Richard Heinberg, a core faculty member at New College and an expert on peak oil and energy vulnerability, collaborated with Sebastopol Mayor Larry Robinson this fall. As prices for oil and gas shoot up and supply runs low, cash-strapped cities need to save energy now—so they are desperate for a plan for tomorrow. The Heinberg/Robinson partnership made sense: Heinberg wanted to give his students real-world experience in sustainable planning and Robinson wanted ideas. The Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, compiled by Rob Hopkins and students in Ireland influenced Heinberg, and he outlined a similar project to students at the beginning of the school year.

Sebastopol presented an ideal opportunity to create the first Powerdown template, because far-seeing Robinson had already formed a Citizen’s Advisory Group on Environmental Vulnerability to advise the City Council about how the city could safeguard public safety, maintain public facilities, supply basic services, and regulate land use, even in the event of energy interruptions and huge price increases. An ambitious solar Sebastopol program is also in the works, with a goal of meeting a third of the city’s energy demands within the next year by producing electricity on the city’s rooftops. In addition to being longtime friends with Heinberg, Robinson has done reading and research on his own that has contributed to Sebastopol’s goal of heading in a “sustainable direction.”

Under the shade of a large oak, surrounded by gardens of food crops and flowers, a group of New College alums listen to a quick outline of the project. The students divided city services and then researched their assigned departments in depth to estimate how each service will be affected by higher gas prices or lowered energy availability. The research will provide a framework to develop short- and long-term response. Wesley Caddell, who was involved with biodiesel production and distribution before his Powerdown work, is researching transportation and solid waste. He admits to running around the house at night now, unplugging all the appliances. Transportation dovetails quite nicely with his thesis on biofuels and algae. Caddell is studying the feasibility of biofuel for city vehicles and how costly it might be to create extensive and usable public transportation. Admitting to having a knack for, and love of research, he is busy laying the groundwork to deal with these issues.

Meanwhile Amanda Green has found in her focus on water and wastewater that 80 plants are using algae to treat wastewater. Greene uses the term “systems thinking,” linking her findings with Caddell’s. Her very slight accent hints of a foreign upbringing, and she voices appreciation for the perspective on community that she gained growing up in Brazil.

The quote she reads from the Kinsale proposal silences the audience: “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood—teach them to long for the immensity of the ocean.” This is a fine way to think about weaning the oil-dependent public.

Hank Flannery returned to school, even while holding down a full-time job with a medical technology company. Fittingly, he is researching fire and emergency services. He discovered that many people who deal with fire and emergency in Sebastopol live in Mendocino and Lake counties and will have trouble with the long commute should the price of gas climb significantly. This is leading Flannery to address Sebastopol’s prohibitive housing costs.

Amber Mamakos is focusing on food security, which fits nicely with her background in nutrition and agriculture. Do enough farmland and resources exist to grow a majority of what’s needed to feed Sebastopol’s population? Where does the city get its food now? Can Sebastopol funnel money to local producers to increase its chances of finding a positive answer to the first question?

We break into two groups, with Heinberg the scribe for ours. We sit on folding chairs in a circle and shout out ideas for a post-carbon world: Complementary currencies&community-supported hitchhiking&rooftop gardens&work from home& methane harvesting&. The ideas come fast and furious, and this last suggestion generates good-natured laughs and the question, “What are we going to do, fasten bags on pigs’ butts?”

Why not hook up those gym exercise machines to storage batteries and inverters and let that energy be put to use? Tax fossil fuels for free public transit& gray water systems&car-free zones&the list grows. This is, after all, a gathering of well-educated people aware of our energy vulnerabilities. How, I wonder, do we get the message out to people who long to leave public transportation for the ease of a personal car? Or the people who drive Hummers as their kids sit in the back seat watching TV?

Getting the message beyond a small sector of society is vital, and that is why Powerdown is so unique and vital. Targeting cities is one way to reach the greater public while changing city programs from the inside out. The infrastructure of society needs to be rearranged with energy vulnerability in mind. Flannery tells me that the people who work for the city are at varying stages of receptiveness. When the Powerdown folks meet with city leaders they are faced with an educational task before they can begin to extract the information they need in order to give back useful advice in return. Educating will remain one of the foremost responsibilities to initiate change. Yet decreasing energy use is not a hard pill to swallow; cities are always interested in cutting costs, and though some energy plans, such as solar, require an initial output, long-term plans are cost- as well as energy-saving.

