Opinion
Many of the articles I’ve written locally relate to the issue of increasing self-sufficiency. Many of our local people have jumped on board the organic and locally-grown foodstuff train but there still hasn’t been much discussion on really transferring our priorities in agriculture to insuring that our community has sufficient food to withstand the pressures of significant interruption in just-in-time delivery. Similarly, there has been relatively little discussion about creating a local energy infrastructure and moving toward some measure of self-sufficiency in this critical area.
In my job I see a reasonable cross-section of the counties unemployed or under-employed workers and I can tell you without hesitation that many of these folks are headed for the precipice with no safety net in place. Most of them have been hardworking people, the majority over 45, who are unwilling or unable to move to another locale to pursue employment opportunities. They expect that the government has somehow prepared for this disaster and that they can expect some sort of relief or help. Sorry —there is no help coming. We’re on our own.
I also attended the 2008 Economic and Demographic Profile Series presented by Economist Dr. David Gallo. The forecast is for zero economic growth locally in the next year. Most of our local industry is not benefiting the county, except for workers wages and buying power, due to the indirect of necessary materials, etc. being purchased out of county. This is particularly true of our wine production industry. Our population growth is expected to come from seniors and retired people and is projected at 2.5 percent over the next six years. That’s about four times our current rate.
One of Dr. Gallo’s biggest bombshells came in his revelation that the “multipliers” often discussed in economic industry projections — i.e., dollars spent that actually create additional dollars — are largely a mythological invention. The actual effect of dollars spent in-county rattling around in our local bucket and increasing is actually very small. Chamber of Commerce figures often tout tourism as producing seven additional dollars for every dollar spent. Dr. Gallo states that the actual figure is closer to 50 cents. Even at the national level the top for multipliers in any industry is about 3 percent. At the state level it’s fewer than 2 percent and locally it’s usually 1 percent or less. For very small rural counties it’s unusual to have a greater than a one-to-one ratio of return.
I postulate that this is due to the distances that rural drivers are used to driving. Urban dwellers who visit here are often shocked by the distances we drive daily to work and to obtain necessities. Local people, used to driving such distances, think nothing of driving to Ukiah or Santa Rosa for cheaper goods and products — at least they did before gas hit the ceiling.
If you think of the economy as a bucket — the state and fed monies coming in are being reduced all the time. Industry has stagnated here and there is little forecast of an economic boom locally. Jobs are typically low paying and are increasing difficult to get. Not much flowing in the top of our bucket! And the bottom is leaking like a sieve with both industries and citizens spending much of their money out-of-county.
But wait, you say, I don’t go out of county to shop much. Every time you shop at a chain market or store for any product or necessity, much of your dollar goes out of county to the corporate headquarters or to out-of-town suppliers or vendors. The tourist who comes to town and spends locally will have some of his money remain here — but only if the hotel doesn’t buy all of its supplies out of the area, and if he doesn’t shop at gas stations, retail outlets and chain stores that send most of their money away to corporate headquarters or who also buy their materials and products out of the area.
In those circumstances — very little of each dollar spent actually remains in-county. The only real money that is guaranteed to stay here and benefit our local economy is money that is spent for products or services that originate here.
Dr Gallo’s point is the only way to stop the money from flowing out the bottom of our bucket is to produce more goods and services locally. More raw materials, more energy, more fuel, more food —everything we consume or utilize on a daily basis. The better we accomplish that, the better our local economy will be and the more resistant we will be to external crisis affecting our standard of living.
So what our leaders need to consider is that much of what they have been given to believe about the industries that supposedly hold up our economy is false — and that our priorities and planning should be more about creating infrastructure and opportunity to locally develop sufficient resources to support our citizens than relying on forecasts or economic projections that are always geared toward the rosiest picture to improve someone’s future bottom line.
Dr. Gallo thought that, with a sound and reliable broadband infrastructure here, opportunities for information and entrepreneurial projects for seniors and people with ideas could be realized. Business incubators is the next step — to encourage people with business ideas to take a chance without the risk of under-capitalization by providing reasonably priced infrastructure through a multi-year proving period where their business could prove itself or fail without undue hardship. There are working models for these types of incubators and it's time we started utilizing them in this area.
If industry and economic growth don’t develop, entrepreneurial ideas are the only way to climb out of the hole. Tourism can’t be relied upon because of its reliance on a stable economy that allows people money and time to come out to play — a circumstance that doesn’t look too good for the foreseeable future — and also because of its less than propagandized profitability in terms of the real multiplier number.
So I come back to my continued push for a commitment to the priority of self-sufficiency in all the areas of necessity that concern our citizens. It’s only prudent.
James BlueWolf lives in Nice.
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- Written by: James BlueWolf
There is an almost infinite number of beliefs embraced or created by countless individuals and many cultures throughout the world. Some of these beliefs are conscious, others become part of our conditioning and lay just below conscious awareness, triggering automatic responses in us.
Some of these beliefs are religious, some are spiritual, philosophical, ideological. Even science has its beliefs, or theories … it often seeks to prove its theories rather than attempting to approach reality without bias, as it claims it does.
