Hosted by:
Mike Dill

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Every time there's a fifth Wednesday, Portland Peak Oil throws a party! Let's take a break from speakers, films and workshops and just have an evening where we relax and get to know each other better.
Remember to bring a dish and join us for a fun family evening. We encourage folks to bring their own plates/utensils as well so we can reduce the amount of paper and plastic waste.
Free and open to the public (as always!).

opening & closing St. Francis:
Jeremy

http://portlandpeakoil.org/mailman/listinfo/council_portlandpeakoil.org 

The above link is for subscribing to the council at portlandpeakoil . org mailing list which was created for two reasons.

• a mailing list generally has a faster turn around time then people thinking to check a website.
• This is for administration and management of Portland Peak Oil events (Wednesdays at St. Francis, ...) getting the speaker's bureau online, .... Please only subscribe if you want to be involved on a fairly regular basis.

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Kerns neighbors (& anyone interested in starting up their own neighborhood potluck) are invited to the Kerns Neighborhood's monthly potluck on the First Sunday of the Month. This month's focus is Edgu, exercise for the spine. Arrive at 5:15, potluck starts at 6 pm.
Healthy Dishes, local ingredients, inspiring ideas encouraged. For more info, email neighborpotlucks@riseup.net.

We desperately need new leadership to promote the following ideals through changes in all levels of government policy:

Changes in zoning laws to allow living above work spaces and allowing homes to be modified to accommodate small business activities. Tax Credits for working from home.

Tax incentives for real estate developers to build real estate products that promote live/work, less consumption of energy and self sufficient communities.

Federal legislation promoting + mandating major changes in energy policy, incentives for clean energy sources and major investment in Amtrack high speed rail throughout the country.

A serious effort to cut back on road building and make existing roads work harder to carry various alternative types of transit to carry bicyclists and mass transit. Even macadam has oil content...

Tax credits for small agricultural plots in unconventional places. Tax credits for organic farming which does not use petroleum based pesticides.

Serious tariffs for imported goods. Let's start thinking about the real built in cost of transportation of goods via auto and ship that presently consume large quantities of fossil fuels. These should also include costs to our air quality.

Anyone care to carpool?

Jason

I live in McMinnville and have been following all the work you are doing in Portland. Currently I am taking the NW Earth Institute's class on Globalism which is being sponsored by Yamhill Valley Peacemakers.

We have discussed how we could take care of ourselves here in the Valley if petroleum powered systems fail and I think there is interest in starting a sister chapter of Portland Peak Oil in McMinnville. I'd like to set up working groups and discussion nights that happen on the same nights your's do up there so that there could be two groups of folks working together on the same things separated only by distance, and interfacing with each other for information exchange and networking. It doesn't make sense to me to burn dinosaurs to actually drive up to Portland, when we could be doing the same work with you all, only here in McMinnville, and communicating/networking via Internet.

Oh PPO Gods and Goddesses - would you be okay with that and would you be willing to mentor us? How would be we get started?

In light of peak oil forcing us to change many aspects of society, integrating education into our vision of neighborhoods as the modern education system is a fairly destructive institution. 

How public education cripples

our kids, and why

By John Taylor Gatto

 

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the

Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American

Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill,"

which appeared in the September 2001 issue.

 

 

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

 

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

 

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

 

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

 

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

 

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

 

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

 

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

 

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

 

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

 

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

 

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."

 

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

 

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

 

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

 

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

 

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

 

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

 

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

As Peak Oil is or will be forcing us change many aspects of society, integrating education into our vision of the neighborhoods would seem to be a great fit.  Of course this is no small task, but the current highly centralized school system is not sustainable and fairly destructive.

http://www.nwherald.com/StyleSection/307526776055521.php

In today's economy of service, you can pay someone to walk your dog, to clean your house or to organize your closet.

Why not pay someone to grow your vegetables?

Community-supported agriculture, or CSA farming, works on that theory. Consumers buy shares of a CSA farm before spring ends

"They do it at the beginning of the season, when the farmer needs the money," said Michael Walkup, who owns Walkup Heritage Farm and Gardens in Crystal Lake.

With enough money to buy seed, equipment and, if needed, labor, the farmer starts planting. When the early crops are harvested, usually in mid-June, shareholders receive a package of vegetables and fruits each week until growing season ends in October.

"It's just a good fit," said MM Graff, owner of M's Organic Farm in Woodstock. "They support you so you are able to do something wonderful."

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On Wednesday, January 18th, a Sustainability Committee started up under the auspices of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association. Whether you live in Sunnyside or not, this monthly meeting on peak oil preparedness in Sunnyside is very interesting. The meeting is free and open to the public.
For questions, call the Sunnyside Hotline at 503-295-1699.

Hi all. I recently bought 50 of the peak oil posters from http://www.oilposter.org/.

I am using them as handouts for politicians and citizens groups in the areas where we are developing our plants, but I have some extras, so I would be happy to donate 10 of them to the group for use in community outreach activities.

They would be ideal for schools or high-traffic community centers.

Do with them what you think is best to spread the word.

I will bring them by the Wednesday biodiesel meeting at St Francis.