“There are so many factors that we are not even aware of,” Robinson cautions. “Nobody really knows an easy systematic way to figure out all the effects of rising energy prices.” Consider, for instance, the precise costs and energy required for a specific piece of machinery. Where does it come from, how is it repaired, where do its parts come from, what else does it need to continue working∧ can it and its parts continue to be manufactured and at what cost?

Contemplating a post-carbon world is overwhelming. Of the 15 who began the project, 11 dropped out. I asked the four remaining what kept them motivated. “Sometimes I spread myself too thin to be really part of something,” says Mamakos, “but it feels amazing to be part of a solution with this.”

And luckily there is much activity in Northern California surrounding peak oil preparation. Sonoma has become the first county in the nation to have all of its municipalities pledge to reduce greenhouse gases, which Robinson notes is pretty much one and the same with reducing dependency on fossil fuels. Just this past month, for perhaps the first time in history, Sonoma, Marin, Mendocino, and Napa county officials gathered to learn about energy vulnerability at a summit arranged exclusively for them. The interest in signing on to the next Powerdown template was high. The next summit, in September, will be open to the general public in addition to city officials.

Says Greene, “It is our role and responsibility to help our government out, and that role and responsibility is to be vocal and take action.” The adoption of an energy vulnerability plan by a city will pave the way for other cities and lead to some noise in our federal government about these issues. Heinberg intends to continue offering the project to students, using a different city each time, so that finally every city in the greater Bay Area may have a template for change.

The Powerdown Project (www.powerdownproject.org) will release its first general template, called Citizen’s Toolbox, in mid-August. Residents can use the template to bring energy vulnerability to the top of crowded city council agendas, instigate Peak Oil resolutions, or create ad-hoc advisory committees such as the one in Sebastopol. Through consultations with officials and community leaders, the students are also completing a Municipal Template, available in mid-September, to identify energy vulnerabilities and provide short- and long-term solutions. The project will provide interns to Bay Area communities in January 2007.

As the ideas proposed in the discussion group float around my mind, I stare at the highway unfolding in front of me, surrounded by other single drivers, oblivious or oppressed by our energy future. I vow to return to biking as my city transportation and to water my garden, where I’m trying to coax some food from the earth.

But consideration of such studies might soon become possible if a new rule by the EPA is allowed to stand. The change, which became law in late January, would allow the EPA to consider studies in which humans are deliberately exposed. Why? So the EPA might change its standards of how much pesticide exposure is too much for human health; the pesticide industry has long fought EPA guidelines for use and exposure, believing the agency’s figures are too conservative.

The EPA emphasizes that the new rule prohibits studies on pregnant women and children and sets up a review board to determine whether future studies meet the new guidelines. But critics say that the law has loopholes that would encourage more testing of non-pregnant adults. “The new rule explains under what circumstances [the EPA] would accept studies on humans. Previously, they didn’t accept such reports at all,” says Brian Hill, staff scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). “We believe this violates what Congress has told them to do, so our only recourse at the federal level is to sue, and we might also seek stronger state protections as well.”

Watchdog groups also protested. “The guidelines do not prohibit [using data from] pesticide experiments with children who are in orphanages, foster care, or have handicaps,” says Michael Susko of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research, “and [they] also appear to allow for third-party data which may be acquired from third-world studies that may not follow ethical practices. The use of such studies can make us complicit in such practices.”

At least 22 studies previously submitted to the EPA that had been barred from consideration during past administrations stand to gain acceptance under the new rule.

In one of these studies, people were instructed to take pesticides with their morning orange juice, according to a recent report by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Congressmember Henry Waxman (D-CA), who oppose the new rule. In another such experiment, students and other healthy young adults were enclosed in a room and gassed with a chloropicrin—an active ingredient in tear gas—for an hour at a time over four consecutive days. Several environmental organizations expect to mount legal challenges this March.

