ASSORTED ISSUE, LOCAL OR OTHERWISE (including the Weeks Street Primarty School

GETTING RID OF MEGATRUCK THROUGH TRAFFIC

It took incredible sacrifice, discipline and procedural smarts to get the large cement and gravel trailer trucks off Highway 14. The process was driven by firmness and determination, but was never nasty. And it became eventually evident to be one of cooperation and mutual respect. 

THOUGHTS ON FOOD PRODUCTION AND PLANNING, ETC.

Growing your own food is very hard, and only the most dedicated and/or talented can make a success of it. Since I'm not in the latter category I try to help with food production at the edges, looking for ways to support it from outside the industry.

Among my major interests (and perhaps abilities) is comprehensive planning. In comprehensive planning , one examines as many relationships as possible, much as a good artist might. And as with an art project, there is much that is subjective and qualitative along with what is scientific and rational. So I don't believe there is a single approach to food production, but many, including many that are experimental and unresolved. For instance, I favor no-till growing that doesn't disturb top soil. But I'm so far from being able to recommend it for universal food production that it behooves me to back off the subject and allow others to carry on with their own practices which have wide practicality and acceptance. 

But I do have ideas to share that connect to those wider planning relationships I mentioned. Some of these pertain to Jamaica:

WHAT IS THE PICTURESQUE? (It applies to the feeling of infinity in the distant views along the Turquoise Trail.)

"The concept was propagated by the statesman and writer Edmund Burke. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful argued that both beauty and the overwhelming experience of the Sublime were perceived emotionally, and generated by subjective rather than objective criteria. Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are exclusive. His idea of the Sublime was a contrast to the classical perception of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues, and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality able to establish feelings of powerful emotion, creating a pleasant experience. Burke’s thesis also concentrates on the physiological effects of the Sublime, mainly the emotional quality of fear and attraction."

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/theories-of-the-picturesque-and-the-sublime-english-literature-essay.php

STALLS

- Food stalls can be sanitary and picturesque at the same time. The roughness is the charm, the soul, the magnetism of the Jamaican scene.

- There can be ruggedness and uniformity at the same time. That would derive from system. Not just a scientific medical system, but also an aesthetic one too. (Jamaica must avoid too much sterility, too much surrendering of soul and color). 

- Food stalls might or might not be integrated with housing, depending on the local situation.

- Food stalls focusing on the vending of local food can also "sell" or "project" cultural ideas that have potential social and economic benefit. This includes materials and design approaches with effects that could be germaine to tourism.

HOUSING

- There is an existential crisis in affordable housing. Existing housing practices are driven by profit, and are hobbled by conformity to inappropriate social and environmental ideas.

- Relatively small adaptations to housing can facilitate food growing in and around the structures themselves.

- Planning around water and various critical issues of governance can benefit Jamaican livelihood.

FACEBOOK AND GOVERNANCE: ISSUES

- Facebook may be a medium of "soft governance."

- Reporting to relevant government authorities.

- Non political, auxiliary, voluntary  people's governance.

- Need for cooperative people on the ground.

- Liaising with the PM for mutual support.

- Need for links with government. 

- Reasons to focus on St. Ann parish.

- "Restoring St. Ann's Bay" is vision oriented.

- How to leverage small amounts of money.

- Tourism as a matrix for issue convergence.

- Minimalist strategy in keeping with limited resources. 

CAROL CARPENTER

- Carol Carpenter spoke about a charter school for Madrid in five years. That was four years ago. 

- Carol was then employed half the year on the east coast in a very high level job. She is now here full time, and if the vice chair of the Community College.

-  Could this be discussed?: Make the Madrid school an experimental extension of the Community College? Reflecting their curricular resources?


MANIFESTO

- Land (including place) is more important than people. People emerge from and are dependent on land, and not the other way around

- Aesthetics are the most useful guide: "Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth," or whatever it was Keats said.

- The poor need close to 100% of our social attention. Yes, a rising tide lifts all boats

- We got into the mess we're in by throwing things, places, peoples, cultures and languages away. We must stop doing this

- Children are the new slaves to run energy on. Historically, energy depended on human slavery, morphing into fossil fuel slavery (on which we now ENTIRELY depend, while it tanks along with it correlated economic system.

- Substituting children as the energy source doesn't mean cruel or stupid forms of coercion; it's just that there might be no other energy source that allows ANYONE to survive.



JANET

1) Cooperation:

- You are the only person in Jamaica I'm aware of who is not somehow closed off from the diaspora. Others will occasionally chime in, do great things, then when your hopes are raised, will totally disappear. They simply won't answer you. One feels spurned, hurt, but there being no other choice, one hangs on and posts here or there. Thanks for being you, Janet!

2) Strategy:

- We must have strategy, or else we'll just keep throwing thoughts out into the wind, whence the rubber never hits the road, and there is no structure to build onto. I'm particularly guilty of that. But what's the alternative?

- Covid-19 will probably be the best chance we've had in our lifetimes to get in there and be listened to. Can we squeeze through the crack which the virus presents? 

- Are there three specific things you'd like to see that I can help with...possibly in exchange for your helping me likewise? Or even one specific project. You had mentioned planting something for the public outside your window. I want to board up that little wood structure in St. Ann's Bay. 

3) Building: 

- We seem to have related visions there. I am more than willing to continue making little diagrams on grid paper of whatever design projects can be mutually decided on.  It's easy enough to transmit electronically, and the grid means that things can be measured more easily, thus relatable to children who can be brought in to participate.

What are your thoughts?

Trevor