The group intended the stories to be presented in public kiosks scattered around town. But the vision eventually morphed into a web site. Today—a decade later—Shaping San Francisco is a seductive hydra: with about 1,300 pages divided into 52 chapters, the sprawling site is, in the words of its creator, “a perfect example of a mental illness.”

As intended, the site is an ideal tool for understanding the bones of the modern metropolis. All the city’s neighborhoods are represented; pick a race, sexual orientation, religion, gender, or profession and learn how such communities influenced the land- and folkscape.

In addition to continually working on the site, Carlsson leads pedal-powered tours that make visible how class struggle and natural history are an integral part of San Francisco. His passions are evident online as well: snippets of botanical tours from 1945 share cyberspace alongside interviews with ’30s union organizers. One can study photos of pre-Sunset District sand dunes or of the Symbionese Liberation Army safe house in Bernal Heights. And you can place yourself in the virtual topography by clicking on any one of 49 hills.

Carlsson says the motivating question behind the dozen-years-and-counting endeavor is one of how to approach history. “Partly [Shaping San Francisco was] going to stage a revolt against American-style history,” he explains. “Objectivity from a historical point of view is just laughable to me.” Aside from oral interviews, he says most of the source information on the site is written by someone else—”usually some white guy, usually in a newspaper”—thus begging the issue of veracity. Carlsson and the hundreds of other volunteer contributors to the project have added their own sensibilities about class and ecology in attempts to set the record, if not straight, then more accurately Lombard-like.

More than ten years after Carlsson began compiling facts on his 500-megabite hard drive, the project about the past has itself become a slice of the city’s history. He’s currently working on converting the files to a Wikipedia format so that anyone with a keyboard can add to and update the hundreds of pages, though he admits such freedom could usher in a panoply of subjective dramas: “What if the Maoists want to put in their take on San Francisco’s history?”

Carlsson is not fond of the typical reaction to the project: awe. He laments that it’s “kind of discouraging,” explaining that he’d rather it inspire others to use technology to strengthen community involvement and connection to a place. He lauds a similar site he was recently turned on to: organiccity.com, a storytelling project created by two students in CSU East Bay’s Multimedia Graduate Program, which focuses on downtown Oakland and the area around Lake Merritt. The nascent site is very user-friendly, with viewers easily able to participate through clicking on a map to locate stories and by adding their own tales. “It’s a perfect example of what Shaping San Francisco should evolve into,” Carlsson says.

Though the two Yubagals are the driving force (and the financial capital—they’re operating without sponsors or underwriters) behind Peak Moment, they have a rotating crew of about ten APPLE members who help out. By mid-July, 25 episodes of the sustainability talk show have aired on NCTV channel 11, Nevada City’s community access station—exploring everything from cattle ranches to determining if solar is the way to ensure your own energy future. Donaldson spoke from her home outside Nevada City about the unique strategy of broadcasting sustainability issues into the living rooms of local channel-surfers.

How did you get the idea for a TV show on the localization movement?

We got the idea a year ago as APPLE was forming. My background is in graphic design, and Robin’s is as a computer software designer. In the late ’90s, we took a video class and that caught fire for us, so we’ve been building a small business since about 2002 videotaping events in our community. While brainstorming for APPLE, I said, “We’re living at a peak moment on this planet,” and bing!—but it didn’t bear fruit until this December, when I helped do a studio shoot for our local community access television station. I saw how easy that was, so we put the word out to other friends in APPLE because we needed more crew. We started the show in late January.

Do you have any background as a talk show host?

No! I simply have a background as a person who enjoys engaging people in conversation and finding out what people think. And no, we don’t have a teleprompter in our little studio.

How many people watch the show?

We don’t have any idea because our local television station doesn’t do viewer surveys. There are 10,000 subscribers to cable in the Nevada City/Grass Valley area. We want to get it out to a much wider audience. It’s already showing at the Auburn community station and in Mount Shasta, and we’re looking for people to put it on their community access station or college station.

What sort of feedback are you getting from the broader community?

The jury’s still out for folks who aren’t yet on this wavelength. That’s part of why I’m trying to cover this topic not just from experts but to have space for people’s personal responses. I’m trying to tap it at every level—people who are scared about the news, who are afraid the whole thing’s going to crash. I had a couple of sisters—episodes 10 and 11—who first read about peak oil at Matt Savinar’s site lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. [Savinar's book, The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050, is available at the site.] Savinar points out how fossil fuels have led us to far exceed the planet’s carrying capacity. In other words, human population is in overshoot.ÊWithout those energy inputs (and without alternatives to rapidly take their place at the scale we now use energy) he sees a massive die-off of human population until we are at a level of sustainability.ÊThat’s a pretty scary scenario, and one that I don’t tend to emphasize in talking with folks because it triggers so much fear and then paralyzes people because they’re overwhelmed. However, it really propelled the O’Brien sisters into positive action: they took a permaculture course from Solar Living Institute and both of them got gardens going and one moved to an off-grid home. Hearing how they emotionally responded—they wanted their whole family to move together so they’d all be safe together—those stories are just as instructive for people who might be hearing about peak oil, looking at what people can do in a positive way and not getting lost in fear.

Presenting a TV show is wonderfully novel considering that, within the sustainability movement, television is an oft-shunned medium.

We’re a television-literate culture. Here’s the irony—Robin and I don’t get television: we don’t get satellite. But we’re aware that’s where a huge part of America lives, and not just America but the world. We traveled to Thailand in 2001 and every shop had a little TV on. Downstairs where the people were living, little TVs on. All over the world, people are watching, and they’re watching other people’s stories, and they’re learning how to live. What television’s done across the world is say, “Look at these wonderful and exciting lives the Americans live! Look at all the things they consume! Look at all these wonderful things you can have!” We’ve certainly spread that message of “consume, consume” that is eating up the planet. So this is our own modest way of hoping that some of the stories people share—not just their own information but their stories—are a different set of models for how we might live.

This past April, you represented APPLE and Peak Moment at the Northern California relocalization conference in Willits.

