Sunday, August 28, 2022

Broken Fragments of Antique Legends

"“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.”"


 

Each furnished with his staff and knapsack,
And some provisions for the war
We ventured on without conceiving,
What trials lay yet before

— Issachar Bates, “A Winter’s Journey to Busroe” (1811)

History is all iteration, wrote Melville. This week while going through an old file cabinet I came across my rain-stained pencil and ballpoint journal from the summer, 50 years ago, when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. I glanced over a few pages before determining to make it into a book someday.

Wedged into the interior liner of the back cover I found a selfie from 1972. Judging by the small stream running behind me where the trail had been, I’m guessing this was taken in the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania right after Hurricane Agnes. The Blues run about 150 miles (240 km) from the Delaware Water Gap to Big Gap. At their southern extent, the western flank slopes down into the Cumberland Valley, which extends off into Kentucky and Ohio.

I was 25 then and it was not until I was 70 that I learned my ancestor, Shaker poet-singer-songwriter Issachar Bates, had walked perhaps even this same trail where the picture was taken. In 1805 he and two other missionaries left New Lebanon, New York, for an extended recruitment mission to the American West. It was a time of festive camp meeting revivals along the frontier and Issachar performed at a Shaker rave at Turtle Creek, Ohio on May 23, 1805. Falling down trances a la Saul of Tarsus and snake-handling were the best one could do before psychedelics if you abstained from applejack spirits.

After founding another Shaker colony at West Union (Busro), Indiana, my great great great great grandfather was nearly castrated and lynched but was saved by his gifted tongue and sense of humor that disarmed the angry mob. (I would likely still be here regardless since he only joined the celibate Shaker order after fathering my great great great grandfather). From 1806 to 1811, Issachar by his own account was in constant motion, traveling some 38,000 miles on foot or horse.

 

Mouth of Fox in Indiana by Sigismond Himely (after Karl Bodmer). Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834. Achermann & Comp., London 1843–1844.

 

The Western Shaker converts and colonies were fragile in their beliefs and practices — being a long distance for communication with the better-established colonies in the East — so elders like Issachar felt it necessary to make regular visitations, resolve conflicts, decide hard questions, and relate stories of the tribulations of others to serve as good examples of perseverance in the faith. His handmade two-story fieldstone home known as Deacon’s House still stands in Pleasant Hill Shaker Village on the Ohio side of the Kentucky River. In a different Shaker Village, he built a dormitory for 40 faithful from stones gathered from the dry floor of the Wabash river in a drought year. Typical of a missionary’s penchant for divine attribution, Issachar called the drought a gift from God.

Ye may judge that it hath been dry in this country — we got stones for our cellar wall out of the bottom of the great Wabash which was a great favour to us. We got all our stones in the Wabash. We have often thought of the words of the psalmist (while we were rolling out such nice stones, which had been hid where the finger of man could never before touch them), “What ailed thee thou sea, that thou floodest, And thou ordain that thou was driven back?” (Answer) “At the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of the whole earth.” What ailed thee thou Wabash that thou was so dryed up? Because we had a special gift of God to go to building in this place, where God hath placed his name and we took hold of it and God — even God — opened the way, that he might confound and put to silence an unbelieving spirit, that was always crying out that we had nothing here to build with. But we have now found out that we have enough to build with, and that if we do the work, God will provide the stuff.

Carol Medlicott’s biography of my grandfather describes his travels in the “West” of early 19th century North America. He would have seen these places very much as the teenage Busro Shaker, William Redmon, described them:

The prairies, rivers, ponds, bayous, &c abounded with birds, fishes, fowls, & game of all kinds peculiar to that country: Wild geese, swans, pelicans, brants, cranes, ducks &c. Fishes astonishingly plenty, of strange kinds & uncommon in size. Among the numerous birds, Paroquets as mischievous as beautiful; Black Birds by millions; Prairie Hens by thousands, they rose from the fields as a cloud making a noise like thunder. But I must not be tedious for it would require a Book to hint at all the peculiarities of this New World, as seen by my juvenile eyes.


The Kentucky and Ohio Shaker colonies lay very close to areas where the Shawnee traveled seasonally for hunting and salt supply. Sixty miles due north lay Vincennes, a thriving frontier town on the Wabash founded by the French in 1732, which had been a key western military outpost since the Revolutionary War. Since Vincennes had been named the capital of Indiana Territory in 1800, military authorities in the region had worked to establish overland trails, or “traces,” linking it with other population centers. Some of these followed older Indian or animal trails, such as the Buffalo Trace, surveyed in 1805, between the falls of the Ohio at Louisville and Vincennes to the west. About the same time, Vincennes residents petitioned the U.S. government to support the development of a trace between Vincennes and Red Banks, and this led to the establishment of forts, taverns, and ferry crossings along the route. In 1807, soldiers from Vincennes were ordered to patrol the Red Banks Trail to discourage Indians from interfering with white travelers.

