Third Paradigm is an out-of-the-box thinktank on community sovereignty and regenerative economics.

We look at how to take back our cities, farmland and water; our money, production and trade; our media, education and culture, our religion and even our God.

We present a people's history of the Bible and a parent's view on how to raise giving kids in a taking world.

Radio Free Brighton
Tu 2:30 pm, Th 5:30 pm (UK)
Tu 6:30 am, Th 9:30 am (PST)

Free Radio Santa Cruz
Listen Live Sun 1:30 PST

Upstart Radio online

3rd Paradigm has been featured on these shows and stations:

Unwelcome Guests
by Lyn Gerry
on multiple stations

The Wringer
by Pete Bianco

WHCL Hamilton College

Global Notes
by Roger Barrett
CHLS Radio Lillooet

New World Notes
by Ken Dowst, WWUH
West Hartford, CT

Welcome to Third Paradigm. That was "Take Back the City" from the indie-band Snow Patrol. Lead vocalist Gary Lightbody reports that this song broke from his usual theme of romantic disaster. A native of Northern Ireland, he conceived of this as a love song for Belfast but ended up writing it in Berlin. Both cities contributed to the grit and rawness of the lyrics. What makes it particularly apt as the theme for Third Paradigm is the sense of personal responsibility in the line "Take back the city for yourself tonight, I'll take back the city for me." If we are going to redeem our cities, and the countryside in between where the food is grown, it won't happen by holding someone else responsible, even if they are.

Today is Thursday, and the day of giving thanks for our food. But the global food system has never been so broken. We'll look at the heartbreaking statistics, and the even more disheartening projections. But we'll also look at the success in food sovereignty movements that the "twin tsunamis" of the economic and food crises have inadvertently cleared the way for. Meanwhile, here in the States, the banks, auto industry, and stimulus packages are circling like sharks to get their bite of the wounded US Treasury before it sinks for good. From the grassroots, however, the new President-elect has become everyone's favorite pen-pal, with a wall of letters from within the US and a flurry of earnest posts from around the world. And so, I've added my own two-bits as a housewife, called "Obama, Listen to Your Mother! Everything I Know About Governing, I Learned from Raising Kids." We'll guess how Obama's mother might deal with institutions that have gotten too big for their britches. Is it politically incorrect to spank a bank? But before those urgent questions, a Thanksgiving Grace by Raphael Jesus Gonzalez:

Grace

Thanks & blessings be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessings to them
who share it
(& also the absent & the dead).
Thanks & Blessing to them who bring it
(may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
(may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
& blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want - for their hunger
sours the wine & robs
the taste from the salt.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & work of justice, of peace.

~ Rafael Jesus Gonzalez ~

From In Praise of Fertile Land, edited by Claudia Mauro

My own Thanksgiving celebration has taken a different turn from the sociable gathering of extended family around a heavily-laden table. Several years ago, I realized that I had the nature of a closet monk with a visceral craving for solitude. Maybe this should have occurred to me before I had three kids, all of whom were pretty young at the time. In response, my husband gave me the nicest of gifts – time alone. Each Thanksgiving, he takes the family to Los Angeles to visit his sister without me. Although I wish I could clone myself and be in both places at once, my writing sabbaticals at home have become precious to me. Each Thanksgiving I spend in my clean and empty house, I'm filled with gratitude. I'm thankful to him and to my daughters for letting me go (or stay, as the case may be), to my sister-in-law Joan who, as a fellow mom, never makes me feel guilty, and to her extensive Colombian in-laws for giving my family the boisterous, social, more-is-merrier holiday that they crave.

This break from the norm, however, has made me more connected to global food conditions around this time of year, and more reflective about the subtext of divinely-sanctioned entitlement that underlies our rituals and traditions. In this sense, it's probably better for everyone that I'm sequestered and quarantined. These insights of mine can spoil the mood faster than a flatulent uncle. But because it's still early in the day, before we've put on our faux-Pilgrim roles, I'll read the poem I wrote on Thanksgiving Eve in the year 2005.

That was Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from the soundtrack of Once, which is a wonderful indie-film if you haven't seen it - refreshing for the non-sappy story it tells of a friendship that doesn't become a romance, intertwined with some of the most emotionally-stirring music and evocative lyrics I've heard.

