It's not too late!

We are pleased to announce that Norman Solomon, co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, will be joining Thom Hartmann, John Nichols and Donna Smith at the Healthcare NOT Warfare Benefit at Busboys and Poets on June 6!

There's still a chance to take your place with the leading lights of progressive thought as they speak about the burning issues behind the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign. And, for a few dollars more, you can spend time schmoozing with these luminaries before they speak.

Join us for this evening of celebration and community at the private reception at 8:00 PM before the main event. Click here for details and to reserve your ticket.

Or simply come to the main event at 8:30 PM. Click here for details and to reserve your ticket.

This promises to be a fun and entertaining evening. We certainly hope you can attend this warm-up celebration, sure to get you ready for the June 7 Rally with the Nurses at Lafayette Park. Click here for more information.

If you can't make it to Busboys and Poets @ 14th and V on Monday night to hear Hartmann, Nichols, and Smith, we hope you will consider making a contribution. Click here so we can continue to build our Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign.

Hope to see you there,

Tim Carpenter
PDA National Director

11 AM today: roundtable about Pepco's reliability

MD Delegate Tom Hucker will be holding a community roundtable about Pepco's reliability, clean energy, and measures which the General Assembly has and will take to improve performance. The event is hosted by the Fenton Street Market this morning at 11:00 AM in front of the Silver Spring Civic Center.

Please bring your best ideas about Pepco and Maryland's clean energy future to the Community Forum at Fenton Street Market, 11 am on Saturday, June 4. RSVP please! http://www.fentonstreetmarket.com/?p=2891

Saturday, June 4 · 11:00am - 12:00 Noon

Veterans Plaza

8523 Fenton St.

Silver Spring, MD

11 AM today: roundtable about Pepco's reliability

MD Delegate Tom Hucker will be holding a community roundtable about Pepco's reliability, clean energy, and measures which the General Assembly has and will take to improve performance. The event is hosted by the Fenton Street Market this morning at 11:00 AM in front of the Silver Spring Civic Center.

Please bring your best ideas about Pepco and Maryland's clean energy future to the Community Forum at Fenton Street Market, 11 am on Saturday, June 4. RSVP please! http://www.fentonstreetmarket.com/?p=2891

Saturday, June 4 · 11:00am - 12:00 Noon

Veterans Plaza

8523 Fenton St.

Silver Spring, MD

Memorial Day Weekend and the Victory Garden - 5/31/11

Memorial Day Weekend and the Victory Garden - 5/31/11   

I was lucky enough to spend my morning and early afternoon yesterday in three different gardens, growing in two of them and advising in the third. Being in the garden is always a joyous time, even with the summer heat, but it had special resonance on Memorial Day: since early in the last century, if not before, food gardening and local food production has held a special place in American life, a role which is at once both intensely practical and intensely patriotic.

Washington Post garden writer Adrian Higgins captured this beautifully in his recent commentary, "The victory garden, still a winning idea."  Mr. Higgins noted, as so many of us do, that "the closer I am to the source of the veggies I eat, the better I feel about myself and the planet." 

The article is a clarion call for people to get involved in growing food, stressing that we are already moving toward a time "when we will need victory gardens on every block, in a post-industrial, post-global planet, when advancement is measured in localizing our world, not expanding it."  Brilliant. The only thing Mr. Higgins missed was mentioning that this movement is happening right in his own backyard, with Montgomery Victory Gardens!

In addition to growing our own, we will also need to defend the farms that still exist, and hopefully we will do so with all the vigor and determination that the Victory Gardeners of WW II fought their struggle.

You have all heard of the dire threat to Nick's Organic Farm, the only organic seed producing farm in Montgomery County.  The next public meeting in this struggle is on Thursday, June 9.  You can read more about it at the new Save Nick's Organic Farm website, as well as find opportunities to volunteer in the campaign.

Whether you join us on June 9 (please do!), grow your own food, or participate in any of a myriad number of ways folks are recreating our food system, you are participating in one of the most important, fundamental, and downright patriotic movements of our time.  Don't forget it!

For the new food revolution,

Gordon Clark, Project Director
Montgomery Victory Gardens