Critics of the rule say that part of what’s driving the issue is the use of “the interspecies rule of ten,” which is used to translate the results of animal studies into thresholds for pesticides in humans. A standard routinely used in toxicity calculations, it starts with the level at which animals experience toxic effects then multiplies that level by a “safety factor” of ten to convert animal exposure levels to allowable human exposure levels.

Next, researchers must multiply by another factor of ten (called the “intraspecies factor”) to account for the fact that even among human beings, people differ in how much of a pesticide they can tolerate. For example, asthmatics are often more sensitive to inhaled chemicals than the general population.

Finally, the Food Protection Act of 1996, which only recently has begun affecting the EPA’s decision-making, requires another safety factor of ten to account for the fact that children are often more sensitive to chemical exposures because of their size and continuing development.

“When you’re basing your testing on animals, you’re talking about a safety factor of 1,000. This drives the pesticide companies nuts,” says Jan Hasselman, an attorney at Earthjustice. He adds that by testing pesticides in humans, pesticide manufacturers could argue for exposure levels that are up to ten times less stringent than today’s, because they wouldn’t have to use the interspecies factor in their toxicity calculations.

Critics of the new regulations also worry that chemical companies might rush to start new pesticide studies unfettered even by what they consider loophole-ridden rules, because the current EPA rule holds that any studies begun before April don’t even have to satisfy the new guidelines to be considered admissible.

“Any study started before April 7 is considered an existing study,” says Hasselman. “There’s an incentive for pesticide manufacturers to go out tomorrow and start their studies,” he adds. “And with the EPA clearing up uncertainty with a rule like this that has big loopholes, the pesticide manufacturers will increase their reliance on human testing,” says Hasselman.

The rule’s opponents are also quick to add that they are not against studies that look at incidental pesticide exposure to populations living and working near places that are sprayed, as long as the studies are carried out ethically. PANNA’s communications director Stephenie Hendricks is careful to point out that such studies, carried out properly, could help people regularly exposed to pesticides, such as farm workers and people living in rural areas. But, as Earthjustice’s Hasselman puts it, “That’s a far cry from paying someone to spray pesticide in their eyes.”
MAKING CONTACT:

http://www.epa.gov/oppfead1/guidance/human-test.htm

http://www.panna.org/resources/humanTesting.html

The new location is farther away from environmentally sensitive Laguna de Santa Rosa and closer to US 101, factors tribal chairman Greg Sarris says were primary considerations for the shift. “If we are indeed going to be keepers of the land, we have to demonstrate that now,” says Sarris, who refers to himself as a “staunch environmentalist” and hopes that his tribe can use profits from the casino to acquire and preserve open space in the North Bay.

The move marks the third site for the tribe, which previously abandoned a controversial Sears Point site and donated its options on 1,700 acres of wetlands to the Bay Institute before acquiring the hay field site in 2003. Meanwhile, plans for the casino continue to move through a federal environmental review process, with a draft statement due out in late spring, at which point the public will be able to make additional comments on the draft.

The new site was the subject of an October 2005 meeting that made it clear critics were not appeased by the change. The Stop the Casino 101 Coalition continues to vigorously oppose the project, and press liaison Marilee Montgomery said the group had retained “one of the best environmental litigators in the state” to challenge the project as it moves forward.

H.R. Downs, president of the OWL Foundation, which advocates for a sound groundwater management plan in Sonoma County, says the new site has many of the same problems as the hay field. The casino would remain atop an area that Downs says is in extreme groundwater overdraft. “It’s highly irresponsible to put this in,” says Downs. “This casino was never planned for.”

But some mainstream environmental groups are pleased with the move. “In terms of land use, we see this as a preferable site,” says Daisy Pistey-Lyhne of Greenbelt Alliance. “But we are still watching to see that our main land use concerns are addressed through the environmental review process.” Pistey-Lyhne says she believes other groups are waiting to see what the draft environmental impact statement reveals.

The tribe still has hoops to leap through beyond the EIR: The land must be put into trust by the federal government and the tribe has to negotiate and sign a state gaming compact with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger before the casino can move forward. Sarris says he hopes the final EIR will be available early next year, at which point he says the tribe will be able to work on architectural drawings for the gaming resort.

