Thursday, September 24, 2015

Land Theology

Published Sept. 23, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette



“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!  Isaiah 5:8


     Last week I wrote about land tenure and its importance, not just in the book I’m working on but also in our individual lives and in our communities.  What I didn’t fully understand when I began this book project, however, was that concerns over land tenure go all the way back to biblical times, particularly concentrated, absentee land ownership.

     Before Jesus, before Isaiah and Jeremiah, concentration of control over the best, most productive agricultural holy lands by a few individuals created impoverished conditions for the rural peasants and the mass of urban dwellers.  That’s what made those prophets cry out.  They were crying out not just against the injustices created, but also for the covenant broken, the one the Israelites made with God before they crossed the River Jordan to occupy the Promised Land.   These are the roots of what has come to be known as “land theology.”

     Up to a point, I may be excused for my ignorance 25 years ago.  My parents were suspicious of bible thumpers, and that carried over to the text itself.  Up to a point, you who have read the Bible all of your lives may also be excused, because most theologians over the last 2000 years have also missed that message.  In that scholarly vacuum, I guess our preachers may also be excused.  After all, in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church itself was a large landholder and the source of permission for European explorers to seize the land of natives in the New World, creating landlessness and injustices we still have not lived down. 

    In 1977 an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann published a book called The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith.  In it he laid the foundation for what would become “land theology.”  My Methodist preacher friend John Pitney picked up that ball and carried it to the Forum on Church and Land in Fresno, where I first heard the message in 1992.  Another Old Testament scholar, Marvin Chaney, presented his research there on the land tenure conditions in 8th Century BC Palestine, providing a framework for us to compare with California’s state of large-scale, industrialized agriculture.  I left that event physically, emotionally and intellectually transformed, i.e., converted.

     But I think what made that conversion possible was a moment 14 years before, in the office of a retired Berkeley economics professor, Paul Taylor.  I was there to learn about federal reclamation law from him, and to help his efforts in any way I, as an untutored 28-year-old, could.  He’d been invited by Cornell historian Paul Wallace Gates to publish his collection of law journal articles on California water and the 160-acre limitation.  His task that day was to start to write the introduction to this volume of works that spanned more than 20 years, a culmination of his passion and his scholarship.  I was there to help type.

     He got a few sheets of yellow unlined paper, got his pen, and began to think.  Then he looked up at his bookshelf which spanned the entire wall, floor to ceiling, and said “Where’s my Bible?”  At Berkeley I’d never heard an academic ask that question, and had no idea why he wanted it, but joined him in the search until he realized it was at home.

     The next day he returned to the office with Isaiah 5:8 written on a 2x2 yellow Post-it.  I typed it at the top of the page, followed by two other quotes he’d chosen, a passage from the 1902 Reclamation Act and a sentence from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958.  His eyes asked for my approval, but I still didn’t understand what it meant, particularly Isaiah.  He looked at me kindly then and said “Laying house to house, field to field – that’s when people buy up all the land.”  That was my real introduction to land theology, there in the UCB Department of Economics at the knee of a gentle genius from Iowa.

     And now I carry the torch myself.  The truth will not only set you free:  it can set you on fire.  Run the course.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your flaming visions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Property Rights and Community Wrongs

Published Sept. 16, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            “Search for a congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.”  Paul Schuster Taylor, 1979
 
     “What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on one.  I usually say “agriculture and the common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like “small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”  But the thread running through it all is land tenure.

     “Land tenure” is not a term most people use, although it applies to every single one of us.  It means the system that determines peoples’ access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the subcategories of relationships determined by that system.

            In this country, the system of private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.)  The subcategories in our system are “landed,” “tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”  The concept of private property is so important to our entire socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost god-given.  To criticize private property here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.  

            What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,) particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred to as “absentee ownership.”  What’s wrong about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.

            Last week’s paper carried a wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of Exeter’s True Value Hardware.  The letter pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over lightly:  the landowner’s decision to raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice.  It’s the kind of action landowners take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict. 