We decided that while we were at the conference, we’d do some Peak Moment interviews with people working hard on localization. We stayed with a friend in Ukiah who’s part of a localization group called GULP—Greater Ukiah Localization Project—and showed them a few shows They got all fired up about the possibility of interviewing people in their community who are involved in localization efforts. And we’ve had localization groups in other communities who said they’d love to have us do some sessions with them.

Now it’s taking on a life of its own, growing into the notion of taking it on the road and using our videotaping skills to empower folks on the ground. Sort of like a biodiversity movement—every community’s going to have its own approach to how to localize its economy and how to build its own sustainability, which institutions and organizations are already open to that and which won’t be, how many will be able to work with their government leaders and how many will have to work with environmentalists first so they can begin to work with middle-of-the-road folks. Our hope is that we can empower people because telling their stories of what they’re doing in their communities can make them proud and we can make DVDs and use them as starting points for discussion or to take back to community leaders. If we videotape what Solar Sebastopol is doing, can Ukiah do that in its community or in my community? We need that cross-fertilization.

Is Peak Moment Road Show the next step?

Our idea, which sort of sounds crazy in the light of fossil-fuels pricing, is to have a little studio in the back of a motor home and go from community to community, videotape what they’re doing on-site, or do the interviews in the back of the little motor home. Just from our trip to Willits, we have 16 shows in the can. Now I have people contacting me wanting to be on the show. There’s no end to the material. People are excited about sharing what they’re doing. We need to be the media, and Peak Moment is a part of that.

The couple, both 65, had already devoted ten years to full-time activism when, in 1997, Louisiana-Pacific Corporation decided to sell 200,000 acres of timberland in Mendocino County. “The time was ripe for a change in how the forests were owned,” Perkins says. While unsustainable logging—and the subsequent destruction of forest ecosystems—generated millions of dollars for corporate headquarters in Portland and Atlanta, the couple’s small community of Albion, like scores of other Northern California mill towns, suffered a boom and bust economy.

A few months prior to the sale, Mendocino County’s then-Supervisor, Charles Peterson, proposed that a representative group of locals, from third-generation foresters to Earth First!ers like Perkins and Heil, come together to buy and manage timberland for public use. The vision entailed a working landscape supporting selective harvesting and recreation, with profits recycled through the community, as opposed to its likely alternatives: further logging or cutting up the land for development.

But where would the money come from? Financial services company US Forest Capital suggested seeking alternative strategies, such as tapping into tax-exempt bond markets, to fund these mega-land grabs.

Heil explains why this strategy was so compatible with Peterson’s plan for a “working forest”: “If you have less to pay back on the interest, you have less forest you have to cut down to pay it back. On a local level, we realized that we had to take control. As these big companies were moving out, it was the time to acquire the base of production.”

The first attempt failed: The nascent Redwood Forest Foundation International (RFFI, or as Perkins fondly calls it, “Reffie”) had only existed for a couple of months when they lost the bid on the LP property.

Eight years and about a hundred meetings later, the organization is involved in closing its first successful deal: with Hawthorne-Campbell, the timberland investment group that snagged Georgia-Pacific’s 194,000 acres (RFFI also tried to buy the whole plot). Hawthorne-Campbell is selling RFFI 16,000 acres of overharvested—but relatively healthy—forest land along Salmon Creek and Big River for $48.5 million.

At first, Hawthorne-Campbell wasn’t interested, but as Perkins describes it, “conversation continued.” About a year later, RFFI teamed up with the Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit that protects land through conservation easement and then turns the management over to another party.

“We simply don’t have enough public money to buy and preserve large tracts as park land,” Perkins says, underlining the group’s biggest hurdle. As Heil puts it, “We understand the ecology of the forest, but the funding? It was a strong learning curve for eight to ten years, and we still are in that process.”

The partnership with the Conservation Fund, which has protected five million acres and counting across the country, was invaluable for RFFI, ensuring economic resources and a reputable track record. Funding also came from loans through the federal Clean Water Act and the state water board. These were monies, Perkins says, intended for projects such as sewage treatment but that often regulate buffer zones around creeks and rivers to prevent sedimentation. “So it’s a little bit innovative, what we’re asking for,” she acknowledges.

The immediate goal—”to wrest this land away from outside corporate ownership,” says Heil—is accomplished. Albion residents will now be able to walk along their natural waterways, previously inaccessible without trespassing on corporate-owned property.

The next challenge—to repair eroded hillsides, restore the native salmon population, and regenerate a hardy ecosystem—will test RFFI’s mettle. As the first nonprofit to receive its charter to manage a forest, there aren’t many models to follow; logging the land to pay back loans will require a keen balance between ecological stewardship and economic reality. Heil guesses that in perhaps 40 years the debt will be settled, leaving the next generation of Albionians to determine how many trees they want to cut.

These first 16,000 acres are just a foot in the door. Much of the land Hawthorne-Campbell owns is broken into outlying pieces, some with ocean views or near roads. From a real estate point of view, these pieces are perfect to subdivide and sell for profit; for Perkins and Heil, the plots are ideal to manage on a watershed level. According to Perkins, Hawhorne-Campbell just sold for development the last wildlife corridor that crosses between Albion River and Salmon Creek. They hope RFFI can step in before chainsaws and construction crews arrive.

What the forest will look like in 40 years—subdivided and just a memory or a working ecosystem controlled by locals—is still in question. But Heil, Perkins, and the “most unusual collaboration” of RFFI, are proving that while money may not grow on trees, whole forests just might be able to grow on money.

But Ohlsen’s had little time for self-indulgence. During the past eight years, the 26-year-old has organized direct actions at protests around the globe, planted gardens throughout his native Sebastopol, been arrested five times, helped found three nonprofits, and taught almost a dozen permaculture design workshops, all the while generating the occasional income through landscaping gigs.

His refusal to take, in his words, “the average American isolationist stance,” was spurred fresh out of high school. The upcoming “crisis” of Y2K lurked a couple years ahead, and Monsanto’s Terminator technology sounded a little too Blade Runner for him and his fellow nature-loving friends.

