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Legislating Local – by Steven L. Hopp

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The epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States has incited parents, communities, and even legislators to improve kids’ nutrition in one place they invariably eat: schools. Junk foods have been legally banned from many lunchrooms and school vending machines. But what will our nation’s youth eat instead-fresh local produce? As if!
Dude, it’s going down. In 2004, in a National School Lunch Act amendment, Congress authorized a seed grant for the Farm to Cafeteria Program, promoting school garden projects and acquisition of local foods from small farms. The Local Produce Business Unit of the Department of Defense actually procures produce. Benefits of these programs, above and beyond the food, include agricultural education through gardening, farm visits, presentations by local farmers, and modest economic gains for the community. More than one-third of our states now have active farm-to-school programs; farm-to-college alliances are also growing.
The USDA Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has a Farmer’ Market Nutrition Program for purchasing local food. It provides coupons good for fresh produce purchased from farms, farmers’ markets, and roadside stands. In 2006, some $20 million in government funds provided these benefits to more than 2.5 million people.
In a strong legislative move, Woodbury County, Iowa, mandated in 2006 that the county (subject to availability) “shall purchase…locally produced organic food when a department of Woodbury County serves food in the usual course of business.” Even the prisons are serving local food, in a county that truly recognizes the value of community support.
For more information visit www.foodsecurity.org and www.farmtoschool.org.

-Steven L. Hopp
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

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The Blind Leading The Blind – By Steven L. Hopp

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Critics of local food suggest that it’s naive or elitist, whereas industrial agriculture is for everybody: it’s what’s for dinner, all about feeding the world. “Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn,” wrote Steven Shapin in the New Yorker, “is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers’ market.”
The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it’s hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the pointy end: it’s perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture’s latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that’s so. Exhibit A: “golden rice.” It’s a genetically modified variety of rice that contains beta-carotene in the kernel. (All other parts of the rice plant already contain it, but not the grain after it is milled.) The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds-with some strings attached-to Third World farmers. It’s an important public relations point because the human body converts beta-carotene to vitamin A; a deficiency of that vitamin affects millions of children, especially in Asia, causing half a million of them every year to go blind. GM rice is the food industry’s proposed solution.
But most of the wold’s malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity. In India alone, farmers have traditionally grown over 200 types of greens, and gathered many more wild ones from the countryside. Every single one is a good source of beta-carotene. So are fruits and vegetables. Further, vitamin A delivered in a rice kernel may not even help a malnourished child, because it can’t be absorbed well in isolation from other nutrients. Throwing more rice at the problem of disappearing dietary diversity is a blind approach to the problem of blindness. “Naive” might describe a person who believes agribusinesses develop their heavily patented commodity crops in order to feed the poor. (Golden rice, alone, has seventy patents on it.) Technicolor chard and its relatives growing in village gardens-that’s a solution for realists.

Stephen L Hopp
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

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PROP wants to know what you think!

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Please take a moment to fill out this survey about Portland.
We are gathering opinions for a research project.
Thank you!

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Mike Breaks It Down…

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If you haven’t seen this clip on you tube, take a few minutes and see what Big Mike has to say about the connection between the oil disaster in the gulf and wet t-shirt contests.

This came in from MoveOn.org…

What’s the connection between oil company executives, wet t-shirt contests, the Department of Interior and the disaster in the gulf? Scary thing is, there is one. Watch Big Mike break it down and connect the dots. Hey, if you’re going to stand in front of a blackboard, you might as well use it to actually explain something!

There’s been a lot of finger pointing and a lot of confusion about how we came to face the greatest oil spill in US history. This video lays it out. This problem started in Washington and can end in Washington, but only if President Obama and other elected leaders get real about closing the revolving door between corporate lobbyists and our government.

Lobbyists make up 2% of Washington DC, yet they’ve been able to run roughshod over our democracy, rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say.

If you think it’s time to take our democracy back, we think this is a video you and your friends will want to see.

We need radical transparency now!