And what is reality? Is there an absolute truth, an objective reality? Both religion and science, that are very similar in their dogmatism, state that their world views are true, because essentially separate from human consciousness, therefore standing on their own and unassailable. One such absolute truth is “given” by God to prophets or mystics who write it down and make a religion of it, the other “discovered” by scientists in the laboratory, who translate it into a formula or theorem.
Everyone knows the riddle of the tree falling in the forest … if no one is there, does it make a sound? It produces a sound wave, which is an energy pattern, which can only become sound when a physical apparatus such as a human ear catches it and when a brain translates it into what is experienced as sound. Different creatures hear differently, and give sound different meanings according to the experiences of the species.
So what is reality? Can it exist separate from consciousness, from the physical brain and the mind that give it form and meaning? Is there anything that can actually exist apart from consciousness, standing on its own as an absolute, separate truth?
If we agree that consciousness gives form and substance to energy fields that are highly responsive to it and highly malleable, we must also remember that the chosen focuses of consciousness, at the individual as well as the mass level, are pre-determined by chosen beliefs. As we believe, so do we see, feel, experience, and create … as we believe so do we form our lives and our world. If we believe we can walk on hot coals without getting burned, we will do it. And if most of humanity believes that the world must end, the world will end.
Life, it could be said, is a series of experimentations within beliefs systems, from which our human world springs. We embrace existing beliefs or create our own belief systems and use them as long as they serve our individual evolution and the evolution of our species. We then discard them and our world changes as our beliefs change. As this is the nature of human experience, to create illusions and explore and move through them as do actors on a stage, it is quite unavoidable, because the ultimate reality, if there is such a thing and as far as our species is concerned, is a psychic field of infinite potentiality, of endless creativity.
This creativity is what distinguishes us from animals, whose behaviors are mostly pre-determined by what is called instinct, and who live in a state of grace, or harmony and balance with the creation and true to their nature, without having to strive for it.
The Biblical myths of the tree of knowledge and of the fall are meant to symbolically represent this leap in human evolution from a pre-determined life, a purely instinctive life, to a life of conscious choice and creativity, that are the gifts and responsibilities of conscious evolution.
Today, there are reactionary movements in the world, primarily rising from organized religions gone fundamentalist, but also from political ideologies, that would propose a regression towards pre-determined life, not in a natural state of grace as in the animal kingdom, but under coercion and oppression, under harsh laws that would re-establish the authoritarian state. As differences and multiplicity are erroneously perceived to be causes of conflicts, many people are progressively espousing the belief that only the eradication of such differences can lead to global peace.
Even the most progressive and open-minded among us state that, for example, “not seeing skin color” is the proper way to deal with racial differences. The Olympic slogan, “One world one dream,” resonates with these rising fantasies of the unification of the world through uniformity, and of an ultimate outcome of one world government, one world ideology, one world religion, one world culture.
Human creativity, the fulfillment of which is the very condition necessary for consciousness to evolve and even survive, can only be stifled under authoritarianism, that breed conformity and uniformity, the opposites of creativity. Coercive authority is indeed the enemy of creativity (try to force a poet to write, and see what s/he produces under such conditions … all true artists are rebels by nature … all dictatorships silence artists and intellectuals first, then burn books). If we understand that creativity is an intrinsic part of the human psyche, we can imagine what all that opposes creativity does to the human spirit, which explains the degree of violence our world is experiencing on a constant basis. The primal energy of creativity emerges, under oppressive conditions, in destructive forms, like steam under pressure, or like a grizzly bear that escapes captivity.
The enemy of creativity is also fear, that is always at the very root of all aspirations to achieve dominant power, control, and authority. Because fear is unavoidable, to live as a true human being requires great courage. Not just the courage to work, raise a family and do the right thing, but the courage to accept the greater responsibility of being a co-creator of the individual and mass realities we all experience. It requires the courage to acknowledge that consciousness is the root and the ground of the world we know.
The path to peace is not to suppress multiplicity and cause humanity to submit to inflexible dogmas and ideologies, to the unification of the world under globalization and other agendas meant to “homogenize” the world, but to acknowledge differences, and not only respect and honor them, but celebrate them … to see differences in skin colors, in cultures, in belief systems, in languages and religions, in human behaviors, and celebrate them joyfully! To no longer perceive creativity to be a threat, by accepting the facts that there is no absolute truth, only relative truths, there is not one proper way, there are many paths, and there is no objectivity, only subjectivity. There is no reality that can remain separate from the viewer or witness, even at the sub-atomic particle level, there are only individual perceptions, and mass perceptions within species, cultures and historic periods.
The beliefs we choose to call “truths” do not originate from outside of us, they are our creations. Only by understanding this will we stop fighting to invalidate other’s beliefs, or “truths,” or perceptions of reality, and accept the very liberating fact that the only valid power given to us is creative power, not dominant power or coercive authority, whose foundations are fear and that consequently can only generate more fear, and oppose creativity or the very nature of human consciousness.
And all of this, of course, is part of an individual’s belief system, not an ultimate truth, even the “facts” stated as such for the purpose of clarity.
Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.
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