Percy Schmeiser vs Monsanto: The Story of a Canadian Farmer's Fight to Defend the Rights of Farmers and the Future of Seeds

Moderator's Note: We are providing without comment a link to a Democracy Now! interview with Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer and Right Livelihood Prize winner, that has fought the Monsanto Corporation over the contamination of his non-GEO canola by Monsanto's Roundup Ready transgenic canola.

Percy Schmeiser vs Monsanto: The Story of a Canadian Farmer's Fight to Defend the Rights of Farmers and the Future of Seeds

Seed Sovereignty: Renaming and Reclaiming Frijol

El Rito, CO.   Our 2010 harvest season is quickly coming to a close.  We have picked the last of our heirloom white floury-flint corn known as maíz de concho, which we have been roasting for several weeks in our adobe ovens to make chicos, a winter store food for hot stews that awaken the senses on a cold morning or evening. In the Culebra watershed, most of us are now waiting patiently for the heirloom maíz de concho, habas (Fava beans) and bolitas (beige beans) to dry on their plants so we can finish the season's seed collecting and saving.

With all the activity surrounding chicos production, it is easy to overlook the other principal activity we have been engaging during the past two weeks: Collecting seed from the milpas. This has been a good year for our seed-stock production. Last year, I nearly lost all my maize seed to critters. I got careless during a hectic sabbatical. This year, I was more vigilant and also had very good help. We are bringing in a bumper crop of heirloom maíz de concho seed corn, about two barrels full.

We had not planned on making chicos at all this year, but in the end we had enough corn in the field to save seed and still make three hornos full of chicos, or a bit under 150 pounds. Not an overwhelming supply but it will please our local co-op and our friends and neighbors who can now count on having at least a little of this traditional winter-store food.

Bolita beans still on our minds 

My followers may recall a blog entry from last year on the Bolita Bean Wars. I expressed concern at the time over the introduction of commercial hybrid versions of our native heirloom bolita bean. The Culebra watershed acequia communities are after all home to some important and distinct varieties of bolita bean (Phaseolis vulgaris or "common bean"). I will have to dwell on the "common" part of this scientific name in a moment.

The introduced commercial hybrid varieties most likely came from Adobe Mills, Inc, based in not too distant Dove Creek, CO. They are the principal commercial producer of hybrid bolitas for the entire Four Corners bioregion. This was more likely an accidental introduction rather than the result of an incident in which a local farmer purchased hybrid stock from Adobe Mills as production seed. 

We have not been able to identify anyone that has ever bought the hybrid variety from Adobe Mills with the intent to directly plant this variety. It is more likely that the Adobe Mills bolitas were sold at a local grocery store and someone either decided to plant instead of eat the beans, or the store-bought variety was somehow accidentally mixed in with a batch of some family's local heirloom seed. This seems plausible except that hybrid seed may not be as viable over generations as a local land race.

The source of concern is that many of the locally-sown bolitas appear like the Dove Creek hybrid and also do not have the traditional flavor, texture, or creaminess of the local heirloom. However, it turns out that there may have been at least two original local bolita strains - the bolita chiquita and the bolita grande or cuadrada, or at the very least, local people recall that they have had names for both of these two distinct varieties. 

These memories date back at least two human generations.  Bernadette Lucero, a fifth generation native of San Luis and leader in our local farmers' co-op, recalls her Father once explained that bolitas chiquitas were for local people and the grandes or cuadradas were for sale to visitors and outsiders.

This mystery will now likely be resolved when local farmers undertake a new plan for a collaborative plant breeding project working in consultation with the Organic Seed Alliance. The OSA visited San Luis area farmers on September 11, the second such visit in two years. The seed savers and plant breeders organization has made our acequia farms in Colorado and New Mexico a regular stop on their annual nation-wide tour.