Our Ninth President

William Henry Harrison became the first governor of Indiana Territory in 1801 and while still in his 20s concluded multiple Indian treaties acquiring millions of acres for the United States — vast swaths that today constitute Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, southern Michigan and the eastern portion of Minnesota — by conquest, fraud, brutality, and deception. Four decades later, at 68, Harrison was the oldest person to assume the American presidency until Ronald Reagan, lasting only 31 days until his death, a record for brevity of office that has not since been matched.

You should be good, and serve the great spirit in your own manner, without being taught by ministers sent from the white people.

During their quiet interludes on the trail together while journeying from place to place, Issachar Bates and his companions talked about the Indians and wondered whether they might convert them to the revelatory Shaker gospel. As early as the spring of 1805 they had heard rumors of camp revivals among the Shawnee. Medlicott writes:

George Catlin, Ten-sqúat-a-way, The Open Door,
Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh (1830)
It was there in about 1805 that a Shawnee named Lalawethika, the younger brother of Tecumseh, had endured a series of disturbing religious visions that plainly illustrated to him the consequences for various wicked behaviors. As a result, he renounced alcohol and began a vigorous program of charismatic preaching among the Indians. He adopted a new name, Tenskwatawa, meaning “the open door,” and began urging the Shawnee to purify themselves of all practices adopted from white Americans and embark on a spiritual revival. To most, he became known as “the Prophet” About 1806 he moved with his brother Tecumseh and a very large group of followers back into Ohio to a settlement near Greenville, where the treaty expelling the Shawnee had been conducted in 1795.

 When the Indiana Shakers paid a call at the Greenville settlement, Carol Medlicott writes:

The men were awestruck by the Indians’ enormous timbered “meeting house” built for worship, 150 feet long. All preachers themselves, and familiar with the challenges of outdoor speech-making to scattered crowds, the Shakers were particularly amazed at the vocal delivery of one of the Indian orators, identified as a cousin of Lallawasheka: “Ten thousand people might have distinctly understood him & his voice might have been heard over the plains for the distance of at least two miles.”

Some twenty-five Indians, including Tecumseh and the aged Chief Bluejacket, along with interpreter Peter Cornstalk, returned the visit to the Shakers at Turtle Creek, guided there by the Beaver Creek Shakers. They witnessed Shaker worship, singing, circle dancing, and preaching, with a crowd of several hundred assembled.

A Stand Down Order from Shaker HQ

Mother Lucy Wright, the Shakers’ principal authority at the New Lebanon Ministry, received the report of these visits and was openly dismayed:

Since I have heard of your going after the Indians, I have felt some tribulations on that account though I do not know the cause of your going & therefore cannot judge whether you went in the gift of God or not, or whether it would not be better to have sent some of the young believers than to have gone yourself I leave you to judge — but this I know, that as you are the first in your order, your Gift is to bear & suffer the most for the increase of the Gospel.
We believe it [preaching to the Indians] ought to be done by some of the young believers, that… have not much gift in relation to white people and then leave them to act for themselves, &c by no means gather them, for they are Indians & Will remain so, therefore cannot be brought into the order of white people, but must be saved in their own order & Nation. We believe that God is able to raise up them of their own Nation that will be able to lead & protect them… therefore we believe it to be wisdom not to meddle much with them.

However, the Shakers at Turtle Creek, unaware of Mother Lucy’s concern because of the slow progress of mail to and from the frontier, continued to pursue their newfound friendship with the Shawnee during the summer of 1807. In August, Issachar Bates and Richard McNemar made the long hike to Greenville, passing along the way some ancient Mississippian earthworks.

Issachar wrote in his journal:

…all these mounds & the prospects around them are great marks of antiquity & are very striking to the eye.

This time Issachar met Tenskwatawa in the enormous Indian meeting house and attended an assembly that continued overnight with singing and dancing. Soon after, a group of fifty Indians traveled to Turtle Creek on August 28, and joined in the music and dance of the Shakers there, much to the consternation of the local militia.

Chastened by learning of the letters from Mother Lucy, Issachar wrote a letter to his new friends, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, in the Summer of 1807:

Brothers, we do not think strange if some people call the work of the good-spirit which is among you foolishness and nonsense. It is because they do not understand it. So they say of the work among us [the Shakers]. They… say our good people who have confessed & put away their sins ought Not to dance & rejoice before the great spirit. But we tell them that the good people did so more than three thousand years ago, when they got away from Egypt a country of wicked people & went to a place where the prophets of the great spirit told them. But after awhile them good people did wicked, & then the wicked people stole Dancing away from them. But the good spirit spake by his prophets & said that in the last days, when The day of judgment would come on the wicked, then the good people should rejoice again in the Dance, both young men & old together, & the good prophets wrote it down more than two thousand years ago, that the good people might see it. If the Interpreter has a Bible, he may find these things in Exodus 15.20 & in the book of Jeremiah 31.14 & in many other places. But brothers, what is the reason that the wicked people do not believe when they see a good people that will not cheat, nor lie, nor drink whiskey, nor quarrel, nor fight, nor do any bad thing to any one? The only reason why they do not believe the work of the good spirit is because they want to be wicked.
We say that the great spirit has raised up prophets of your own, as he had promised long ago. But there are a great many good chiefs and great men, and peaceable citizens who love and observe the laws of the country, and want to live in peace, and such are willing that you should be good, and serve the great spirit in your own manner, without being taught by ministers sent from the white people.

