Just finished reading James Workman’s latest, Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, and it has fed into my thinking about Asheville’s water rates.

Heretofore I have advocated that we encourage conservation by determining average per capita use (which for bookkeeping reasons probably means average per-bedroom use), then reducing rates below the average and raising rates above the average. This would enable rate payers to limit their bills more significantly through conservation efforts.

Workman’s careful analysis of water use and water problems around the globe has led me to consider a new formulation: The first 50 or 100 gallons per person per day should be free, with sharply steeper rates above that. (The number of free gallons is subject to analysis and debate – but is based on the idea that everyone has right to some quantity of potable water.) At the same time we create a water credit system. You would accumulate credits by using less than your free allotment, and the credits could be traded. The value of a credit would be established in the marketplace and would presumably be lower than the established rate. Therefore, those who conserve could sell credits to big users. Overall the price for “big” use would still be higher than it is today, so everyone would be encouraged to conserve, but the tradable credits would help big users to offset some of the price increase. This kind of system is no more difficult to operate than cell phone minutes or frequent flier miles, both of which are quite familiar to modern citizens.

Because the system would apply to all on the Asheville water system it would meet the requirements of the Sullivan Acts that we offer the same rates inside and outside the city limits, but because there are more large users outside the city limits it would presumably shift more of the burden to county customers.

Advocates for justice staged an international day of action, May 19, to raise awareness of the plight of Troy Davis, a 40-year-old man who has spent the past 18 years on death row in Georgia for a crime he evidently did not commit. Davis was on the scene when a law enforcement officer was murdered and was convicted on the basis of witness testimony which has since been recanted. Jurors have come forward to insist they were misinformed about evidence in the case. No weapon was ever found. Furthermore, one of the witnesses who testified against Davis is a principal suspect in the case.

In Asheville, more than three dozen people gathered at the Brooks-Howell Home, for a candlelight service and vigil Tuesday evening. Dr. Kiran Sigmon, a local physician and friend of Davis, led the service, describing her family’s contact with Davis over several years, and reading a profoundly moving letter the inmate had sent to his supporters around the world last November. Sigmon’s daughters participated: Joy played a quiet piano accompaniment and read a list of states which still embrace capital punishment, together with the number of inmates on each state’s death row; Lee lit a candle of hope for each state as the names were read. The ceremony was interspersed with song, “How can I keep from singing?” and poetry.

This says it all. We need to pass the NC Racial Justice Act.

It’s urgent that we contact our legislators to encourage support for the NC Racial Justice Act. It has passed in the state House and is now in committee in the NC Senate.

Race is a major factor in death sentences in our state (as in many others). While murder rates across racial lines are constant, the population of death row is largely black. Convicted murderers of whites are far more likely to be accorded death sentences than murderers of non-whites. In at least one case, the white man who planned a murder was given life in prison while the black man he hired was sentenced to death. And death penalty juries in this state have historically been mostly white.

(Here’s the story of one innocent man convicted, in large part, due to his race.)

This law, when passed, will permit convicted murderers to argue that race played a role in their sentencing and, if successful, would change the sentence to life without parole.

Sen. Martin Nesbitt
300 N. Salisbury St., Room 300-B
Raleigh, NC 27603-5925
919-715-3001
martin.nesbitt@ncleg.net

Sen. Tom Apodaca
16 W. Jones Street, Room 1127
Raleigh, NC 27601-2808
919-733-5745
828-696-3510
tom.apodaca@ncleg.net

The sinking of the global economy has barely begun to sink in. Numbers representing the dollar losses are so big they have become meaningless to most of us. While we are offered comparisons to the Great Depression, those too become meaningless in the face of our very different circumstances today. We are in uncharted waters and the boat is going down.
The easiest future to imagine is a return to the status quo ante. It is a recent past in which we learned to be comfortable. Unfortunately, we don’t have the means to go back. The boat really is going down, and we no longer have the tools or the money to build a new one.
Our economy, our entire way of life, was built on cheap and abundant energy. No matter what the price at the pump might be today, cheap, abundant energy is history. (Look for prices to spike again later this year.) Sadly, we used the credit card our parents gave us (to buy gas in a pinch) to run up debt on the rest of our purchases as well, and in the memory bubble of easy credit we bid up prices, imagined we had created real value, and then borrowed against that as well. There wasn’t ever a there there.
As Jimi Hendrix sang it, “Castles, built out of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.” Well, the wave came in and the wave washed out, the castle dissolved and the boat went down.
We are here on the beach. What to do?

