the weathervane

September 24 march and rally

A wonderful group has formed in Athens called the Georgia Climate Change Coalition (GCCC.)  We have decided to participate in the event they are doing a great job of planning for September 24th.   We will not be planning a seperate event.   Please join us in joining in with the GCCC.   Read below for more details….

Georgia Climate Change Coalition

Through education, advocacy and action, the Georgia Climate Change Coalition aims to increase awareness about climate change and its projected impacts; work in  partnership with all Georgians and stakeholders to promote solutions and adaptations to the climate crisis; actively support local, state, national and international energy/climate change initiatives and legislation; serve as a clearing house for climate information.    

Georgia Climate Change Coalition Launches in Athens

September 24 march and rally will call for reduced carbon missions 

 Athens, GA — Responding to extreme weather events, a punishing drought and growing concern about the impacts of climate change, an eclectic mix of Athens residents will officially launch the Georgia Climate Change Coalition on September 24, 2011.

 The group, which consists of fly fishers, University of Georgia faculty and staffers, environmental activists and community members , is staging a march from the University of Georgia to Athens City Hall, where a rally will be held urging civic leaders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

 The event will be affiliated with the worldwide “Moving Planet” rally planned for the same day by 350.Org. The non-profit group, founded by author-activist Bill McKibben, hosted the world’s most widespread day of political action on Oct. 24, 2009, bringing together 5,245 grass-roots actions in 181 countries around the world.

 Organizers hope the Moving Planet rally will eclipse the 2009 event, and the Georgia Climate Change Coalition is asking all residents of Athens and Georgia to join in this day of grass-roots action to raise awareness of man-made climate change, address climate change denial, and promote cutting carbon emissions to slow the rate of global warming.

 “Let us come together on this historic day to pool our common efforts,” Athens organizer Barbara Burnett said. “We need to conserve energy, reduce our burning of fossil fuels and begin conversions to alternative energy.”

The Georgia Climate Change Coalition will begin preparing for the Moving Planet rally later this month, asking residents to fill out pledge cards to reduce their own energy, gas and water consumption.

Then on Wednesday, September 14, at 7 p.m., the group will host an Athens screening of a rolling teleconference hosted by former Vice President Al Gore, highlighting extreme climate events – floods, fires, storms, heat waves and drought – in every time zone around the world (www.climaterealityproject.org).

The screening will be followed by a climate change symposium at UGA’s Ecology School auditorium on Friday, September 23, 5:00 - 8:30 p.m., discussing climate change impacts in the Southeast.

The following morning, Saturday, September 24, marchers are asked to gather at 11 a.m. on the greenway near Carlton St. and Agriculture Drive, UGA south campus, where University professor Chris Cuomo will kick off the event. The march will pass by the University’s coal fired steam plant enroute to Lumpkin Street, and from there to City Hall in downtown Athens. Speakers will inform civic leaders that they have community support for reducing carbon consumption and that all Georgians must respond to this appeal.

“Our fly fishers work hard on stream improvements and habitat conservation,” said Oconee River Chapter Trout Unlimited member Rich Rusk, whose group led the call last Spring for greater focus on climate change. “For us, trout are the canaries in the mining shaft. Fish dying in a recent North Georgia drought sends a message everywhere. We must all move with greater urgency on this massive threat not only to North American trout and salmon, but the entire planet!”.

Those wishing to participate can find parade route, pledge cards and information about the Sept. 14, 23 and 24 events at the Georgia Climate Change Coalition website, www.georgiaclimate.org.

About the Georgia Climate Change Coalition

Through education, advocacy and action, the Georgia Climate Change Coalition aims to increase awareness about climate change and its projected impacts; work in partnership with all Georgians and stakeholders to promote solutions and adaptations to the climate crisis; actively support local, state, national and international energy/climate change initiatives and legislation; serve as a clearing house for climate information.

The group is actively seeking coalition partners from across the state (see www.georgiaclimate.org).

The Master Roaster

“Once you’ve seen all the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”*

10 Notes on the Master Roaster, from small Hotel Room, Bogota, Colombia April 2011

I have just completed a series of two three-day 8 hour-long trainings on roasting to over forty different Colombians in the mountains of the Quindio Province.   Before heading back to America, I took up this room in the Hotel Americas to make myself familiar with silence again.

I have had regular excursions in spastic-honking-cabbies across the divide of Bogota to the cupping lab at Virmax, where I have been working though endless scores of samples and making notes with groups of cuppers.  I also made it to the Museo de Oro, where I found myself enraptured by the postures of gold encapsulated miniature Shamans sitting with their hands cradling their knees and this being called, much like the Buddhist Lotus, a basket position.  But outside of that, the majority of my time in Bogota has been spent in a room reviewing my thoughts at five years as on what it means to be a Master Roaster.