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Art in the rain

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Davinci arts middle school is an art oasis in near ne Portland.
Just recently I was visiting the school to check on the Water Garden when i saw a group of students beneath a large blue tarp. The rain was steady but no one complained. They were too busy firing their latest ceramic creation using the oxygen reduction method of raku .
If you would like to see this action click on this to my blog on Sustainable water gardens.
http://davinciwatergarden.blogspot.com/2010/06/raku-movies.html

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BP Slick THE SOURCE

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This really hurts to watch, but we have to face this. We have to learn from our mistakes. The government has to learn. Will they? Will we one day be independent of oil? Will we one day not be at war?

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Forget Shorter Showers-Why personal change does not equal political change – by Derrick Jensen

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Some friends and I recently got together to talk about the oil disaster in the gulf and what we can do about creating change and helping rid ourselves of our addiction to oil. In that meeting one of my friends read this article aloud to us about upping the stakes….

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

By Derrick Jensen

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The Secret Powers Of Time-by Phillip Zimbardo

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Adapted from Professor Philip Zimbardo’s talk at the RSA, the latest RSA Animate conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Check out this amazing animation!

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Death Factories

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On June 23rd, over 400 people attended the Public Utilities Commission hearing in downtown Portland to discuss PGE’s plan for the continued operation of the Boardman Coal Plant. The Oregon Beyond Coal Campaign sent a strong message to both PGE and the PUC with the vast majority in attendance supporting the early closure of Boardman and rejecting PGE’s 2020 plan. Among the crowd testifying for clean energy and the first to speak in front of the PUC was mayor Sam Adams. Dozens of students came out representing 10 different schools across Oregon that passed resolutions to close Boardman in 2014.

Sierra Club Beyond Coal and Sierra Club Student Coalition together presented nearly 3,000 petitions calling for a 2014 shutdown of the coal plant.

There was some really good press…KGW 8, KOIN 6, KBOO, the Oregonian, and blogger Dennis Newman of Natural Oregon.

All in all is seemed like what could be deemed a successful night for us environmentalists. Now we’re just waiting for the verdict.

One of the speakers that night, Lloyd K. Marbet, the Executive Director of the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, knew he wasn’t going to be able to cover all his points in the two minute time frame that he had, so he made copies of his testimony. He handed them out to the PUC as well as to anyone in the crowd who wanted one. Within, his testimony was this article written by James Hansen titled Coal-Fired Power Stations Are Death Factories. Close Them.

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Understated – By Rollie Aden

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I write as a new convert to The People’s Republic of Portland and just now read through the several entries in this blog. WOW! Take some time to read for yourself. This blog has extremely insightful, very honest assessments of issues facing our world. Bloggers analyzed standard accepted answers and dispelled the many totally wrong concepts floating in my consciousness. I take my hat off to you and lay down my pen. Keep it coming fellow writers.

I found it very surprising that this blog says next to nothing about The People’s Republic of Portland nor its co-founder and present moving force, Jennifer Forti. I found it surprising until I met Jennifer. Now I understand. Jennifer would never write an article about herself or PROP. I think a force greater than myself drew me to PROP just for this reason. Someone needs to say what everyone thinks and everyone knows.

Recently I spoke at a friend’s funeral and found myself summing up his life in one word. Since that day I have secretly done this exercise with people that I know and those I want to know. I choose “understated” as Jen’s word. She earned a degree in art and design, plays drums, creates with clay, dances with March Fourth Band, maintains a growing business, involves herself in social causes, collaborates with like-minded businesses, designs clothing, and meets with countless creative types akin to me.

Her websites say little about her. She says little about her. Her websites speak only briefly about The People’s Republic of Portland. You see why I chose “understated.” I sat across from a very accomplished woman with an disarming smile, a tremendous background, an entrepreneurial spirit, a boundless energy, and an almost unnerving humility. When I asked about her background, she answered but never showcased. On first impression Jen and PROP seemed mysterious even coy. Upon second look I saw a person who let her work and her actions speak for her.