To help counteract a future of lonely bomb shelters and sterile seeds, they began scouting for front yards—the bigger the lawn, the better. Ohlsen’s first nonprofit, Planting Earth Activation, or PEA, landed on the welcome mats of Sebastopol with a simple plan: to give away gardens. He and his friends were door-to-door salespeople with green thumbs, hawking not a product but a free service—Food! Beauty! Ecological diversity!—to willing homeowners and others.

In three years, PEA planted organic heirloom seeds on over 100 plots. And it wasn’t your average geezer garden club: Ohlsen, one of a core team of about ten people, was just 19 when the group took root; of its 40 members most were, he says, between 17 and 20. One Sonoma County landowner thought the crew was doing such stellar work that he rented his Rohnert Park home to six of them at a reduced rate.

Though the majority of the gardens were for single-family homes, PEA was tapped by the city to initiate weed control after Sebastopol adopted a municipal no-spray ordinance. Instead of pulling the unwanted species out, Ohlsen’s team put a replacement landscape in, sheet mulching and planting one site with fig and Asian pear trees, another with pineapple-guava hedges.

Ohlsen says two factors led to the group’s breakup at the end of 2002: ego and finances. “It was the spirit of give-away, but it just wasn’t sustainable,” he reflects, noting that planting over 100 gardens isn’t cheap. For the first half of PEA, the gardeners paid for all the inputs, until they “wised up” and the homeowners funded their projects. “I think we were a little before our time.”

The collapse of one nonprofit led to another: Ohlsen immediately cofounded the RITES Project—Return Intentions Toward Ecological Sustainability—which established five school gardens and three service learning curricula while setting up a system that yielded compost tea, a valuable natural fertilizer for sustainable gardens.

The most unique project involved helping the city of Sebastopol acquire land for a skate park. For the past 14 years, local skaters had attempted to build permanent vert ramps and concrete bowls on three separate sites, all of which were shut down due to neighborhood outcry.

The RITES Project joined the fray, mediating the skater/non-skater divide and providing design and landscaping so the new park would be eligible for open space grants—which enabled the city to buy the land. The result is the Sebastopol Skate Park and Community Garden, as yet unbuilt but with a vision of a two-acre Garden of Eden punctuated by the clickity-clack of metal on metal and well-executed ollies.

“It’s a perfect function stack to have a skate park and a garden,” Ohlsen beams, invoking one of ecological design’s dearest principles—deriving multiple uses from one system. For instance, Ohlsen suggests planting a citrus grove above the concrete park to take advantage of the heat emanating from the thermal mass. A culvert leading from the road will require storm water management and erosion control; a community garden will overlap teenage territory with adults more concerned with soil than telling kids what to do; a model wetland restoration project and model food forest will demonstrate bioremediation and agroecology techniques. And of course, the “rough interface of kids and skateboards” necessitates a quickly accessible educational first-aid garden, advising fallen skaters with signs such as, says Ohlsen, “‘If you’re bleeding from a wound, grab this plant.’”

As the RITES Project continued to evolve, Ohlsen was shifting his energies from the local to the global, comprehending how—with the corporate patenting of genes, the epidemic of small-farmer suicides, and politically induced famine—feeding people is an increasingly radical practice.

PEA was in Seattle in 1999, converting a parking lot median into a potential stew of potatoes, dandelion, and garlic, its first guerrilla-gardened plot. “I looked around and saw every type of person, and I looked ahead and saw this massive police presence representing corporate global empire,” Ohlsen says. “It was this ‘click’ moment when I realized what I was up against. I decided to devote myself to the global justice movement.”

In 2003, Ohlsen launched into full-time organizing by founding a couple more political groups: Adopt-an-Activist, a community-supported program sponsoring activists and their projects, and the Sonoma County Green Bloc. The Green Bloc performs actions meant to make people think: “We felt it was vital to get alternatives out there for the global media to write about other than just street protests and the Black Block ‘breaking the windows,’” Ohlsen says. It was also a way, he explains, to offer seldom-seen solutions to other activists, who can easily burn out after years of hackneyed chants and recycled slogans.

The Sonoma-based eco-activists brought a vision of another world to free trade meetings. At the 2003 USDA-sponsored ministerial on biotechnology in Sacramento, the Green Bloc occupied and replanted the city’s oldest community garden, slated to be razed for condos. When Cancun hosted the WTO meeting, the Green Bloc teamed up with Mexican permaculturalists to create a functional, rock-and-reed, seven-barrel graywater system, a worm compost bin, and a solar oven. Just a couple months later, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit in Miami, Ohlsen brought the protest closer to home, blockading the Santa Rosa-branch Bank of America—a corporation belonging to three lobbying groups that helped draft and fund the free trade agreement—for nearly three hours.

During this same time, Ohlsen was teaching courses in permaculture, a system rooted in observing patterns and principles found in nature. He brought permaculture techniques to his street tactics and gave a dose of protest to these classes, too, in a combination called Earth Activist Training (EAT). At this past July’s G8 conference in Perthshire, Scotland, protestors built a temporary ecovillage to house the international activists based on a design by one of Ohlsen’s EAT classes. Using reclaimed, scavenged materials, they constructed a graywater system, composting toilets, kitchens, and neighborhoods set up to facilitate effective social organizing.

Though his students’ design made a big impression, Ohlsen himself stayed in Sonoma County. The previous summer’s Biotech Conference in San Francisco had been a turning point. For eight days, Ohlsen scrounged for sleep between planting sidewalk gardens in the low-income Bayview and participating in street actions, all the while being trailed by not-so subtle cops. He realized he was tired. These days, from the crescent-shaped strawbale home he shares with his wife, Leyah, in rural Sebastopol, he is coming full-circle, back to the uber-local: their garden. The past year has afforded him some down time to incubate new ideas based on business models rather than the nonprofit.

“One of my greatest lessons from PEA was, ‘How do you sustain a project?’” Ohlsen says. “Activists now need jobs where they’re doing their activism, and it seems easier to offer a service than to write a bunch of grants.” Towards this end, he is designing an educational program that begins with an internship, evolves into the students working with a client on a project that applies permaculture principles, and eventually morphs into a local, green cadre of professionals able to manage their own projects. Called the Permaculture Farm Internship Program, Ohlsen plans to run it (along with a program centered on peak oil and climate change) under an umbrella business with a familiar ring: Permaculture Earth Activation.

