Paxus Calta (born in the 1950s) is a political activist living in the United States who attained some prominence beginning in the 1980s as an anti-nuclear power campaigner in eastern Europe and the U.S. He is a member of Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, in the southeast U.S., where he has lived for nearly 9 years, and is also an active proponent of polyamory, the idea that consenting adults can honestly practice multiple simultaneous romantic relationships. In 2004, he wrote a chapter of the book The Impossible Will Take a Little While (compiled by Paul Rogat Loeb, in which he detailed a successful campaign to overthrow the Bulgarian government launched by an 18-year old [1]. He remains active in contemporary movements against nuclear power and in memetic design. He continues to develop the quasi-science of funology and co-authored the personal growth system called co-empowerment.
Biography
editCalta was born as Earl Schuyler Flansburgh, or "Sky" as a nickname, in the mid-1950s. Calta studied game theory in engineering and economics at Cornell University, after which he worked as a software designer. In 1982, he changed his name to Paxus Calta (which translates as "peace power"). In 1988, he hitchhiked on sailboats across the Pacific, settled briefly in Australia and then moved on to Hawaii where he worked for Makai Ocean Engineering.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Calta attempted to do organizing work in eastern Europe but was told "We have too many US Americans here already, if we need your help we will call you". After touring Asia, he moved to the Netherlands and worked for The World Information Service on Energy (WISE) in Amsterdam. Calta has adventured extensively, having smuggled monks out of Tibet into Nepal, having protested a top Soviet tanks in Estonia, and guided submarines between the Hawaiian Islands laying test power cable power and working briefly for Standard Oil of Ohio on the North Slope of Alaska.
Calta was invited by the Czech Deep Ecology organization, Hnuti DUHA, to run the international campaign against the Temelin nuclear power plant from Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1991, which remained his primary home base for most of the 1990s and where he became a prominent activist against nuclear power. In 1998, Calta and partner Hawina Valkenburg (Falcon) took a Polish Steamship across the Atlantic and moved to Twin Oaks Community in the United States. Calta has a personal webpage
Political activism
editThroughout the 1980s and 1990s, Calta was active in efforts to stop nuclear power plants from being built in Eastern Europe and the West coast of the U.S. More recently, he has campaigned against a planned new plant in Virginia, near Twin Oaks Community. For a time he was a public face of various anti-nuclear campaigns, and his personal website (which appears not to have been updated in several years) includes the text of a speech he gave against nuclear power after which he and then-IAEA director Hans Blix debated the appropriateness of protest as a political strategy. .
Calta was the Chair of the international campaign commemorating the Chernobyl 10th anniversary and co-managed the FAIRE project (Free & Applied Internships in Renewables and Efficiency) which trained east European activists in English language skills, campaigning and then placed them in western environmental groups as interns. The FAIRE project was funded by the Heinrich Boell Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green Party.
The Czech Deep Ecology organization Hnuti DUHA (which translates as "The Rainbow Movement") invited Calta to be the lead international anti-nuclear campaigner after he left WISE. While DUHA still exists, it is a less radical organization than during Calta's tenure.
Calta initiated the Clean Energy Brigade project in the Czech Republic in which local activists installed energy saving hardware in residential homes and public buildings at materials cost in exchange for documentation of reduced energy use. This program was expanded to 11 East European countries and is now called the International Energy Brigades. In aggregate, the efficiency upgrades from this project are abating literally thousands of tons of CO2 each year.
According to CoMedia [2], Calta was the Lead Nuclear Campaigner for the 56-country Friends of the Earth International network and is on the Board of Directors of the Nuclear information and resource service in Washington, DC. He is a strong proponent of energy efficiency and sits on the Green Hydrogen Coalition's Steering Committee with Jeremy Rifkin.
Calta was also the interim campaign manager for Brad Blanton's second run for Congress in 2006. Blanton ran as an independent on a Radical Honesty platform. Calta developed the idea of "the wire" in which everything the candidate said would be recorded and put up on the internet, making the politician transparent and verifiably honest. Blanton agreed to operate under this condition.
Lifestyle activism
edit
Calta has also been a prominent activist in less clearly "political" causes, authoring a widely distributed and translated pamphlet about polyamory and writing and speaking on behalf of various environmental, anti-consumption, and other radical causes. He has also been a very active member of Twin Oaks Community since 1998, serving as the group's recruiting manager since 1999. Many members of Twin Oaks give his recruitment efforts a large amount of credit for helping to increase the group's population - especially its population of young and politically active people - following a population decline and period of low community membership. Calta has stated that he sees Twin Oaks as politically significant due to its ability to serve as a model of a society based on sharing, equality, and cooperation.
