The tourist meta-gaze, we tourists gaze at the tourists gazing at themselves. Seaside Tanah Lot temple stands behind us not giving a damn.

By my second day in Bali, my travel partner Patrici and I have determined there are three kinds of Bali tourists: Australians on holiday, lovers on honeymoon, and single women seeking enlightenment à la Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love infamy. Patrici and I are none of these, so we quickly begin to ask ourselves what we are doing in this place.

She and I stroll through the heavily touristed cities of Kuta, a beach town famous for its warm and friendly surf, and Ubud, the cultural capital of the island. We aren’t sure what we are looking for. Before now, I never expected in my life to visit this little island in Indonesia. The trip was a last-minute appendix to my Philippines journey. Patrici said “Meet me in Bali,” and I, compelled by a nomadic wind, answered “Yes.”

We wonder if there is even a Bali apart from the swank resto-bars of Kuta and the Eat-Pray-Love yoga-meditation packages. It is by serendipity that we get as close to it as we do, when our host Kayti, invites us to visit her school to see a small garden her students have grown.

On the drive down from Ubud, we stop at the Bali International School in Sanur where we meet Luke, Alyssa, Niamh, and Gabrielle. These seventh graders and their classmates have taken what they call a “wasteland” strip in the back of the school, re-worked the soil, and have planted pumpkin, ginger, bamboo, spinach, and cassava. Everything is grown organically. Luke takes great care pulling dead leaves from a vining pumpkin, and Niamh hand-waters using a water bottle poked with holes.

Seventh-graders Gabrielle and Niamh stand in the midst of cassava and ginger plants at the Bali International School three-month-old garden.

The garden has been an experience in teamwork and leadership for the kids. They held meetings to plan and design the plot and now they have a spot of earth where they spend hours together even off school hours. “Usually during the day we’re just out on the floors in the concrete,” says Gabrielle, “Now we can enjoy nature here.”

A group called Bali Urban Farmers taught the students the basics of permaculture. Robi, a member of BUF and a self-identified farmer-musician-journalist, speaks with his arms as much as his lead-singer voice. He gestures about the need for organic farming in Bali and soon we are hopping to Denpasar to visit the BUF demo farm.

Grunge-rock activist-farmer Robi points out the various young crops of the Bali Urban Farming demonstration farm.

The farm is an old house compound, the walls of two buildings in rubble at the ground, surrounded by garden. Robi points to where the kitchen and meeting rooms will be. Despite having the site for only seven months, the garden is lush with vegetable plants, a fish pond, chicken and pigeon coops, and a lone white duck trying to escape my camera.

Robi says some day they hope to hold a market with the food they grow and maybe even host concerts here. BUF is a small group that began with Robi and some of his friends. I ask him how they stay organized. He says “We get together, and we just have fun. It’s like rock and roll. It has to be fun.”

BUF is a part organic farmer community, part artistic collaboration. This bath tub was used in a recent art exhibit to house a spontaneous permaculture fish pond. Now it houses young plants at the BUF demo farm.

Robi directs us to a friend’s exhibit of paintings criticizing the industrial development of Bali. Patrici and I look at each other decidedly and then are off for our own bit of rock and roll. We relish the serendipity of hosts that have led us to find what we sought, without even knowing what we were seeking.

Bali is a small island, lush in nature, rich in culture, and veiled in religious tradition. Almost everyone here is trying to find some enlightenment, some romance, some bit of “the real Bali.” The real Bali is as much a myth as the imagined Bali. It isn’t some elusive strip of surf or a hidden village. It is a school garden, it is seventh grade permaculturists, and it is grunge-rock fun.

Manila is a city that has been thriving since before even the Spanish arrived in the Philippine archipelago. In the sixteenth century it was the Kingdom of Maynila, ruled by the Muslim Sultanate of Brunei. Since the Spanish the city has passed through the hands of the Japanese, the Americans, and finally the people of the Republic of the Philippines. It is perhaps due to this centuries-long hodge-podge of occupations that Manila is the confused city it is today.