Recently, the Assembly health and toxics committee held its first hearing on AB 319, a bill introduced by Assemblymember Wilma Chan (D-Alameda), that would ban the manufacture and sale of toys and childcare products containing phthalates and bisphenol A. These chemicals are found in hard, clear-plastic bottles, dishes, teething rings, vinyl books, and beach balls. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are also found in the bodies of most Americans.

EPA research biologist Earl Gray testified that scientists have conducted lab tests on phthalates for 25 years, and findings have shown disruption in the production of testosterone that can result in low sperm count, malformations of sexual organs, and disruption of the endocrine system. Biologist Frederick von Saal, who has conducted dozens of studies of bisphenol A, told legislators that no state or nation has assessed the literature on the harmful effects of low doses. Bisphenol A has been associated with changes in brain, pancreas, and thyroid function, as well as hormone levels and behavior. It has been linked with the increased secretion of insulin, which can lead to Type II diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Testifying against the bill were chemical and toy industry representatives and their own researchers. Jim Lamb, senior vice president of the Weinberg Group, an organization representing manufacturers, said that the research findings were not relevant because testing has been done on rats using much higher chemical concentrations. Compelling manufacturers to make products with the “least toxic alternative” would force them to use chemicals that have been tested even less than the compounds in question, he said. Toxicologist Lorenz Rhomberg from the American Plastics Council said no regulatory body has restricted the use of bisphenol A, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Products Safety Commission.

Some manufacturers, such as Evenflo and Medela, already have phased out phthalates and bisphenol A in baby bottles and other products. Newer products sport “PVC free” labels, meaning that they don’t include the polyvinyl chloride plastics that contain phthalates. These compounds have been banned in the European Union and 14 other nations. After the hearing, AB 319 was killed in committee. Chan is considering reintroducing the bill or attaching it to a different piece of legislation.

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Children’s exposure to toxic substances has been the focus of other activity in Sacramento: In January, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) made California the first state to categorize secondhand tobacco smoke as a “toxic air contaminant.” This ruling may revive legislative efforts to ban drivers from smoking when children are in the car and curb smoking in multifamily dwellings.

CARB’s ruling was bolstered by the California EPA’s new research findings documenting a causal link between secondhand smoke exposure and pre-term delivery; asthma induction in adults; breast cancer in younger, primarily pre-menopausal women; heart disease and lung and nasal sinus cancer in adults; and sudden infant death syndrome. The report, which underwent a four-year scientific review process that included public comment, contained the first-ever outdoor monitoring of secondhand smoke exposure near designated smoking areas in California.

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Children are the winners in California Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s lawsuit against 71 major retailers and distributors of costume jewelry containing lead. The businesses, which sell the lead-laced baubles mainly to children and teens, failed to warn consumers about lead-related health risks, a requirement under California’s Proposition 65. In January, many of the retailers reached an agreement with the state that includes a $1.8 million settlement, new standards for lead-free and low-lead content jewelry by 2008, and an industry-financed education program. While many companies agreed to the settlement, litigation continues with Wal-Mart, Jordache, Papaya Stores, Gerson Co., and Royal Items.

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Meanwhile, Proposition 65, which requires warning labels on foods containing chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects, faces a potential challenge from the federal government. In December, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the National Uniformity for Food Act. The bill has a good chance of passing in the House, where over 226 representatives, including Central Valley lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, cosponsored it. In the Senate, its fate is uncertain; Dianne Feinstein is urging her congressional colleagues to reject the proposal.

The National Uniformity for Food Act would prohibit states—after a three-year waiting period—from establishing or continuing food safety warning rules that differ from FDA rules. States could petition the FDA for an exemption, but they must prove to federal regulators that the stricter rules “would not unduly burden interstate commerce.” The legislation would effectively gut the food-labeling component of California’s Prop 65.

For his part, Lockyer is pressing for greater enforcement of Prop 65, including forcing french fry and potato chip manufacturers to post warning notices over the chemical acrylamide and demanding that canned tuna producers post labels warning of mercury. Both of these represent ongoing California lawsuits that would collapse with the passage of the National Uniformity for Food Act. For more information, contact California League for Environmental Enforcement Now (CLEEN) at (510) 654-6148 or info@cleenca.org.