The Canoe Tips

News of the Shawnee presence and the rise of a new Indian “prophet” sparked complaints in the white settlements of the region. Because of these threats, in 1808 Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh established a village that the Colonists dubbed “Prophetstown” north of present-day Lafayette, Indiana near the confluence of the Tippecanoe River and the Wabash River. There they urged Native Americans of all tribes and nations to resist invasion and occupation and to remain resolute in their rejection of acculturation.

Three years later, a white vigilante army led by William Henry Harrison burned Prophetstown to the ground in the so-called Battle of Tippecanoe, which was really just a genocidal attack on the Shawnee religious center. The Prophet, who had forecast victory over the whites, lost his influence, became an outcast, and migrated to Canada during the War of 1812. Tecumseh allied himself with the British to oppose US expansionism but was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, after which resistance in the Ohio Valley ended. His last words were “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.” Harrison’s ethnic cleansing campaign removed the surviving Shawnee to Kansas.

“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” became a popular and influential campaign song and slogan of the Whig Party’s Log Cabin Campaign in the 1840 United States presidential election. Its lyrics sang the praises of Whig candidates Harrison (“Old Tippecanoe”) and veep John Tyler, while denigrating incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren. The song was revived for the 1968 Off-Broadway musical How to Steal an Election. According to Wikipedia, where you can hear the jingle, the song “firmly established the power of singing as a campaign device” in the United States, and with the other songs and slogans of 1840, marked the “Great Divide” in the polarized cravenness of American political campaigns. The North American Review said at the time that the song was, “in the political canvas of 1840 what the Marseillaise was to the French Revolution. It sang Harrison into the presidency.”

The ironies of religious practices considered scandalous because they reveled in song and dance and a campaign jingle that catapulted a jingoist into the White House are head-shaking. You can call William Henry Harrison sort of an early version of Bosnia and Herzegovina President Radovan Karadžić — who now serves out his life sentence in a UK prison for ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war (1992–1995).

All nature calls for busy hands, 
For this is heav’n’s decree;
The beast, the bird, the insect stands A monitor to me;
The little busy artful bee 
Works ev’ry shining hour,
And her industry I can see, 
In ev’ry opening flower.

— Issachar Bates, “Industry”

North of Delaware Water Gap, within sight of the Appalachian Trail at Mt. Tammany, is Shawnee Island in the Delaware River. I wondered if that might be somewhere Issachar and Tenskwatawa might have met. As it turned out, that name was given to the island by a surveyor sent by William Penn, who mistakenly thought the local Indians were Shawnee when in actuality, they were Minsis. There are a few dozen places in SW New Jersey and NE Pennsylvania — Shawnee Village, Shawnee on Delaware, Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort, Shawnee Mountain Ski Resort — all tracing their name to that surveying error.

Much in the way Black Hawk described Rock Island in the middle of the Mississippi (today Moline IL), Shawnee Island may well have supported temperate fruit and nut forests, wild game and unlimited fish for the Minsis, Lenape and Delaware peoples. Today it is a 27-hole golf course. Cost of membership: $600 to $2200.

Some years after reading those passages in Carol Medlicott’s book, I learned that Tenskwatawa had been survived by a mixed-race daughter, whom he had named Marcy Bates. As far as we know, there are no other “Bates” in the family line of Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, or of Algonquin-speaking Indians, for that matter. Issachar’s mother’s name was Mercy Bates.

History is all iteration, wrote Melville. Or as Mark Twain said, “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

 


 


Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad



T
he COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

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Sunday, August 21, 2022

Teenagers on Summer Break Earning Money Saving the Planet

"The best carbon dioxide removal technology may be one you least expect."

 


This past week I passed over the swollen rivers and through the damaged landscape of Kentucky to reach the USBI Biochar and Bioenergy 2022 Conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. If you are new to biochar, or perhaps learned about it a decade ago, there is fresh science awaiting you. Besides being an exquisite elemental, carbon will soon be an extremely disruptive new industry and will transform the human relationship with its home planet in the coming years. Tens of thousands of peer-review journal articles, in scores of languages, are now published every year. The quick takeaway: if this discovery can scale quickly enough, ancient indigenous technology might just save us from near-term human extinction.

Beginning around 2006, reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), composed of thousands of the world’s top climate scientists, were alarmingly clear: we must get as good at taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as we’ve been at putting it in. Even as solar panels and wind turbines sprout like mushrooms, reaching “net-zero” is no longer enough. We’ve waited too long. We now have to go beyond zero and capture large amounts of legacy emissions that otherwise will linger in the atmosphere and ocean for centuries, wreaking havoc on weather, sea level rise, and food production.

We’ll have to attack human activities that are hard to decarbonize, like flying across the ocean, taking a taxi, or making cement. Holding temperatures down will require vacuuming huge amounts of carbon out of the air using both real and mechanical trees. The good news is that we have the means. The replacements cost less and provide greater benefits than how we perform these activities now. It is not technology or economics that holds us back.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), about 7.6 billion metric tons (or gigatons) need to be eliminated from present emissions each year--about a fifth of current fossil pollution-- to get us to net zero by 2050. That is the glide path we need to get on. We can do that by switching to renewables, right?

