Why I am not a Conservative

I realize this may not fall ostensibly under any of the categories I purport to blog about here (Education, Physics, Sustainability, and Faith), but I feel like it does fit in the context of Sustainability, so hang in there with me. 

The other day there was this 14 year old "conservative prodigy" on the Fox News channel, who boiled down what it meant to be a Conservative into 4 principles: 

1) Respect for the Constitution 

2) Respect for Life 

3) Reducing the size of government

4) Personal Responsibility 

This was fabulously put, because on many of these counts I whole heartedly agree. The issue I had was with the Reduction of the size of the government, and in addition, I don't think Conservatives are really about #4, Personal Responsibility. Let me explain:

I would certainly love to live in a world in which people could govern themselves, and I think as a general educated, moderately moral civilization, we haven't done poorly at that... or perhaps that's just easy to say from my position, in the safest state in the country. But in any case, I don't think it's proper to reduce the size or role of government if there is corruption that needs checking. 

I was just reading a review of a Joel Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, which basically contends that Corporations, whose only agenda is to pursue money, bears all the insensitivity and moral character of a deranged person. If corporations are truly to have "personhood" in the legal sense, then the company's "mental health" must be assessed as well, and for many Inc.'s the diagnosis would be "pathological".  We have a broken business system, this is why I associate Big Business with Conservativism, because Big Business would like deregulation, lifting of moral and ethical obligations, and Conservatives, who would like to see government reduced, would give it to them. 

If Conservatives were really about Personal Responsibility, then they would hold businesses with corporate "personhood" accountable and this means more regulation, not less. 

But there's a second reason why I don't think Personal Responsibility is really on the Conservative agenda. 

Because of the nature of businesses to make a profit at the cost of its laborers (through cutting health benefits, livable wages, safe working conditions) as well as their tendency to pollute as much as is legal (or more), some people will wind up being poorer than others. This may be seen as the fault of the business, as my previous statements would imply, but ultimately businesses are made up of people, and in the end people are responsible for keeping other people in poverty. 

So who is to help out the folks who wind up as "less fortunate" than others? We may say that this is where the church comes in. It's the church's job to take care of people in poverty. Sure. Yes. However, what the church can provide is simply not enough to make up for what corruption has stolen from people in poverty. We ought to be thanking the government for taking forcibly from us what we should have given voluntarily to our neighbor. We may disagree about the functionality of the welfare system, but in the end everyone is looking for better solutions than welfare, and hopefully we will find some. Perhaps Neighborkeepers is one of these solutions, but in the meantime I think it's entirely justifiable to say that our society is better for taking care of its poorest members.  I think if Conservatives were really in favor of Personal Responsibility, there would be more support for government programs safeguarding financial and racial equity, and workers rights. 

To be fair, I don't consider myself Liberal either, and perhaps if I feel so moved I'll run a critique of Liberal ideology next. 

Church Farm Update & Sustainability at St. Andrew's

As usual, I have lots to update about, but because of recent comments (yay!) :) I'll bend this post towards the relevant topic: Where is St. Andrew's at with our efforts to be and advocate for sustainability. 

There's lots on the bill for this summer.

Awesome thing #1: Canoe trip down the Penobscot river, learning about the environment, ending with a stay with the Penobscot tribe and learning about how the land and Western civilization impacts them. As far as I know lots of people are interested in this.

Awesome thing #2: We just started reading Wendell Berry in our Discussion Group, which (of course) has sparked lots of fascinating conversation. 

Awesome thing #3 (and this one is my baby) hehehehe: We're hoping to partner with another local church - specifically North Avenue Alliance Church, which has land, to start a "church farm".  

This is a major part of our vision for the future of our church. We're finding that our big thing is helping to fix broken systems in our community, and one of those systems is food and cycles of poverty, and so... let's address them both and start a farm! 

We went back and forth about the models for making this work: 

Do we do family-sized plots and let people be responsible for their own square of earth? or do we let the whole space be planned by people who know how to do agriculture and then get volunteers to dig in the dirt on "volunteer days". I think it will be the latter. Hopefully we'll get connected with NeighborKeepers to involve people in poverty. Then the food will go towards the people who helped (they'll get paid according to the hours they spend perhaps?), cooking classes, and canning classes. I also hope we get to include some seed-saving classes. 

Or... perhaps in order to not duplicate what's already happening in our community, we might collaborate with a group like Burlington Community Gardens, or Permaculture Burlington.  

So now, I've just got to finish the proposal and get it to North Ave's elder board before the 3rd Monday of the month(!). 

Homeowner Education and Non-Profit Collaboration

Today the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative met in Richmond and my (utterly exhausted) two cents were that I am tired of publicity and I'm hungry for action. We've got these "demo projects" we'd like to make into a reality, but we're so far from a solid plan that it's hard to know where to go next. Specifically the demo project ideas are to
1) start farmers growing pelletizable crops on underutilized agricultural land (so as not to reduce the food supply)
2) pelletize said crops (ideally one industrial size universal pelletizer per county) and
3) work with LIHEAP to get pellet lots of 500 stoves per county into low income houses.


We'd need a business plan, and funding and a collegiate consortium-run research facility to answer questions like "what specific blend of prairie grasses is best?" "How do pellet stoves work in a mobile home?"


But this was (in my mind) too big. We needed something easier to chew on. LIHEAP is good, but it's middle to upper class folks with capital who need to know that this technology is reliable, financially viable, and eco-friendly. Homeowners would seriously jump for this if they only knew!

So that's where I proposed we start. We hold educational meetings in Bristol, Montpelier, and Burlington (in that order) directly aimed at middle-upper class homeowners. If we can get a critical mass of homeowners in one town to agree to purchase pellet stoves, then we can hook them up with cheaper bulk purchases of pellets from local suppliers. That would be the main focus of the meeting.

Meanwhile we're planning to talk to Hal Colston of Good News Garage and NeighborKeepers about cooperating with his newest project: Wood for the Common Good (maybe we can adapt that to Grasses for the Masses?). The rumor is that hasn't taken off quite as planned, but we've got a huge force and energy to put into it, but we'd want to adapt the program to include high-density perennial pellets, and possibly set up a carbon offset program (I may talk them out of that plan). My job is to talk to Hal Colston, and set up a meeting with him and the rest of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative.

(Gosh, I can't believe I'm trying to do all this and get National Board Certification simultaneously!)