The metro Manila region is where the gasoline meets the groundwater, where the superpoor are hidden by supermalls, and where the shrines of national heroes are overshadowed by high-rise condos. Worlds that seem polar opposites exist right on top of one another. The inescapable poverty and pollution compete with the city Manila is trying to become — welcome to jet-setters and the economic elite of the world.

The Manila skyline, replete with condos and oil drums.

At the end of last week I visited the Pandacan community in Manila. I work with FACES–the Filipino American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity–a US-based organization that partners with Advocates for Environmental and Social Justice, based in Pandacan. Sixto, the Secretary-General of AESJ toured us around this neighborhood, where the national poet Carlos Bulosan once took his lover Celia on boat rides along the Beata River–a river that today carries trash along banks of concrete before meeting the Pasig. This area was once covered in wildgrasses used to feed work animals like the carabao and the horses who pulled kalesas. Now it houses an oil depot, the borders of which are up against the walls of people’s homes. A pipeline leads up to this depot, and in 2010 it was discovered to be leaking millions of litres of fuel into the ground in Makati City.

Linear Park in Pandacan, the literal fenceline.

This city sick with poverty and pollution is also the city of the SM super-mall. Nearly every barangay has an SM nearby, and the Mall of Asia, the biggest mall in the continent I’ve been told, sits facing the Manila Bay spitting fireworks every weekend. Malling is a culture in this town. For those with the means, one of the best is at Bonifacio High Street in Fort Bonifacio. You enter the strip mall through the plazas of high-end restaurants topped by low-rise condos. The fountains and grass of the plazas are flanked by boutiques where you can find American and European labels and designer products of all categories. At the Fort, people jog with their huskies in tow, careful to not get hit by the Lamborghinis speeding by.

One of the great malls of this country.

Manila seems to be the metropolis aspiring to become something else without dealing with what it is. The same place where condos skyrocket left and right also houses Smokey Mountain–a shantytown built on top of a landfill. In the Tondo barangay, this is where adults and children dig through the trash for scrap metal, old electronics, and anything re-salable to make a living.

This city both fascinates and disgusts me. Manila’s history is rich, but its present is poor in many ways. Despite or because of the billions of dollars of development poured to improve the quality of life for a few, poverty greets you everywhere. To ignore this reality is both ludicrous but somehow necessary for the millions who brave the smog and traffic to get to work everyday, so they too can afford a cup of Starbucks coffee.

The view from a landbridge leading to another great SM mall.

Despite everything that annoys me about this place, I want to come back. The country of rich rice fields and fisheries in the province also is the overcrowded streets and endless subdivisions in the capital. This is the other Philippines. The Philippines Filipinos want to live in, not knowing that it is actually the Philippines trying to become some place else.

I am leaving the country, at the tail end of my journey more intrigued by it than ever. It’s mystique makes no sense. Bahala na — whatever will be will be. Manila is what it is, and that is one hot glorious mess.

Until I return,

With love,

Adrien

Hi friends,

I apologize it’s taken so long for me to write. I have been swept up by this place. It has kept me in a deep long embrace for want of time lost between us.

I am in Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines — the city in which I was born. This isn’t the densely concrete and pollution-ridden Manila. Kalibo is the capitol of the province flanked by a river spilling out into the Visayan seas, ricefields, and mountains draped in verdure on all sides. Here you find Jollibees and small department stores across the street of the old public market, where vendors butcher meat in the open air and you can select from piles of dried fish of all varieties.

Tricycle is the main mode of transportation to any part of the town — a motorcycle with a carriage attached to the side that seats up to eight people, if one hops on the seat behind the bike driver. The sound of diesel motors fills the streets all hours of the day.

This last week that sound was also accompanied by the melodies of glockenspiels and drum beats floating into our homes. The annual Ati-Atihan festival is the perfect example of the schizophrenia of Filipino culture. This is a festival where a man marches through the streets, face painted in tribal stripes, carrying a statue of the child Jesus in one hand and a Red Horse beer can in the other.