            The Brewers then went on to suggest a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community identity.)  They then went on to express the hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a good community.”

            That last sentence might have some impact if the current owners are local.  The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business housed there) sold the building several years ago.  This is simply to say that I do not know if the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it.  My experiences here in Lindsay document that local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners can.

            But it’s a question we should ask.  Who will look out for the needs of the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or care?
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Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send your empty building nightmares to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247

 

           

Monday, September 14, 2015

Studebaker Desert


Published Sept. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The other night I was scanning my bookshelves for pieces I might have left out of my collection of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good.  When my eyes lit on it, my fingers reached for Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, a book so dense with the common bad of water politics it could take a month of reading to find a few pages to excerpt.

     Published in 1986, the book was described as “a savagely witty history of America’s reckless depletion of its water resources,” in Newsday.  The Washington Post Book Review called it “a highly partisan, wonderfully researched portrayal of the damming, diverting and dirtying of western rivers.”  Publishers Weekly said “This timely and important book should be required reading for all citizens.”

     Although I think Publishers Weekly was right, I doubt the book was well read here in the Valley.  Almost 30 years later many of our citizens are still making the same kind of arguments for more dams that Reisner showed were reasonless and irrational, in massive denial of the facts of water’s availability and the costs to develop it.  The reason for making those arguments still exist - that dams can make a few people temporarily rich - but 30 years later those people are even smaller in number.  Unfortunately, they may be more powerful.

     I grew up in the 1950’s, when big water projects like the CVP here and Bonneville in the Pacific Northwest were viewed as heroic and totally positive undertakings designed to create and spread wealth among the western citizenry.  I remember watching newsreels in school about their physical construction and economic contributions, and I believed every word of it.  I chose Grand Coulee Dam as the subject of the first report I wrote in grade school.  A decade earlier that same spirit had captured Woody Guthrie, who worked for the feds for a month putting this heroism and hope into song.

     But by the 1980’s the promises showed their true colors and the costs had begun to show up.  In Reisner’s introduction, “A semidesert with a Desert Heart,” we can see why:

            “One does not really conquer a place like (California.)  One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.... The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it.  But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move... The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green - and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater.  But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels . . . has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. 
            “What they seem not to understand,” he continues, “is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made.  Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert.  But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed.”
           
     How to live here in this place, within the limits nature provides and God or someone has allowed us to stretch well beyond, is a question this drought has provided for us to ponder.  If we respond rightly, I think we may be finding ourselves downsizing and going backward to something once more common than the Cadillac.
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Trudy Wischemann is an old car lover who writes.  You can send her your more politically correct water conservation ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.
   



Keeping a Distance

Published Sept. 2, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette




     For the last two weeks I’ve been studying the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980’s, learning its causes and consequences.  When a friend asked why, I jokingly said “It puts my work on the City of Lindsay in perspective.”
 
     There’s more truth to it than I thought.  While I can attend a council meeting without fear of being disappeared, tortured, raped and murdered, there’s a parallel between what happens here (or doesn’t happen) and the state of civil non-discourse that existed in El Salvador prior to that war.  The primary one is the distance the haves keep between themselves and the have-nots, and the way “having” is used to seduce the barely-haves and might-not-haves into putting their eggs in the haves’ basket.
 
     That’s what I saw clearly half-way through Tuesday night’s council meeting.  Two groups had come to register their protest over budget decisions:  the city employees furloughed last week with their union representatives, and members of the public, largely Spanish-speaking, who feel the proposed increases in sewer and garbage rates are unfair. Many of the city employees held signs that fingered missing cash reserves, the official reason given for cutting their incomes.  The members of the public delivered almost 400 signed ballots for the hearing on Prop. 218 that evening, which they had gathered in less than 5 days.
 
     Many people spoke during the public comment period, which was extended to accommodate English-Spanish translation.  Members of both groups were clear about the hardships being imposed by the city, although there was plenty of confusion about who to hold responsible.  Later in the meeting Danny Salinas blamed it on them for not attending the budget workshops this spring, as if these consequences would have been obvious during those discussions.  They would not.
 
