>>>SHORT ANSWER:Harmony onstage/ harmony offstage
A musician = one who makes musical harmony for a living. A sustainable musician = one who makes harmony for a living: musical, social, and ecological. A sustainable musician gives as much attention to the harmony they create offstage as to the harmony they create onstage.
>>> MEDIUM-LENGTH ANSWER:
What can "harmony offstage" look like practically speaking?
For SHAKE YOUR PEACE! it looks like:
- Touring around on our Xtracycle longbikes without the aid of a support van (see #3), using public and mass transportation like trains and buses, and less frequently: walking, hitch-hiking, freight-hopping, biodiesel van/bus, and ridesharing.
- Anti-Copyright/ Pro-Stewardship (un)license on all creative material. (see #2)
- All of our merchandise is presented, both at shows and on this website, as ShareFare: a no-prices, donation-only, pro-stewardship paradigm. In other words - we don't put any prices on our stuff, and people pay what they feel is appropriate. (see #6)
- Merchandise made with eco-materials and in a fair-trade paradigm. Patches and shirts are printed by my sister Kira, with an eco-safe non-toxic ink that was chemically engineered by my brother-in-law Andy, on 100% organic fair-trade cotton canvas, and on salvaged (2nd hand/ turned-inside-out) t-shirts. Say it Green!, their company, is a socially responsible, family-owned and operated, wind-powered business.
- We strive to play shows outside, with no-price, and working with local social justice and environmental organizations, community gardens, cool neighbors, and other cool community efforts we believe in, as often as we can.
- Our website is hosted with 100% wind & solar power by Thinkhost.
- We often play shows using a pedal-powered PA system:
Homemade with car audio parts and plywood, and featuring a 10" hemp woofer. Electricity for the PA is generated by the audience using a velorutionary pedal-power technology developed by our good friends Rock The Bike.
- Reducing the carbon footprint of our CD:
>>> 1 CD = 1 new tree. One tree's planted by the band, or on behalf of the band by organizations such as Trees For the Future, and American Forests, for each CD we make.
>>> Packaging printed with soy-ink on 100% post-consumer recycled cardstock by Stumptown Printers in Portland, Oregon (thanks Eric).
>>> CD sleeve assembled by the audience "as they please" at shows with salvaged arts & crafts supplies: hole punchers, scissors, paintbrushes, golden yarn, yarn needles made from twisty-ties, and paint.
>>> CD's that folks order online are hand-cut, sewn, and painted by me, up in the 8x9 camping tent on the roof, using the materials listed above.
>>> Fuel used in CD-manufacturing and shipping offset by wind-power and tree purchases.
>>> CD's are printed by Earthology, a non-profit organization as well as an organic farm that runs on 100% renewable energy (geothermal, wind, etc.).
>>> CD scraps generated during manufacturing are recycled into milk cartons.
>>> If a person can't find a CD recycling facility in their area, they can send it to us and we'll recycle it, and reimburse them for the shipping.
>>> LONG ANSWER:
First we ought to define what we mean by "sustainable."
Simply said, we use the word to mean:
Living in harmony-with, within the provision-of, and in lethal defense-of one's particular bioregion (in our case it's the San Francisco Bay Bioregion), in such a way that your great-x-60 grand kids can enjoy all the diversity and richness of lifeforms that the bioregion can support in a healthy state.
Is SHAKE YOUR PEACE! sustainable?
Not yet... One way we’ve compromised 100% sustainability, for example (among many), is by building a website - a seemingly innocuous activity that creates tremendous disharmony in the Community of Life. Both the computer we used to build it and the computer you use to view it, like all computers, contain mercury, lead, cadmium, and all kinds of toxic stuff. It was likely made in Southeast Asia under despicable conditions, and will likely be 'recycled' there under the same conditions.
From petroleum-based CD's, to steel guitar strings, we openly and repeatedly compromise sustainable purity as we pursue our music. You might ask why we do that, given that we seem to be conscious of how disharmonious it is. There's a number of reasons why. One is that we don't know how to live 100% sustainably; we grew up in the American suburbs, and we're just continually trying to figure it out as we go. Another reason is because we think it's important, at this point in the game, to reach our community where-we're-at with messages of sustainability, and not just completely withdraw from the people and culture we grew up in. We want to be right up in the mix with everybody, shoulder-to-shoulder, and take responsibility for all the craziness that we humans collectively perpetrate on other forms of life.