Since October, the 19-year-old residence hall advisor has walked green, talked green, and lived in the Green Room, a new student-run project aimed at producing a living model of what a sustainable dormitory could look like.

Robertson’s electricity-guzzling appliances were swapped for energy-efficient alternatives, her chemical-laden personal products replaced by eco-friendly substitutes, and durable solutions supplanted disposables. Overnight, Robertson transformed herself into a living ambassador for sustainable living, and her room became a teaching tool.

“The concept is teach by showing,” says Lisa Bauer, manager of UC’s recycling services (see page 11). “We’re trying to model the room so students can make the choice to live more sustainably.”

The design of the room, located in Putnam Hall, is far from revolutionary. The walls are institutional beige, and industrial-strength carpeting covers the floor except where Robertson has placed her yoga mat. Outside her door, hall lights blaze night and day. But even in these generic rooms, students can make changes to reduce their ecological footprints. For instance, after switching to low-energy appliances, the Green Room uses 35 percent less energy than any other room in the building and generates the equivalent of 473 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide per year, says Laura Moreno, one of the project’s student coordinators.

The rest of the energy-saving is up to Robertson and a series of conscious choices she makes, beginning at the building’s door. In keeping with the Green Room’s mission, she shuns the elevator and dashes up four flights of stairs to her floor, an activity that she insists has gotten easier over time.

Inside her room, a dazzling array of placards informs the curious. In front of the bottle of organic sage deodorant hangs a sign with information on parabens, a preservative found in most hair gels, shampoos, and anti-perspirants. Scientists believe parabens may be linked to cancer.

A placard next to a bar of Tom’s of Maine soap warns that while anti-bacterial soaps may kill up to 99 percent of germs, their use has researchers worried about the creation of a generation of highly resistant bacteria. Next time, the placard recommends, wash your hands with regular soap and water for a full 10 seconds. They’ll be just as clean.

The new soaps, deodorant, and makeup might be fun, but the changes to Robertson’s lifestyle aren’t all glamorous. There’s the thermos she carries around for her cup of morning coffee. Savings: one paper cup, one cardboard coffee sleeve, and one plastic sip-top per day.

There’s the notebook she has constructed out of a Trader Joe’s corn flake box and used sheets of computer paper. Then there are the reusable plates and silverware she would use if she cooked more often. But the alternative for Robertson isn’t take-out containers and plastic utensils. Despite her busy schedule, she takes time to sit in the dining hall at least once a day and eat a full meal.

Near the refrigerator, a power strip dangles from atop a closet. Its ease of use is important—even when appliances seem to be turned off, they still suck miniscule amounts of electricity, says Judi Quach, a project manager at Strategic Energy Innovations (SEI), a San Rafael-based nonprofit that helps communities and businesses become more energy-efficient. If every appliance from the television to the computer (except necessities like the refrigerator) is plugged into and turned off from a power cord before their owner leaves the house or goes to bed, the phantom energy drain can be reduced dramatically.

It’s a small change, but consider that the average student has 17 energy-consuming products in her dorm room, says Quach. Multiply that by the hundreds or even thousands of students in a single dormitory. US universities spend close to $20 billion a year on heating and electricity costs alone, according to Department of Energy (DOE) estimates, and phantom loads are part of that bill.

The Green Room owes its existence to the DOE. Armed with a grant from the federal Energy Star program, SEI approached Bauer with a plan to create an energy-efficient dorm room. The nonprofit was already setting up two other Energy Star model rooms at the University of Hawaii and another UC campus, and Quach thought Berkeley might make a good fit. When SEI approached Cal, administrators jumped at the chance.

Louisiana’s Tulane University unveiled the very first Energy Star dorm room in 2001. But Cal’s Green Room coordinators took the idea further, turning the project into a sustainable prototype. After switching Robertson’s refrigerator, television, stereo, and lamp for donated Energy Star-rated products, a $150 private donation was used to replace household items that can be harmful to the environment or to human health with alternative products.”If we can provide students with a learning tool, they can incorporate this into their lifestyle,” says Quach.

So far, it seems to be working. “I’ve always tried to be energy conscious,” says Robertson. “But now I’m more concerned about how long my shower is lasting. And even if I’m running late to class I’ll take the extra moment to turn off the light.”