Catching and storing energy, deriving the details from the larger patterns, valuing the fertility inherent along the edges, Ohlsen strives to model his actions on his discipline, a personification of permaculture principles. He’s contributed a lifetime’s worth of work—and weathered the ebbs and flows of an activist career—inspired by an unwavering faith in his vision: “It’s possible to live in a just society and a healed environment. It’s within the human potential to design systems like that. The earth wants to be healed more than anything, and so I know she’ll work with us on this.”

Windborne Farm is neither monocrop nor market garden but 30 acres devoted to heirloom cereal grains such as rye, oats, wheat, kamut, and barley in the winter and millet and buckwheat in the summer. Greene also cultivates dry beans, dry corn, and pumpkin seeds. Not a veggie in sight.

“I just really like growing grains,” Greene says, not least because the fields are so beautiful in the late spring. “With vegetables, it’s a real hustle. Grains are in the ground for a long time. You don’t have to go to market three days a week.”

But a less-hectic growing cycle doesn’t translate into idle days. Windborne Farm produces about 15,000 pounds of grain and beans that Greene plants, maintains, cultivates, and mills almost singlehandedly. Though she does have two draft horses, Odin and Thor, to aid with the quarterly harvests, she rarely hires help. Not only would she rather work in the field than be a boss, she is uncomfortable with the class dynamics that come with relying on migrant farmworkers.

“It’s highly skilled labor, and I can’t afford to pay them what they deserve,” she explains. “I really don’t want to farm at the expense of other communities. Besides, how do we allow for immigrant labor to move on?” Greene says that after 14 years of working on farms, she created an operation that exemplifies a sustainable model of farming—and this means sustainability “in terms of a whole society, not just the land.”

Greene doesn’t compensate with heavy-duty machinery. “I’m a real small-scale, cottage industry, with low overhead. It doesn’t fit for me to have a $50,000 piece of equipment.”

The farm isn’t “certified anything,” but Greene’s crops are grown organically with some aspects of biodynamic farming, a holistic approach that uses principles that encourage the land to regenerate and heal. She maintains a high level of diversity, rotates crops, and composts.

“To be certified organic, you just have to not use chemicals,” Greene says. “Biodynamic farming is more of a whole ecology. It’s making an on-farm ecological cycle.” She believes the organic movement has become increasingly commercial. “I like biodynamics because it’s more spiritual than material.”

Greene worked at Mendocino County’s Live Power Farm in Covelo for two years, where she learned about “associative” economics: a localized system of mutual support between consumer and farmer. Members depend on the enrichment of the land for their survival and thus pay the farmers to steward it while also growing their food. The farmers bear less of a financial risk because money flows to them directly from members rather than through an impersonal market clogged with middlemen.

Greene is pioneering her own innovative relationships. Three years ago she started a program where people can lease one of her goats and receive all the products, such as soft cheeses, from that goat. Otherwise, Greene’s income, which amounts to about $2.00 per pound (“way more than I’d get selling wholesale”) is generated through her 90-member CSA. She does not supply high-end grocers or sell to nouveau organic restaurants. Instead she provides a monthly CSA bag that contains seven two-pound sacks of whole grains, freshly milled flours, hot cereal mix, beans, and corn. “If they don’t bake, it’s not going to work,” she laughs, adding that she tucks a few recipes into each bag—which she used to sew herself but laments that she no longer has the time.

Whether launching rent-a-goat or kindling a demand for “obscure” crops like teff, an Ethiopian grain distinguished as the world’s tiniest, Greene is growing a community of fans who have an intimate knowledge of their food. “Everyone gets mad at me if a crop fails,” she says. And in a culinary era characterized by TV dinners and wintertime peaches, provoking such an emotional connection just may be Greene’s biggest accomplishment.

As a naturalist with the Web of Life Field School, Kristen Morse finally had a job combining three of her passions—education, working with kids, and being outside. The personal rewards of passing on a legacy of conservation to her students rendered her paycheck more like a bonus, to the point where the unopened envelope gathered dust on the kitchen counter. “Isn’t that the sign of your ideal job?” she asks.

When you open up that neglected paycheck, it becomes obvious why Morse hasn’t bothered. After taxes, she earns about nine dollars an hour—equivalent to what a barista makes in San Francisco. No tips or benefits, either.

In his book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Yale University historian Paul Kennedy appeals for “nothing less than a re-education of humankind.” In Kennedy’s thinking, educators like Morse should be financially rewarded on the level of doctors, lawyers, CEOs.

This disconnect plagued Ed Grumbine during his 21 years as director of the Sierra Institute, an outdoor education program for college students. “It’s just a worst-case scenario of society not valuing teaching,” he says. “There’s never been a golden age when it wasn’t a problem.”

Historically a “woman’s” profession, teaching is often considered more as glorified babysitting than shaping the minds of the next generation. A new teacher’s average salary is $30,710 a year, lagging even lowly liberal arts majors in post-graduate earnings. According to a study by University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Richard Ingersoll, 33 percent of teachers switch careers within the first year, and almost half bail out within five.

Outdoor ed has its own set of disparaging assumptions. Leading hikes across beautiful backcountries six months a year isn’t considered a career in a culture of workaholics. But Morse’s on-season was comparable to a year’s worth of work. From nine to four, she led in-the-field ecology lessons, a day bookended by overseeing the eating, sleeping, and well-being of up to 140 kids, plus parents and teachers. There were night hikes, campfire entertainment, and only a few hours to tweak the lesson plan for the next location’s segment.

Grumbine says environmental ed is often relegated to the extra-curricular: “There’s the structural problem right there: sustainability isn’t integrated into our society in general, so why would we expect anything different from environmental education?” After all, he quips, a kid can’t prepare for the No Child Left Behind tests if he or she’s at camp for a week.