In 2011, we will start a plant breeding project to determine which of the varieties grown by local farmers are true local heirloom bolitas. What we are learning is that it is not enough to save seed. That is only the first step. To protect heirloom crop diversity, we also have to be mindful farmers and avoid planting our heirlooms in settings that might expose the local varieties to cross-pollination with hybrids and, worse, transgenic crops. Constantly checking the morphology (appearance, structure, and color) and cuisine qualities of our heirloom crops is an additional responsibility of all acequia farmers committed to seed sovereignty.

To address some of these threats, we are currently working on the adoption of acequia by-laws that would ban the cultivation of commercial hybrid or transgenic varieties of corn, bean, and squash in our watershed. We also envision working with the Costilla County Commissioners to adopt a similar ban targeting the southern half of our county where the acequia farms are concentrated; the northern half of the county is dominated by large-scale corporate agribusinesses that irrigate with center-pivot mechanical sprinklers and are prone to monoculture practices.

Stay tuned to this blog for further developments as we continue to report on our local seed sovereignty campaign.

Renaming frijol

Underlying these efforts to protect and nurture local home-spun heirloom varieties are some larger questions of a philosophical and political nature. It fascinates me that the formal process for naming plant species and varieties actually seems like a not so subtle form of neo-colonialism.

Take the official and scientific name of our cherished frijol variety, the bolita. It actually does not really have a scientific name of its own and is thrown in with numerous varieties under the single rubric of Phaseolis vulgaris, or the "common bean" as this is typically translated.

But the Latin root, vulgaris, has a complex meaning and a careful study of the underlying semiotics betray a sense of hierarchical class and race-based judgment in the act of naming something as "common," or "not special," "coarse," "unrefined," etc.

When I look at a handful of bolitas chiquitas in the palm of my hand, "common" is the last notion that enters my mind. These are rare specimens and as far as I can determine there are no more than a few dozen pounds of the small, round, and beige-colored variety among all acequia farmers in the Culebra watershed, including the two pounds of heirloom seed stock that I produced from my third year of breeding bolitas in a high altitude environment -- 8,100 feet at our Rancho Chiquito kitchen garden plot in El Rito (San Francisco), Colorado.

What makes the local bolita special is that it is able to withstand extreme frost exposure and what I like to characterize as "cold sunshine" because we have such radical diurnal extremes at this altitude with 30-40 degrees difference between the daily low and high temperatures. The two pounds of seed stock that I grew last year in El Rito withstood three late frosts - two in June and one after July 4. I think this qualifies the bolita strain as something other than designation as P. vulgaris.

The point of this is not to launch a campaign to challenge the hidden cultural politics of scientific nomenclature and biological classification. The point is to highlight how persistent this colonialist outlook has been over time.  I want to suggest that Linnaeus certainly formalized this race and class hierarchy in biological classification when he imagined humankind to be split into different races including "wild men, dwarfs, troglodytes [cave dwellers], lazy Patagonians."

We can rename frijol and indeed we can draw our inspiration from the "folk name" for this unique high-altitude legume since we already have inherited a special name, "la bolita chiquita." I believe that when we "name" something we are not just classifying it so that we can identify and understand its place in our world. Part of marking the place of the "named" in the world is that it involves a rank-ordering and segregation of objects into categories that we deem "useful" or "threatening" and "neutral" or "benign." 

The naming of something is also about our relationship to it. Here is where commonalities and distinctions become political judgments since the power to name something often translates into the power to control and manipulate that which is named. So, we invent categories like "noxious weeds" and wage a pesticide-laden war against the named threat. Or, we call something "vulgaris," and reduce it to uniform sameness.

We can invert this convention and rethink what we mean by "common." Back to the bolitas in the palm of my hand: These are rare, but they are also a shared part of our extended multi-generational cultural heritage: "The seed is the memory of the plant of how to grow well in this place," my Grandmother, Margarita K. Peña, used to tell me. 