She has the ability to communicate in words; however, the artist in her chooses her medium. I think Jennifer Forti speaks through her work, and she speaks through other people. Riding home from my meeting with her it dawned on me that Jen has chosen in addition to dance, clay, and cloth yet another medium. She has chosen the medium of people. I can’t tell if she made a conscious choice or even if she knows, but she definitely has another medium.

The people medium comes out in words like collaborate, promote, celebrate, and recruit. I knew that Jen had much on her plate the day we met. We sat and talked for a couple hours during our first. awkward time together. She never looked at her watch, fidgeted, or even hinted that she had more pressing matters to which to attend. She never made me feel like she had more important people with which to meet.

I met Jennifer originally at the Mississippi street fair and offered my services as a writer to her. When I followed up with an email, she contacted me with a meeting date. I have few delusions about my ability to help her. What skill could I possible have that she might need? The only gift I have; I give right now. I tell the story that she humbly has withheld. I know that if she will allow me to hang out that I will receive much more than I could ever give.

I felt ashamed of myself. I like to shine the light on my meager accomplishments and the exciting things going on my life. She showed interest but probably thought “what a pompous boob.” Her humility slowly but surely shut my mouth. Society tends to think of artists as isolated, tortured souls. Jen seemed neither isolated nor tortured; although, I suspect that she has experienced enough pain to rend her empathetic to those in process.

I found Jen touchingly empathetic toward and amazingly understanding of the creative side of my personality. Artist once they learn to accept the creative person living inside themselves then need to learn how to live with that person. Gosh, that sounds terrible when I write it. Anyway, she understood me without excessive explanation on my part.

If I had to interview someone to fill the role of director and owner of The People’s Republics, I can think of no one better than the person presently in the role. Again riding home another thought hit me. I often feel like a conservative in liberal clothing. I wonder if Jen sometimes feels like a liberal in conservative clothing. I’ll have to ask her next time we meet. In any case it didn’t really seem to matter between us. We had bigger fish to fry to steal a metaphor.

Jen will display at Alberta Street’s last Thursday this Thursday. I suggest you meet the lady behind the shirt. You will walk away saying but one word, “understated.”

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May 21st, 2011

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For this, the first episode of Community Voices, I was fortunate enough to capture a conversation about religion and Judgment Day between myself, 3 Christian Pilgrims and a man passing by.

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Understanding Who We Are

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According to Facebook Insights, the PROP community is not only growing faster but we are peers. Take a look at the image on the left and you will notice that we are primarily women between the ages of 25 and 44. However, there are nearly just as many men in the same age range within the PROP community. With most of our members living in Portland Oregon, it makes sense that our most engaged community members are also located there.

PROP’s community is beginning to take form and so are our efforts to create a stronger sense of identity on and offline. In this attempt to understand ourselves, we are beginning to ask the community to describe themselves. Here is a link to our first Community Survey: http://bit.ly/fBIFCy.

Help PROP out by taking 30 seconds to answer four questions. Your guidance defines us.

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Salvation Through Song

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I have seen Ron at the same corner of SW 6th and Yamhill for the past 2 months, spreading the word of his God and Savior. Each time I encounter him, he seems almost blind to the quickly passing crowd as he speaks. His passion is deep and the impact on those who listen to his words must be significant. His words can be summed up as “hopeful”.

This is a man who has so much faith that he feels compelled to spend his waking hours helping others before they ask for it. His pulpit is the street and his sermon of salvation, given daily. It is truly the degree to which a man believes in something larger than his life that defines him. And appreciating this, it makes sense that there would be something definitive about Ron, something needing to be shared.

When I was looking for already existing media to help recreate the environment in which Ron and I had the conversation, I didn’t expect to what I did as seen below.


View Larger Map

What you see above is a Google Street View Car having photographed Ron while he was at work. Ron has been doing his street preaching long and often enough for Google to have found him. I am surprised by the consistency in Ron, most others don’t have his apparent dedication to a cause. But hey, Ron is a man with a mission.