Perhaps, then, a solution lies in institutionalizing ecological literacy. Celeste Moyer thinks so. As the statewide manager of the California Regional Environmental Education Committee, Moyer has been instrumental in working with the state government to develop environmental skills and concepts as part of the content standards. She says that Pennsylvania is currently the only state with legislated environmental education standards.

One of the last bills Governor Davis signed before his recall was AB 1548, or the Education and the Environment Initiative, a landmark law that included what Moyer considers the biggest win—new science textbooks will contain environmental concepts. “This is the furthest we’ve gotten to have something concrete to formalize environmental education in the schools,” she says. Though the next state-adopted science textbook won’t be published for another six years, CREEC is writing a model curriculum and preparing California’s 1000 school districts to teach it.

Environmental education activists must become politically savvy, Grumbine argues: “If you want to change the school system, you have to be pragmatic.” Necessary for a change is understanding how policy is made and knowing who’s in charge. Join the local or state school board, he suggests.

Then there’s the money problem: schools are under pressure to keep the prices low. Web of Life Field School is one of the cheapest—about $275 per student for four days of instruction, room, and board—and still, cost is prohibitive for many urban public schools, paradoxically the children who tend to have the least exposure to the natural world.

“We need an advocate to pressure the state to give money to subsidize these schools,” Morse says. “The states should match the $250 per kid so we’re getting $500 per kid.” Currently, she says the school receives around a few hundred dollars annually in donated monies, maybe enough to cover one or two students’ tuitions. Grants are tricky: if more money comes in one year, more people are hired; if the grant scene isn’t so bountiful the next, those newbies are out of a job. Morse is independently designing a job position—a hybrid of fundraiser, lobbyist, and consultant between schools, the camp, the government, and the greater community—basically an outdoor ed superwoman to acquire sustainable sources of funding.

“Teachers burn out because they have these adult responsibilities like a personal life, husband, kids, a home,” Morse says. “You don’t even have a home,” and laughs: “Maybe it weeds out the money-hungry.”

Her sarcasm reflects the truth, a point Grumbine hits on as well. “The average American lifestyle is not sustainable, it’s not a model to head for. So automatically people interested in environmental education are probably going to have goals set lower on the totem pole to have a healthy standard of living. One part of creating alternatives is to live an alternative.”

Katherine “Kat” Steele has been trying to navigate this edge for the past five years since she left a job as a dot-com advertiser to become a teacher of permaculture design. The educational basis of permaculture—an integrated system for a sustainable lifestyle—is the two-week design course. Steele is scheduled to teach two courses and one seven-day teacher training throughout 2006.

Because she is not associated with a big company or institution, Steele is basically a freelance educator. And like most freelancers, she has a handful of other jobs to augment her primary passion, from web development to administrative work for the Oakland-based Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility. Then there are her unpaid contributions, such as helping organize the East Bay Permaculture Guild, which she co-founded three years ago. She says her catapult out of the corporate world has led to feeling spiritually and socially sustained—but not financially.

“Permaculture is not institutionalized—there’s not an ad in the newspaper right now for a permaculture designer,” Steele says. “Being a permaculture teacher is not a career at which you can work full time and make a lot of money. It’s a privilege, but it’s also a choice, and it’s not easy.”

A design course including meals and lodging averages $1,200. Steele’s projected income from teaching this year is about $6,500, after taxes. If she calculates that hourly, it comes out to a little over $15.00 an hour——not too shabby, she reflects, until she notes this does not include preparation time, marketing, putting up fliers, accounting, lining up presenters, arranging sites, and post-class obligations—following up with a contact list and project support.

The lack of financial resources, coupled with an infinite workload, prompted Steele to get creative. Instead of solo teaching, she’s taught her past 19 classes as a collective effort, sharing the responsibilities with at least one other designer. Though she realizes that dividing the work means splitting the profits, she maintains that the cooperative approach makes more sense given the subject. Permaculture ethics—such as “Share the surplus”— underlie each class. “We’re not keeping our profit,” she explains. “Surplus money is recycled. If the class makes more money than we budgeted, we’re not going to pay ourselves more. That money goes into a scholarship fund.”

One of the first courses she taught was at the Alameda Point Collaborative. Free scholarships were available to residents, most of whom were previously homeless or recovering from domestic abuse. In line with permaculture’s principles of observation and site-specific solutions, students applied their new knowledge to designing systems—among them a food forest, public nursery, and edible landscaping—for the neighborhood. Steele is co-teaching a second urban permaculture weekend course this spring. Part of the class will happen before students even set foot on-site: they are asked to fundraise $200 to contribute to a scholarship fund for students wanting to participate but prohibited by the cost.

Regardless of the profit (or lack of), Steele is inclined to teach anyway. “Generosity of time, and generosity in general, is something we need to cultivate in our culture,” she says, confident that what she offers will be returned eventually. “That’s just the way the world works. It’s a pattern of nature.”

Undervaluing teaching, however, is not a natural pattern but a social perturbation. And until some grand paradigmatic upheaval in consciousness occurs, the interim offers a hodge-podge of pseudo-solutions: institutionalize eco-curriculum, find more money, create alternative models, scrape by. Steele argues that sustainability should not only be mandated for schools but for every citizen as job training. “It’s safety, it’s survival. This is a public right to have this information.”

Amidst the hectic joy of a week turning on scores of kids to the great outdoors, Morse recalls her mantra: “The show must go on.” If education engenders understanding, inspiring a love that in turn motivates a conservation ethic, it is essential to have teachers eager to pass on their knowledge. Whether the income flows or not, the show must go on, now more than ever.

Check out Steele’s urban permaculture design course, happening over six weekends this spring at the Alameda Point Collaborative: http://www.apcollaborative.org/classes.htm. You can visit the Web of Life Field School at www.wolfschool.org.

Monday:

Naturalists arrive and familiarize themselves with trails. There are always last-minute changes to lesson plans.

Tuesday:

Students arrive, between 80 to 100 kids, divided between four or five naturalists. The students move into their cabins (“They bring these enormous suitcases. It’s really cute,” says Morse), are split into groups, and take a two-hour hike. The hike sets the tone for the rest of the week. In the late afternoon the kids play, then eat dinner afterwards. Then comes campfire, a 50/50 mix of science-based songs and stories and pure entertainment. Each naturalist has an assigned night for “tuck-ins,” when they go to the cabins and read a story or soothe fears.