No. And it’s likely the IEA is wrong in its numbers.

Given the speed of climate change, climate scientists say, 7.6 GtCO2e/y would be too little, too late. They say that depending on how fast we accelerate to net-zero, we still need to draw down between 100 billion tons of CO2 by 2050 and 1 trillion tons by 2100. That last figure would mean sucking up all the carbon that has been emitted this century, and then some, but because the ocean has been banking carbon for 200 years and will give it back with only a small interest deduction as we make withdrawals, we actually need to remove 2 or more times one trillion tons to recover the comfortable Holocene that humans evolved in.

Going Beyond Zero

Listening to science, the EU in November set a goal of removing 5 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by 2030. Their target is net-zero emissions plus 5MtCO2/y drawdown in just a little over 7 years. The EU Commission was an early backer of Swiss startup Climeworks AG, which, for about $15 million, built an Iceland prototype plant now withdrawing 4000 tons per year and pumping it into a basalt repository. It would need 10 million of those plants just to hit net zero.

The U.K. government is spending 100 million pounds ($135 million) to support early-stage direct air capture (DAC) that it hopes will help hit the country’s target of net zero by 2050. Elon Musk and his foundation have put up $100 million for an XPrize carbon capture award and Bill Gates and his foundation have put in hundreds of millions to support carbon capture startups.

In its first year, the Biden administration announced a “moonshot” program to speed innovation in DAC with a goal of getting costs below $100 a ton, but the defeat of Build Back Better by the Republican-Senate-plus-Joe-Manchin last summer put Democrats’ climate ambitions on hold. Then this past Tuesday, in quite dramatic fashion, the largest federal investment in combating climate change was passed and signed by the President.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will reduce the US’s CO2 emissions by 42% below 2005 levels by 2030, almost meeting its commitment under the 2015 Paris Agreement. This equates to 0.8–1 GtC of additional carbon emission reduction in 2030 relative to the current policy baseline. An article in Lexology published this week sets out a detailed breakdown of all the climate and energy beneficiaries. While the IRA largely ignored biochar, that will be funded separately in the forthcoming Farm Bill that also provides hefty biochar subsidies through the US Forest Service.

The drawdown darling of the IPCC reports is not DAC but Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). BECCS, however, is a technology besieged by goblins, trolls, and highwaymen. In the BECCS scheme, plantations of row mono-crops, which can be trees as well as GMO seed grains and grasses, are machine harvested and fed into steam plants to make electricity, reducing the biomass to ash and capturing smokestack emissions in much the same way DAC works. Liquid CO2 is then pumped down an old oil well or mine in the forlorn hope that it will never escape. Studies have shown that putting CCS on smokestacks raises the cost of electricity by over 40% and diminishes output by 28–31%, hazarding the UK and Europe’s already fragile winter energy supply. The world’s largest BECCS operator, Drax, has been booted from an investment index of clean energy companies as doubts within the financial sector mount over the sustainability of its wood-burning power plants. Nonetheless, the UK government is paying Drax over £1bn every year to burn the world’s forests and replace them with mono-crop plantations, with IPCC approval.

There are other Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies such as:

  • Enhanced Weathering-silicate minerals, such as basalt, absorb carbon and could be ground to powder and spread over large areas. Increased crop yields would be one benefit but mining and transportation might negate any climate mitigation impact.
  • Ocean fertilization-adding iron to ocean waters could promote the growth of plants that can absorb carbon and store it on the seabed. In practice, there have been worries about side effects and whether it would even work. The notion that marine plants would simply sink to the bottom of the sea and be interred in sediment has been debunked by ocean biologists.
  • The 80 other methods outlined by Paul Hawken in his bestsellers, Drawdown and Regeneration. Some of these show promise, but others are flights of fancy.

Enter Biochar

This YouTube video, produced by Biomass to Biochar Ireland, gives a one-minute primer on what biochar is.


 

At the recent USBI conference, I caught a glimpse of what the potential CDR scale can be. At a workshop convened by Advanced Carbon Technologies, speakers from Australia and South Africa zoomed in to describe twenty years of work replacing asphalt highways.

Asphalt is a hot mix of tarry oil and gravel that gets poured on road surfaces all over the world and allowed to harden. It has a limited range of temperature tolerance so it develops cracks and potholes with wear and needs to be resurfaced at regular intervals. This adds to its fossil energy impacts.

In South Africa road building engineers started exploring shale and coal mining residues as an alternative in 2000. They also began using biochar as a soil stabilizer. Then they made the leap to adding biochar to the asphalt mix. Eventually, they discovered they could eliminate asphalt, Portland cement and solvents altogether. They moved biochar up from the base to the wearing course. After cold pressing biochar directly into quarry gravel and adding a 1% emulsion to seal the surface, they watched in amazement as the road hardened in under an hour, allowing traffic to resume, and lasted without maintenance for more than a decade. The temperature tolerance of biochar surfacing was from -30C to +80C. When cracks developed, they were self-sealed by the “eggs” of emulsion trapped in the pores of biochar.

