Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

Editor’s note: At a time when people are bashing environmentalism, including many of the political extemists in our area, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet and county resident Gary Snyder is arguing for “The Etiquette of Freedom.”

As Snyder puts it, “Learning the birds and the flowers is not just high school science or nature study — it’s local etiquette. It’s rude not to know your neighbors, you know?”:

Here’s a review of the book from S.F. Weekly:

By Jonathan Kiefer

If all you had to go by was its title, The Etiquette of Freedom might imply some crummy blowhard’s latest George W. Bush–nostalgic gas blast of foreign-policy punditry. What a relief that the actual book is something more like the opposite.

Even if you’ve never heard of Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize–winning San Francisco native poet, and his old pal Jim Harrison, the author of Legends of the Fall, you’ll quickly get the sense from this patchwork quilt of conversations between them — with section headings such as Trans-Species Erotics and Zen and Poetry — that this is no ode to jingoism.

The Etiquette of Freedom essentially amounts to a hardbound printed supplemental feature to the recent documentary The Practice of the Wild (included on DVD in the book’s back cover), wherein Snyder and Harrison, plus a few friends and colleagues, hang out and chat about life, literature, and their mutual appreciation of “Deep Ecology,” a philosophy holding that responsible citizenship of the world includes mindfulness with regard to humans and nonhumans alike.

(The Practice of the Wild also is the title of a Snyder essay collection, also recently rereleased in a new expanded edition from this book’s publisher, Berkeley’s Counterpoint Press.) As Snyder puts it, “Learning the birds and the flowers is not just high school science or nature study — it’s local etiquette. It’s rude not to know your neighbors, you know?”

Although a fundamentally complaisant exercise, The Etiquette of Freedom does at least challenge the prevailing habit of assuming films to be at the top of our cultural food chain. In the case of this material, it suggests, there’s still further to go when the documentary is done — namely, into the good, old-fashioned immersive tranquillity of a book.

Today, ever the impressively well-adjusted Beat retiree living in a hand-built home in the Sierra foothills, Snyder still knows what’s going on.

More of the review is here.

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Editor’s note: Along with Nevada City Council members and the media, I received this email from Chuck Shea, owner of the Parsonage B&B:

Dear City Council Member,

I have received notice that the proposed B&B ordinance has been placed on the agenda for Wednesday December 8th City Council meeting.

I would like to point out that this is the second evening of Victorian Christmas and as such is not an ideal time to hold this hearing.

The town should be focused on Victorian Christmas and not having to deal with such a divisive issue as this ordinance during this very important time for business and the town.

Therefore, I am requesting that this hearing on this proposed B&B ordinance be postponed until at least January 2011 and allow the Christmas season to proceed without this distraction.

Best Regards,
Chuck Shea

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Our elected and business leaders seem content to roll a rock uphill when it comes helping our region out of its economic slump. And, as always, it’s going to roll back on their head.

They’ll still get elected, though, because the constituents — mostly political ideologues, not pragmatists — are too ignorant to see it’s not working.

Instead, our local elected, civic and business leaders need to work to diversify our economy beyond real estate and construction and “old” economies — lumber and mining, for example. They need to embrace, not fight, the regulations that are on the books.

•Incoming freshman Senator-elect Doug LaMalfa — whom I voted for out of hope for “compromise” and “innovation” from the right in a Democratic state — is proving to be another “rock pounder,” just like his predecessor Sam Aanesdad. And he hasn’t even voted on any legislation yet.

Doug is going to “look into some of California’s blanket environmental regulations, which may be acceptable for urban areas but don’t work in rural counties,” according to his interview in The Union this morning.

(BTW, the word “blanket” doesn’t belong in a “news” article. It shows a lack of understanding of the complexities of environmental law — and the world, in fact.)

Go Doug! You “look” into those regulations. He’ll have about as much success as Sam. None.

The laws are on the books. Why not try to work with them than work around them?

For example, in the case of Robinson Enterprises, you could help the owner find low-cost government financing to help ease the financial burden of compliance for vehicle emissions. But to many ideologues, a government loan is a dirty world — dirtier than the emissions themselves.

•Our Congressman Tom McClintock’s idea of “local” is to target birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants — a virtual “non issue” in his district. Tom’s idea of helping to raise money for the district is to bash the stimulus program, as he did in a letter of “support” for broadband.

•In Grass Valley, our electeds continued to “talk” about economic development, addressing the strategies I wrote about the other day.

But you hear the same old rhetoric.

The county Contractors Association, for example, argued for “reducing development fees or creating local preference for Grass Valley contractors” to stimulate spending — a familiar “saw.”

But as I’ve argued before, this group needs to get out of the box and come up with ways for its members to make money off the state regulations — a program to help remove lead paint from the walls for homeowners or embracing more “green” building. The Truckee contractor’s group is far more innovative.

In Tahoe, the contractors have made a lucrative business of helping homeowners comply with “best management practices” or BMPs at the lake, rather than fighting the very strict regulations. It’s a smart, pragmatic approach.

Reducing development fees can be short-sighted public policy. As one council member pointed out, the money is used to fund projects such as the Dorsey Drive intersection.

In short, there’s very little — if any — original thinking. It’s the same old saws from the same old people (or their identical ideological twin).

Our western county is too small to be influential in state politics. We need to build bridges, not burn them.

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What if China had a WikiLeader, and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America, writes Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.

“America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation,” he writes. “But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.”

Examples:

•”They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them.”

• “They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran.”

•”Americans just had what they call an ‘election.’ Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other . . . so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him.”
It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems.

•”Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good.”

The article is here.

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