Wednesday:

Hikes begin with a skit or song. If they’re in Santa Cruz, Wednesday is spent at the creek, with the next day a trip from the woods to the beach at Natural Bridges, so students explore two different habitats. During the day they are journaling, writing poems, reading stories, and playing games. Come dark, they go on a night hike, no flashlights allowed.

Thursday:

Another full day on the trail. Morse often initiates a solo hike, during which kids follow cards she’s laid out. Capping the day is a Town Hall Meeting, with hypothetical controversies such as whether to build a mall near riparian habitat. The naturalists play developers, and the kids become senior citizens, unemployed construction workers, business owners.

Friday:

Kids write a letter to themselves about their memories for the week and their goals for next year. Morse tries to ensure that the concept of interdependence will survive the drive out of the woods, suggesting, for example, using a travel mug instead of paper cups, an act that over time conserves tons of resources.

Learn more about WOLF at www.wolfschool.org.

Ask any activist about egos in the movement and prepare to stay awhile. The book by late journalist Robert Hunter, The Greenpeace to Amchitka, is no exception but it’s probably more entertaining. The activist crew is warned early on to avoid self-importance with its accompanying and potentially destructive loss of perspective. But the advice is hard to heed. Thirty-four years after The Greenpeace’s maiden voyage, Hunter remembers the vessel as “a floating paranoid grandiosity trap.”

In 1971, Vancouver was a convenient border-hop for Vietnam War draft dodgers and was home to the world’s largest expatriate crowd. When the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, a Vancouver-based anti-war group, heard about the US plan to detonate a hydrogen bomb——250 times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima—underground off Amchitka, an island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, they chartered an 80-foot halibut boat to get there first. Aboard the temporarily rechristened Greenpeace were twelve men—the grizzled captain, the engineer, and ten “eco-freaks,” most in their twenties—armed with a Geiger counter and good intentions.

Everything seemed lined up for a successful two-week protest run: a strong web of media contacts, homebound wives coordinating the effort, even a nod from the Prime Minister and broad public support in Canada. They gobbled their rations too quickly and were amateur sailors at best, but bigger unknowns began to overshadow the countless trivial annoyances. Is Fineberg, the only non-Canuck on board, an undercover CIA agent? Is it more effective to try to change the system from within the Establishment or on the outside-or in the middle of the Pacific? If they manage to reach the three-mile territorial limit off Amchitka and the bomb is still scheduled, what do they do then—jump in a skiff and pray to their oft-invoked Tolkienian characters?

When the test is delayed, the struggle becomes all about continuing on or turning around. Hunter, wondering at what point one has fulfilled an obligation, wryly considers titling the book, “Cop-out on the Way to Amchitka.” The journey took 43 days, most en route. The looming detonation becomes almost inconsequential, as communal conflicts supercede the big blast. Hunter, only 29 when they embarked, becomes at times a nearly insane observer. In true gonzo fashion, his story of overlapping personalities and ideologies is Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test with a Green streak. With photos every few pages, readers get visual candy to document the tension and the triumph.

The Greenpeace sailed before the days so-called ecoterrorists and environmental nonprofits were commonplace. Today the international nonprofit that was born of the Amchitka protest celebrates Hunter, who died of prostate cancer last year, as the person who “invented Greenpeace.” One can’t help but wonder what the author who described the trip as being “as much about ego as ecology” would have to say to that.

In Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming, Winona LaDuke delves into how tribes fight against the destruction of their home/holy lands. When her exploration journeys off the map into other realms of the sacred—imagery and names, ancestors’ bones, DNA—she discovers that whenever there’s “a problem of two spiritual paradigms and one dominant culture,” irony abounds. Museums conserve sacred objects with toxins, endangering the health of those who repatriate them—Kachinas so contaminated scientists classify them as toxic waste. Academic researchers try to save a genetic record instead of providing essential services to those who could perpetuate the genes. Prehistoric stands of wild rice become threatened by pollen drift, mining, and bio-pirates.

Though filled with a standard cast of bad guys—even a neo-Nazi——towards the book’s end LaDuke offers up a few stories that aren’t atrocious. Some tribes are regaining the power to define what’s sacred, to the spiritual, ecological, economic, and cultural benefit of their communities. The Nez Perce, for example, are buying land optioned by white Washingtonians. Diabetic elderly Ojibwe are receiving traditional foods from a native-run program. Wind energy on the Pine Ridge reservation has the potential to produce 4,500 times the electricity residents use; the Lakota recently signed a $300-million wind development contract.

LaDuke charges most Americans would be hard-pressed to name ten tribes. She’s probably right. But read her newest book——full of almost too many details——and you’ll have dozens of vulgar abuses, plus a couple bright spots, to go along with the names.

Up for an escapist read with a bit more depth than your average thriller? Although built on a ridiculous premise (woman gives birth to hybrid bonobo/human child), Primal Tears hits enough sociopolitical bull’s-eyes to stay absorbing all the way through. Sage has an idyllic childhood on a multigenerational Oregon commune (a couple crusty hippie elders in attendance, along with Mom and stepdad—Sage’s real dad swings through the branches at a bonobo sanctuary in San Jose). But the parents grow increasingly isolated and protective, and it turns out they’ve got good reasons—the local Christian right isn’t thrilled with Ms. Combo Gene. The three take off bushwhacking through the Trinities, escaping helicopters and rifle-toting searchers. After that, things rapidly go global, and soon Sage is traveling worldwide at the behest of a Bill Gates-like billionaire, seeking support for “my people”—bonobos—by urging her other people to put a damper on the overpopulation and habitat destruction imperiling all creatures. Feminist politics mixes in, along with tree sits, living off the land, and lots of partying. Surprisingly, the left is often as craven as the right. Leave this book on your plane seat and surprise the next passenger.