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Christmas Past, Present, and Future (A tribute to the season and to Charles Dickens)- By Rollie Aden

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Charles Dickens walked a winter night and watched white snow turn black in the acidic rain of nineteenth-century England. He saw children as young as five filing from factories dirty, hollowed-eyed, silent, and tired from the long hours of work in dirty factories fired with greed and fraught with danger. Raw sewage from the thousands of horse drawn cabs, cattle, and hogs mixed with human waste that ran down the street into the Thames where London’s masses got their water and their cholera. Dickens often walked ten to twenty miles a day through London’s filth. Privileged kids sang in a school yard, “Ring around the Rosie, pocket full of poses, Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down.” The cryptic song echoed through the streets. Coal fired chimney pots belched black soot that covered London’s edifices and coated London’s lungs. Two classes of people passed in a cloud of pollution mistakenly called fog. They seldom acknowledged one another, but barriers break down on Christmas Eve.

Mr. Dickens faced his own set of problems. His literary career teetered on failure’s ledge with attendant financial ruin. Nineteenth century Britain used debtor’s prison as common means of punishing the poor; thus, even a person of Dickens’s stature feared poverty. Watching a family trim a tree through a frosty window, he probably reminisced about past, simpler times. Did a father coughing up black mucus tear him back to the present? A man and a nation hung in the balance. Dickens later wrote in The Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of time, it was the worst of times. This night Dickens thought of Christmas past, present, and future. He went home and wrote a haunting tale about greed and death and the consequences of a life spent chasing wealth. Unlike the cutesy Christmas movies we watch on television this Christmas Eve, “A Christmas Carol” paints a bleak picture. In spite of the soot and sewage Dickens’s finds a message of hope. People can change, and they can make a difference in the lives of others.

Today I pedaled through a bitter cold wind sucked from Hood River down the Columbia River Gorge into Portland’s streets. I stopped my bicycle on a bridge overlooking Interstate 205 to warm my hands and to practice something they call “mindfulness “in psychology. As a writer I simply call in looking–really looking in the same way that Dickens’s looked on his twenty mile walks through the city. He observed with all five senses. I attempted the same. The harried air carried no smells as if in too big a rush to carry odoriferous baggage. It’s cold sting on my face made me feel strangely alive in its deathly grip. A dark, gray cloud blanket muted winter’s light, and drivers turned on their lights not to see but to be seen. The clock read 2:30 pm. Like a huge Christmas tree, a red string of taillights snaked through the gigantic fir boughs covering hillsides adjoining I 205.

Standing over that highway I thought of Dickens and the world he faced. I thought of my world. A few days ago a young man plotted to blow up thousands of Christmas revelers in Portland Pioneer Square at the annual tree lighting event. America fights on the fronts of two wars this night. Iran and Korean could make for two more. Setting a new high for Christmas, gas prices surpassed the three-dollar mark. Over-population, pollution, world-wide economic collapse, and threat of pandemics threatens our very existence. Rather than seek solutions, nations fight. Wikileaks exposed them. The Wikileaks founder finds himself in jail.

As in the days of Dickens’s Our Christmas Carol has a bleak side. It also has a bright side found in people driven by the cold winds of Christmas that in some way makes one feel strangely alive even in the presence of death and disaster. One finds hope in the random acts of kindness (RAK) performed on city streets without fanfare, at little expense, with no expectation of profit or payback.

Our forefathers created the first government in all of human history run by the people for the people. They expressed a confidence in the people to govern themselves. Forces threaten that government and those people. We the people have made our share of mistakes, but dammit we have some good people in this country. America we have much to fix, and we have people with hearts and hands and heads to do just that if we focus a bit more on what we share in common and focus a little less on what separates us.

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January 2011

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Happy New Year from all of us at PROP!

