A quick couple of examples, if somewhat messy examples, using an exceptionally & wonderfully culturally-rich locale on this Eaarth …
1.India has numerous challenges for numerous reasons.
Mostly it has to do with people.
But we don’t want to rid of people???
Or do we?
2.India is getting hotter with climate change and it has a serious smog problem.
Air conditioning and technological engineering efforts at getting rid of smog are “solutions”?
But both air-conditioning and getting rid of smog (especially technologically-engineered efforts) exacerbate climate change towards getting hotter and hotter.
Another quick and dirty example of a personal Catch-22 …
Intense efforts toward money -making capitalistic entrepreneurial podcasts and associated efforts might help paul bain martin in getting his message about too much artificiality affecting quality life for biota on this Eaarth out to the populace in hopes for it to cogitate on and take “appropriate” action toward solutions … BUT martin’s artificial podcast would contribute to the overload of (capitalistically fossil-fueled, climate-changing, ecologically-disruptive) artificial information from rampantly increasing artificial podcasts. (Enrolada!!! https://www.paulpeaceparables.com/2018/05/18/enrolada-by-paul-bain-martin-jan-2007/ )
I could go on & on in this “poem” down these complexly cluttered paths of conundrums and road-bocks of Catch-22s. But I must stop and deal with the immediacy of pleasing a loved one … or perhaps the pleasing another loved one … or another??????
*********************
Therefore, I MUST simply accept this reality of an increase in Catch-22s.
On the other hand … deep down … I truly do not???
It is a Catch-22.
Love,
paul bain martin
( 7 Ss / VV->^^ )
In Solidarity toward Peaceful Degrowth/Sustainable Ecological Communitarianism
…………………..
*McKibben, Bill. 2010. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 272 pp.
What is below is an email form a dear fiend of mine, Tom Giessel … wheat farmer, Farmers Union Historian, on the board of Ogallala Commons for many years, devout Roman Catholic, all around good fellow!!! …
“This was sent to me by my friend, Barbara. It is a great message.
Just click on the link in blue, below [after reading her thoughtful message]
Tom G. Subject: Everything Of Value – Big Geek Daddy
This is the memorial we could/should all be making this Memorial weekend. This post which is not particularly recent features Fr. Boyle who founded Homeboy Industries in LA. It provides a powerful antidote to today’s world of war, greed, injustice and hate.
It is not the death and destruction from the most powerful, destructive military ever developed, it is not the boasting, bragging and bloviating about how devasting and overpowering we can be, it is not the war and warriors we have unleashed on the global community – no – it is about the kindness, compassion, mercy, justice and love for all those left out, marginalized, hated, incarcerated, criminalized, different, sick and suffering, starving, left in abject poverty that we can look at and in them see ourselves, that we can learn from, that we can empathize with and call our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and show that we mean it by creating a world in which we can all live in peace with justice and dignity for us all.
Peace can never come from war, cruelty and injustice. To remind myself of this, I have a quote that hangs on the wall of my office by Pope Paul VI – “ If you want peace, work for justice.”BSR“
paul bain martin
( 7 Ss / VV->^^ )
In Solidarity towards Peaceful Degrowth/Sustainable Ecological Agrarianism & Communitarianism
“Metaphorically, “living in a bubble” describes being isolated from the broader world [local & global Nature], often due to limited interactions with diverse perspectives or a preference for comfort zones.” (AI Overview from Google)
……………………
I live to speak out strongly and thus learn much from others. (And I agree with the great statesman & President Lyndon Baines Johnson [and his wife Lady Bird] from Texas, that “the only thing worth being is a teacher, preacher, or a politician” ,,, and of course we know that that all of us are teachers, preachers, & politicians, with a hope that we are good ones … who facilitate ecological learning for us all!)