The heirloom seeds in my palm are not "common" but rather part of our "commons." As a seed saved, the bolita has the power to help the entire community thrive and to continue to adapt to life at 8,000 feet above sea level and a 70-80 day growing season. We are pushing the limits of what is possible with the "Three Sisters" in North American agriculture in this high alpine desert. It is the inherited "wisdom" of seeds saved and passed unto the next generations that is the source of our resilient livelihoods. 

In the end, the renaming and reclaiming of bolitas chiquitas is a transformation of the seed into an emblem of our autonomy. Seed sovereignty is meaningful if it is part of an equitably self-governed community of practice that has the capacity to protect all the qualities of place that sustain our local culture, language, ethical orientations, and customary law. The seed is the most vital source of that sustenance. Sin la semilla, la acequia no tiene destino.

 

A Poem by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Sustenance: A Poem For Leonard Peltier
 

All you wanted was to feed 

The People, and a hunger entered 

your Spirit. All you wanted  

was to end the pain, and the pain 

of your Sundance entered your heart. 

"Where are our warriors?" a Grandmother 

asked and the small boy in you rose up, 

a sweet smoke offering. You gave

your life, but all you wanted was life 

on Earth for all your starving relations. 

You spoke for the young as a young man 

and your Spirit-Song answered. You stoked 

the fire for The Elders, until now, an Elder, 

you fan the flames of Freedom in our lifetime,  

keeping the fire of all our dishonored treaties.
 

You studied Liberty while they waged war 

upon us, and upon those who looked like us, 

the flower of your Spirit opening to let us all  

inside your cell. You wanted the many colors of  

the Rainbow, your warrior-Spirit becoming you. 

You gave us your life, your words, 

your Rainbow on the whitened page. 

You fed us all. They locked up your Light

but not your fire. It blazes like sage, smolders  

in the concha, the smoky prayer of your resistance. 

All you wanted was to feed, to end the hunger- 

of the flesh, of the the Spirit, of conscience. 

Now, with starvation all around, a mold that 

just won't wash, you feed us, The People, with  

your fasting, your writing, your glowing example. 

Here, in this sacred circle of Earth, fed by
 

the Sundance that is you, may you walk 

and love among us once again, telling 

the Truth of the Old Ones, of the ones not yet 

born. We are fighting for your freedom still. 

Well fed by you, we know,
 

we tell, and we demand:
 

FREE LEONARD NOW! 

FREE LEONARD NOW! 

FREE LEONARD NOW! 

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Sept. 12, 2010 

for Leonard Peltier's 66 birthday

  

and for peace with dignity and justice

Primeros chicos de 2010

El Rito, CO. We present a few photographs of the first chicos del horno of 2010 from the milpa popular at Rancho Dos Acequias in San Acacio, Colorado.  Chicos are a traditional Native American food produced from multi-generational heirloom white corn that is roasted overnight in adobe ovens fired-up with brazas de piñon. In the morning the roasted corn is removed, shucked, and then air-dried for 3-5 days under the sun, producing a hardy and delicious winter store. The Slow Food Ark recently listed chicos del horno as an endangered food. The artisan craft knowledge to produce chicos is also endangered since it seems fewer and fewer family farmers are dedicating themselves to this labor-intensive effort. Our first 100 pounds involved 5 days of intensive and highly skilled labor and we are yet to clean this first batch. For a detailed description of the steps involved in making chicos del horno, please see the blog post of September 18, 2008. Some of my colleagues tell me that the reason so few people make chicos is that no one tiene las ganas. It does take a lot of work, and there are few economic rewards, but chicos del horno is our version of a local, slow, and deep food that connects us to the land and water through the seed, and from there to one and every living being. Para mi, para vos, para los animalitos de Dios.

NOTES ON THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY - What do we make and how?