     The concerns of both groups went unanswered, though discussion went long into the night.  Facts were hard to come by as figures flew through the air.  The SEIU union representative, who was beginning to make sense out of some of them during Tamara Lakin’s budget discussion, initially was denied the right to ask questions during that agenda item by the mayor, despite the fact that we had just cemented that right a few months ago. 
 
     In the end, in the face of both groups, three councilmembers - Danny Salinas, Pam Kimball and Mayor Padilla - first voted to raise the sewer and garbage rates.  Then they approved the pay increase negotiated for the police by Bill Zigler, despite the 10% paycut he had dealt the non-uniformed employees the week before without council’s knowledge, much less approval.
 
     By that time, many of the city employees had bought the argument that we can’t afford to subsidize the water/sewer/garbage account (essential city services) and must make it pay despite the hardships it might inflict on those people whose incomes are hanging by a dry thread in this drought.  They did not seem to find it troublesome that we still subsidize big-time both the McDermont Field House and Wellness Center from the general fund, which are non-essential services that only a portion of our population can afford to enjoy.  Apparently that lucky portion includes some of our city employees, despite their 10% paycut.
 
     Keeping a distance between ourselves and those who have to struggle to stay alive may feel safer than trying to figure out what to give up for equality’s sake, what to do to help close the distance.  But if that pledge we say at the beginning of each meeting, which ends “with liberty and justice for all” is to mean anything, we need to make decisions that don’t widen the gap.
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Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send her your distance-closing examples c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.
 
 
 
 
 
 


    












 

 

 

 

 

Hearing Voices

Published August 26, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s been an unquiet week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted hometown.  With paycuts, petitions, and the usual propaganda, some of Lindsay’s many voices have been speaking outloud.  Sorting the messages has kept me busy, although I think the cacophony is a healthy sign.


     Underneath that din, there have been other voices wafting through my days.  One is my cat Dot’s, who wakes slightly earlier than I do with a bleat, not a meow.  She is old, growing more frail by the month, and deaf enough to be confused by sounds rather than guided by them.  An affectionate lick by one of the others or her own sneeze can knock her down.  When I look at her, I often see her entire life passing before my eyes.  Her time is coming to return to dust.

     When she arrived at my house as a kitten, she was just a speck.  Two girls found her and her brother in the park one evening, wandering around with their eyes glued shut by mucus.  The girls brought them here, and though I already had enough cats, I also had a tube of antibiotic eye ointment in the feline medicine cabinet.  The girls did not, so I was the kittens’ best chance.  That was June 1998.  I’ve never been sorry.  

     I’ve been sorry about the park, however.  Where the kittens were born, near the hospital bordered by the orange grove, where you could sit on the grass watching kids run around like banshees and feel like you were out in the country - that place is gone.  It’s buried under the concrete and blacktop of Ono City Parkway.  The missing orange grove is now just a paragraph in the resolution permitting the development of an up-scale housing subdivision there.  That paragraph required the developer to remove the trees section by section as building progressed.  Instead, he bulldozed the entire grove to install the underground utilities, which he never finished.  Now his plans have turned to dust along with the ground itself.

     So another voice I’m hearing is the sound of my own regret.  I hid my eyes as the City began destroying the park to build the aquatic center.  When I finally woke up, saw what was planned and realized we should try to save the part they hadn’t deranged, it was too late.  The photographs they used to get the grant from the state to renovate the park showed its terrible condition but didn’t mention that the City was the agent of that destruction.  When I called the state seeking help in delaying the renovation until public input could be included in the design, they didn’t believe me and forged ahead, turning our once pastoral place into an urbanized space.
    
     Arm-in-arm with regret are the voices of betrayal.  Sitting in the Memorial Building Thursday evening for a community meeting on the proposed rate increases for sewer and garbage, I was jolted by flashbacks of two meetings almost 4 years ago.  