This is hardly a new question for Shyaam Shabaka, a 64-year-old former public health worker devoted to solving the paradox of Richmond’s inner city: in a community “totally inundated with environmental and social problems,” he says, the low- income populations most adversely affected are usually “the least engaged” in finding solutions.

“The work I’m doing now is public health work,” he explains. “I don’t think people have yet understood how things like asthma, obesity, and lack of education parallel poverty.”

Earlier, at an Earth Day celebration of 2,000 people, Shabaka demonstrated his beehives and planted a host of veggie crops. Our destination now is EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, almost six acres of creek-bordered land Shabaka has spent the past three years developing into a hub for youth to learn about growing food and the local ecology.

As we pass through central Richmond, Shabaka points out the lawn in front of Kaiser Permanente Hospital where he sells organic produce to health care professionals and patients. We drive on through the Iron Triangle, an area denoted by rusting railroad tracks and a high concentration of pollution—the combined efforts of ChevronTexaco, General Chemical, and other industries that have moved business elsewhere but left their toxins behind. Shabaka’s other farmer’s market is here, in this home to poor blacks and immigrants, many of them Southeast Asian. As we roll through streets bordered by one-story houses where few flowers—or anything green—punctuate the gray of the sidewalks and blur of hazy sky, he draws my attention to a pair of sneakers hanging from a telephone wire.

“Those shoes are to mark territory,” he says, explaining that neighborhood gang members are kings inside their boundaries, yet know little of the opportunities beyond their hard-won turf. “Right now they’re like dogs fighting over a fire hydrant. I want to show them the whole world is theirs, that they have a responsibility—to the birds, to the trees, and to other people in it, too.”

Shabaka’s EcoVillage Farm, a couple of miles east of the inner city, offers urban residents an altered reality in which food is pulled from the ground (not plastic-wrapped on liquor store shelves), water flows in tributaries across the land (not from leaking faucets), and as much attention is bestowed on cultivating community (not maintaining deadly sidewalk wars) as is given to growing the squash and the peppers and the beehives. Though teenagers already attend EcoVillage workshops ranging from creek restoration to social justice, the site is still in its early phases. As Shabaka puts it, “We are being while we’re becoming.” Part of being includes birth; in late April, EcoVillage Farm had two week-old black lambs frolicking among its well-established rare heirloom fruit trees and the tall, soft grass.

The process of acquiring the property began almost three years ago, when the former owner preferred Shabaka’s proposal of using the land to work with kids to a housing development. After transforming multiple Bay Area inner-city lots into community gardens, only to have the owners decide to sell the newly productive soil, Shabaka realized that securing a permanent swatch of soil was a necessary step. “Building one community garden after another was certainly not sustainable,” he recalls. “I had to reflect on what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing—transferring knowledge and experience to youth to help them.”

Now, bolstered by a loan from the Trust for Public Land, a grant from the Coastal Conservancy, and a recent grant from the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Shabaka can proceed with his vision: creating a butterfly garden, a wetland, and an agroforestry area; removing the ivy suffocating the native buckeyes and laurels along San Pablo Creek; making earthen structures and constructing a classroom yurt, building a bigger greenhouse and carving one continuous trail along the creek.

“We’re working on a timeline of five years, but 90 percent of the work will be done in two,” Shabaka says. “Each new thing will be an educational project that will enhance the area and the community.”

The approach is straightforward: rather than bombard kids with an onslaught of eco-buzzwords—”sustainable,” “permaculture,” “organic,” “watershed”—these vital concepts are demonstrated through hands-on doing. “People take a situation that is very simple and complicate it. It’s just growing food.” Shabaka smiles. “These kids on the corner in North Richmond? They are very, very bright, but using big words is intimidating, so we have to find points of relation.”

To teach about watersheds and agroecology, for example, Shabaka and a Richmond High School biology class are trying to figure out what’s behind the fish parasite explosion in the Sacramento Delta. To test their hypothesis that pesticide runoff is a major factor, students caught sample fish and sent them to a pathology lab at UC Davis.

“The learning that will take place around this is incredible,” Shabaka says, noting that this one project is not only a lesson in chemistry, watersheds, and the disaster of monocropping, but it’s also about environmental justice. The parasites affect bluegills, a species commonly caught by Asian and African-American subsistence fishermen and taken home for dinner. The parasite devastates local bluegill populations but doesn’t harm the black bass, another Delta fish species—one that, unlike the bluegill, brings in large amounts of money from sport fisherman. If the parasite affected the black bass, Shabaka argues, the problem would have been solved long ago.

After exploring EcoVillage Farm, we travel northeast towards De Anza High School. Burnt rubber “donuts” decorate the parking lot; 20 feet away lie 12 acres of meadow, fertile soil ready for student-led food production, one of Shabaka’s many ongoing projects.

EcoVillage is visited daily by De Anza students fulfilling their “civic learning” requirement. Though many, particularly Latino and Asian students, have recent connections in their families to farming, they still must be “reintroduced to the land and environment from a different perspective,” not as hired hands working for a profiting boss but as engaged decision-makers cooperating to help crops grow. This is especially true, Shabaka says, for African-American youth, whose grandparents often carry demeaning, violent associations with working the soil.

Amidst the farmer’s markets, workshops, lamb-birthings, and fish experiments, Shabaka is organizing car washes, bake sales, and general “beggings” with junior high students to raise money to attend the World Summit for Children and the Environment in Japan at the end of July. “Kids are seedlings,” he says, and just like the starter plants in organic soil in the EcoVillage greenhouse, they require healthy surroundings in order to survive and, better yet, thrive.

Back in the Iron Triangle, where North Richmond residents deal with the death of community members daily, there has to be a reason—something to care about—to want to stay alive. “If today is hell, you might as well check out of here today. And the youth,” Shabaka shrugs knowingly, “suffer myopia anyway. But if you can get them to see how a seed is growing, you can translate that to our selves, our lives.” In the end, EcoVillage is about something greater than how to grow food or identify native plants.

Shabaka sums up the vision: “Basically, it’s instilling hope.”