Moreover, the engineers learned that they did not need-or want-”food grade” biochar suitable for agriculture. They could make biochar from sewage sludge, salty seaweed, or municipal wastes that contained mixed media of plastic, foils, heavy metals and other contaminants. Pyrolysis at 500C or above destroyed the pathogens in hospital wastes and antibiotic-laden feedlot manures. If the plastic or foil content was too high for “Class One” biochar, it could be blended with coconut coir or other woody wastes to get the carbon content up to 60%. Once poured into a roadbed, the plastics and other wastes would remain there essentially forever. The surface was inert, weather-resistant, and durable. It was a cold mix that could be made at a village scale and in fact, the South African rural development agencies began distributing small emulsion-making mills so that villages could do just that.

Let's Do Some Arithmetic

While I was listening to these speakers, I was stealthily looking up some numbers on Wikipedia. A mile of highway requires 30,000 tons of aggregate quarry stone. Add to that 3,000 tons of biochar and 1-percent emulsion. Convert to kilometers and you get 1863.35 tons of biochar per kilometer. China alone pours 9,650 km of road every year. It would require 18 million tons of biochar to replace asphalt completely in China. Translated to greenhouse gases more generally, Chinese roadbuilding could remove 66 MtCO2e-66 million tons of CO2 equivalents-annually. Prior to the pandemic, China released 12 billion tons of CO2 per year, so it would still have a long way to go to net neutrality.

6 million kilometers x 1863.35 tons of biochar = 11,180,000,000 tons of biochar  

11,180,000,000 tons @ 80% carbon x 3.667 for carbon dioxide conversion = 32,800,000,000 tons CO2 removed

The world as a whole adds some 40 gigatons of CO2 from human activities every year. The world will add 3.0–4.7 million km of additional road by 2050, much of that going into roadless wilderness areas such as the Amazon, the Congo basin, and New Guinea. With normal repair resurfacing, we cover the planet with 6 million kilometers of new pavement every year. Following the same formula as above, that translates to 32 GtCO2e/y-80 percent of all anthropogenic emissions combined. If we could pour that much new plastic/biochar highway for the rest of this century, along with all the other measures we will be taking to reduce our carbon footprint, we could theoretically return the atmosphere to the pre-industrial greenhouse gas composition it had in 1750. Of course, we can’t ramp up a new industry that quickly, nor is it likely biochar would take over 100% of road building despite being less expensive and a superior product in every way. There are many unknowns about arresting climate change at this late stage. Still, it is probably the best news to come out of the carbon dioxide removal sector in a long time.

When I was a teenager, a “good” summer job was in highway construction. Most of this work was seasonal-the heat of summer months-and labor requirements in North America peaked from May to August, which lined up neatly with schools’ summer break. The pay was good, the work unskilled, and you got to be outdoors. Imagine now. Teens could still be making money building roads but they would not be inhaling smelly asphalt fumes all day. Instead, they could be saving the planet, day in, day out. They would have become Emergency Planetary Technicians.

__________________

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 __________________


The COVID-19 pandemic
has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

Sunday, August 14, 2022

Detox Tribalism

"We need to keep our toxic genes from disuniting and destroying us"

 


 

We are both blessed and cursed by the genes that make us herd animals. There is no way to switch off those genes but there is a way to keep them from disuniting and destroying us. We could elevate the order and scale of our definition of tribe, for example.

Here is a fictional story. During World War II a Nordic country was occupied by a militant neighbor to its East. This neighbor had activated the tribal tropism, uniting its people to wage war based upon ethnicity and religion. The invader’s leader issued orders that all Jews in occupied territories would henceforth sew a yellow Star of David onto their coats to let everyone know they were not Christian.

The people of this Nordic country, who were primarily Christian, could have allowed this and thereby added fuel to the religious divide even within their own society. Instead, something else happened. The mayor of a large city, whom everyone knew was Christian, sewed a Star of David onto his coat. Seeing that, the people of that city did the same. Soon, Christians across the countryside were wearing a Star of David on their coats.

Pause and consider for a moment what emotions you would have felt if you were a citizen of that country witnessing this. As a Christian you would have gone from feeling shameful, looking the other way as your Jewish neighbors passed by you with their yellow stars, to walking with pride, looking your fellow countrymen in the eye, and feeling their equal pride. Sure, the mayor would likely have been hauled out of his home and shot, but unified action by everyone could not be so easily arrested.

That is the way to get out of the red versus blue morass the United States finds itself in. It is how to get past the capitalist versus former-communist power plays. White vs. Black. Fox vs. MSNBC. It is how we end vaccine apartheid and solve for climate.

We are all earthlings. We face a common threat. We have to unite if we are going to get past this.

Millions of years ago, perhaps when our ancestors were early mammals, perhaps before, they elected the defensive strategy of grouping. It is a selection in evolutionary biology that distinguishes solitary hunters from pack animals. Consider a herd of zebras or wildebeest crossing a river full of crocodiles. A few will be picked off but the majority will make it to the far shore. That’s a pack strategy.