In this process herein of speaking out as a teacher, preacher, & politician, the major theme of this short piece (because I have PT, organizing & cleaning, prep for a Seguin Independent School District Long-Range Planning Meeting coming up and for a ZOOM conference call with friends in Brasil for planning for the launching of our book “Games We Play”* in Portuguese, etc.) is “bubbles”. However, true to form, I am certain I will go off on a few tangents.
(Photos from the Love Honduras Vet & Vison Volunteering Mission this Year, 2025:
We all live in various bubbles. The predominant overreaching one across today’s Eaarth** is a very artificial neoliberal capitalism/consumerism dependent on militarism & deadly destructive armaments & soldiers (much of it from the U.S.) and quite separate in the human mind from “Nature” (though necessarily connected, … if precariously).
This bubble is a globalized world that is flat (Friedman 2006).
paul bain martin’s sub-bubble supposedly involves an ethos of a very idealistic but pragmatic belief that he is attempting to effect change & live in a world of caring & sharing-solidarity & peaceful-degrowth and eventually a world of sustainable quasi-matriarchal- agrarianism and communitarianism. Current Republicans & Trumpsters are in a quite large sub-bubble which believes in less regulation in community (less of the regulation which was developed in an attempt to prevent socio-ecological destruction), and it is a bubble which has considerable confidence in an autocratic oligarchy of lassie-faire capitalism (not based on science and with lots of fluff & gobbledygook [Texas statesman Maury Maverick, 1944]) (and with a quite visible & strong flimflam-hand). Most “progressives” believe in much more governmental attempts at regulation toward protection from socio-ecological destruction and support efforts toward equity, diversity, and inclusion, yet they cling on to a capitalism & entrepreneurship efforts toward equity & ecological sanity …which a “paul bain martin-type” believes is an impossible dream, i.e., paul bain martin strongly believe we need a radical, if critically-thought-out & smartly-planned, systematic system change away from Nature-exploitive & humanity-exploitive capitalism …and toward degrowth. … Of course, there are many other sub-bubbles of libertarians & anarchists, socio-ecological democratic socialists, “independents”, Marxists, Christian Democratic People’s Party (in e.g., Hungary), etc.
Breaking Out of My Bubble from Early Indoctrination in Rural/Christian South-Central Texas, Immediately Post-WW II. My story of transformation from dreaming of being a Catholic priest to being an ignostic degrowther and sort of a Jesus of Nazareth-, St. Francis of Assisi-, Gandhi-, John XXIII-, MLK, Jr.-, Berta Caseras-, Pope Francis-, the Dalai Lama-, Winona LaDuke-, Leo XIV-“christian” and PEACE***maker is complex and would be long with tales of interactions across the classes & “races”/ethnicities & varying formal & informal educational experiences, folk of varying gender/sexual persuasion of humanity in Latin America (including an “illegal” trip to Cuba in 2006 in which I gave three [3] talks at a sustainable community conference) and Europe (mostly Poland & Ukraine) and North America. … But let me tell you one little tale.
In the late 1980s when I was Sustainable Agriculture Coordinator for Leftist Democrat Jim Hightower’s Texas Department of Agriculture, we had a visitor from the USSR who was interested in our Hightower-TDA innovative & progressive efforts toward sustainable organic farming, planned-controlled grazing systems, farmers markets, farm-to-table/farm-to-school initiatives, ecological protection, and good nutrition programs (which TAMU was not effectively doing and which Republican Rick Perry very effectively disrupted in a sort of Trump-light style when he was elected in 1990.)
This visitor was brought to my office, and I was asked to take him for a two-day tour of the south-central Texas agriculture with which I was very familiar (conventional AND some which was developing toward sustainability). This visitor was a fascinating character of about my age, or a bit older, with a good command of English, was a talker!, and he had a briefcase full of 1950s-70s black & white photos of the Soviet Union. He had been raised Muslim, had grown up in the southern Ural Mountain area of the Soviet Union, and had worked as a migrant combiner of grains in his youth. He had also spent considerable time working in Siberia. Later he studied physics and was a young colleague & collaborative scientist of hydrogen bomb-developer & peacenik, Andrei Sakharov.