- Stephen

http://www.portlandonline.com/oni/index.cfm?c=29014 

If you are event remotely interested in working with your Neighborhood Association I would strongly recommend checking out the above URL.  If someone doesn't get to it before me (hint), I'll make up a clickable map with links that direct you to the various neighborhood associations meeting times.

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The Kerns First Sunday Potluck will happen on the first Sunday of the Month (April 2 is the next potluck).
We are also adding a topic for each potluck, such as bike maintenance (this is tentative topic for April 2), permaculture, a game night, art project, Kern's history walk, edgu, etc. I would like to hear ideas from my fellow Kerns neighbors on topics that would interest you. We also need people to lead topics so if you live in Kerns or close-by & want to lead a discussion contact me to schedule it.
Remember to bring food or beverage (please keep in mind that we are family friendly).

Last night at our March General Meeting, we had a great small discussion group, facilitated by Randy, brainstorming actions at the neighborhood scale. Here are some notes:

• Flyering whole neighborhoods about peak oil
• Writing articles for neighborhood newspapers
• Speaking slots at neighborhood association meetings
• Free film screenings in neighborhoods
• Identify "mavens" within neighborhoods:
• spiritual/religious leaders
• social leaders, including association officials
• local artists and activists
• small business owners
• cool kids/student govt. at high schools

We came up with the idea of a Neighborhood Peak Oil Challenge. This would be a fun, competitive "game" we could play this Spring whereby teams could form in interested neighborhoods to form and carry out action plans for peak oil outreach and preparation. We could brainstorm "prizes" and each neighborhood's plan could serve as a potential model. Discuss...

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Three day class, Friday to Sunday covering introduction to permaculture and appropriate technology. Information at www.portlandpermaculture.com or call 503.293.8004.

I am planning a stratigic relocation to the portland area this summer.

I am an electronics tech with over twenty years experience.

What is the employment situation in Portland?

I find jobs on the internet, but would like more direct info.

Bob Pike

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NE Area Peak Oil Potluck
We gather once a month to socialize, discuss, strategize and support one another in making our lifestyles more sustainable, our homes more efficient, and our sense of community more intact.
This month our discussion will include “work parties” - how they might be organized to get particular projects done in our various homes. You need not be a homeowner to participate!
Bring food to share. (Plates, utensils, glassware provided.)

I am getting a Peak Oil (PO) presentation on the agenda for my Richmond Neighborhood Association meeting in April.
My intention is to explain the PO basics and why a local response is necessary and what it would look like. The goal would be to create a neighborhood level discussion and familiarize neighbors with each other on a preparedness level.
I would love to hear feedback on other approaches, methods, or if this has been done before - please share the experience.
Specifically - what do we ask of the Neighborhood Association?

Wow, I've been so out of touch lately. Out of touch with my dearly beloved PPO group (hurrah and huzzah to all of you hard workin' folks carryin' the torch!) and out of touch with the world it would seem.

Here I am at almost the top of a mountain (2100 feet, get snow pretty regulary and I'm only 40 miles from Portland). I'm 8 miles up a dirt/gravel road off of Hwy 26 and through the tiny town of Buxton (don't blink, there's not even a post office and the local community hall is for sale, just one church and some farms). Even my mail box is 8 miles away from the house, down in the town, served by the "mail lady" who works out of her home.

In some ways this seems like the perfect place for post-peak living: away from the madding crowd (and it will be getting "madder" yet soon, eh?). There won't be too many people that can find my garden (when I finally get one going). Got the cleanest, best tasting water ever from a spring on the property. Since we're at the top up here, and there are only two houses somewhat "above" here, there shouldn't be much pollution, I think? Most importantly we're not dependent on any "systems" to provide the water. The house is even on only a gravity fed system, no power needed - doesn't make for very forceful showers tho, tee hee.

Portland Peak Oil has recently been contacted by a writer with the Willamette Week - Ian Demsky. The paper is interested in doing a cover story on Portlanders preparing for peak oil.

I spoke with Ian this morning on the phone and he has a special request for the group. He's looking to interview folks who were not necessarily environmentalists or activists before learning about peak oil, but who have
made major changes in their lives to prepare since learning about peak oil. You know, an case study angle to move beyond the usual "Portland greenie". Here's his message:

----------------------------------------------------------------

We're exploring doing a cover story on how ready Portland would be for the scenario spelled out by the peak oil proponents. We're looking for some local folks that heve been involved with this issue. Also, peak oil seems to
dovetail well with Portland's already green consciouness -- but maybe there are some folks out there who weren't very green to start with, but peak oil came as a dramatic wake up call?

Heather just posted this to the PPO Announcements list and I thought it was worth posting here:

I thought some of you might be interested in joining the Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET). NET teams assist the Portland Fire Dept. in your neighborhood during an major emergency. To become a member you must take the training. It's a 7-week course of 3-hour sessions with emphasis on hands-on training, followed by a 4-hour practical exercise.

I'm taking the winter training right now & learning about things like earthquake awareness, hazard mitigation, utility control, fire suppression, hazardous materials, disaster medicine, light search & rescue, team response & management. They generally have two choices of days to attend classes - an evening during the week or a morning on the weekend.

If you are interested in Spring '06 training call 503 823-1260 & leave your information. Details will be mailed out to you closer to the training date & then it's first come, first serve for the classes.