November/December 1985 RAIN Page 3 expertise to our operations. Secondly, we are creating a national correspondents network to alert us to innovative grassroots projects around the country. (You'll find a description of a regional version of this network in the Pacific Cascadia Bioregion Report. If you are interested in being a part of our national network, let us know.) Finally, we are continuing to add to our contributors network. Got an article you want published? Read any good books lately? Heard of any exciting projects? Drop us a line. Also, we've hired a marketing consultant to help us get RAIN into the many thousands of hands out there that we feel would be interested in it. You can help, too. Do you know of a bookstore, food co-op, etc. that should be selling RAIN but isn't? Send us names and addresses and we'll try to rectify the situation. Finally, we've got a new intern named Connie Cohen, and guess what? She can draw pictures! You'll find her artwork in two articles in this issue: "Government Nature's Way" and "A New Medium in the Making." We're happy to have an illustrator in our midst for the first time in a long time. —FLS LETTERS I enjoy and am always learning from your magazine. However, in John McKnight's article on bereavement counseling, I could not agree with the analogy between bereavement counselors and tractors. I am a psychiatrist and recently bereaved person and have done some research on bereavement lately. I believe that bereavement counselors (and perhaps counselors in general) are symptoms of deficits in a social order rather than stealers of natural community functions. They are of value chiefly to those who are socially isolated or are dealing with grief in a dysfunctional manner (that is, prolonged or absent mourning). In the same way counseling can be useful for those who, for whatever reason, did not obtain sufficient love or wholeness in childhood and suffer as a consequence. Granted it is a paid and artificial relationship, but there is often nothing else available as these people tend to be socially islolated and without the means of developing other resources. In an ideal social order, at least theoretically, these people either would not exist or would be cared for in another way, but now these people are here and they are suffering. I feel it is a legitimate and needed social role to help alleviate that suffering. Counselors and physicians also fill a need by adding to our cumulative knowledge of mental and physical problems and may, as a consequence, help in developing more effective prevention or treatment. Examples might include highlighting the social problem of child abuse or developing effective treatment for schizophrenics instead of locking them away or burning them as witches. There have been mistakes as there have been in every scientific field, but over time there seems to be a corrective process. ... Until the social order or its members mature satisfactorily, there will be a continued need for counselors. But these counselors have a continued responsibility to speak up about the social order that makes them necessary. Tom Meyer Areata, CA I have just read "Raindrops" (September/ October) in which you explain why you have dropped the umbrella term "Appropriate Technology" as subtitle and as partial definition of your social focus and are casting about for another umbrella concept that will adequately convey your purpose. I should like to share with you what has become for me a useful symbol and concept, serving a corresponding function in my own life and actions—the Miracle Whip Microcosm. I have a Miracle Whip jar, the quart- and-a-half size, into which I placed a bit of mud and some water from a stagnant irrigation ditch, and some of the assorted greenstuff which lived there. I poured melted paraffin into the lid, screwed it down tight, and sealed it up with electrician's tape at the edge. The jar has stood on my windowsill ever since. For the first six months the sealed jar showed slow but continuous change; the predominant type of algae was slowly replaced by a different kind, and the little animals that could be seen cruising around kept gradually changing in kind and in numbers. Now, five years later, the community in the jar remains approximately in balance, the animals using the oxygen made by the plants and the plants using the carbon dioxide made by the animals, each feeding each other assorted nutrients, and the bacteria and other invisible creatures filling and bridging the gaps between the various larger-scale parts of the cycle. This jar is a solar engine. Nothing is added nor subtracted except energy which enters as sunlight and departs as heat. All the other resources are totally recycled.... For me, the Miracle Whip Microcosm serves as a model of how the world works, on a number of different levels, and over the years has come to have ever deeper meaning for me. It is an icon, a symbol with profoundly ethical and religious, as well as economic, political, and biochemical lessons to offer.... The life-system of the world is an interconnected and—most importantly— an interdependent network of organisms, substance, and energy exchang«;s. The finite limits, the similarities between the earth and the jar, are starkly clear in the now familiar whole-round-ball picture of the earth as seen from the moon.... I have gradually, with the passage of years, given over the quest for personal and physical immortality and have transferred much of my survival urge, the assignment of ultimate value, to survival of the human species. Since the Miracle Whip jar reaffirms what any biologist knows—that stability and resistance to change is a necessary requirement for the survival of an ecosystem—then stability of the world (including human) condition should be the goal of every economist, sociologist, politician, parent, voter, taxpayer, national leader, legislator, realtor, "developer," banker, wage earner, farmer, or conscious person.... It would be useful to discuss and debate whether this model is appropriate for understanding the world and our place in it. Is stability, rather than constant growth, the desirable goal? Do I occupy a place in the system analogous to one of the entities in the jar? Are humans integral parts of the earth's ecosystem, or are we privileged and potentially immune to the imperatives of our bodies' chemistry, viscosity, and temperature tolerances, and the the unforeseen consequences of our actions? And if we do accept this as an appropriate model, what kinds and what magnitude of changes are compatible with survival of the system? With survival of the human species? How many people can the earth support at what levels and kinds of activities? What ethical principles are suggested by the jar? Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" comes to mind; appropriate technology, deep ecology, and Green politics are concepts that come from this model. What is the meaning of "progress" in this context? And finally, your unbrella concept and mine converge: surely the essence of the Miracle Whip Microcosm is community. Ted Merrill Mt. Vernon, Oregon
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