It’s the tragedy of the commons on a small scale, explains Quach. Since students living in dorms never see a bill for the electricity or water they use, it’s easy for them to be wasteful. That’s where Robertson’s example comes in—think of it as a course in Behavior Modification 101.

Robertson believes more students are following her lead and turning off the water when they brush their teeth. The floor’s recycling bins are always full, and the night-owls usually remember to turn off the radio. Eric Michal, a civil engineering major living across the hall from the Green Room, says its example has made him “think twice about his lights and computer speakers,” and he is trying to implement small changes in his lifestyle.

Of course, not all the PR has worked. Robertson still teases one of her hallmates about his long showers, telling him that if every dorm dweller cut his daily shower by just 1.5 minutes, he could save 12,000 gallons of water a year. And in an ideal world, says Quach, the Green Room would be housed in an LEED-certified building, painted and carpeted with nontoxic products, and stocked with sustainable furniture, such as an all-wool mattress. But the focus here is on small changes students can make easily.

“There’s different shades of green,” says project coordinator Moreno. “You don’t have to be the darkest shade of green to help the planet.”

“I’m definitely one of those kind of nuts,” says Bauer, punctuating the air with her hand as she flits dizzyingly between her interview, a student worker awaiting her paycheck, and a series of urgent text messages.

Trash is the unlikely culprit that keeps this energetic 45-year-old with a penchant for colorful dangly earrings working at such a frenetic pace. Seven tons a day with a mixed paper program to be precise, and a couple hundred more pounds of organic waste that is composted.

“I know it’s not sexy,” she says, but in terms of the environment, “It’s where the rubber hits the road.”

Her official title is manager of Campus Refuse and Recycling Services, but Bauer’s reach does not stop at the dumpsters hidden in the shadows of the school’s service entrances or the tiny, windowless room underneath Edwards Field that she calls her office. Chances are, if it’s been reduced, reused, or recycled at Cal, Bauer has had something to do with it.

Behind the scenes and “under the radar,” working “12 hours a day if not 15,” according to partner Douglas Labat, Bauer does everything from carrying in reams of recycled paper into the university’s halls and handing them out like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed to introducing eco-friendly ideas to the administration.

Look back to the very first membership roster of the chancellor’s-level committee on sustainability formed in 2003, and Bauer stands out as one of only two people nominated to the group by then-Chancellor Robert Berdahl. The idea started a few years earlier when Bauer, frustrated by the lack of a voice afforded to an overactive recycling manager, began looking for a way to imbue green ideas into overall campus planning. This year, the committee completed the first comprehensive report detailing concrete steps to lessen the campus’ environmental footprint.

“Her job description is managing solid waste,” says Bill Berry, a professor of earth and planetary science who invited Bauer to co-teach a freshman seminar with him. “But she’s driven the bus on sustainability.”

Until a few years ago, says Bauer, she had no idea what sustainability meant. But according to Berry, Bauer always had a bottom-up approach to stopping waste before it starts. Through their class, Bauer has helped launch student-run projects like the Green Room and has recruited dozens of environmental peer educators who help spread the word among students about recycling and reduced water usage.

The transition from waste management to overall sustainability has been a slow process, says Bauer. She only stumbled upon trash-as-mission in the ’80s after a few months of working in a youth hostel at Point Reyes. Those who had come to commune with nature, she noticed, invariably brought mountains of Styrofoam plates and plastic utensils with them in order to avoid doing dishes in the hostel’s fully equipped kitchen. The nature-lovers created so much trash that the hostel had to buy a bigger dumpster.

“I realized that I wanted to go into garbage because it was just not being handled properly,” says Bauer. Armed with a used pickup truck and a makeshift route culled from restaurant listings in the Yellow Pages, Bauer was ready to go into the recycling business for herself. “I had this half-baked scheme,” she says. “I was going to pick up newspapers and bottles and cans and get them recycled. I had no clue what it would cost, what I was going to get paid.”