The short story is that contrary to the propaganda I was indoctrinated and infused with in the 1950s-70s as a U.S. citizen, this visitor showed me very lovely women of Russian during that period … and they didn’t all wear old bulky clothes and high top, cruddy, lace-up shoes. His photos of Siberia in the summer were absolutely marvelous and not all snow- and Gulag-covered. The pictures of crops of the Soviet Union seemed to be bountiful and beautiful. According to this visitor (and later one of my older students from Bolivia who had been a diplomat, and a friend from Cuba), Moscow rivaled any other city in the world in terms of beauty. He emphasized that there was much “free enterprise” in the old Soviet Union. And according to him, many citizens of the Soviet Union were quite happy with their governmental social services and health care.
As we talked, we both realized how terribly indoctrinated and propagandized each of us were in each of our respective nations.
I could go on about what I “bubble-breakingly” learned from this visitor from this wonderful visitor from the Soviet Union (and later from various dear friends … from black agricultural economist friend from Cuba who studied in Cuba, Siberia, and Brasil; and from a leading agroecological scientist from Chile whose mother taught some of Marxist Salvador Allende’s family & who married into the Somoza family; from Polish entomologist Kazimierz Weich who defends & yearns for some of the socialism from before the fall of The Wall, but who also embraces some of capitalism; and from Jose Luna and Jose Lopez of Dominican Republic; and from indigenous friends and indigenous co-volunteers of Pine Ridge Reservation each year; etc.).
But let’s move to our wonderful Honduran experience this year.
“Love Honduras” Bubble-Changers. Trips to other countries and within other cultures to interact in solidarity with & volunteer with, have been life-changing and dynamically burst and modified my bubbles in my life. Honduran trips with an Episcopalian Mission group for the last ca. 15 years+ have been particularly educational and mind-opening and -expanding (and uplifting) toward effecting change in my ethos & attitudes … and actions for realizing sustainability.
Some small snippets follow:
1.The Reverend Father Ripp Hardaway pointed out how in contrast to what occurs in a more urban environment, the more campesino-like, agrarian folk in the rural communities in which we worked … readily expressed and realized their eagerness to work in solidarity with us to learn together and improve their communities toward resilience & sustainability and eagerly express their gratitude and love! (Paraphrased with many of my adjectives.)
2. This year Elders in the rural communities in Honduras expressed their disappointment in the Trumpian tariffs and rigid closed-door (selfish, non-christian, isolationistic) policies which they felt were particularly hurting the poor and powerless in various areas of Honduras. (Tonight, 5/26/2025, on the PBS News Hour their was an excellent piece about how Trump’s cuts to USAID have detrimentally affected Catholic Relief Services and poor hard-working farmers in Honduras. … I hope we ALL can see how wonderful a service PBS does in getting out the Truth and assisting in continually exposing the corrupt and uncaring (except for self) president we have. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/catholic-relief-services-faces-uncertain-future-after-trump-cuts-aid-funding )
(I will also add that I do know the stories of close friends from Honduras and Nicaragua who traveled under terrible conditions and struggled to get to the U.S. because of terrible inequity. It is not right and just unjust for a U.S. citizen to relatively easily enter countries all over this world, whereas it is almost impossible for folk in other countries to enter the U.S. … I reiterate, this injustice is simply not right!)
3. The youth of Honduras sang such beautiful & touching songs and prayed so lovingly. They really embraced us and showed true love and gratitude.
4. Trump has made derogatory remarks about shit-hole countries, undocumented folk, people of color and various ethnicities, and women, etc. At any time of his life, I would have liked to have seen him try to match the work and intellect of Hondurans, women and men with whom we work on these vet & vision team-trips! Of course, I do realize that Trump could slickly lie and con his way out of any reality of productive, sustainable work, or of that of a sustainable livelihood … while still receiving plenty of silver spoon-dollars and other non-deserved dollars ($) (and “The Plane” & other bribes), etc., etc., etc.!