As we enter a new decade, I would like to take a minute to thank all the wonderful people that have contributed their time and their talents to growing the people’s republic of portland with me. Our mission is simply to be an agent for Portland’s progressive thinkers and doers. Through developing this brand and realizing our mission, I’m discovering that the people who have stepped in to help, are precisely the people who are doing great things in the community.  So thank you Kevee, Bret, Lander, Rollie, Brian, Sharon, Joe, Deflew, Jenn, and everyone who’s been an inspiration and a support.  Here’s to new and ongoing ventures!!

Check it out!

The time has come to officially launch the NEW WEBSITE!  This is very exciting for me because with the help of just a couple people, we’ve built it to the hub that it is today and it’s been a HUGE learning experience for all of us.  Case in point to the power of teamwork!  We have added some exciting new content that we hope you’ll take some time to explore.  I speak specifically of the podcasts, or “PROPcasts”, that are intended to highlight Portland’s progressive thinkers and doers that I mentioned above like Tucker of PDX Bridge Festival, Katrina of Supportland, Chris of Heart In Oregon, and Madeline of ORNORML.  We have also added many more businesses to our directory which continues to grow everyday.  If you have any socially and environmentally conscious businesses that you would like to see added to our directory, send your suggestions to info@thepeoplespdx.com .

PROP’s Question Of The Month

Have you found yourself partaking in an event, part of an organization, or experiencing something that helped the local community and that you found particularly rewarding?  If so, would you like to share it with PROP?  Tell us your story about a cause, project or social awareness group in our local community that you found particularly rewarding. If it aligns with our mission, we will gladly promote and share it with the rest of Portland via our newsletter, our website and our social media sites.

To learn more about PROP visit our About Us page.


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Was Ist Das?

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WAS IST DAS? MarchFourth in Germany Trailer (2011) from Diggable Monkey on Vimeo.

As I enter my 7 year run as a performer with The MarchFourth Marching Band, I’m pleased to announce that The Germany tour Documentary “Was Ist Das?” is in it’s final stages of completion. Thank you Diggable Monkey Productions!!! As a matter of fact, tonight we will be gathering with members, friends and family of M4 for a pre-screening. This is so exciting for all of us, not only to have our magical journey documented, but to be able to offer the public a glimpse of what it’s like to be on and behind the scenes with one of Portland’s most iconic and eclectic musical outfits. Not to mention, it’s going to make a killer promotional video! This 28 min. documentary should be hitting the Portland screens sometime this spring. For now, here’s a little teaser for your viewing pleasure.

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Learn the Delhi Belly Dance (un-edited)

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listen to Delhi Belly – by Luke Solmon

This video was meant as an instructional video for the members of MarchFourth Marching Band. Ariel and I revised one of the “Delhi Belly” dance moves known as “the bunny hop” with a new move now entitled “the wrist clap”. It’s been 11 months since we posted the original video on You Tube titled “Learn The Delhi Belly Dance” and we’ve since gotten almost 2,ooo views! This piece is a huge hit at our shows and the feeling of seeing an entire room full of people dancing in unison is indescribable. As rough as this video is (and not even meant for public viewing) I felt like posting it and blogging about it. It’s a way for me to share with you the stuff that happens behind the scenes. It’s special I think and it deserves recognition. Recording this the other day with Ariel brought me back to the days when I was like 12 years old and my friend and I would record our voices on cassette tape. It was a very nostalgic moment for me. If you plan on coming to one of our shows (the next one being our anniversary show at The Crystal Ballroom on March 4th!) you should take the time to learn the Delhi Belly dance. It’s super fun, especially when you’re doing it with a room full of people!

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DIY City: All My Favorite Things About Portland (can be created anywhere else): by Jenna Roberts

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As I enjoy a meal of organic lima bean soup that I swapped for a tarot card reading,I ponder on all that I love about Portland. The show Portlandia has drawn attention to our cloudy little corner of the Pacific Northwest. While we may enjoy this rare spotlight, many residents wonder if it will repel or magnetize an onslaught of jobless hipsters who are attracted to the very culture it mocks. Most of the community here is either scraping by underemployed, or are on strait up ‘funemployment’. Newbie’s scramble for over 3 months to find a meager paycheck, but many stick it through for the sake of living in a culture that they could very well have created in the community they hailed from. If you are one of these people itching to migrate to Bridgetown for our surreal offerings, here are the things you can do right where you are to enjoy the lifestyle without the 8 months of rain and the applications for food stamps.