Originally a hundreds-of-years-old feast celebrating the sharing of Panay Island between the native Atis and the migrant Malays, like most Filipino tradititons it has also been Christianized. It is a festival of the Santo Nino (Holy Child), an image of Christ the child in royal garb which originates in some story about how a small statue from Flanders, Belgium arrived in the Philipines.

We sad-sad (march) in the street to the beats of legions of drum corps — groups of boys who make money being hired to play during this festival. Various groups dress in tribal costume and paint their faces black in accordance with the original tradition of the festival. The town’s plaza overflows with festival-goers and reckless tourists.

On the last day of the festival the whole town parades from the church in the plaza through the main streets of the town — the drunken horde led by the town mayor and the bishop of Aklan.

I haven’t been to this festival since I was two years old, so being here for basically the first time in memory is siempre overwhelming. With the Romans, I too paint my face, drink, dance, and feast in the name of God, the Son, while attempting to reconcile that my celebrating is sponsored by San Miguel beer and Coca Cola corporation.

“Ati-Atihan is in your veins,” my Uncle Bullet says to me. If it is in my veins then the whole Philippine Islands are my body. The white sands of our disappearing islets. The mid-day funeral processions. The violent pitting of cock (rooster, okay) against cock in a dirt ring to the death.

This is the country where I come from. Until the next letter may these words suffice.

With love,

Adrien

As I ploughed the soil of Veggielution farm of San Jose in the last few months, a vision echoed through me of my grandfather. My father’s father was a trader with the Panay bukidnon, the indigenous mountain people of Panay Island in the Philippines.

Once I asked my dad what grandpa did for a living. He told me that my Lolo Adoy would travel days up into the mountains, spend sometimes months there, and then come back down with vegetables and wild game traded with the indigenous people for town goods. He may even have been given a small plot of land to tend for his own crops in the mountain.

This fact I add to the growing pile of mysteries that I have to solve around a man I only knew in his later years. A man who spoke sparingly, prayed frequently, and enjoyed McDonald’s like it was the best thing he got out of America.

Today I am leaving for the Philippines for the first time in eight years. I will be there for a month, the longest I’ll ever have stayed since immigrating when I was three years old. This is a trip I’ve been dreaming of since I first heard that story of my grandpa trekking up Mount Madyaas.

Since then I’ve learned the value of the soil beneath my feet, rolling it between my fingers, laying down seed and stem. I am going back home now to do more than find the ghost of my grandfather in the mountain, I am going back to plant myself in the earth that sprung me.

Tonight I finally launch into a mid-night flight across the Pacific to go back to the beginning of everything. Practically into my very own PBS-special, wherein I find a funeral, a festival, farmland, and a fathomless mountain awaiting. This is my travelogue, a chronicle of this re-rooting.

I will do my best to share with you the visions and prophecies that come to me.

With anticipation,

Adrien

There are days when I am working on the farm or in my yard and I just stop. I stare at the soil, the plants, the work. I look up, and take a deep breath. It’s a stance anyone who farms or gardens has taken over and over.

“To be here, caring for a small field, in full possession of the freedom and plentitude of each day, every day– this must have been the original way of agriculture,” wrote Masanobu Fukuoka.

Before organics, before permaculture, there was a Japanese farmer who saw that the only way to grow food in a healthy way was to abandon chemically-based commercial agriculture.

He devoted his life to his farm, growing, experimenting. He found that when you add as little as possible to nature, with very little labor you can grow a strong bountiful crop.

The One-Straw Revolution is Masanobu Fukuoka’s account of his work and his life, originally published in 1978. He offers his methods and pedagogy behind “natural farming,” but this book is more than a guide to farming. It is beyond biography and philosophy. It provides a light to the way in which we are to live with the world sanely.

Fukuoka set down a simple call — return to nature. In a time when Western-style agriculture had taken over Japan, he set out to prove that you can grow vast quantities of food without pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. While these inputs drive to increase yield and profits, they in fact, destroy the life of the soil.