Why take responsibility for society and its craziness?
There's a strong argument made (check out Endgame, by Derrick Jensen) that civilization is fundamentally unsustainable, cannot be redeemed, and that it's our ethical responsibility to bring it down, now.
Whether you agree with this view or not (I personally do), we feel that it's our responsibility in the meantime, to use some aspects of civilization - "the master's tools" (petroleum CD's, laptops, steel guitar strings, for example) to "dismantle the master's house" (the automobile, copyright, prices, etc.) and to sound the alarm as we transition out of 'civilization,' rallying folks to move collectively toward a more sane and sustainable future.
One of our heroes, folksinger Pete Seeger, had a boyhood dream of becoming a Native American/ Johnny Appleseed/ mountain-hermit kind of guy some day; the kind of guy who never had to compromise his eco-purity or take responsibility for a screwed-up culture he didn’t create. He tells the story of when he told his buddies at school one day:
“Come on, Pete, every single person’s not screwed-up,” replied one of the boys.
“No, but society sure is. The only ones who can be honest are those who don’t have to compromise: the hermits. I wouldn’t mind being one.”
“But Peter,” his buddy replied, “what kind of morality is that? Be pure and let the rest of the world go to hell?”
The community’s fate is our fate.
The fact is, no matter how sustainable we can become as a band, or you as an individual, sustainability isn’t something that a “we” can meaningfully achieve apart from a mythic “them.” Why? As a great cowboy once said to his friend when they were crawling across the desert and his friend thought he spotted naked women dancing over by the cactuses: “Them’s an illusion.”
Humanity, in all its diversity, is like one body: even if the left hand is feeding the mouth organic kale, if the right hand is feeding it gasoline-filled ho-ho’s, the body will still get sick and die. If we’re living sustainably and our neighbors aren’t, then we aren’t living sustainably. Some could argue that if you have an arm that won't stop feeding your body gasoline-filled ho-ho's until you're dead in a puddle of Chevron-vomit, that you should amputate it - better that than lose your life. What do you think?
The world is doomed. We can't reform the right arm cause it doesn't have ears, we can't amputate the arm because it's too strong, it's going to keep feeding us gasoline ho-ho's til we're all dead. So what's the use of creating sustainability on the deck of the Titanic?
If you've ever held a guitar in front of you, facing you, and sung at the body of it, you might have noticed that the strings vibrated with whatever note you sang at it, even though your fingers weren't plucking or strumming. This phenomenon describes how I feel when I'm gardening, when I'm swimming in a river, when I'm playing music for free, when I'm writing or singing folk songs (music that we all own together), when I'm composting my humanure, when I'm riding my bicycle hundreds of miles to a concert, or when I speak up about the rights of our landbase.
I feel like I resonate with "sustainability" like a guitar body does that has a voice singing at it; there's something in me that produces sympathetic frequencies. There's some kind of invisible force that reaches out to me from the high stepping hooves of deer, from the heirloom tomato, from the rock & roll bicycle tour and makes me go: "fuck YEEEEAAAAAH! THAT'S why I'm alive! It's to swim! It's to be a singing mammal! It's to eat tomatoes! (etc)"
Obviously being a human, unlike the guitar, I have the choice to be deaf to the vibration when it comes at me - maybe because I'm feeling scared of how much weirder and weirder I'm getting the more sustainable lifestyle practices I adopt, maybe because I like steak and I don't want to go Veggie, maybe because cars are just so much faster, or whatever - but if I shut my ears and eyes and I'm a square asshole my whole life to the beauty that's shouting at me from the rocks underneath my boots, the fact still remains that they call out at me, and that I'm being a square asshole; the fact remains that I was built to resonate and to be in harmony with them.
In the end I don't personally really care if this is the Titanic and we sink tomorrow or if the ship will never sink. I don't want to get up on the bandstand of the universe and honk sour notes. I want to resonate with the rocks and animals til my death, today or 80 years from now. Why? Cause it just feels too good not to.