What teaching would I leave behind here at the gates?  What note would I nail to the wooden fence post as I left in the evening behind a wall of crickets and a fading screen of darkening blue?  What pace would I set the drum machine on as I laid down my broken down card board box, flipped back my Vans cap and set upon my suicide break-dance?  

One:  Roasting is not an art, nor is it a science.  To call it either or both, is akin to calling the heroic symbols posted on the cave walls of the ancients paintings or formulas.  To be so naive.  Roasting, rather, is the flicker of the soul cast outward.  Roasting is love.  Without the passion, there is no craft, just production.  Mechanical sick production.

Two:  To be a master roaster you must constantly be a student of four things: green beans, yourself, brewing practices, and the great machine.   You must constantly kneel before these as Surfer goes to the shore at the end of the day and watches the sea.  Watching how things change and connecting the roast to these changes.  See the parts, but remember that the sum is greater then all the parts put together.

Three: Roasting is like playing a par-three hole of golf.   The first swing (or phase of development) is controlled but the strongest in force.  You may approach differently, but of the three this has the greatest vigor.  The second stroke(phase of development), if on-course, is more controlled with the interest of setting up the final shot.    The final shot is gentle and controlled, so to guide the concentration emptied into a single space.  A missed shot, requires a soft and gentle return to course.

Four:  The master roaster is never a stagnant state.  He is always in the process of becoming the master.  This process is through the ebb and flow of roasting and cupping.   Though repetition, we find expression.  Roasting is about DEVELOPMENT.  If you are not developing, you are baking or burning.   Develop the subtle changing miracle over small time.

Five:  The master roaster is a student of the senses.  In spare time, you must submit yourself to arts, love-affairs, violent street fights, butcher boards, running marathons, listening to philosophical debates, meditations, strict yogic postures, Gestalt councils….etc.

Six:  The Machine will never beat the master Roaster in a kung-fu challenge for best roast of a coffee.  The machine follows numbers, coffee is not a number.  The master roaster must understand the mechanical numbers, but be a student of the swift and slow winds that run between words, underneath bridges, across empty fields, and power and fear.

Seven:  Being great at Roasting coffee happens before roasting coffee, during roasting coffee, and after roasting coffee.  There is no beginning and no end.  One day you will be able to abandon your timer.

Eight:  The cleaner your roaster, the sharper your sword.

Nine: Start with fire. Learn everything their is to know about fire.  How it moves.  How it lives.  How it transfers.  How it relates.   How it dies.  The roaster is the alchemist, the fire is the medium.

Ten:  Burn this blog. Everything is false.  Listen to yourself as much as you do others.   Cultivate a trusting sense of knowing, without having being told.  Roasting is telling a story, but it also a way of being, a path that isn’t found by a guide or a leader.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said.

“What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer those questions because we have read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures.   We can’t get outside the aura.  We’re part of the aura.  We’re here, we’re now.”*

*D. Delillo, White Noise 1984

Reconsidering the Person

(episode #1)

In a morning taxi ride from Kristiansand to the airport, I'm seated with a UN delegate working to protect biodiversity in the northern region of Norway around the city of Bergen.   It's early, and darkness is still holding its own over the shadows.  I'm tired and barely keeping my head up.  At a point in the conversation she asks me where I'm from, and as I move to answer I find a black hole in my awareness.  I can’t remember where I am from.

(episode #2)

The premier coffee destination in Norway is without a doubt the miniture coffee factory of one Mr. Tim Wendleboe.   On an overcast Saturday afternoon, I catch a taxi up to an ultra-hip neighborhood to visit this culinary destination hot on my mental radar.   Mr. Wendleboe was nowhere to be found upon arrival, though his name was everywhere around the shop--on the doors, on the bags, on the walls, on the book that he wrote himself. The coffee is excellent, and I snap photos of every angle of his operation--memories in case I forget.  I'm so excited it's spooky.

(Begin Blog)

Life often defaults into a loop. 

A pattern that repeats itself without awareness of the changes at the core.  Allowing for the micro to become the dominant characteristic of the macro.  The small changes become the big picture.  One face begins to equal many faces.  One story explains everything.  We get religion.  We get society.  We forget our names, we remember others', we snap photos on endless shutter patterns to tell even still others of the names, places, and people we can no longer recall.   

Maybe it's time to reconsider the person.   Slow this spin.

(Deconstructing Spin)

Sophisticated consumer behavioral studies are based around understanding people and predicting these loops.  It’s not a stretch to say that companies often act so as to continue to loop.  Reinforcing consumer behavior by providing it not only what it wants (market demand) but also the psychological atmosphere of reinforcing the loop.  "A coke and a smile" becomes the same repeated background noise.   

This is worse than white noise.   This is the time to throw down your pack and fix eyes to sky. Check the coordinates.   Check the compestela.