 

El Rito,  CO.     A common refrain among "populist" politicians of all stripes is that the U.S. government needs to develop policies to stanch the "out-sourcing" of American jobs to places like China, India, and Mexico.  Ours is a "jobless recovery," we are told, and the only route to a prosperous future that includes the working class is for the government to adopt and implement policies that allow markets to create more jobs here. This will enable the current weak and slipping economic recovery to reboot by addressing the sticky upward trends in unemployment.

All of a sudden political elites have discovered the problem of structural unemployment. This type of joblessness is caused by the twin engines of automation and globalization, qua out-sourcing, which destroy jobs not as a consequence of cyclical downturns but as a result of structural and geopolitical changes in the organization of corporate-controlled labor markets tied to global commodity chains. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison warned of these changes as early as 1980 when the draft report of their smash book, The Deindustrialization of America, first made the rounds in graduate schools across the country.

This sentiment, presumably part of a retreat from a full embrace of "globalization," is fairly widespread across the ideological spectrum from Left to Right.  Politicians as diverse as the democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), the socially conservative but liberal Keynesian Representative Tom Perriello (D-Virgina), and the libertarian Senate candidate Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) have all lamented the notion that we no longer make anything in the United States. Manufacturing is dead. We are a nation of hapless and deskilled consumers. The key to recovery, many of these presumably "populist" politicians declare, is for us to start making stuff here instead of just consuming imports from China or India.

There are a few common elements in this political narrative: Our manufacturing has decreased to the point that it is but a moribund remnant, a rusted corpse, in the midst of nearly deserted industrial ghost towns like Detroit or Youngstown and countless southern cities wracked by the decline of textile and other manufacturing industries.

The predominant narrative runs like this on the Left: Our government is failing to rebuild American industry and we need a twenty year-long stimulus program that restores America's manufacturing might while rebuilding (and in some versions, "greening") the nation's infrastructure.

On the Right the narrative follows a different thread: Our government has hobbled and scared the manufacturing sector into out-sourcing by imposing too many taxes and undue environmental, labor, and safety regulations and oversight. The state needs to retreat from any kind of social regulation and instead pursue a free market approach so that manufacturers return to the U.S. once labor, environmental, and other costs and potential liabilities are reduced and contained. 

Neither one of these narratives is even close to accurate. First, the Left and Right populist discourses both overlook the fact that the U.S. is still the world's leading producer of food. What do we make? Food. The matter of how we make all this food is a rather contentious and significant problem that I will address in a follow-up blog.

On the Left, there are too many proponents of the idea that we can simply re-industrialize the U.S., albeit with smart grids, LEED-certified designs, and other green job strategies. But current Left-liberal proposals that seek to move toward a "greening" of our energy grids, housing, and other infrastructure do so without addressing unresolved and complicated problems of social, labor, and environmental injustices -- please see the blog of March 19 on Obamaecology.

This reveals how the dominant liberal-progressive narrative for restoring America's manufacturing might is actually a shallow economistic and greenwashed vision of re-industrialization. This policy actually reduces the working class to mere labor inputs. But people are apparently as tired of that as they are of unemployed or discouraged worker status and the below subsistence wages they now get for the jobs-sans-benefits that replaced much of the remaining vestiges of the social welfare model in the old union-styled collective bargaining contracts.

On the Right, the notion that capitalists are over-regulated is a bald-faced myth that fewer working class Americans appear to naively accept without question. This is one reason that populist rhetoric has become a recurring theme in the current political discourse of the mid-term elections. Does it not occur to Rand Paul and his libertarian clones that the still unfolding deep water BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was a consequence of the effects of three decades of neoliberal deregulation that started with the Reagan administration? The U.S. economy is actually the least "regulated" among Western capitalist nations.