Humans are bound by our DNA to seek tribal affiliation. These genes are at the source of all fashion. We signal our tribe with what we wear, the car we drive, the neighborhood where we live. We put on a coat and tie to tell others we are part of the business tribe. A heavy gold chain around our neck with a medallion bearing our initials signals we are in the strong hunter pack and we will be good providers.

We use subconscious language to communicate neurolinguistically. Lipstick and blush mimic the signs of arousal in other body parts, signaling we are ready to join in the effort to propagate the tribal gene pool. We put on a miniskirt and stiletto heels to advertise our fertility. Our brains receive these signals and process them below the threshold of our thought processes.

We are ready to sacrifice for our tribal identity even to the point of giving our lives—the basis of foxhole camaraderie. Team sports both mimic and prepare for that level of sacrifice.

We select tribal identity based upon skin color or other physical features that are genetically nearly indistinguishable under a microscope. We separate ourselves by religions that are nearly philosophically identical in their acceptance of  an afterlife, saviors, gurus, and prophecy.

We divide ourselves into tribes dogmatically by the biological gender assignment in the first trimester instead of the spectrum of hormone gender assignments that occur in the third trimester (7 to 12 percent of which do not match biological gender).

When we assail straw men and proclaim ourselves “white, God-fearing, native-born patriots,” our brains actually get a greater dopamine reward from speaking disparagingly about the other tribes than we get from saying or doing something for our own tribe.


The cure for all this is simple. It is a jujitsu move, bending the force of our own genes towards a better outcome. We merely elevate the order and scale of our definition of tribe. An example is the ecovillage movement. It has no ethnic, religious or geographical boundaries. While Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza might be kept from entering Israel or visiting a kibbutz—or even entering a Jewish Settlement in their own zone—and likewise Israelis are kept from most travel across the Green Line, the Green Kibbutz movement has been joined with Palestinians in permaculture and ecovillage trainings and knowledge exchange since the early ‘90s.

Likewise, when the invasion of Ukraine divided East and West, Ecovillages opened the Green Road to help migrants flee the war zone and resettle in ecovillages from Western Ukraine to Denmark and Portugal. Ecovillagers in western countries still maintain friendly communications with their counterparts in Russia. They track media that unites more than media that divides. Where they are politically active, they support unifying leaders like Estonia’s Kaja Kallas rather than divisive demagogues like Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

They sense the destructive power of tribe even while being, undeniably, a new tribe themselves. They have just shifted the scale.

__________________


Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sunday, August 7, 2022

Building a Chinampa

"Five hundred years ago, the fortuitous combination of agroforestry and aquaculture was unbeatable."

This week I donned my tall boots and waded back into our constructed wetland to restore and rebuild the chinampas. Rob Wheeler, for more than 20 years the Global Ecovillage Network representative to the UN Headquarters in New York, brought along loppers, a machete, and a portable saber saw to assist me. During my nearly three years of pandemic absence, the wetlands had taken on a life of their own and become a swampy thicket of fallen branches, bent-over bamboo, and nettles. One could be forgiven for not seeing beneath all that to what it will eventually become — the most productive food system, on a calorie per square foot basis, ever devised by humans.

A chinampa is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as a “small, stationary, artificial island built on a freshwater lake for agricultural purposes.” The word was originally from the Nahuatl word chinamitl, “woven fence or hedge,” made from the native willow, Salix bonplandiana. At the time Hernán Cortés arrived at the Halls of Moctezuma, the word was synonymous with a southern region in the Valley of México centered on Xochimilco.

Traditional chinampas are biodiverse; they can be kept in almost continuous cultivation, their soils are renewable, and they create a microenvironment that protects crops….

— Roland Ebel, in Hort Technology

The Conquistadors could not fathom the island city of Tenochtitlan when, on November, 8, 1519, they crossed the Ixtapalapa causeway over Lake Texcoco and beheld the spectacle of its glimmering central pyramid, broad white boulevards, and flowered verges. It was the most beautiful city any of them had ever beheld. Cortés and his men marched across the causeway until they were met by the Aztec Emperor, Moctezuma II, who greeted them, descending his royal litter to offer gifts. Moctezuma was immediately taken prisoner and ransomed for gold and silver. Once the ransom was paid, he was executed.

 

Gary Todd, Painting of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco on Lake Texcoco (9755215791)

Six months later the Aztecs rose up and threw out Cortés, but it was too late. While the Spanish army spent 1520 exiled to Tlaxcala, General Smallpox ravaged and decimated the city, reducing its mighty army to bleeding pustules. Cortés returned in 1521 and razed what remained. He wanted no one in Europe to see what he had seen, so he took down the pyramid and turned around the stones in walls and boulevards to rough sides out. He ordered construction of Catholic churches on the pyramid mounds. He burned the codices, executed the royal heirs, and attempted to erase all traces of the old order. Tenochtitlan was renamed “México.” Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente Motolinia described the reconstruction:

The seventh plague was the construction of the great City of México, which, during the early years used more people than in the construction of Jerusalem. The crowds of laborers were so numerous that one could hardly move in the streets and causeways, although they are very wide. Many died from being crushed by beams, or falling from high places, or in tearing down old buildings for new ones.

