We could completely muzzle corporations and not hurt any citizen’s right to free speech one bit - despite all the sloppy thinking and myth to the contrary, corporations are not people.  In fact, if you trace the legal precedents of this notion, used to subvert the 14th amendment to serve corporate power, you find a very insubstantial reed - essentially one railroad case containing what many think was a clerical error.

This ruling has transformed the basis of our democratic system from “one person one vote” to “one dollar one vote”; giving corporations, with their unparalleled ability to create large piles of cash, to vacuum dollars out of the economy,  the means to completely dominate our political system.  Any pretext that citizens have equal footing - or perhaps mattering at all - has been stripped away.

With the integrity of the supreme court completely shot, where can we turn?  This ruling, coupled with the inability to put any meaningful health care (not health insurance, but health care) plan in place makes it is clear that the federal government is of no use whatsoever when it comes to supporting the well-being of ordinary people.  The only thing that I can think of is that we have to start looking to ourselves, to our communities, for support and sustenance.

In practical terms, what does this mean?  Well, it seems to me that if we are now on the “one dollar one vote” system, we have to stop giving our votes/dollars away to those that are working against our own best interests.  We need to keep them for ourselves, for our communities.

So, start thinking about what you buy.  Is there a local coffee shop you can go to, rather than Starbucks?  Can you get that bread from a bakery from across town, rather than at the national chain store?  Can you get that book at the library rather than Barns & Nobel?  If you start reading ‘em, the library will start buying them (and a library will share ‘em with your friends!)

Do you really need that new pair of Gap jeans?  Isn’t there a second-hand shop down the street that has something that has a little more personality?  Or maybe there is a tailor nearby, in one of those dusty storefronts about to go under, who would be happy sew up your old ones?  I’ll bet there is a farmer who would be happy to provide some fresh, real food - one who could use your money to keep the farm going.  Take some time, make the connection.

The dollars you spend do not just vanish into the air, they represent your power, put to use by whoever you give them to.  Give them to those who share your values.

And, think about where your money is parked.  Whether or not you are paying attention to it, it is working on your behalf, either supporting what you care about or working against it.  If you are in a 401k, ask about socially responsible option.  Get your deposits out of a national bank and into a local institution, preferably some local development credit union.  They will make loans to businesses in your community, creating jobs for your neighbors, giving you more local choices.  This kind of investing provides returns you can really use - a place worth living in.

Local investing is currently difficult, but we are working on things like local currencies, regional stock exchanges, community funds - the means to facilitate this kind of thing.  We need the wind of your demand in our sails to power us as we do.

It is time to start making real choices - not simply pulling a lever for “Red” or “Blue” come election day, debating  “Low Fat” or “No Fat” grab-n-go yogurt, Exxon or Shell in your car, Fox or CNN on the TV tonight.  In this new era of One Dollar One Vote it is time to start choosing where we place our dollars, thinking with care about each and every one.  It is time to start lining up our dollars with our politics - it may be the only real power we have left.

Lets us use it to take care of each other - if we don’t, who will?

This is a new theme.  If there is a huge public outcry I will bring back the old look - but I think this is a bit cleaner and highlights the writing.  I will slowly be adding back the essays that got wiped out by the change-over.

Is this work pace sustainable? For another trimester or two …

Hello to Pennsylvania from a Vermonter!

I wanted to say that we carried Vermont because, among other things, there was room for every kind of support, from every kind of person. From folks organizing honk-n-waves to the political heavy hitters raising thousands of dollars. From those that love to make phone calls to those that sat quietly in the background, but kept our organizing web sites up and running. Our own Philip Baruth has a great write up, with some great pictures, at Vermont Daily Briefing in his March 4th post.

I have heard from the campaign that the most effective thing you can do is canvass - and this is probably true in a strict political sense. But I know that really, the most effective thing you can do is what you feel passionate about - and the most helpful way to put this passion to use for Obama is in the way that you feel to be the most effective.

I know that joining this campaign has stretched me beyond my comfort zone. I hate making cold calls, and I spent several evenings calling down to SC, wondering who would listen to a white boy with a new england accent - and I had great conversations, found support, and learned something about others and myself. I walked up to trailers on dirt roads in New Hampshire, dogs barking inside, knocked on the door - and found people that were eager to find a candidate that offered hope of a solution to problems they were facing. I have done what I can to surface support at work, letting people know it is OK in this apolitical office to show concern, show support, talk to each other about things besides business.