Today the planet is facing ecological collapse. The notorious Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, where runoff from the agricultural heartlands of America spill out of the Mississippi delta every year is at one of its largest sizes ever this year. We are in need of a revolution.

Some may see the revolution set to simmer as communities all over the country begin to speak out, and in so doing face police-state repression. In the late seventies, Fukuoka’s revolution was about saving the planet. Today his words cut deep as scythes.

There are two farmers I see in him — the one standing out at his fields extolling the natural life, the other standing up  speaking out against industry leaders and government officials.

Fukuoka shows us that a paradigm shift must be fought for. He spent his life challenging farmers, researchers, and the Japanese government to turn to natural farming. Today organics count for less than 5% of market share. The number of dead zones around the world has been increasing since scientists began noting them in the 1970s. They aren’t called dead zones for dramatics. Nothing lives in those parts of the ocean. Is that the future we want for our children? Seas where nothing can live? Swaths of land where we have killed off everything that keeps the soil rich and alive?

The one straw revolution is a challenge. It challenges the supposition that we humans are central and superlative to the dynamic, self-sustaining life systems of the planet. It is also a challenge to fight to return to nature.

The one-straw revolution is not a metaphor — it is Fukuoka’s call to transform our society into one that finally values this planet as our one and only home. It will take work — it will even take struggle. But, as Fukuoka may say, it is as simple as letting nature finally lead the way.

I just finished watching a livestream of young activists Ellen Choy, Josh Healey, Christsna Sots — recipients of the Mario Savio young activist award — and economist Robert Reich, speaking to over 2000 students, workers, faculty, and community members on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.

I watched the OccupyCal General Assembly for two hours, while I also attempted to read Derrick Jensen. This past Sunday I attended Earth at Risk, a series of conversations Jensen held on UC Berkeley campus with guest activists and scholars about building a culture of resistance in this time. A time when our living world is being dismembered piece by piece, and our kin, human and non-human, are being exterminated in numbers that can reasonably be called biocide.

Last week when students peacefully demonstrated on my former university campus by linking arms, they were brutally attacked by riot police. I have seen the video too many times to stomach.

Earlier this same week, police raided and cleared out Occupy Oakland’s encampment for the second time. Then just this morning the NYPD struck down on where it all began — the two-month old Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, evicted and expelled to the streets by the hundreds.

I am overwhelmed by the violence being done to our bodies. Our individual bodies, our movement body, and our greater body, the Pachamama.

I am beginning to understand why resistance matters. We are in the middle of a war. The violence of police in Oakland, in Berkeley, and all over this country reveals that power has no qualms resorting to violence, even in the face of non-violent action, to sustain its power. What sort of pre-emptive logic justifies the beating of students and faculty to ensure the safety of the campus? The same logic that believes “linking arms and forming a human chain” is “not non-violent civil disobedience.” This is in fact a tactic that defines non-violent civil disobedience.

At Earth at Risk, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith meticulously outlined the reality we face. The industrial system based on unrestrained exploitation of the earth’s limited resources is structurally unsustainable. This system will destroy us before it destroys itself. But power never concedes power willingly. In fact, they argue, that this system will only transform with the decisive coordinated action of a resistance movement.

Resistance means that we are no longer naive to the reality of power. Resistance means knowing that power will use all force within its employ to repress any movement that means to redress any abuse of that power. The violence at UC Berkeley, at Oakland, in New York City happening today right now, shows that.

I can not tell my friends at Berkeley to be safe. I no longer believe these protests are anything but safe. What we are doing is dangerous. We may be tear-gassed or beaten. But in the face of violence we can not relent. We must begin to put up our own bodies to hold the line for justice.

The industrial system we have been fooled to depend upon is already contracting. It is not hard to see this. In time, any unsustainable system collapses. When collapse comes, we will no longer have the privelege of naivete. These protests and raids are dress rehearsals for what is to come.

The one reality I am most afraid of is this: When collapse comes, many people will die. Some of my friends and family may die. The communities I care about most will be impacted first and worst. This is already happening.

