You are invited and I hope you can join Senator Wyden for his Marion County Town Hall on
Sunday, January 4 at 3:30
at the Salem Public Library at 585 Liberty St. SE.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Fritz Graham
Senator Ron Wyden
707 13th St., SE Suite 285
Salem, Oregon 97301
503-589-4555 fax: 503-589-4749
fritz_graham@wyden.senate.gov
The Age recently had an article on the emerging practice of "guerilla gardening", taking a look at the "Gardening guerillas in our midst". This concept seems to have steadily increased in popularity in recent years (admittedly from a very low base) as the permaculture movement's ideas have been propagated through the community.
Unlike the usual approach taken when trying to grow food in the suburbs - converting spare land on your own property (as discussed by aeldric previously and, more recently, in Jeff Vail's series on A Resilient Suburbia) - guerilla gardening involves cultivating any spare patch of urban land that isn't being used for another purpose, which could provide a substantial addition to the food growing potential of suburbia.
Kind Regards,
n the public arena, essayists often are criticized for not offering solutions to our looming energy crisis. Here are some suggestions for those tired of the hand-wringing and ready to do something useful.
Expand your view beyond simply finding fuels other than gasoline to power vehicles. The obsession with keeping cars running at all costs could prove fatal, especially because so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Cars are not part of the solution, no matter what fuel they use. They are at the heart of the problem. Trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting from gasoline to other fuels will only make things worse. Think beyond the car. 
We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is headed toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soil and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to solve this problem. Farming soon will return closer to the center of American economic life. It will have to be done more locally, at a smaller and finer scale, and it will require more human labor.
We have to redistribute the population. Virtually every place in our nation organized around automobile dependency is going to fail. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami) can support only a fraction of their residents. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract.
We have to move things and people differently. Get used to it. Don't waste society's remaining resources trying to prop up car and truck dependency. Water and rail are vastly more energy efficient. Start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuels. We also have to prepare our society to use water much more to move people and things. This will require rebuilding infrastructures for our harbors and for our inland river and canal systems, including the towns associated with them.
We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies of scale are going down. Wal-Mart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of scarce, expensive oil. They will not be able to run their "warehouses on wheels," those tractor-trailers rumbling incessantly along our interstates. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to Asia also are endangered as the United States and China compete for Middle East and African oil.
We will have to make things again in America. However, we will make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we still will need household goods and things to wear.
The age of canned entertainment is coming to an end. It was fun for a while. We liked Citizen Kane and The Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players, playwrights and scenery makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stagehands.
We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they 
will fail anyway. Since we will be a less affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away.
We have to reorganize the medical system. The skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck-passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We probably will have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Fewer doctors of the 21st century will drive German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. 
Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail — everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is being done now, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who admire you.
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