But, when you boil it down, the effectiveness did not come from my discomfort, or where or how the conversations happened. The effectiveness came from one person talking to another, listening to each other’s concerns, making connections between those concerns and the possibility of change, between those concerns and hope.

The effectiveness came from the human connection of talking to each other about the issues that are important to us, and getting back in touch with an idea that we have the power to create a solution. That we have the power to change, and that Obama is asking us to believe in that as much as he is asking us to believe in his ability to serve us as president.

One person talking to another. That is how it works - be it via canvassing, on the phone, over coffee with a neighbor, writing a letter, posting to a blog, or holding a sign and waving at a street corner. One person talking to another - something each of us can do, in whatever way we can.

I look forward to supporting all of you in PA

I found this one, Q10. It is an editor designed for one thing - banging out text. It has no fonts, none of that fancy bullet link format paragraph double spacing stuff. No scrollbars. No hover help.

Just a big black screen - no distractions - and when you type, text appears.

You can save it to a file. Cut and paste. Spell check. Best of all, down the bottom, on the status bar, there is the word count. So, for example, I can tell you that I am on paragraph 3, line 12 (lines of text, not lines on the screen), word 133.

And, it has a timer, so you can set a time goal, keep you from getting lost in those thoughts, or drifting around moodle. (or, for those of you interested, it is a perfect setup to run drills for NaNoWriMo in November - if you don’t know what that is, just ask …)

Now, for those assignment word limits - 500 words, 250 words … who cares? I can just bang out text on this baby till, well, till I’ve said my piece, or … that little word counter down in the corner ticks over.

Nice light executable, so it fits on your flash drive, you will always have your “pen” with you.

Closest thing I’ve found to a typewriter. A writer’s editor. Perfect.

Go to http://www.baara.com/q10/. Download it. Start typing (alt-tab to get to your other windows apps, F1 to get the help card) Oh My God, only twenty five more words till I hit the two hundred and fifty word goal for this piece. Oh, yea, you can download a sound file so that this baby even sounds like the typewrite you used to play with in your father’s study when you were a kid.

It was great to see everyone at the Sheraton last night, and great to watch the delegates roll in on the big screen.

It was even better to get up at 6:00 to a blanket of new snow, nervously peek at politico.com while the coffee was brewing, and see the percentages in California up from the 32% I went to bed with …

I just loved the line “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”.

And it got me thinking … Vermont is a small state … and we are a pretty lively group … what if we wanted to knock on every door in Vermont?

According to the most recent projections from the US Census, there are 309,557 dwelling units in Vermont. Run that through the 82% occupancy rate from the ‘00 census and you get roughly 253,800 doors to try.

Now, all you GOTV vets know that we target Dems and Independents. But here in Vermont we have the TVI - the True Vermont Independent - who will put a Republican governor in office, but send a Socialist to the US Senate. Go figure. But this means you never know which door a vote might be hiding behind, so we’ll skip the targeting.

Besides, we don’t want anyone to feel left out. Bad for business if word gets around we skipping some folks.

Now our volunteer list here has about 128 people on it. A quick survey of the other VT lists shows that they are smaller, around 50 - 30 folks each. Add ‘em all in, adjust for overlap, and we get, say 175 people. If everyone brings a friend, that goes to 350, maybe pick up some strays and call it 400.

Now, for the big calculation. 253,800 door by 400 people gives us each 634 doors. 634 chances to figure out how to get that get that piece of campaign lit to sick in the screen door with the dog barking, have a great conversation with a new voter, hear stories of elections past, share thoughts & concerns, argue, be told “get out of my dooryard” …

634 doors. That is a lot. But not impossible, in the next four weeks, if we gather some help.

What do think? Willing to give it a go? Imagine all 30 VT delegates for Obama … It could tip the balance. It could send a powerful message: We are the one we are waiting for.

OK, who’s got those voter lists?

Natural capital is a way to express the productive value of ecosystem services, much like financial capital expresses the productive value of monetary assets. Ecosystem services are the basic biological functions that supply resources in the form of materials and energy, and provide a sink for wastes of various kinds.

Like financial capital, natural capital can be spent, conserved, or accumulated. Consider a five acre farm field, growing vegetables. We can view the ability of the land to support the crops as the natural capital inherent in the land, much as we view the ability of a tractor to support the farming operations as a form of fiscal capital. The productive ability of the field depends on both inputs.