My kin are already dying — the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and Alberta, the poor and hungry of Fresno and Detroit, the legions of species disappearing every day — black rhinocerous, the tern — gone forever from this planet. We must be willing to resist now, because we can afford bruised ribs. We can not afford losing hundreds more species every day. The poor, the poisoned, the dispossessed can not afford our waiting.

I sit in the comfort of my room chatting with my friend about the collapse of the global industrial system. And I tell him:

The time will come and we will all have to take up our part. You and I we have to do our part to bring our people into the revolution and make it a revolution for our people too.  Because when the collapse comes, our people will die first. Unless we do something about it.

He responds: That something is beyond my imagination at this time.

Then, our work is to imagine harder.

In a time of violence and death we are called by the greatest authorities of our spirit to do all that we can to save all that we care for. To resist. The time for believing you will not be beaten is over.

The time to prepare to fight for what you love is now.

Families, neighbors, and friends take to the streets of Oakland on November 2 to the call of "We are the 99 percent."

Just and healthy food has always been a prerequisite to building an empowered people. One of the Black Panther Party’s original initiatives was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, one of several that operated under the slogan “Survival pending revolution.” These programs sought to heal and strengthen the people and the movement. The panthers knew that when we eat well, we are able to build a world rooted in health and justice, rooted in the sustaining power of the earth.

So on November 2, when I attended the Oakland General Strike, I was not surprised to see the slogans and movement of food justice literally feeding the activity of the day.

Occupy Oakland called the strike in response to police violence against protesters the week before. The last general strike in the country was held in Oakland in 1946.

I arrived at Frank Ogawa Plaza to the hum of activists, intellectuals, and all the fanfare you might expect from a day-long protest. But there were also altars placed throughout the grounds, prayer and meditation circles, free art and books — the city was alive with the energy of the people. Families were talking to one another about saving their jobs and homes, and children marched chanting more fiercely than any others.

Prayers and stories fly at a tent where anyone can share their "99% story."

This was the city we dreamt of. People in the street exchanging gifts and supplies, discussing politics, singing and dancing. This is how everywhere should be all the time.

In the middle of the festivities I found myself drifting into the throes of the food justice movement–for which Oakland is an epicenter. The strike drew thousands of people together. Lunch and food throughout the day was offered for free by organizations like Food First, People’s Grocery, local restaurants, and bakeries.

At one corner of the plaza by an altar laden with vegetables, marigolds, and incense, a food justice tent stood. Community leaders taught a circle about how to organize for healthy food in our neighborhoods. I learned organizers set up a guerrilla garden for the occupy site just the day before.

By the food justice tent community leaders lead a teach-in on how to get more healthy real food into our neighborhoods.

The rhythm of the day pulled me into fashioning a banner with some friends. It read “We are the 99% and ALL of us EAT.” I later marched this banner among the thousands to the Port of Oakland where the strike culminated in the shut down of this fifth-largest port in the nation.

In the world we are building, healthy, real, just food is a fundamental fixture. This world is one in which people are able to grow food, share the bounty, and eat in ways that uplift workers, families, and the environment. The occupy movement, despite media obfuscation, is not about the right to plop a tent down on public space. The occupy movement is about making a better life for our children and for our grand children.

At the Oakland General Strike of 2011, I witnessed the kind of city we want to live in — a city living, growing, feeding, and thriving with life. We fed ourselves in body and spirit, survival pending revolution. With our dirt-covered hands  we fight for the earth and all its people. As we eat together, so we build.

Friends march together to the Port of Oakland with our banner for food and freedom.

A man sits cross-legged in front of a line of police forces in downtown Oakland this Tuesday. Photo by Kim White for Reuters.

It has never been beyond the forces of the government to declare war against its own people.

To my friends in the City of Oakland, take heart even in light of the apparently brutal events of these nights. For if a city needs to bring out an army to put down non-violent protest then it seems that peaceful community is indeed a  threat to certain well-invested interests. The community that is building now resonates with so many of us in this forsaken country.

Even if I do not stand against smoke screens and rubber bullets, I stand in solidarity with you. I am occupying my space. In rural America. In the suburbs. In the altars of my own home. I occupy.