A month before she was to start her ill-planned venture, she met a woman at a party who told her about a recycling manager position at Golden Gate Disposal, a division of NorCal Waste Systems, one of the biggest garbage haulers in the country. With no managerial experience, no formal recycling experience, and an intense desire not to work for “The Man,” Bauer showed up for her interview in shorts and handed in a resume printed on one side of a used piece of paper. To her surprise, she landed the job.

Back then, says Bauer, recycling was just “window-dressing,” though at the time, she had failed to read that in the fine print of her job description. And these days, she still considers recycling to be “just a band-aid.” While she still hauls seven tons of recycling off the Berkeley campus each day, her real goal is to stop garbage before it starts.

For her, that means getting through to the next generation early. “Most people think, ‘Oh yeah, I can get these individual water bottles, cause guess what! I can recycle them,’” says Bauer sarcastically. The next step, she says is to make people stop and think about what it takes to “take it, make it, ship it, and recycle it.”

Why China? “What happened in China in the ’30s and ’40s was a peasant revolution,” Sturdevant says. “We had not seen a successful peasant revolution. It was a new way of organizing life, society, and economics.”

As an activist in the Civil Rights movement during college, Sturdevant realized “on an experiential level” the problems within American society. “I saw this system wasn’t working,” she says. “China offered an alternative.”

During the Vietnam War, Sturdevant joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars to advocate against America’s containment policy of China. She came to UC Berkeley in 1972 for her post-doc and stayed on to teach Peace and Conflict Studies. The early ’80s found her in Beijing, editing English language publications and living among an international community of what the Chinese deemed foreign experts. It was the first time the Chinese had interacted with North Americans for decades.

“This was when I began photographing,” Sturdevant says. “And I made the decision that I didn’t want to stay in the academic world. I didn’t fit there; I was too good a teacher, and that is not thought highly of. My working class consciousness was very strong, and I was one of only five or six women in Asian studies at that time. It wasn’t good for me.”

Photography offered an alternative, and her study of the Chinese language gave her a valuable reference: every Chinese character can fit within the same square, and each is perfectly balanced. “I had a sense of framing based on the language,” says Sturdevant. She provided the photographs for a 1992 book she coauthored: Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the American Military in Asia. Not long after, she traveled to India for a vacation. Rest turned into inspiration; it was here Sturdevant laid the cornerstone for the women’s agricultural photography project she operates today. “I photographed what women do in the fields, and when ag work is not available. They work with cement, in cashew plants&almost all in the countryside. It was three months hotter than hell, and we ate whatever the peasants were eating and slept on boards.”

When she returned to the States, she had an opportunity through the American Friends Service Committee to work in California’s Central Valley. “The central question is what kind of work women really do in agriculture, and how it differs when you have petrochemical farming as you do in the valley,” Sturdevant says. “For instance, the harvest of lettuce is mechanized, but women do certain tasks and men do certain tasks. Women’s work here in the Central Valley is pretty much the same as women do in non-mechanized India. I call it the `U’ series, where women are bent over in a U. They’re in perfect Yoga poses, like a triangle. Women are the planters of the world. They’re the ones who put the seed in the ground, the life-givers.”

The Migrant Photography Project came about when a revolutionary school superintendent wanted to use photography to address the problem of illiteracy in valley schools. Alphonso Anaya was fired soon after—”He rocked and rolled too much,” according to Sturdevant—but the project lived on. “I’d never done that kind of thing,” she says, “and I wasn’t sure if I could. Sixty percent of the Lindsey district parents are illiterate. While Al was superintendent, he was able to raise enough money to outfit a darkroom. We bought used cameras, chemicals, and he housed us in a building on campus. We started recruiting women to come learn photography. We were open to recruiting men, but men don’t do this. Women do the school relationships, the kids and school.”

After Anaya left, funds ran out. But Sturdevant was able to stay in the building—and then the grants began to come. “We’ve gotten grants to work on pesticide drift, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, groundwater toxicity due to dairy runoff. We photograph housing and labor and use the photographs to educate. We do exhibits in the community and elsewhere.”

The fotonovella project is something new. The first fotonovella—written by community members with photographs to illustrate the story—is about pesticides drifting into the home and the neighborhood. “They’re basically comic books,” Sturdevant says. “It’s eight pages on pesticides. We’ve had horrendous drift dousings. The drift goes into people’s homes, and it’s generation after generation exposed to it. The project photographed 350 images of home, and then we edited the images and the story. The next one is on pesticides in the field.”