1. Overcome the culture of conspicuous consumption

Portlanders rarely buy new things except for undergarments and food. Some dumpster divers don’t even do the latter. We like to make things and fix them. If we don’t have the time or capacity to do so, we usually have talented unemployed friends do it for us for trade.

We shop at Goodwill a lot, which supports our ladies in their sexy grandma fashion and our weekly costume theme parties. We prefer to get home goods at the Rebuilding Center and go to Scrap Recyclers for arts and crafts supplies. Part of this is environmentally driven, since new things equal future landfill junk. Part of it is economical, and we’re all pretty broke. It’s not necessary to drive nice cars, or any car really, to get a hot date, because bikers are sexy. There is less social pressure to be rich, and more social pressure to be conscious of how you’re actually impacting the world.

Methodology 101

Naked Lady Parties (or Nude Dude Corrals)
Invite your mutually gendered friends and acquaintances to come over to your house with bags of their unwanted clothes. Clear one room, set up a full-length mirror, and lower the curtains. Offer snacks and drinks until most have arrived, and then have everyone drop their bags into one giant pile of apparel and dig dig dig for your finds! Guests strip down as they try on new fashions and stow away their new trashed treasures in the same bag they just unloaded. As you return the leftovers to a donation site, you can delight that your new favorite bodice top is the same one that helped your best friend hook up with her hot boyfriend.

2. Support your Local . . . Everything

With the way the economy is suffering, do you really want your dollars going to a megalith like Wal-Mart? The few extra dimes that you spend at local places will get turned back into the local economy much more quickly, thus raising the overall economic health of your community. If the mom and pop’s have all shut down, then you can avoid chain restaurants and buy your groceries at the farmer’s market.

Methodology 101

Start a local non-profit radio station. Use the internet radio feeds to start up and flyer the hell out of your town. Invite schools to participate. Advertise local businesses. Play music from local bands. Share local political concerns in an intelligent discussion instead of watching idiot pundits on major news networks tell you what to fear. Enjoy how easy this is in our current technological universe.

3. Prioritize Art in your Life

The biggest river in this city is not the Columbia or the Willamette, it’s the creative flow of art that floods the hearts and minds of every inhabitant. We’re not so much into going to museums as we are into having arts and crafts nights to do decoupage or learn welding. Creating art fills up your soul. It’s mentally and emotionally healthy. It’s what is lacking in the TV-centric lifestyle.

Methodology 101

Throw a costume party. Have a pile of stuffed animals that people can cut apart and re-sew back together to make monsters. Offer a talent show portion of any event. Invite closet musicians and other friends to sing songs that they love to cover or wrote themselves. Dork out.

Have gatherings where your friends teach each other how to craft, sculpt, weld, dress, design, stitch, knit, draw, paint, dance, and then put a bird on it.

Turn off the TV and make something. Don’t worry if it’s crap. You can burn it and use the remnants of charcoal to draw a portrait of your TV.

4. Survive the Awkward to get to the Amazing

I dated a guy who knits. He’s not gay. He just likes knitting. I think he’s way hotter because he’s not afraid to be a man who knits. When I visit my old hometown in suburban San Diego, I find it hilarious that everyone is in costume, but they just don’t know it.

Portlanders revel in their unique tastes. Yet, it’s not the zoo bomb bikers with thick- gauged plugs in their earlobes who stand out the most. It’s the people who just play around with figuring out what best suits their authentic selves, and wearing it well. They are allowed to play because no one flinches or jeers when they unicycle past playing a bagpipe.

Granted, Portland has some issues with being a city of cliques who don’t merge enough. It’s also way too Caucasian to be called diverse. But, one thing is clear, we like our fringe freaks just fine.

