Hollygrove Fresh Farm and Market helps Downtown's Neighborhoods Eat Healthy

It was just the final thing that renewed Wednesday as my community day. Riding home from another great bicycle (picnic) adventure through the French Quarters we stopped to visit friends outside of St Anna's church on Esplanade Avenue about three blocks outside of the French Quarter. They were buying beans to bring to a dinner party.

Of course there is always more to it. We talked biofuel growth between the Gulf Coast and South America. We talked Colombia. They may one day take us up on 'hotel-sitting' for us on the beach for a while. We would be honored and delighted to have more great representation and ambassadorship of New Orleans and The United States of America abroad.

Our friends were picking up their Weekly Produce Box from Hollygrove Market Esplanade Avenue - three blocks from French Quarter for visitors who want to still eat healthy great foods while traveling on a budget or with dietary restrictions (which New Orleans eating out does make somewhat more difficult and/or expensive than should be necessary these days).

Thanks St Anna's for remaining a beacon of human resoration now more than 5 years Post-k. We love the idea of one day having a weekly box delivered full of the Hollygrove Market's produce. But, that might mean changing the visit to St Anna's and we would not want to miss all the great comraderie which we get in public outdoor neighborhood (bikeable) locations.

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Only months after forgotten disaster: Haiti

I.

It seems it must be more time. It is mere months after their disaster: Haitians deserve not to be forgotten by the world. But an excuse is not for any nation or individual to give: Why have all our efforts efforts have not done enough for Haiti? We are all responsible. There is no excuse left for any one of us: We are all responsible to act.

What have we done to change the suffering of Haitians? What do we know how to do?

Our efforts for Haiti are for our whole humanity. What we do for the least among us reflects on our entire human ethic: frail, incomplete, resolute, impossible, merciful, self-interested.

Even our poorest nations (maybe more importantly our poorest nations) should be treated with equality, respect and dignity as our world finally decides once and for certain if we are all to be judged together: integral, decent, connected, dependent by standards of international solidarity.

The case of Haiti's disaster was a result of legacies of colonialism and geographic centralization by monopolies of capitalism and military industrial complex. Our response and quorums to restore nature and humanity for Haiti matched the call for equity in the rebuilding of our City of New Orleans healthfully, holistically, with an engaged and empowered population of democratically governed five years previously. Haiti gives us a positive reason to reevaluate strategies and opportunities for implementation of more humanistic and scientific responses to disaster: the standards which we mete out in Haiti really are our minimum respect for our humanity.

II.

Disaster is an opportunity which can benefit corporations, government, people, and/or the environment. It is past time we began treating it as such. While on the one hand Naomi Klein and Naomi Zack both painted true portraits of the political and corporate backing for philosophies of planned responses to disaster (which, incidentally, got the USA into our current roles on the Gulf Coast, after Haiti, or in Afghanistan/Iraq theaters of war).

Taken positively, there is are some possible positive interpretations of the quality of world reaction to disaster which says that disaster offers us the chance to see our common self interests, how they are connected, and ACT.

In her analysis of Disaster Capitalism Klein points correctly to the ways governments have behaved and used disaster to push through unpopular economic plans. This news, taken together with the consistent failure to establish recent protocols and new global conferences and it may be fair to argue that we have come away with little results from the pressing changes of our climate.

However, the world has a consciousness dilemma which can potentially be an arbiter of change using the same terms described by Klein and Zack. If communities are organized for participation, engagement, and, as possible, for local controls and decision-making, disasters (whether they occur to us or effect us from around the globe) may be arbiters of good sense and positive actions. [The same agent of change used for enormous economic and political change can become an agent for local change, local governance, and/or change of personal or communal responsibility.]

The nations are still not together; (Copenhagen 2009), it is still obvious that any of our recent disasters point to unwillingness, either by our planetary orb or its people, to any longer accept either individually self-interested motivation of nations; or, world's unrelenting environmental changes that demand new actions and world multinational endeavors be cooperative.

III.

What we are doing from where we are today and on our trip? What do we know that we can share with Haitians? What are the actions we know of now which make positive changes occur?

Raising awareness...acting constantly
Supporting local actions, dignity, and participation-based engagement of communities
Acting to reduce global inequity
Acting to reduce environmental degradation
Purchasing fair trade products
Support macroeconomic benefits for human restoration in disaster
Shrinking our carbon footprint
Blogging about our Actions (for Haiti)
Supporting businesses that benefit poor countries economies

We want to continue discussing disasters, how they happen, how they are mitigated, how to prevent them, how to use them for good.

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The Great Oil Spill

written by Nathan, May 2, 2010

The great oil spill of 2010 that now slickens the coastal fisheries of our home Louisiana looks particularly offensive from the coast of the Atlantic in West Africa. It is, however, easier to make out through the horizon of thickening plots and dying seas just how wealth generated from our seashores of home mimics colonial trespass, management of land purchases, and the like. A long history of exploitation does not even find financial benefits or economic justice in the riches still pouring from the Louisiana purchase 200 years on.

Louisiana, an economic boon for the United States, is still only an afterthought in discussions of economic justice, resource degradation, and oppressed peoples. While all classes of people are affected by the dangerous physical and environmental degradations at place on the Louisiana Gulf Coast wetlands, our political class will make no collective efforts at restitutions and environmental clean-up and reconstruction so long as they are in the pockets of status quo decision making. Other classes have no power. While we laugh at our tongue-in-cheek state motto, “Louisiana - Third World and Proud of it,” we do not seek meaningful change or equity improvement either as a nation or locally.

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