Nordhaus and Shellenberger use global warming as the string through the essay, and offer their own institute, Apollo Alliance—a project calling for a $300 billion public-private investment over the next decade—as a solution to transition from reliance on oil to an economy built on clean energy. I spoke with Shellenberger several times.

Katie Renz: You and Ted have thrown the environmental movement into a sort of identity crisis. What was your intention?

Michael Shellenberger: What we’re trying to do is undermine the assumption that in order to get something you have to talk about it. The Bush Administration doesn’t feel the need to be so literal. It doesn’t go out there and say, “We want to privatize Social Security because it’s part of our effort to destroy the federal government and create a situation where Republicans dominate American governance for the next fifty years.” They say, “There’s a crisis in Social Security and action must be taken now.” Environmentalists need to overcome their literalness around what the problem is and how to talk about it.

So with “Death Of,” we said, “What if we conceptualize this problem differently, as a problem of underinvestment in the clean energy industries of the future?” We need to create a post-environmental progressive movement that tells people what they can have and what they can be.

But can massive problems like global warming be addressed through visionary reframing and investment without passing legislation?

How the heck are you going to get action on global warming if all three branches of the government are in the hands of anti-environmental extremists? We need a wholesale transformation of the global energy economy. This is not like dealing with smog in Los Angeles. This is a global systemic problem. Even if the United States makes the transition, we need to have a politics that helps transfer the technology or increase technological assistance to places like China and India.

While there can be very powerful economic benefits to a regulatory approach, it just doesn’t really work politically anymore. There’s no constituency out there saying, “We want to see more regulation.” If you lead with investment, and you say, “Look, we need to make these strategic investments in the industries of the future,” then you’re in a position to say, “And we need to make sure the American people get a return on their investment.” That’s where the regulation comes in.

Have you been surprised by the response “Death of” continues to provoke?

We thought that it would cause a kerfluffle within the environmental activist community, but we didn’t know that it would become a projection screen for so many progressive hopes and fears. And we’re surprised how widely read it’s been outside environmental communities.

It seems your critique would be easy fodder for the anti-environmental right to say, “See, even environmentalists admit defeat.”

Well, there are really two responses. On the one hand, The Economist read it as an endorsement of free-market environmentalism, and various bloggers have read it as an endorsement of building a broader left-wing coalition, neither of which we actually said. But mostly the right has attacked it, because we describe global warming as one of the great ecological crises of our time, and for the deniers out there, it’s not something that fits into their worldview.

How has the essay affected the environmental community?

I think the effect has been overwhelmingly positive. Before we wrote that essay, there was more debate in the American Library Association over the archival storage of newspapers than there was in the environmental community over the future of the human race. Will the environmental community take this as a sign that it needs to evolve into something more expansive, powerful, and relevant? I don’t know, but there certainly is a very big desire to continue the conversation, especially among young people.

Some nonprofits are worried that this critique is going to affect their funding.

I’ve seen no evidence that anybody has stopped giving money to environmental causes because of our essay, and if it took our essay to get environmental funders and leaders to wake up to the fact that they are weaker today than they’ve been in 40 years, that’s great. We’re in a situation in the United States where 30 years ago Richard Nixon was signing environmental laws, and now the Bush Administration says global warming is not real. Pretending that we just need to tweak our message is a form of denial every bit as serious as denying that global warming exists.

If you want to make yourself look weak, tell people that the house is on fire and they just need to get a glass of water to put it out. Environmentalists tell people that global warming could mean the end of the human species and the way to prevent the end of the human species is to use fluorescent light bulbs and to buy a Prius? We need to tell people the truth. It’s going to require a transformation of the economy that’s also going to end up creating millions of jobs worldwide, creating economic development in countries that have been left behind.

The main solution you and Ted offer in “Death of” is the Apollo Alliance.

We deliberately shied away from offering a ten-point plan. There are a dozen ten-point plans that come out every year by this or that progressive or environmentalist. And it never adds up to anything because it never grapples with the fundamental assumptions. So we still have people coming back to us saying well, what should environmentalists do? Our point is we should stop being environmentalists and move on to something more powerful and expansive and less arbitrary. I mean, what is the environment? Why is AIDS in Africa not an environmental problem but global warming is? We have to ask ourselves, if what we include and exclude is totally arbitrary, then why is it even useful anymore? Better to step back and figure out what kind of country we want for ourselves and what kind of values will animate that politics. Apollo was offered as an alternative to the I-have-a-nightmare politics that’s dominated environmental and progressive politics for the last 40 years.

It sounds like you’re advocating not so much for environmentalism’s death as for putting it out of its misery so a more successful, solutions-based movement can be born.

We come from environmentalism; we were as trapped by the categories as everybody else in the movement. We’re deeply sympathetic to how hard it is to break out of that thinking. But we have to do it, for the future of the planet and—scratch that—really for the future of the human species; the planet’s gonna be just fine no matter what.

The death that needs to happen is the death of an identity as environmentalists. And that’s what freaks out the 1960 baby-boom generation so much. They’re so wrapped up in their environmentalist identity. Plus, the baby-boom generation, which is in power, is deeply tied up with their own sense of themselves as youth. To have these thirties-something guys come along and say that this isn’t working anymore and we need to change felt very threatening for them.

The one thing that both our supporters and our critics don’t focus on is that this is a really old problem in the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. While we all learn in grade school that human beings are animals, we forget it when we go about our daily lives. If we are truly part of the earth, then why are environmentalists so concerned about habitats for animals and not concerned about habitat for human beings? There’s a whole bunch of African-Americans and Latinos in California who don’t have adequate housing. At the very definitional level, those are environmental concerns.

Isn’t the environmental justice movement bringing the social and the ecological together?

The environmental justice movement raised everybody’s hopes that it was going to make the connections. But what we end up seeing is a focus on a very narrow set of concerns, namely refinery emissions, lead paint, toxic waste sites. It’s not considered an environmental justice concern, for the most part, to be advocating major economic development—a jobs program, housing, homelessness.

Would you identify more as a progressive then?

I consider myself a post-environmental progressive. “Environmental” simply to acknowledge where I came from; “post” because we’re moving on; and “progressive” because that’s what we want—progress.