The very significant difference between our looming Post-industrial Depression and the Great one of yore involves numbers, too, but they are round numbers easily grasped.

Most Americans were rural in 1929. Most of us are urbanites today. North America (excluding Mexico) had about 100 million residents then, versus a little over 300 million now. Most of the world’s petroleum was still in the ground back then, and we were using it slowly. Most of it is gone now and we are using what remains at an exponentially increasing rate. The U.S. was a petroleum exporter then, an importer now. Other natural resources were in abundant supply back then, including vast amounts of timber and untapped fertile topsoil. We are far poorer in natural resources today. And while the Depression slowed growth, we had a burgeoning manufacturing base which went into overdrive to produce the machinery for World War II and the post-war domestic boom that followed. To top it all off, many people enjoyed only modest means and many were poor in 1928, but very few carried much debt other than a household mortgage and most mortgage holders had substantial equity in their homes.

So we are going to crash harder and longer this time.

What is the most rational response at the local level?

Every decision we make as a community from 2009 forward needs to be considered in light of our current reality. That may seem self-evident, but, unfortunately it is far easier said than done. If we direct our efforts toward recreating the past, we will fall further and fail faster.
We need to plan now for a society and economy based on localism. Tbere will be less motorized transportation, particularly for people. Automobile and air travel will be sharply curtailed, with trains picking up the load. (Trains are far more efficient than planes, trucks or buses.)

We will be greener because we have to be (see the post above). We will depend far more on local farms because they will be the most reliable sources for food. Money will stay in the local economy longer, and we will depend on local production and local mechanics to meet more of our technological needs.
For Asheville, in particular, we need to start now to imagine and build a post-tourism economy. We don’t have the means to build a boat, but we can cobble together a raft that will float this community through the hard times ahead. It is time to start building.

Mountain Xpress cartoonist Randy Molton gave my book a push. Thanks Randy!

Click here for the whole picture.

Those of us who have been saying that Asheville’s City Council members are spineless when it comes to big bucks development and pandering to tourism were confirmed in our dour assessment on Tuesday night. They voted to replace the putatively progressive Holly Jones (recently elected to the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners) with the Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President/Executive Director Kelly Miller.

As Bruce Cockburn sang it, “It only gets worse.”

We urgently need to prepare for a post-tourism economy. Solving global warming will require radical shifts in our carbon fuel use. Tourism will very soon not be what it was for Asheville. Miller is the wrong choice. Asheville will be worse for this. Count on it.

Barry Henderson, a partner with his brother James Henderson in Henderson Amusement, has been busted again for operating illegal video poker machines. Henderson Amusement was the largest of the game operators involved in the federal case against former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford. Both Henderson brothers were convicted on illegal gambling charges in 2007. James faces six years in prison and Barry was headed for a one year sentence. His sentence was reduced and incarceration delayed because he cooperated with authorities.

Now it turns out he went right back into the gambling business and was operating four Pot-o-Gold video poker machines in Burke County. The location was busted in August and he is just now facing trial. If convicted again he could face 25 years behind bars.

The most fascinating fact to emerge from the new charges is the discovery of records at the location which indicate he took in $300,000 between August 2, 2007 and August 5, 2008. That comes to $75,000 per machine, per year. While it’s true that not every location would necessarily be as profitable, if one multiplies that figure by the 520 plus machines I discovered in Buncombe County in 2005, the total approaches $40 million annually. No one reporting on these cases and none of the prosecutors involved have mentioned anything like that kind of figure in connection with video gaming in this county.