Does it not occur to neoliberals and free market fundamentalists that capitalists failed to rebuild post-Katrina New Orleans, especially African American neighborhoods like the 10th Ward?  Or that tidal marshes and wetlands continue to be devoured by capitalist energy developers, leaving the city even more vulnerable to destruction from storm surge despite rebuilt levees? It was unregulated free market forces that made New Orleans vulnerable in the first place by destroying the natural Mississippi delta and estuarine ecosystems that protected the city for centuries from storm surges. The political economic disaster that followed this not-quite-natural disaster is one of the most vulgar of all scaled-up acts of environmental racism in the history of the U.S.

Another flaw in Right-wing rhetoric is the notion that deregulation of capitalism will resolve the second contradiction of capitalism: Namely, the externalization of the costs of production unto labor and the environment as "discounted waste."

This is really what libertarians like Rand Paul are talking about when they champion the ideal of the "unfettered" free market. They want to continue to "discount" corporate liability for these so-called "externalities." Libertarians and neoliberals are equally averse to recognizing the basic notion that, for workers and the plant and animal inhabitants of the environment, there is nothing "external" about the effects of toxic wastes, workplace hazards, or habitat destruction. 

But so-called "negative externalities" like pollution or workplace hazards, that poison and injure workers and their surrounding communities and threaten air, water, and wildlife habitat qualities, are never accounted for in the cost-benefit scenarios presented by neoliberals and their libertarian allies.

The idea that we can treat "nature" and "labor" as part of a system of "tradeable development damage permits" (as is currently the case in U.S environmental regulation) is the height of libertarian and neoliberal arrogance and delusion. This standpoint has now become the rationale for making a commodity out of climate change itself by creating a market in "credit default swaps" so wise investors can hedge their bets on one such externality [sic], the release of carbon dioxide into the atmospheric "commons." 

By now it is obvious that Left and Right wing politicians alike have it wrong when it comes to re-imagining the future of "making stuff" in the USA.

The question is not just: What do we make?  It is also: How do we make it?

Predatory or Solidarity Economy? 

(A caveat for any postmodern critics):  We can begin to answer this two-sided question by presenting an ideal type in the form of a purely heuristic "imagine that..." type of exercise. In other words, I am not presenting an immutable or fixed category of absolute opposites nor am I championing an either/or choice among binary entities. I am presenting two actual extreme counter-poles along an ever-shifting continuum in the forms of political composition of the organization of power in and through our extant economic institutions.  

The conceptual distinction I wish to make is between a "predatory" economy at one end of this continuum and a "solidarity" economy at the other end. I invite my followers to engage this exercise purely for the sake of analytical discourse.

Capitalism is predatory because it takes what it needs by force and resort to violence. 

What is a predatory economy? To paraphrase ecofeminist scholar-activist Maria Mies: Capitalists "prey" on nature, worker, woman, colony, and all manifestations of the "Other." Capital devours the Other. The land is a "natural resource," waiting to be consumed to manufacture things important to capitalist desire. Or, it is the exploitable units of labor time abstracted from living human bodies who actually transform these "natural things" into other "things with a price," i.e., commodities, through the manufacturing process controlled by capitalists.  

This predatory activity has always led to structural violence and is also an underlying cause of the multigenerational historical trauma experienced by members of the unjustly subjugated communities or groups targeted for appropriation and exploitation.  

 

Capitalism is predatory because it takes what it needs by force and resort to violence. In order to produce commodities, the capitalist must be able to appropriate two things that usually "belong" to someone else. One is the labor power of the human body and the other is comprised of nature's body, the land, minerals, water, and other sources of life that must be reduced to inputs of material production.  

  

The capitalist also relies on the unpaid labor invested into social and biological reproduction, work that is usually done by women in the household in the form of caring for the Other (future workers, etc.). The process of forcibly appropriating living labor and nature is what Marx called the primitive accumulation. This is invariably a violent process.  

The primitive accumulation is the lifestyle of the capitalist, it is the everyday behavior of a predator. You forcibly separate the other from itself and you end its autonomous life. The predator only cares to nourish itself. It has no concern for its prey, which is a mere object, in the capitalist case, of so-called "productive consumption."   

