tradition) than condemning land for parks and wilderness, it is a course.of action we'd be better off stepping bravely into rather than being backed into, as we now are. With regard to "Ivan Illich on Ivan Illich," did he simply say: ' A lot of work is done in a home, generally It would be easy to never leave Rainhouse and still acquire a "global perspective." This has been especially true over the summer as visitors have brought us their stories from Japan, France, England and Sweden. first to come was Takashi Ishida from the Kanagawa Prefecture Government Office. "Jake" (his English tutor's name for him) . queried me for two hours on the nature and method of achieving Oregon's anti-nuclear legislation in our last election: There were a few language obstacles to hurdle right off. A major one involved the difference between a conservative and a conservationist. Jake's English was remarkably more manageable than my Japanese (how much can you rel,i.lly learn from reading Shogun?) but he lacked a certain political peppering. Another expression he had to struggle with was that of a "backyard revolution." "Revolution" he understood well enough, hut "backyard" was a word he'd never heard. I described a movement that coalesced a political base of power, house to house, and block by block. "Over the garden gates" organizing rather than out in the streets. He was "very interested." Japan, led by Jake's progressive prefecture, is embarked on a campaign they are calling The Age of Regionalism with goals of decentralizing government control and increasing citizen participation. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Not long after Jake's visit, Annie Bloch came for a couple of days. Annie lives in Paris where she has been communicating with RAIN on EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System). It was too early in'Mitterand's administration to get he.r feedback • by housewives, that in fact only serves to allow the household to consume more products of the wage-labor sector of the economy, in words twice as long and half as accurate, or did I miss something? I certainly prefer to see more articles by people dealing with specific problems, who can generalize on a socialist government for France, but she seconded Jake's interest in locally self-reliant r communities. Annie brought up the real conflicts between "Green Party" environmentalists in Europe, and the bread and butter issues of a large constituency. "For environmentalists to have any significant influence in France, they must address the economic issues that affect everyone. They cannot afford to separate themselves from the questions of unemployment and inflation." More universal lessons were learned from another visitor, landscape architect Michael Brown from the United Kingdom. Michael was one of the people behind the New Mills project we announced for sale recently. The predictable bad news from the Thatcher regime is the collapse of underfunded organizations, to say nothing of the very desparate times faced by England's even poorer individuals. Our Swedish visitors, Thorbjorn Ek and Goren Roseberg from the Research Group in Economic Geography at ~he University of Lund, came with the specific goal of researching intermediate level business developments "in order to keep jobs and capital in areas which are not highly industrializedwhere larger corporations abandon communities because they can no longer make significant profits there." We offered them names of people active r:iationally in shop closure and worker self-ma_nagement areas, and arranged appointments for them with Portland leaders with similar concerns. It was gratifying to be so useful. Our guests have confirmed what we have suspected; that there is a solid, loosely coorAugust/September 1981 RAIN Page 3 from their concrete experience, than partmystic ramblings of self-proclaimed philosopher princes, which is how I perceive Mr. Illich. • Thank you. Brian O'Regan Berkeley, CA dinated, international restructuring taking place. Th~t Wfi are all discovering our incredible dependency and vulnerability to big business and big governme.nt, and that as we leave the nest or are kicked out of it, we find out;ide the ";helter" more commonality than we ever dreamed. The more we alter our role in response to our independence,.the more we will be learning from and working with each other. Which leads me to introduce Scott Morgan Androes and Tanya Kucak our summer interns. There is an implicit agreement be.:' tween interns and RAIN staff: "You teach me whatever you know and can teach, and I'll do the same for you-we'know different things." With these two, I'm about as close to a,n ivy league education as I'll ever get. Scott is from Harvard and Tanya graduated from Princeton. We're all just getting to know each other.-CC
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