The day-to-day input/output ritual becomes so hard-wired into our operating system it becomes difficult to determine what is an important decision.   We call the same friends, watch the same shows, drive the same roads, and replenish goods we have come to trust.  Thinking becomes a violent act. 

And still, these patterns are having their true and good validation.  We place ourselves on repeat in order to provide mental harbors, something familiar enough to shade the unknown with the knowable, the understandable. However, no matter how hard we try, these harbors we come to trust appear one day as abandoned and dead ship wrecks. The rotting wooden planks and the looting of hooligans becomes apparent as our barren feet swell, and the now incomprehensible and utterly painful record keeps skipping.  Coke becomes fattening, syrupy, sugar filled muck that rots our teeth and makes us feel uncomfortably warm in the face and rancid in the gut.  No more coke.   No more smile.  Yet the pervasive marketing tries to shift as though some wicked, malicious, sick programmer in the sky was altering the matrix yet beholden evermore to that which sets the original alterations in place.   A matrix working for a matrix.

(Enter Change)

It is called change. No matter what marketing firm you have hired, you cannot prevent it from coming. The folks we work with in Norway call it a revolution.   If there was ever a more apt definition of revolution, I think this is it......The slow beating the fast.   The clocks falling off the wheels and shifting in direction.   Fast becoming so, so, so, so, passe'.

Recently I have seen a trend of the large scale industrialized producers purchasing small and local entities, like Ben and Jerry’s.  They are chasing the trend of consumers shifting their trust to the small-scale producers.  This is the one of the oldest tricks in the book, the wolf appearing at your door dressed in the cloak of the sheep.

One of the major goals talked about in the Slow Coffee meetings this week in Norway was how to enable the small scale artisan producers to grow in a manner that can preserve their identity.   How can Slow Coffee become an entity that helps the companies we have grown to love remain lovable while still enriching and growing their brand/identity/employee payroll/offerings/etc?  How can we change the game?  

It has been said if there is one thing you can count on in life, it is change.  At every change vector there are two roads of choice. Hesse described this phenomenon as a long horseshoe-shaped corridor that is a mirror on one side and a great many doors on the other.  

STAY WITH ME HERE.

I think that in order to reach these change goals we need to first and foremost reconsider the consumer as the person.  Not on the basis of statistical input/output behavioral traits, but on the unique, unpredictable, and dare I say, beautiful human traits.   We need to celebrate these through the art of true story telling and making the time to rejoice and celebrate these stories.

What does it mean to reconsider the consumer as a person? How do companies take on important human domains like empathy and care at a very close level without being totally and utterly destroyed?  These are real and serious questions for which I don't have the final answer, but am willing and wanting to consider....re-consider.

In spending this week in Norway, I have been enabled to examine a whole different mental map of society.   Any new and different city has the opportunity to dissolve you. This is why we travel, or at least why I travel.  The experience of going into the disambiguation phase of identity and routine is for me as pure and refreshing as any drink or elixir to be found on the market.   If there is one hope I take home from this experience it is that I return to America with a new form of bright eyes, ready to act.

I go into every coffee bar.  On the road I become a pioneer junkie of coffee.   Sometimes I am in a spot where the barista doesn't know where the coffee was grown or roasted and I find myself in right there...right in that Parisian post-modern Brooklyn of the lonely.  

Can a coffee bar heal loneliness and transform it into solitude?  Is there a chance for something more if a true story can be told? Can a coffee roaster change the direction of how we consider the source?  Can small business be the radical change agents in our consumptive field?

In a speech last week in Norway, a local psychologist pontificated that the coffee bar has always been something both profoundly social and profoundly anti-social.  Can the coffee exchange provide a real and important form of sharing something without unnecessary speech?   In the ever expanding identity search in coffee via Fair and Direct trade, we have come to see an expansive watering down of the story.  So much so, that the loop has begun to fade into the background and to silently do its work even here in this ever growing sector of the economy.   Did you think that we were immune?

(Sweep the leg)

You can think of this sampling as a story you are telling yourself—one made of the world as you hear it, and the theater of sounds that you invoke with those fragments is all one story made of many.  Though it isn’t through fragments that a story is made personable, it is through decision of the story teller to lose themselves in the mystery that is the tangible and human aspect that makes something rich, special, and unmistakably something that you want to be a part of...

I can remember where I am from.  The hole in my darkness is swallowed with content.   The light moves up over Kristiansand and I am at the airport in Oslo, with something to think about.

Once upon a time on Washington Street...

1000 Faces Coffee is proud to announce that we have opened a coffee stop like you have never seen before. Small, transparent, collaborative, and the embodiment of the efficiency of slow.  This is our showcase. Please stay tuned to information blitzkrieg, unheard of schemes and stolen idea's from the 4th frontier of coffee, and good ol' neon as much as we can pump in....If you know where to find us already though, come and stop in tomorrow..September 8.   7am-12am.