This predatory logic is rather convoluted and mystified: I will consume you so that I can make things to sell for a profit so that I can produce more things to keep selling so that I can continue to use the products you make for me through the labor time and transformation of the land, water, and minerals I steal from you to make these things.   

The myriad place-based forms of human cooperation and co-habitation with other living organisms and the living landscapes in homeland ecosystems are the basis of the solidarity economy. 

What is the solidarity economy? The myriad place-based forms of human cooperation and co-habitation with other living organisms and living landscapes in homeland ecosystems are the basis of the solidarity economy. The solidarity economy is based on co-habitation rather than development or exploitation of place.  

The solidarity economy does not presume that "nature" is a "natural resource" to be exploited for the sake of human greed and transformed into a mere commodity, a thing with a price. The solidarity economy does not imagine that nature is a wilderness, to be kept separate from humans. The solidarity economy understands nature as our home. Home ecosystem. The two are not apart. You cannot take one from the other without diminishing the well being of the one left without its companion.

Solidarity is an ancient practice. As a human normative orientation it has been around much longer than notions of individuality. Solidarity derives from the oldest evolutionary urges and strategies that involve forms of mutual aid and dividuality instead of competition. Solidarity relations characterize much of the natural world and its dynamic processes of change, adaptation, and co-evalness. The social ecologists (e.g., Bookchin), informed by wise readings of Kroptkin, have argued this point precisely for some time.

  

The solidarity economy values cooperation and promotes mutual reliance interests: It is in my interests that my neighbor also succeeds. I find this on the acequia every day when my neighbors come through to help me get some work done. This form of cooperation and shared resources is the sinew and muscle of the solidarity economy. It eschews individual and acquisitive (selfish) interests.  

 

The solidarity economy does not need money and it does not need to produce commodities. It is interested in producing for and through relationships; it harvests networks and their capacities instead of focusing on individualized accumulation of money wealth.  

 

The solidarity economy is quite unlike the neoliberal and libertarian quest for individual self-aggrandizement, which distorts liberty under the guise of the hoped-for side-effect of maximizing the social good through acts of material acquisitiveness and the mindless over-consumption of the earth and its resources.  

 

The solidarity economy is based on recognition not so much of "limits" as of "reciprocal obligations." The notion and value of reciprocity is that it promotes pairing and coupling and these reiterations of cooperative or complementary endeavors are the material and cultural source of resilience of social and ecological systems alike. In the solidarity economy, one does not limit consumption out of a sense of duty to the "conservation of natural resources" so that future generations can have stuff to exploit as well. One does not "conserve" one's home; you "dwell" in it, and never alone. This is always a "storied residence" in a "mixed" community of humans and other living organisms and the watershed landscape itself. 

 

In the solidarity economy you are in a web of relations, produced through memory, myth, ecological wisdom, and shared lived experiences in and of place. And the enmeshing of a person in a web means you are obligated to live well in your place, by which I mean without displacing Others.

 

So, this poses the question again: What do we make? If we make commodities for the capitalist circuits of production, then we are also making and experiencing violence. Systematic structural violence is an inescapable attribute of the corporate capitalist organizational form because everything, from the gene to the biosphere, is for sale. The corporate capitalist in a way has no choice, given the negative ontology of aggressive desire that traps being at its basic level in which one natural attribute, competition and aggression, becomes elevated to its arbitrary, but socially signified, status as the universal attribute of all "human" nature. In this system, the capitalist cannot help acting predatory, lest the corporation becomes prey to a bigger, more aggressive competitor, say a mega-corporate conglomerate.

 

The solidarity economy is a concept that needs to inform the unfolding and widening discussion of public policies for a new "green jobs" transformation of the U.S. economy. The liberal, progressive, neoliberal, and libertarian solutions and models for this transformation, for every one purports to be "green," are problematic because none of these partisan ideologies recognize, let alone privilege even obliquely, the determining role of community, place, and ecosystems in shaping and remaking these policies. They fail to allow for a working out of their rooted application on the ground through place-based watershed (not basin-wide) and land grant councils for example. Direct local participation is a pivotal principle for the flourishing of the solidarity economy.

