the Carter Doctrine and beyond. But these topics are for future blog entries.

The Good News and the Bad News

Here's the -- tentatively -- good news:

New CEQA Guidelines Expected to Shift Transportation Priorities

Here's the bad news:

Oberstar: Mass Transit Got the Shaft to Make Room For Tax Cuts
"The reason for the reduction in overall funding -- we took money out of Amtrak ..."

Say it ain't so, Joe.

The City Chicken

This is Joni holding an egg. She and I have recently gotten to know each other through our volunteer activities -- we've been tabling across from each other at different events for a couple of years now. She is originally from Upstate New York, but she and her husband have been living in their house in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco for 35 years now. For 30 of those years, she has been keeping chickens for their eggs. She now has four chickens. She gets her chickens and organic chicken feed from a place in Half Moon Bay. I guess she drives to Half Moon Bay -- but otherwise she rides her bicycle all over the city. In this photograph, you can see the enclosure that she and her husband have created for their chickens.


Long before it was fashionable, Joni and her husband installed solar panels on the roof of their house. They also practice solar drying -- hanging their laundry on a clothesline to dry instead of using a dryer.


Much of San Francisco is considered too cold and foggy for hot weather plants such as tomatoes, peppers, and corn. But they grow all three of those food plants in their backyard garden on the sunny east side of San Francisco. Their chickens have the run of the garden, and, just like my aunt's chickens, they produce eggs with brilliant orange yolks.


When Joni and her husband first moved in, there was nothing in their yard, but their neighbor had two baby plum trees, and they transplanted them to their own yard. The trees are now full-grown and producing fruit, and they have strung up a hammock between them. From other plants, they also harvest Gravenstein and Golden Delicious apples, Meyer lemons, pineapple guavas, and labor intensive gingko nuts.


The plum trees also provide something else -- wood for their wood burning stove in their kitchen. Out of concern for the dangers of releasing particulates into the air, they only burn wood when it is raining. The mosaic in back of the stove is by Joni.

Rally to Save the Market Street Bike Lane

Friday, January 16, 2009


Bicyclists gather at the intersection of Market Street and the Central Freeway in San Francisco to rally against the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) plan to remove the bike lane and force bicyclists to merge with vehicle traffic.


California State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano encourages participants to throw their bike shoes at members of the MTA commission.


San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum would like there to be as many police officers enforcing traffic laws to protect bicyclists as there were police officers keeping a watchful eye on the rally.



Bicyclists Marc Salomon, Pi Ra, and Matt add to the gathering of people in support of improving the bicycle lane instead of removing it.

Grass Fed and Free Range

Cows in the mist, November 2008

Country Chickens
As part of my grandmother’s effort to live closer to the land, she got hens and roosters, began raising chickens, and started collecting their eggs and selling them to customers who wanted truly farm fresh eggs. This was at least a decade before the term “free range” became popular. Knowing full well that eggs have probably been the single most easily collected condensed source of nutrition since the dawn of humanity and our hunter/gatherer days, she also ate an egg every day, insisting that their nutritional value trumped any concerns others might have about cholesterol.

My aunt has carried on that practice, though I don’t think she has any roosters, which can be loud and vicious. The last time I visited her, she served me some eggs one morning for breakfast. Even though I have been going to the farm and consuming eggs there for years, for the first time I noticed the brilliance of the orange yolks. My aunt said that color was from the carotene in the grass and other plants that her free-range chickens are able to forage. To the left, chickens gather at the feet of members of my extended family on Thanksgiving day, 2008.

My aunt and her husband are also raising grass fed beef cattle. They now have four full-grown miniature Black Anguses and one Black Angus calf – with more on the way. My aunt studied carefully before she chose these cows (officially hers are Wyndham cows – a variation of the Black Angus), known because of the quality of their meat, their small size, and their gentle dispositions. The cattle spend nights in the basement of the barn, and then graze a section of the pasture by day. My aunt carefully cordons off different sections using an electric wire so that no part of the field is over grazed.

The cows above had been eying me warily from within the barn and would not initially come out. But the second they saw my aunt pick up a stake and move the electric wire, they emerged from the basement at a trot, eager to go at the fresh grass. (July 2008)

On Thanksgiving day 2008, my cousin's daughter and my nephew enjoy the chicken coup and fresh eggs. Below, my aunt emerges from the fenced off area that encloses the chicken coup, a place safe from coyotes, raccoons, and other predators, in July 2008.