5. Finally, wonderful ecological activist and PEACEmaker, Berta Caseres**** was killed in order to put an end to her activism against socio-ecological destructive neoliberal capitalism in Esperanza, Honduras in 2016 (less than two hours from where we of the Love Honduras Veterinarian & Vision Mission volunteer each year in the Siguatepeque region). … The year 2016 was also the one in which I rode ca. 2500 miles on my bicycle for the wonderful PEACEmaker Bernie Sanders … from Bernie’s town of Burlington, Vermont back to Texas. (Would have truly been wonderful had he been elected president!!!)
To a large extent we all have it very good in our neoliberal capitalistic; Nature- and to a great extent, people of south of the Tropic of Cancer-exploitive; and fossil energy/material dependent U.S.-bubble because of our economic-growth … and military … and global political power. But because we do have the lion’s share of this power, it is WE in the U.S. who are by far the greatest destroyers of life-providing, life-giving Nature (or the major destroyers of a dynamic homeostatic symbiaoses including Homosapiens).
We can do better and do what is right and break out of our socio-ecologically destructive bubble by addressing five (5) key needs through critical thinking & planning & action in solidarity and intelligently &systematically breaking our bubble into a neo-Earth in concert with Nature. The five (5) key needs are:
1.Ecoliteracy
2. Deweaponization & demilitarization
3. Degrowth
4. Realization of a sustainable quasi-matriarchal local & global agrarianism/communitarianism
5. Equity.
************
Thanks for reading, rereading, digesting, cogitating on, considering this. … And yes! I am trying to bring you into my bubble!!!
paul bain martin
( 7 Ss / VV->^^ )
In Solidarity toward Peaceful Degrowth/Sustainable Ecological Agrarianism & Communitarianism
……..
*https://www.harvard.com/book/9781610120463
**McKibben. 2010. Eaarth. Making Life on a Tough New Planet.
*** PEACE, or Positively Ethical Applied Community Ecology.
poetry for eaarth* to earth day, in memory of juan seguin … & pope francis (and others)
by paul bain martin
(bain, name of a prominent family of bankers in my old hometowns of stockdale & devine. bain, my namesake … dad’s beloved brother … was a “pacifist” & was killed very soon after very reluctantly joining in a war against fascism he did not want to enter)
A Mission/Ethos. Despite no free will in the dice rolls over space & time from ca. 14 billion years ago & before, and the existential threats “seeming to come to ‘fruition’ for humanity,” “… we still must attempt to help realize quality life/equity for all biota. (“Seek profound, holistic realization of the Golden Rule while abiding by the Second Law of Thermodynamics & the Precautionary Principle” … or “Within limits there are not limits.”)
A Simple Succinct List of Major Needs for Self & Humanity. 1. Ecological literacy 2. Deweaponization & demilitarization 3. Degrowth 4. Quasi-matriarchal agrarianism 5. Equity
Steps Along the Way of One Insignificant Life.Born with genes & epigenetics of compassion and passion. … Instilled with the importance of a campesino-like agrarianism. … Recognition of need for inclusion. Vatican II. … Experiencing other cultures/learning Spanish from the Peñas at 6 years of age (experiencing the richness & strength of diversity. … … Awards in the senior year of high school. Significant increasing of self-esteem. … Ultimate importance of biology & ecology from Dr. Joe Shaffner et al., Texas A&M U.& other Land Grant U’s. … Marrying a best friend & love. … Importance of understanding and utitilizing energetics from Dr. David Pimentel. … Getting a doctorate (“sub-journeys” & roadmarks along the way). … “Go ahead and do what your experiences & ethos tell you to do (toward equity for all humanity & biota) … and don’t worry about it too much!” paraphrased from examples/bate papo of agroecologist, Dr. Miguel Angel Altieri. … The (moral & ethical) politics of Jim Hightower.