     In one I heard the voice of Mike Camarena, director of city services, telling many of these same people in that same room how the park redesign would suit their needs.  When he discovered that the audience had other ideas and that they would rather see the funds used to fix their neighborhood streets, he “misspoke” about deadlines on the source of funding.  In the other flashback I heard the voice of Bill Zigler, our new interim city manager, reassuring these citizens who came to a city council meeting to request input on the park’s redesign that “There will be swings.”  Swings were at the top of their list.  There still are no swings.

     Friday, when I asked Bill and Mike why there still are no swings in the park, they responded that they have other priorities.  May they be hearing voices soon.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer trained in environmental planning who is mortified by this city’s priorities.  You can send her your list c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

False Witness

Published August 19, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “You’re the first person I’ve called,” said a barely familiar voice on the phone Thursday.  “The city employees are being cut 10% across the board, starting Monday.”

     My heart sank.  Take 10 % off the salaries of those at the top of the employee pile and you might be cutting into their entertainment budget, unless they’re some of those who over-imagined their importance and mortgaged big-time before 2008.  But take 10% off the wages of those at the bottom, where every penny is already stretched thin, and here comes a household crisis.

     The employee who called had been informed by his department head that the cut was needed thanks to the City Council’s dilly-dallying over the budget deficits.  Not true.  When I spoke with Tamara Lakin, head of Finance who claimed authorship of the 10% cut, she was clear that the budget is fine.  “It’s our cash flow that’s in trouble,” she said, caused solely by  “two unanticipated expenses starting in June.”  To avoid a crisis, Lakin moved in the only way she saw possible to release the needed cash into the stream she has to provide.

     The first of those two unanticipated expenses was Rich Wilkinson’s severance package.  The second is the settlement likely pending from Brian Clower’s lawsuit to claim the severance he was denied by Wilkinson, and the pain and suffering resulting from Wilkinson’s management of the Public Safety Department, which created an inhospitable working environment.  If the Council votes to settle rather than let the lawsuit go forward, those facts will die with the rest of the weekly news - which, with Wilkinson gone, may be the best place for them (until the next despot arrives.)  But the price of that silence comes due immediately.

     If the Council bears any responsibility in this cash flow crisis, it is in approving Wilkinson’s goodbye party.  You may (or may not) remember, however, that the three council members who were most likely NOT to approve it were sidelined by Wilkinson’s charge of conspiracy (which was dismissed last month by the DA.) 

     Aided and abetted by Mario Zamora, the city attorney, it was a stunt that worked.  Two of the three were excluded from this vote (Padilla and Mecum) while Sanchez was elected to join Salinas and Kimball to maintain a quorum, where his severance package was approved.  From their long terms on the council, Salinas and Kimball also bear responsibility for supporting Wilkinson’s appointment in the first place and negotiating his overly-powerful contract.  If you want to blame the Council for the 10% pay cut, put it squarely on them.

     Where I want to put the blame is on false witness.  You remember: it’s that thing we’re not supposed to bear against each other in the community of faith, the ninth of the Ten Commandments, the anchor of the Judeo-Christian world.  Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann says the Ten are the framework for another kind of world - Yahweh’s - one where “the big ones do not eat the little ones,” where instead people strive to reduce the size difference, working with kindness for the equality of all.  Not bearing false witness, he says, is particularly important in government where, if there is no truth, there can be no justice.  The big ones will have the little ones for dinner, literally, on a daily basis.  That’s what’s happening here.

     Neighbors, your words still ring in my head:  “It’s always been this way - you’re not going to change it.”  I don’t think that’s true.  What’s true is that we have a vipers’ nest of false witness in this town, and it will continue to claim our vitality as long as we turn our backs on it, feeling helpless.  But when we’re ready to call false witness on the carpet and declare zero tolerance, we’re on our way to a brave new world:  something leaning toward the Kingdom, or at least the democracy Jefferson tried to provide.
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Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte Quaker/Methodist/Franciscan/Populist who writes.  You can send her your false witness sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.