Among the engineering wonders deconstructed by the slave gangs were the vast systems of chinampas that were how a dense metropolitan population of more than 100,000 was sustained in the dry central valley of México. These earthworks consisted of alternating narrow islands and canals, initially formed by willow fences and composted fill from the kitchen wastes, lake mud, rubbish and sewage of the lakeside villages, planted with fruit and nut trees to line and hold the banks and gardens of corn, beans, and vegetables. Freshwater fish were trapped by fences in the canals where they ate mosquito larvae and grew fat on falling fruit until they could be netted and brought to market.


An Engineering Wonder

A 2014 study of the chinampas in the 70-square-mile Lake Chalco-Xochimilco found they were built between the mid-15th and early 16th centuries at the peak of the Aztec Triple Alliance. In a ten-square mile study area, 23,094 relic beds and 400 mounds were digitized for mapping. The long, narrow beds averaged 3.75 meters wide and had an average length of 49.4 meters, with a land-to-water ratio of 1.07:1. In addition, there were many small lakeside homes and villages, large wharves comprised of multiple mounds and platforms, open pools, and wide canals.

According to the researchers, chinampas allowed frost and flood protection, nutrient recovery, and irrigation by splash or scoop techniques from canoe-bound farmers during droughts (the standard tool was a lacrosse-stick-like ladle called a zoquimatl). Normal capillarity flows from the lake through the island eliminated the need for irrigation in normal dry cycles. Large amounts of algae (known as tecuitlatl) were collected from the surface of the Lake and used to make high-protein bread and cheese-type foods. This alga is still grown in México for fertilizer.

These village-wharves probably formed the economic and social hub for the lakeside tenant farmers who were comprised of free peasants (macehualtin), serfs (mayeque), and slaves (tlacotin). Aztec chinampas built through land reclamation existed outside the traditional corporate land holding capolli system and tenant farmers obtained rights of cultivation in return for approximately 50% of their agricultural production in rent payment to land grantees residing in Tenochtitlan.

After the consumption needs (dietary and non-dietary) of some 30,000 lakeside resident farmers, boatmen and fisher families were met, an annual 10,000-ton maize-equivalent agricultural surplus reached the storehouses and markets of Tlatelolco-Tenochtitlan and would have been enough to feed 50,000 persons for a year. Considering this study area was perhaps only ten percent of the full chinampas complex of the watershed, it is reasonable to project an annual surplus of 50- to 100,000 tons of high-calorie foods — roughly 2 to 4 shipments per year the size of the recent Odesa-to-Istanbul grain lift from Ukraine.

The fortuitous combination of agroforestry and aquaculture was unbeatable, but when the conquest killed off the engineers who maintained lake levels, the chinampas and low-lying cornfields sank below the marshy lake surface. Floods carrying human waste spread endemic diseases. The mosquito population grew and brought more diseases.

The Spanish Viceroy ordered drainage engineering in the style of the Old World. He infilled the lake, wiping out fish, birds and the lakeside villages that had grown the food for the city. And yet, the city flourished as a trade center based upon slavery and silver, such that when it was visited by Alexander Von Humboldt in 1803, it was called the “City of Palaces.”

By then, what is today’s largest city in North America had lost the ability to sustain its own population. It had lost its orchards, cornfields, lake fish, and the natural advantage of the indigenous wisdom that had created the miraculously productive chinampas.

The islands were exposed for a short period in the mid-20th century after lake drainage was completed and before Green Revolution machinery obliterated the garden mounds. In the Xochimilco region, the chinampa area under cultivation decreased by more than 60 percent after World War II. Nevertheless, those that remain maintain their highly productive yields on relatively low inputs. Today they mainly grow flowers for the Zocalo market in Mexico City and take tourists on gondola rides. Most city planners assume that the Xochimilco water gardens will be entirely converted into gated residential communities (colonias) by 2057.

 

Peter M. Wilson/Alamy


Today the loss of the chinampas has worsened forest degradation, erosion, floods, land sinking, pollution of soil and water, water retention and infiltration, and biodiversity. Farmers now must cope with increasing pest populations and the stench of fetid waters in the remaining lakes. Were México to seize the opportunity to restore the chinampas to provide food and water to its largest metropolis, chinampa soils would sequester large quantities of carbon.

However, due to their humidity and high organic matter, the greater microbial activity would also favor greenhouse gas emissions. A study performed in Xochimilco indicated that emissions of carbon dioxide were generally low, but that nitrous oxide and methane were high, and made worse by frequent irrigation. Of course, Mesoamerican peoples controlled for that by the addition of GHG-scavaging biochar.

