The Neighbors Project offers How to call the shots in your neighborhood:

If you’ve ever wondered who made the decision to put up the giant flag or rip up a street or cancel your favorite parade, chances are it’s your neighborhood association. They’re usually quite powerful.

Coming soon: part two, in which we demonstrate how to stage a coup of your neighborhood association, or alternately to start a brand new one and seize the reins from the old one in order to create a bitter neighborhood feud!

From a Sprol.com report on HFCS production: “I heard recently the claim that health depends less on how we take care of ourselves than how we take care of each-other.”

Bill McKibben writes in the current American Prospect on global warming:

Europe and Japan have been able to begin grappling with climate change because they retain a different conception of public life. They don’t need houses as large as ours because their cities are in some sense an extension of people’s living rooms. They can cope with public transportation because they haven’t spread as far into distant and disconnected suburbs. In this light, it makes sense that Portland and New York and San Francisco have emerged as the centers of American activism. Those cities still have some public life. But suburban Atlanta? In case you’re wondering if such airy speculation makes a concrete difference, consider that western Europeans use, on average, 50-percent less fossil fuel than Americans. _Not because their lives are poorer, and not because they have some magical technology; because they think a little differently about life_… (emphasis added)

No, the political force that finally manages to take this issue on is the political force that also understands and helps to nurture the deep-rooted and unsatisfied American desire for real community, for real connection between people. The force that dares to actually say out loud that “more” is no longer making us happier, that the need for security and for connection is now more important.

But you could also make a decent argument that this issue is one of the doors into a new and more interesting politics. A politics that is about living the good life instead of acquiring more things. A politics that is about guaranteeing one another medical care and retirement security and a planet to inhabit. Those tasks all seem beyond the every-man-for-himself ethos of post-Reagan America; they rely on some emergent solidarity. Exactly how it will emerge and who will embody it are not yet clear, but physics and chemistry seem to require it.

Global warming is that rare (well, I hope so), overwhelming, all-encompassing, big-picture threat which could ultimately force a new politics of solidarity onto humanity — and, as McKibben points out, it’s just that solidarity which has been sorely lacking in American politics. Climate could also become the defining issue of my generation: “the baby boomers”:http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Udall-Andrews_99-1.pdf (scroll to page 6) got us into this mess, with more than _half_ of the world’s total oil reserves consumed during their lifetimes. That leaves their children to either (a) clean up the mess in a reasonable manner or (b) further delay the inevitable end of profligacy, merely ensuring that it’ll only get worse.

Thumbnail images of posters and other Situationist propaganda from 1968.

In re-reading Stan Greenberg’s “The Two Americas” (hey, it’s one way to see what went wrong), I came across this: the groups he calls The Faithful and The Secular Warriors, the core of each party’s social ideologies — white evangelical Protestants on the one hand and the unchurched and disarmed on the other — are almost equivalent in the electorate. The Faithful are 17%, the Secular Warriors are 15%.

So, which of these blocs of “values voters” truly represents “American values”?

Another thought on AIA: I’ve never seen another profession quite so dedicated to the acquisition of continuing education units (LUs in the trade). The sessions have little scanning stations precisely timed to make sure that you have indeed been sitting inside, absorbing that crucial information; every little tour, many of the booths, even quizzes in the back of Record give you the chance to accumulate those valuable LUs (especially those crucial HSWs). Sheesh — you’d think that people would be in it because it’s interesting, but no. It’s not even like the requirements are all that onerous: eight HSW credit hours means a total of four or five classes or seminars a year. As they helpfully point out in the conference book, you can earn all that at one stinkin’ conference.

I suppose I’m now an LU provider: take my two CNU tours on Thursday, 24 June and you’ll have earned three LUs. Who knew that my knowledge was that easily quantifiable?

$40,000 a year for 10 years, apparently, is what it takes to convince a developer to lease to a small, local retailer instead of a large chain. I’m all for interesting little local shops downtown, but surely there’s a more effective way to do this — a publicly owned public market, perhaps?

This is weird: a suburban tract-house developer in Aurora is building 30 units of cohousing within one of his planned communities.

A nurse… said: “The problem is the government has made us feel like we’ve come out of this divided. The… party exudes a feeling that you are either with them and [the country] or you are somehow unpatriotic or against them.”

— a Socialist voter in Madrid

Sadly, American voters seem to be otherwise disposed: even though the current regime has plainly failed to protect the citizenry, plenty of voters still give Bush credit for “leadership through crisis.” Some pundits are saying that an “October surprise” terrorist attack would benefit Bush, as voters rally ’round the flag — even though an attack then, after three years of the Everlasting War on Evildoers, would plainly demonstrate the incompetence of those in power.

Also from The Guardian, a pleasant paean to how Spain’s citizenry is standing against the new era of fear:

What’s at stake is a long history of the city, that exchange point for trade and ideas that has been the crux of all civilisations. The city orders how large numbers of human beings live in close proximity. In so doing, it civilises and turns strangers into citizens who belong to a civil society in which they treat each other with (more or less) civility. All these words have the same Latin root, civitas.

What the demonstrations in Spain remind us is that civility — the measure of goodwill from one stranger to another — is ultimately what makes a city’s spirit. It is the accumulation of tiny, daily interactions with bus conductors, fellow commuters, newspaper sellers and coffee-shop waitresses — the humour, the greetings, the gestures of help that smooth the rough edges of urban living.

Instead, in the past two days the vacuum has been filled by the people; the politicians would do well to listen, and articulate their civility rather than rush to use the shabby and meaningless metaphor of a “war on terror”. You cannot fight fire with fire, was the implicit message of the silent crowds. Spain’s mourning will have global resonance — as did 9/11. Over half the world’s population now live in cities, and the images we have seen in the past few days offer two alternatives of what the city might mean in the 21st century: a place of terror where the stranger is to be feared and distrusted, or the determined solidarity of strangers — a sea of hands waving hastily scribbled messages with the one word that says everything: “No”. Thank you, Spain, for giving us a choice.

Unfortunately, Americans have never had “liberté, égalité, fraternité” as a rallying cry; in today’s consumer society, we actively shun the latter two. Alex Shakar writes in _The Savage Girl_ that “Hell is not necessarily other people; hell is being surrounded by people who share no solidarity,” which sounds a lot like home.

Yesterday’s NYT ran an article summarizing one study drawn from the MacArthur-funded Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Dr Felton Earls finds that strong social capital (“collective efficacy,” in the study’s parlance) underlies both the “eyes on the street” and “broken windows” theories on crime prevention. In other words, strong neighborhood social capital creates safe neighborhoods and positive school outcomes:

In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes were linked not to “broken windows” but to two other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls, with an unfortunate instinct for the dry and off-putting language of social science, collective efficacy.

“If you got a crew to clean up the mess,” Dr. Earls said, “it would last for two weeks and go back to where it was. The point of intervention is not to clean up the neighborhood, but to work on its collective efficacy. If you organized a community meeting in a local church or school, it’s a chance for people to meet and solve problems.