What is happening in Oakland is happening in Atlanta. It is happening in San Jose. It is Chiapas. It is Palestine. The reality is that the vested fear the strength of peace. There was nothing you did but say you shall not be moved. The city and its armed forces chose the point and time of violence.

So let any act against you by five hundred police forces or more, any grenade, any bullet, be met with the wideness of your compassion.

Let all their spears and arrows obliterate into flower petals at your touch.

Mark Medeiros, Farm Manager at Veggielution Farm, tells volunteers to take home whatever they need from the remaining harvest of the workday.

Agriculture is the backbone of a people. A people’s ability to do work and live as a healthy society rests upon its ability to feed itself sustainably. Agriculture is also the most widespread direct interface a people will make with the land. The way people grow food reveals their ability to care for the environment.

In the United States, the American people’s relationship to agriculture has changed dramatically over history. The family farm was the means by which the majority of Americans made their livelihood sixty years ago. Today only 2.2% of Americans make a living by farming. Most of us have never seen a farm let alone know where the food we pick off the grocery shelf was made and how it was brought to us.

Yet it is in this same moment that people all over the country are coming back to agriculture. Most particularly in urban areas, where we have grown disenfranchised from a healthy relationship with our environment, we are returning to the land as a place of community.

Community gardens have allowed families to grow their own food for many years now. In the last few years many urban farms have sprung up enabling people to find food grown in their own neighborhood. Most importantly the urban farm is becoming a center for community organizing.

This weekend I came to a workday at Veggielution Farm in San Jose. Nearly all of Veggielution’s labor is provided by volunteers, so Saturdays are the most welcome days when upwards of eighty people come together to dig, plant, and harvest. This weekend saw a group of women from the Presbytarian church, local Latino families, and college students joining together to work the land. For many, especially the young people, this is their first time working with their hands, working with soil and plants. This is how community happens.

Without pretentious ambitions, people from every corner of life come together at Veggielution simply to do the work that needs doing. We grow together and share the bounty of the harvest. Something else is happening at the farm too.

We teach cooking classes in Spanish to women in the neighborhood. We give high school youth small plots to jumpstart their own food growing experiences. Families are encouraged to bring their children to Family Days to learn about farming together. The urban farm is not only recapturing the curiosity and drive in people to be connected with nature and to do work with our hands, it has also become a place where people are building community.

What will the urban farm in America become? It certainly is not a short term project — any farmer will tell you that farming is a commitment beyond the seasons. Farming takes a commitment to improve the soil, to better the environment, and improve the lives of members of the community.

In the Bay Area we are lucky to be at an epicenter of the urban farm movement. Places like Veggielution, Urban Tilth in Richmond, City Slicker Farms and Dig Deep Farms in Oakland are bringing community members together to feed themselves.

Cities are transforming policies to encourage food production within their borders. Oakland now hosts a Food Policy Council that develops policy recommendations for the City of Oakland to promote a just and sustainable food system.The Mayor of San Francisco just this year signed a law that would allow urban farmers to grow and sell fruit and vegetables they produce in the city.

There is a national momentum around this new kind of agriculture. In places like Detroit, people are reworking vacant and unused land to grow food and revitalize their community. Groups like the Detroit Food Justice Task Force are helping people connect with each other and develop policies to build a strong food system.

Places like these indicate a shift in the way people are thinking about food and farming. Not only are people beginning to find ways to produce food for themselves, food growing also becomes the means by which community happens. Urban farms become agro-community centers where we connect with each other, learn skills, and grow the rich resources inherent in our neighborhoods.

The strength of a people is grown out of its agri-culture — that is, its culture of food-growing. Urban farms become then a means by which we heal our communities and build self-reliance. They are long-term projects invested in bringing value to the land and connecting people to one another. In this spirit the farm has the potential to be a true center of community.

In this spirit, may many hands come to the earth. Long live the urban farm.

Veggielution Farm beneath the freeway overpass -- here we grow community too.