Now, when we eat a carrot, are we extracting capital? Perhaps. We can farm in such a way that next year the field will not produce as many carrots. If we don’t replenish the soil with organic material, it will be a tad bit more tired. If we don’t rotate crops, the pests, accustomed to the same crops in the same places, will be a bit more bothersome. In this case, yes, that carrot represents a bit of spent natural capital.

On the other hand, we can farm in such a way as to leave the soil as productive next year as it was this year. We apply compost, we treat the soil with care as we plant and plow. Crops are rotated, and some land is always under cover. In this case, the carrot does not represent capital expenditures. It represents the use of the productive power of the natural capital.

How does the concept of ecosystem services tie in? Think of it this way. The land, the soil is not a thing - not simply a pile of dirt, or a place to walk – but a system. The soil is a complex system that cycles nutrients, manages moisture and water flow, builds up and builds up and breaks down stocks of organic and inorganic materials, and hosts whole communities of living organisms that both use and facilitate these processes. Any combination of these processes can be tapped into to do something useful for us.

We generally aren’t too specific or clear in our thinking about these services. We say we use the soil to “grow things”, and, unless we are a farmer, don’t think of which of the suite of the services provided by the soil-as-system we are making use of.
Natural capital then, is the productive capacity of ecosystem services. This is essential – capital is not inherent in the thing, but in the usable excess productive capacity generated by the system. This is perhaps counterintuitive, but, it is true of financial capital as well. The capital value of dollars in the bank is nil. The value of these dollars is in their power to increase productive capacity through the purchase of equipment that increases production efficiency.

The notion of natural capital is essential to a sustainable business model as the concept of natural capital changes the costs associated with natural resource use from production costs to capital costs.

Any business is loath to spend capital – it is suicide. This is especially clear when we view capital not as a thing, but as productive capacity. Give away enough productive capacity and you are done. So, a tight lid is kept on capital expenditures, and capital is always expended with an eye towards increasing productivity enough to recoup the capital, with some extra in the form of profit.

So, by putting casting resource costs as capital costs, the idea of natural capital brings the power of business to bear on the issues involved in preserving ecosystem services. This is essential to business, in that it prevents them from consuming their resource base. It is essential to the planet for the very same reasons.

The appeal contends that, among other things, the Public Service board found that UPC, the company developing the project, had failed to negotiate stably priced power contracts with Vermont utilities, and that, in the absence of these contracts, the project would not “provide and economic benefit to Vermonters sufficient to offset the project’s significant environmental impacts”.

The economic issue is one that is at the heart of the matter. One of the big selling points for the project, on the Massachusetts based UPC Wind’s Web site for the project is cheap local power. From the “power” tab, we are given a list of towns near Sheffield that “have shown strong interest in purchasing energy generated at the Sheffield project”. Another tab, under economic benefits states “Energy for Vermont utilities at competitive market rates”.

This is a bit disengenuous. As noted in the testimony before the public service board, and echoed in the final order itself:

“Unfortunately, the pricing terms of the Vermont Utilities power purchases do not capture one of the major economic advantages of renewable energy: the free, and thus stable, cost of the fuel. Instead the power contracts between UPC and Vermont utilities are largely indexed to regional power market prices, which are both highly volitile and expected to increase over time”.

Score a point for Ridge Protectors.

The Public Service Board does go on to address this in condition number three of the certificate of public good, which states that UPC shall “make all reasonable efforts to enter into diverse, long term, stably priced power contracts with Vermont Utilities”.

The ball bounces back across the court.

These contracts are to be produced prior to the commencement of construction. Has construction started without these contracts in place? If so, the Ridge Protectors appeal would seem like a sure win.

In either case, it seems that not only does the generation technology need to be developed to take advantage of clean power sources, the contracting and pricing mechanisms need development as well.

Turns out CNN is calling this with 0% of the precincts reporting. They are calling it based solely on polling data.

I guess we no longer have to vote.

We ought all stay home, near the television, so we can answer the phone if a pollster calls, and to be sure to be watching as CNN tells us what our future is to be.

What is Sustainability? It means a lot of things to a lot of people. It can mean waste equals food design practices, or it can mean adding Social Responsibility to the mission statement - and then backing up the words with action. It can mean a Triple Bottom Line or Four Capital Accounting. It can mean buying fair trade coffee, a local carrot, or a Prius - or figuring out how to walk there.

It is a broad subject, and over the next two years I hope to be writing here quite a bit about it. I have started a new set of essays over in the sidebar, may add lists of books. Take a look, join the discussion - here or elsewhere.