It would appear that there is a great deal of money still unaccounted for in Buncombe’s gambling racket.

In my youth, when winters here were reliably colder and wetter and the world was my oyster dressing if not my oyster, I not infrequently made what I thought of as global decisions. One of the few enduring dicta was this: the best way to engender deep feelings of thanks on Thanksgiving is to spend some part of the day doing something one really wants to do.

It’s easy enough to say, but harder to achieve. Most of the things we “want” to do are moderated by others or by perceived necessity and doing what we want is often cast as self-indulgence. Thanksgiving Day, for example, most often involves considerable interaction with family or friends—a shared celebration that we broadly “want,” but easily morphed into activity that we otherwise abjure.

I have, for example, spent some hours watching televised football on at least a quarter of my 57 Thanksgivings. Watching either TV or football rank close to the bottom on my life list and doing both simultaneously hovers in the vicinity of root canals and 1040s. But hanging with family and friends is near the top, and if watching violent idiocy on the boob-tube is the game plan for T-day, I’m as there as I can muster.

Notwithstanding my heartfelt willingness to go along and get along, I have followed my youthful decision without fail for three decades. For at least a portion of each Thanksgiving Day I self-indulge. This year I will read and write and paint. Other years I have carved wood, made paper airplanes, written songs, canoed, hauled boulders, taken hot baths or slept in. Some choices are workaday, some silly, some laborious—but the essential element has been waking up on Thanksgiving morning and asking myself, “What do I want to do?” No shoulds or musts. No second-guesses based on someone else’s druthers. “What do I REALLY want to do?”

In 1985 my answer to that question was “split shakes.”

I had built a home in the North Carolina mountains, mostly from recycled material and partly from materials on my property. I hoped to cover the exterior walls with oak shakes.

To that end I had salvaged a leaf from a truck spring. Leaf springs are made from very tough steel and have loops at each end where they fasten to the vehicle frame. I cut off a sixteen inch section and using a sledge hammer and an anvil I flattened the manufactured curve. Then I used a grinder to sharpen one edge and fashioned a wooden handle to fit in the end loop. The finished product was L-shaped with a vertical wooden handle and a sharpened edge along the bottom of the horizontal. The name of this tool, should you decide to order one, is “froe.”

Using a heavy wooden mallet, one drives a froe into the end of a suitable section of log and splits out shakes. Cedar is very weather resistant and splits easily in flat, thin sections, which is why it’s the preferred source for shakes, but the best option on my land was chestnut oak. It is considerably harder to split than cedar but very durable. Before that Thanksgiving Day I had managed to split enough shakes to cover perhaps 200 square feet of the house. A small part, but a start. While the chore was one I very much wanted to accomplish, the process was far too slow to be in any measure a practical choice.

I spent four or five hours of that Thanksgiving splitting shakes, enough to more than double my siding project and enough to make my arms and shoulders ache for a few days thereafter. I have never enjoyed a more satisfying or memorable Thanksgiving Day.

After lunch—for that was a year for a night-time rather than midday feast—I hiked through the woods, down the mountain, to try to locate a rumored waterfall. Irma the dog ran ahead as we slipped and slid our way toward the goal. The water course that led to the fall wasn’t much more than a spring run—a mostly subterranean seep—and I didn’t much credit the stories I’d been told about a “waterfall.” But, following my dictum, I was following my heart as much as a rumor, and down I went.

I came to a ledge that dropped off forty or fifty feet and had to work my way back uphill and around to continue down. As I came around the foot of the cliff I confronted a wonderland. The drips and splashes and spray had frozen into an ice castle lit by flashes of fire and rainbows in the bright autumn sunshine. The fairy palace extended up the entire face of the cliff. I sat on a boulder and stared, marveling and feeling as thankful as thankful can be.

I named that place Shaky Heart Falls.

Irma is long dead. The house is long sold. I have moved many miles and dreamt many new dreams in the years between. Someday I may visit that place again, though the confluence of cold and sun and water is unlikely to recur. But I am certain I will never forget.