Well, it's Thanksgiving Day, 2008, and we're in a global food crisis on a scale which is unprecedented in history and hopefully, will be the turning point in the apex of hunger. But it looks to get worse before it gets better. From this month's FoodFirst! Backgrounder, "The UN World Food Program predicts a jump in the number of hungry people in the world from 860 million to more than one billion people – one of every six people in the world. Retail prices of food in the U.S. increased four percent last year, driven by a combination of speculation, high oil prices, agrofuel consumption, a weak dollar, climatic events, and historically low grain reserves. The USDA projects that price increases will total another three to four percent in 2008; the steepest increase in 17 years. The 35 million food-insecure people in the U.S. who are most affected by the food price crisis may be joined by 50 million others living at or near the poverty level." To put this in context, however, the price of rice, which is the staple food of 3 billion people or half of the world's population, rose 50% in just two weeks in April. The food crisis is coming home to roost, but only after the dragon has ravaged and scorched the rest of the world.

Yesterday, Alternative Radio broadcast David Barsamian's interview of Raj Patel, former Director of FoodFirst! and author of Stuffed and Starved. He stated that everything he knows about food he's learned from Via Campesina, the international coalition of 150 million peasant farmers, rural women, and indigenous communities around the world. Well, everything that I know about Via Campesina, I've learned from FoodFirst! and Grassroots International, another great organization that's just published a downloadable curriculum on Food Sovereignty (or view our pdf version). In short, food sovereignty is the right to feed yourself and your family, through access to the land and the country's obligation to prioritize food over profits in the use of the land's resources.

In October, Via Campesina held their 5th conference in Maputo, Mozambique. The Declaration that resulted begins: "We are men and women of the earth, we are those who produce food for the world. We have the right to continue being peasants and family farmers, and to shoulder the responsibility of continuing to feed our peoples. We care for seeds, which are life, and for us the act of producing food is an act of love. Humanity depends on us, and we refuse to disappear."

The women also gathered in their third conference, and produced a Declaration whose tone is decidedly both warm and tough: "We find ourselves surrounded by the happiness of sharing, the affection of our compañeras, the richness of our diverse cultures and the beauty of the women of Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. We are women with a history and common struggles for life, land and territory, food sovereignty, justice and dignity: we are women who share knowledge and experiences, convinced that ideas, like seeds, grow and reproduce when they are exchanged. We are women who have struggled against violence across history, fighters who continue to defend our territories and cultures from pillage, devastation and death perpetrated by those who have imposed their power since the time of colonialism, and today continue trying to colonize not only our territories but also our minds and our lives."

Finally, the youth held their second-ever conference and wrote a Declaration that begins like poetry, which is the part I'll read, but also ends with a detailed action plan:

As a mother of teenage daughters, I can't help but notice that they've worked romance into the revolution, and so we'll play David Rovics' "Behind the Barricades" and return with my letter to Obama.

For the final segment of our Thanksgiving show, everyone seems to be writing letters to Obama. Julie Mertus, author of Bait and Switch: Human Rights and US Foreign Policy, outlines four steps for him to repair our tattered reputation. Rosa Anaya, daughter of assassinated Salvadoran human rights lawyer Herbert Anaya Sanabria, reminds Obama that there are 35 sovereign countries in the Americas and almost 200 in the world. To be a good US president, he must not try to be President of the World. The Indigenous Councils of Columbia write, "By transforming life into merchandise, by making sacred the accumulation of wealth, by enshrining greed, we believe our societies have entered a crisis, including the economic crisis currently faced by your country." They ask that together, we create the conditions for a new history. Alice Walker cautions him to relax and enjoy his family, and remember that he didn't create this mess, while Garrison Keillor says not to play golf or get a dog. So now I'll add my two-cents.

If you or anyone else would like to respond, my email address is here. This has been Third Paradigm, thank you for listening.

Audio downloads are free for any noncommercial station with attribution.
Transcripts are free to republish except where other copyrights apply.
Original writings by Tereza Coraggio available by permission of the author.
Ask and you shall receive!