While not a member, Calta has been active with Acorn Community, located 7 miles from Twin Oaks. He has worked on recruiting new members and on marketing for Acorns organic and heritage seed business Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Calta manages fundraising for the youth literacy program called the Reading Window School, based in Louisa VA and for Southern Exposure Seed Exchange's Heritage Harvest Festival a joint project to promote organic and heritage seed saving with the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants at Monticello.
In 1999, Calta co-founded the Emma Goldman Institute for Theoretical and Applied Funology, with Frodo Underhill (a real person who took on the characters name). Funology is a largely undocumented quasi-science which "studies fun, using somewhat repeatable experiments" such as parties and festivals.
In 2001, Calta co-designed with Joy Legendre, Hawina Falcon and Kate Adamson the Co-Empowerment system for personal growth and enabling political action. Co-Empowerment uses a collection of tools for helping people, especially activists, to move through their fears and other internal blocks to reach their "empowered selves". Calta and Legendre do workshops and occasional seminars using these tools.
In 2003, 2006 and 2007, Calta was a presenter at the Network For New Culture Summer Camp program. In 2003 and 2007, the co-empowerment tools were/will be introduced and in 2006 he and Tree Bressen presented the work of Joanna Macy on moving through despair to Empowerment.
Calta considers himself an anarchist and propagandist and is the principal organizer of the Fingerbook Propaganda Project, which besides producing and distributing the pamphlet on polyamory also creates and disseminates "Fingerbooks" (small handbooks) on Consensus, designing revolutions, and intentional communities. Calta guest facilitates a class on "How to Design a Revolution" at the Living Education Center for Arts and Ecology (LEC) in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Calta is an author of a number of wikipedia pages.
Family
editCalta, and feminist pagan Hawina, his partner of 13 years, and organizer Sky Blue all are co-parents to Willow that Hawina gave birth to in 2002. He is the son of Earl Flansburgh who was a successful Boston architect. Calta's father, Earl, died in 2009. He is the older brother of John Flansburgh, of rock band They Might Be Giants. Calta's mother, Louise Flansburgh, is the founder and president of Boston by Foot, which gives architectural walking tours of the city of Boston.
Quotes
edit"Your passport to complaining is your willingness to do something about it" From the Ecotopia Principles
"Dream out loud with me"
"Modesty is dangerous: If we believe we are here to do something, if in fact we have the daunting task of turning around a system which appears destined not only to degrade, demoralize and dehumanize us, but to destroy the ecosystem in the process - we don't have time for outdated social customs. You need to tell me what you can do, what you are good at, how you can contribute to helping to make these changes. And i in turn need to tell you the same. Anything less endangers us. Anything less leaves one of us wondering why the other is not being clear, 'Are you unaware of your gifts? Are you unsure of them ? Am i wrong in estimating your ability?'" From personal webpage [3]
"Everyone but the devil means well."
"I'm convinced community is the answer, I'm just not sure what the question is." From Washington Post article on Twin Oaks [4]
"Being rich is not about having money, rather it is having quality options."
"It is not necessary to overthrow a government to have a revolution. Revolutions are dramatic changes in the power relationship between institutions and individuals. So the Sexual Revolution qualifies, the power of the state and especially the church being significantly reduced basically thru a mass civil disobedience. No leaders ousted, no shots fired, but a full on revolution none-the-less." From the "Designing Revolution" Fingerbook for LEC.
"Fear no intimacy"
"we are in the envision and manifest business"
"The antidote to globalization is replacing the materialist mindset with one which encourages sharing."
"The most significant revolutionaries are the ones figuring out how to build the better party. Not a political party, but a social-cultural one - a party that inspires and transforms those who participate in it and then the event replicates itself." From the Funology Manifesto
"i am an optimist – if the anarchist principle is that “you can do what ever you want, but you must take responsibility for it," and you believe the new age principle of “we create our own reality,” then we have an obligation to be optimistic – or else we are creating the wrong reality. For seven years i lived in eastern europe working with small anti-nuclear groups against the most powerful corporations and the state. i was constantly reminding them that it was groups exactly like theirs which had stopped reactors around the world. it is as papa Chomsky so well put it:
"If you assume there is no hope you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance that you may contribute to making a better world. that is your choice."