 

A good place to start with the re-imagining of the proposed coming wave of work to rebuild the U.S. economy is to first eschew the idea that somehow all this can be placed in the hands of a new breed of socially-responsible, labor-friendly, and ecologically-benign corporate citizens. We propose that the challenge is to go green while eliminating rampant structural inequalities of power and wealth: It is not just what we make, but how we make it that matters. Will we continue to follow the familiar individualized hierarchies of the predatory economy or embrace the mutual aid principles of the solidarity alternative?

Critics will immediately ask: If not corporations, then who will lead this quest for a new green jobs renewal of America's economy and infrastructure? We first need to recognize that size matters. The sorts of corporate organizations that everyone across the political spectrum, with the exception of Senator Bernie Sanders, has in mind reminds me of this top-down managerial bias first illustrated by Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" revolution during the first decade of the 20th  Century. We have to scale down, and we have to embrace "re-skilling," especially the tacit social skills of cooperation and the artisan craft skills that are waiting to be tapped as an unacknowledged reservoir of labor's creative fire.

We also must first learn how to recognize and value the existing virtues and strengths of the solidarity economy. Capitalist corporations do not have a monopoly on organizational form as a science or art [sic]. The wisdom of multigenerational community groups, exercised through the informal and formal associations of so-called civil society, are already an organic form of place- and network-based organization.

In this manner, the solidarity economy has economic organization, but it is not the legalistic, bureaucratic, and hierarchical form of the American corporation, that was recently declared by telluric interests to possess the same rights as individual citizens.

 

Instead, the solidarity economy is organized as a set of localized and shifting face-to-face relationships.These exist within dense social networks that constitute themselves from actual lived experiences in which people come to "feel" responsible to share in a common wealth, mutually relying on each other to realize the economic potential of the community, and especially its capacity for self-reliance.

It seems hardly surprising that food production is one of the most common and also most innovative spheres of activism emerging from the placed and mobile webs of the solidarity economy movement. This circulation of relationships begins within bioregions but also weaves networks across geographic spaces. It is both place-based and global in its information and material flows. After all, there are "peasants" everywhere in both the city and countryside, and all of them are lively nodes in their own local solidarity economy and extended networks of mutual aid and reciprocity.

The solidarity economy privileges home-made organizations. It favors an ecosystems approach to co-habitation and not development of places. If we "green" the U.S. economy, let this also have blue, brown, and black colors: Solidarity means we do not discount the costs of our practices and modes of production for labor or the environment. It does not discount eco-racism. In this fully socialized cost-accounting, the only alternative is to go green since to not do so would reveal the bankrupt quality of the endeavor.

There can be no environmental protection without social justice and community-based economic resilience. The principles of the solidarity economy must define the emerging "green jobs" policies that are currently envisioned as the key to the transformation of our industrial, agrifood, and energy systems. As we seek to remake the 21st Century U.S. economy, we must demand a path based on the values of social equity, ecological resilience, autonomous community-based governance, and respect for and privileging of place-based knowledge claims. Indeed, some of the first places where we are witnessing this renewal is in the old "rust belt" industrial centers where the urban agriculture and food sovereignty movements have taken root in vacant lots between abandoned buildings. The solidarity economy is rebuilding Detroit at a landscape level in a genuine grassroots "green jobs" revolution.

Everything we need to rebuild our local economies is likely already here with us, or close by and unrecognized. We don't need new corporations or government programs. We can adapt new green methods and technologies to place-specific needs, situated experiences, and local knowledge of our own bioregions in rural and urban locales. Ultimately, what we are making is our home, and that is a priceless thing.