Component Stories of the Umbrella Story.Plant knowledge from the 6-8 yr-old Peña kids. The beautiful Mexican Carmelite Nuns. Crew leadersTony Cruz & Salome Gallegos. Bare-butt whipping from Dad in front of friends. Fresh black-eyed peas in 409 Big Red from Devine to the cannery in Brownsville.Mrs. Allen and the Boer Wars.The Cottonseed Hull accident.Aldicarb poisoning.Sugar Land Prison Farm. Killing Three of My Dad’s Large Young Boers. Inez Perez & Jerry Levias. Bob Gibson & the Astros. 1968, Randy Mattson, Gun Control, & the Affluent Society.My Loops, spins, Immelmanns, etc.Las aguas prietas de imperialismo. Quid pro quo monies to scientists with Land Grant Universities from transnational corporations. Pinho.Roberto Strang. Senator Tati Santiesteban & Judges James Nowlin & Filemon Vela & Renea Hicks. Keith’s organic pickup trucks. Hidden (or not-so-hidden) pesticide spills, etc. Kazik and the Ukraine. Hilario. Lots of puñ…ing with various organizations trying to do a little good locally and internationally … but thinking it is necessary to get more intimately involved with the San Antonio Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, Veterans For Peace, Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, and Stan Cox in his (their) efforts at Degrowth, PEACE, and True sustainable ecological community.
(All of this was of course informed by many other (reading & university, etc.) experiences, or learning experiences, and all are connected toward “7 Ss / VV->^^” and “in Solidarity toward Degrowth/Sustainable Ecological ‘Communitarianism'”)
“Thoreau’s understanding of Darwin is particularly illuminating. While later writers would extract from Darwin a justification for social hierarchy that saw the richest as the best-adapted, Thoreau, Buell writes, mined Origin of Species for ‘its insights about species distribution, not species mutability.’”
“If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, Thoreau offers something better: not just imagining but practicing the end of capitalism.”
“Thoreau was committed to seeing humans as a collective species—not lords of our domain, but codependent beings engrossed in a shared habitat. Realizing that requires distance, detachment, estrangement: we must go away from ourselves, from our individual interests and concerns, our social habits and habitats, from our assumptions and even from our language, in order to return more free. That won’t just make us better people. It will also make us better neighbors, citizens, and friends.”
Thoughts (nothing new) after coffee and before I put in a day’s work with a hired helper … tidying up around here. (The stuff below … is not very organized …; however, I am ATTEMPTING to communicate, primarily with my friends to the relatively far-Right politically.)
1. I am definitely more conservative than most U.S. citizens. (Trump and Trumpians are FAR from being conservative!)
2. I am not poor and have been VERY lucky in life, but for many reasons I do identify with the poor, disenfranchised, homeless, recent & other undocumented immigrants, have-nots … even desperate very terrible “criminals”.
3. I am not a disciplined, structured, “typical” scientist-type. However, I do believe in a process of Science and in Scientific knowledge (& resultant wisdom and prudence). Given my little- brain, -energy, and -discipline (& therefore -knowledge, -etc.), I have have persistently worked in university & other structured courses & library stacks, etc. and through picking the brains of scientists & others from about 1966 … in efforts to truly profoundly & holistically understand biological/ecological systems … and perhaps put the human component of those systems on a track toward the systems being better for quality life for all.
4. Nevertheless, I do also understand that Faith (INFORMED BY Science) within humanity is super-important for sustainable ecological community including human beings.
5. As I have stated repeatedly recently, I am certain that key needs for sustainable ecological community are …
o ecological literacy,
o de-weaponization & demilitarization,
o Degrowth,
o global local sustainable agrarianism which is quasi-matriarchal, and
o equity.
Love,
paul bain martin
( 7 Ss / VV->^^ )
In Solidarity toward Degrowth/Sustainable Ecological “Communitarianism”