One of the best parts of the fotonovellas is that it’s a new form of advocacy, one of nonprofits working together to serve the community. The Committee for Pesticide Reform raised the money to develop the fotonovella, and the Migrant Photography Project took on the technical aspects. “It’s a combination of forces putting out material for education and organizing,” Sturdevant says. “It’s very different from how people have worked in the past.” CPR is now training community members on how to educate using the fotonovella. “I was pesticided photographing for this one day,” she says. “You have a right not to be pesticided. It should not be part of the deal.”

In 2002, the Engelharts created the Abounding River Game, which introduces people to the concept of “being abundance,” an ideology that Engelhart has been practicing since 1984. “It’s a practice in shifting from our human paradigm of scarcity—not enough love, not enough time, not enough money—to how full life is if we really get present.”

The beautifully designed game opens people up to a new perception of money and resources through inspirational exercises and embodies Engelhart’s philosophy: being at the source of unlimited supply. “This is hugely significant because it’s our inability to be fulfilled that drives the war machine and the ‘mine and yours’ machine,” he says.

The board game spawned offshoots like abundance training workshops—and eventually the restaurant. The Engleharts wanted a place where people could congregate and play the game.

“We thought, let’s have a gaming parlor! A place where we can serve some food and people can play,” says Engelhart. The idea took shape: a raw foods gaming parlor, and the first Café Gratitude was born. “When you surrender to inner guidance, that’s how it goes,” he says. “It’s not linear, and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense. Inspiration is sometimes not there one day and then it’s just a burning future that you can see.”

A visit to the café proves that this is no ordinary restaurant. Always packed with lively raw foodies and skeptics alike, the café’s philosophy reinforces the Engelharts’ vision of nourishing a thankful community. “The book and the board game and the workshop and ultimately the restaurant are all a practice in shifting our paradigm,” Engelhart says. “We are bringing the sacred — presence and oneness and love — to the commercial. Café Gratitude is a school of abundance and gratitude, and the tuition is paid in raw organic food.”

The items on the menu are thoughtfully prepared — and named — so patrons can practice being abundant. When you order a salad topped with brazil nut parmesan; you’ll say, “I am fulfilled.” You are “thankful” when you order Thai coconut soup. Other selections range from live pizza with pesto — “I am sensational” — to a Mediterranean plate with walnut-almond falafel and sprouted hummus — “I am flourishing.”

“We all have names for ourselves,” points out Engelhart. “We’re always calling ourselves something, whether we say, ‘I am shy, I am fat, I am lazy.’ We wanted to create the opportunity for people to practice empowerment since our mind perceives that what we tell ourselves is true. One of the beautiful things about being a human is that we’re not pre-programmed. We can shift and choose where we put our attention.”

Surrendering to inner guidance can bring on an abundance of challenges. Engelhart now finds himself dealing with over a hundred employees and the payroll that accompanies a large staff. “When you declare something like living of abundance, you’re always playing a bigger game, ” says Engelhart. “The universe tells you to step up. The ego and the identity always find scarcity, but if it wasn’t challenging, it would be hard for me to be holding trainings to help people shift their scarcity paradigm.”

There is no distinction between work and play in the traditional sense for Engelhart. “Any other way and I’d be suffering,” he says. “There is no work/play anymore. This is our mission; we are all surrendered to this. This is our nest egg on the line, and sometimes it’s scary and sometimes it’s empowering.”

But even inner guidance can use a business plan. When asked his long-term goals, he says, “I would love to create a really stable financial model for Café Gratitude in the Bay Area, with enough interest to attract investors who know how to grow a business so that we can steer the vision and not so much the details.”

And beyond that? “When you’re following inner guidance, you don’t know,” replies Engelhart, somewhat wistfully. With two sons in the business, there is a possibility of opening a Café Gratitude in LA. “We’re putting a little more focus on getting out there in the world,” he says, and it seems as if the universe is listening, as Engelhart has recently appeared on radio and TV.

In the meantime, the three cafes are bustling. “My life is just like anyone else’s,” he says. “This is just the game I’m playing.”

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.”