Methodology 101

Next time you meet someone who seems strange and makes you feel awkward, take a breath and find common ground. Ask them a question that you may be able to relate to. Avoid small talk and stating the obvious.

Try something new that makes you feel anxious. Step outside your own identity boundaries to see if it feels good to push your limits of self. Use  an eyeliner to decorate your cheekbones. Even if you’re a boy.

Improvise. Risk it.

5. Eco-logical becomes eco-nomical

Upon arrival from Berlin, my Omi would unload a collection of creamers, jams, and plastic forks she collected from her airplane meals. She wasn’t an environmentalist; she had simply survived poverty. The two go hand in hand. People who wear sweaters in the house in the winter and turn off the faucet between wetting the toothbrush and spitting are saving money. It’s simple and extremely un-entitled in mentality. So if it’s yellow, let it mellow, and if it’s brown, flush it down.

Don’t just buy into anything that sells you with the words green, organic, natural, or cage-free. Consider whether the amount of waste resulting from buying a new ‘environmental’ product is comparable to the good it may do. Be progressive enough to find out for yourself. Research where your food comes from. You don’t have to go to the farm, just look online for people who have done so already.

If you want to beautify your area, then advocate for community gardens, re-greening plans, bicycle commuter paths, and protecting the land that you still have left. Portland is a town of protesters, and we love signing petitions and going to local meetings to speak our thoughts on keeping things visually and physically green, and public lands publicly owned.

Methodology 101

Educate yourself with movies like Food, Inc. and books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Maybe even experiment in whole food diets to see how your health improves.

Grow a garden of your own. Install a rain barrel (purchased from your local industrial zone that uses big plastic bins) and save water. Compost.

Get on your bike or go on a hike and get out in it! Share the road with pedestrians and bikers when you drive.

6. Community Community Community

Nearly every party I go to involves a potluck and a snuggle pile. It’s what I love. The potluck often has a mix of treats from bacon to vegan, because Portlanders eat like red neck hippies. The snuggle pile is a safe place to get some human touch without any creepers, because my crew frown on unsolicited grabby vibes. Now, you may not desire potlucks or cuddle puddles, but create the types of gatherings you do like
even if it sounds weird to your guests at first.

The best bonding happens when you give each other the room to experiment. Personal growth is a popular goal in these parts. It can definitely get self-gratifying,
but that’s better than self-depreciating. So yeah, we make vision boards around solstice and process polyamorous relationships more than most. If that’s not your angle, then simply direct yourself into the path that is. Then call your friends over to join you.

Methodology 101

Meet your neighbors by doing a beautification project together. Get ideas for this from Village Building Convergence at http://vbc.cityrepair.org/

Contribute or start up a local ignite gathering. http://ignite.oreilly.com/

Collaborate! Do the things you love in cahoots with other people who’s input will enhance or refine your own project, and you theirs. Trade a ‘mine’ for ‘ours’ here and there.

Portlanders are totally guilty of most of the jokes poked at us on the show Portlandia, but behind each of them is a cry out to the rest of the US to play with using our awesome freedoms a little more creatively. By no means have we made utopia here. But, well, we try. Overall, we’re pretty lazy about it too, so step up and get inspired to create the world you want in your own city. Maybe for you that is the dream of the 90’s. It is alive in Portland. But you can bring it to a town near you.

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Lodekka

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Earlier today I was walking down N. Williams in Portland Oregon near Failing Street, where there are typically only “brick and mortar” businesses. However, today there was something quite different. I noticed a traditional British Double Decker bus that had been converted into a Dress Shop called “Lodekka. This mass-transit vehicle had been retired in a very fashionable way.

It wasn’t until I sat down the owner, Erin Sutherland, and asked her about her new venture that I realized how unique this clothing store was. Above you will find the audio from our conversation and below you will find a photo gallery of Lodekka. Enjoy!

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The Future of the Internet

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Above is a video piece I put together about “The Future of the Internet.”  Have a listen!

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