It is unlikely carbon sequestration will tempt the current president, the son of an oilfield worker and a climate change denier, but beyond Mexico, regions that could benefit from broad-scale chinampas include the Mississippi River Delta, the Hudson River Delta, extensive parts of Florida, the Great Lakes Region in the United States and Canada, the Pantanal region (Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay), the eastern and western Congolese swamp forests, the African Great Lakes region, eastern South Africa, Shanghai and the Yellow River Delta in China, the Kutch District and parts of the state of Kerela in India, the Padma River Delta and (almost all) southern Bangladesh and neighboring India, the Yangon Metropolitan area in Myanmar, extensive parts of Sumatra (Indonesia), the Mindanao River in the Philippines, the Rhone River Delta in France, Hamburg in Germany, the Mersey Delta in England, the Gulf of Finland (Finland, Estonia, Russia), and the Darwin Area and Western District Lakes near Melbourne in Australia.

As Rob and I thinned the overgrown thickets of bamboo, we lay our cut canes and nettles atop the islands and reestablish the free-flowing canals through the 11,000 sq ft alternating lagoon and reed-bed system. We will need to build more topsoil before we can think about food crops on the islands, but for now, the water will again circulate around them, infiltrating new soils at the root zone, nourishing future plants in times of drought, and protecting the site from flooding in times of torrential rain. They will also form a wet barrier in the path of any forest fires moving upslope towards our buildings.

Turtles, hummingbirds, and dragonflies watch and marvel as we labor. This is a system of food production that is preparing itself for climate change.

In several reports to the King of Spain written in the year 1520, Cortés acknowledged the grandeur of the Aztec capital, “as large as Seville or Cordoba” but incorrectly gave the city’s name as Temixtitlan instead of Tenochtitlan. It is possible that once established in his palace in Coyacan he was served a chinampas meal fit for royalty — cornmeal crusted fish, candied pumpkin, sweet corn with nopal cactus, and the thin corn flatbread that the Aztec called tlaxcalli which the Spanish mispronounced “tortillas.” The recipe might have gone something like this:

Chinampas Fish Fillets with Calabaza En Tacha

Serves 2

Ingredients

  • 2 (6-ounce) tilapia fillets
  • 1 nopal cactus
  • 1 small (2 lb) pumpkin squash
  • 1 c kerneled sweet corn
  • 2 limes
  • 1 tomato
  • 1 small onion
  • 1 chili pepper
  • ⅓ c yellow cornmeal
  • 1 Tbsp all-purpose flour
  • ½ c masa harina, (not cornmeal)
  • 1½ c water
  • 1 c grated piloncillo, or brown sugar
  • 1 tsp sea salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 Tbsp cacao powder
  • 2 Tbsp maguey agave syrup
  • ¼ tsp dried oregano
  • ¼ tsp dried yerba santa
  • ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 8 small, handmade corn tortillas

Preparation

Calabaza En Tacha

  • Quarter pumpkin and remove seeds
  • Wash, drain and reserve the seeds
  • In a medium saucepan simmer 1 c water, 1/2 c piloncillo, and the juice of one lime until the piloncillo is dissolved
  • Add the pumpkin quarters and bring the mixture to a boil
  • Reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, for a half-hour
  • Remove the lid and simmer for an additional half-hour, until the pumpkin is tender and the sauce reduced to a glaze
  • Remove squash and drain
  • Blend cacao powder, 1/2 tsp cinnamon and maguey agave syrup and garnish squash quarters
  • Sprinkle evenly with ¼ tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper
  • Place quarters in a shallow pan in oven and bake for 20 minutes at 350°F

Âtôle Breading

  • In a medium saucepan combine masa harina, water, milk, piloncillo (or brown sugar), and 1/2 tsp cinnamon. Whisk the mixture and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, whisking often.
  • Reduce the heat gradually for 5–10 minutes, whisking often, until your desired consistency is reached.
  • Remove the ātōle from the heat and combine ⅓ c yellow cornmeal.
  • Bread the fish fillets

Fried Fish

While the squash is simmering:

  • Scrape spines and hairs from nopal cactus
  • Julienne nopal, chili, onion and tomato

When the squash is baking:

  • Toast tortillas on hot comal, remove and keep them warm in linen
  • Toast squash seeds on comal
  • Blend vegetable ingredients with squash seeds and kernelled corn on comal at medium heat
  • Grind or pulverize oregano and yerba santa to fine flakes and sprinkle atop comal mixture
  • When corn mixture begins to brown, gently lay fillets on comal and raise the heat
  • After 2 minutes turn the fillets and smother them in roasted corn nopal mixture
  • Cook another 2 minutes or until fillets flake easily

Serve

  • Remove squash from oven and fish with corn-nopal covering from comal and plate
  • Quarter the lime and place two slices on each of the serving plates
  • Place warm tortillas in linen in basket at table
  • Serve with the beverage of your choice

Note: All of these ingredients would have been used by the residents of Tenochtitlan before 1520. Although oils of avocado, coconut and other plants would have been available to them, they did not use these for frying. They did not have iron skillets and instead used the comal.


 


Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The Great Change is published whenever the spirit moves me. Writings on this site are purely the opinion of Albert Bates and are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 "unported" copyright. People are free to share (i.e, to copy, distribute and transmit this work) and to build upon and adapt this work – under the following conditions of attribution, n on-commercial use, and share alike: Attribution (BY): You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non-Commercial (NC): You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike (SA): If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws. Therefore, the content of
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