BATNA: Lessons from Conflict Resolution

Self-Reliance Improves Your BATNA

 

My conflict resolution students swiftly learn to apply the word BATNA to every conflict situation. The principle of Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement means that anyone negatively affected by another person or entity should first look for options that are wholly within their own control to improve their own position in a way that will minimize the impact of the actions of others.

For example:  Afraid your place of employment might be downsizing? Bolster your eduction and job skills to make yourself as valuable in your workplace and as employable elsewhere as possible; start up other income streams, even small ones like selling some homemade items on Etsy, so that when your employment ends it won't feel quite like dropping off a cliff. Or, relationship on rocky ground with an uncertain future? Strengthen your network of friends and community, and shore up your financial independence; the boost in self-confidence may help put the relationship on better terms, or will clarify its ending without feeling like the your whole life is ending, too.

Every day brings us reports that food prices are rising, food production is down while population is skyrocketing, climate change is bringing drastic shifts in agriculture and patterns of civilization, and the food reaching our grocery store shelves is full of GMOs, lead, arsenic, high-fructose corn syrup, and a host of chemicals with names we can't pronounce. Health care costs are soaring while our health is diminishing.

It often feels as if we are ever-increasingly the helpless victims of massive corporate and governmental forces that we can not possibly control. Do we even have a BATNA in the face of what experts say is global environmental and economic collapse?

It is true that there are many things in life which any one of us can not control. Yet, you always -- ALWAYS -- have a BATNA. There is always some realm of your existence over which you have at least some modicum of control, about which you can make choices and formulate decisions to better your own position.

The food we eat is an area of our life over which we exercise a large amount of control. As supermarket prices rise and family budgets shrink, it sometimes may not feel that way, but it's true. Remember how I said that in the face of possible job loss, starting even a tiny sideline income stream was useful to improve your position? So it is with food. Even the smallest step towards food independence begins to free you from the power of the corporate agriculture giants and reduces the harmful impact of other people's actions on your body, wallet, and family.

Growing sprouts or shoots on the edge of the kitchen sink adds a nutrient-rich green vegetable to helps stretch your grocery shopping dollars and boosts your health. One pot on an apartment balcony with a single cherry tomato plant and some lettuce will give you fresh, nearly free salads all summer, helping to offset shortened summer work hours. Buying at the local farmers market is a fabulous option if you don't have growing space or time -- and can be cheaper than you thing, especially if you come at the end of the day and negotiate. (Many farmers markets also take EBT cards and some states provide food-assistance recipients with extra farmers markets coupons as well.)

Buying produce in season and throwing some in the freezer creates a buffer for lean times. Eating lower on the food chain -- lentils instead of meat some nights of the week--is cheaper and healthier. Drinking ordinary tap water instead of soda or other bottled drinks saves money and could be the best single thing you could do for your health.

Any one of these little steps empowers you by moving you one small step further away from the impact of decisions made by corporate agriculture--yet without any diminishment in the quality of your life or health. In fact, you'll improve your health, reduce your anxiety over food bills, and likely develop new tastes and food interests that will enrich your life far more than the box of expensive powdered donuts could have ever done. BATNA is about making yourself stronger and freeing yourself from the shadow of others' power over you. The more you re-assert your control over the food you eat, the stronger your BATNA, and the less power bad news about food prices and supplies will have over your life.

Famine on the Horn: Starvation and Politics

I am sitting on my front porch surrounded by my own miniature Eden, with beds full of lettuce and basil and beets, garlic about to be harvested, squash and tomato vines taking over the neighborhood. The surrounding houselots, fields and farms are rich with nut trees, wild cherries, and escaped apples and pears. An afternoon stroll may bring back mushrooms, wild garlic, wild grapes, serviceberry, raspberries or blackberries depending on the season, along with lesser-known wild edibles like trout lily bulbs, cattail tubers, or fiddlehead ferns. Even my perennial bed is full of good eats and drinks: daylily flowers, bee balm, burdock and chicory. I consider the lilies of the field--and I eat them.

Amidst this abundance, famine seems unimaginable. Yet as I sit here, tens of thousands of people from the region of Somalia are walking days and weeks across burning desert to reach the largest refugee camp in the world -- Dadaab, an outpost in nowhere, Kenya, originally designed to hold 90,000 refugees of the Great African War and now holding over 400,000 people.

The present famine in Somalia is the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent. But to call it a famine, suggesting that it is merely a product of random unlucky rainfall cycles or maybe a crop failure, does not begin to accurately describe the situation, any more than the expression 'potato famine' describes the political and sociological disaster that occurred in Ireland in the mid 19th century.

I've heard folks quip cynically, "It's a desert, and it's always been a desert -- you don't want to starve, don't live in a desert." Not true on all counts. This is not the place to debate world desertification, other than to say that much of the world we now know as desert was not desert at one time (check your old testament for its descriptions of hanging gardens, flowing fountains, and towering cedar forests in the Middle East, for example). But many Somalis lived in villages built around wells, rich in cattle and crops plentiful enough to feed everyone amply and have grains, meats and vegetables left over to trade in markets for goods or cash--a permaculture Eden-like environment not unlike my green front yard. Until someone crashed through with tanks, killed the cattle, poisoned the well, salted the fields and raped the women.

Local food security vanishes with the speed of a flame in the face of war.  Just ask an American from the South about the impact of Sherman's burning march. The tactic of destroying food resources goes back thousands of years; something about Carthage springs to mind. Permaculture is hardly permanent in the face of tanks and guns, unless one has the bigger guns to protect it, or the cash or gold in a bank account to buy the land and seeds to start over, assuming your bank does not also collapse.

On top of the disaster of war, Somalia has experienced lower-than-usual rainfall for several years. With freedom of movement and trade, Somalis may have resolved the hardship on their own, or with a minimal boost of some temporary food aid, much as those Americans hit by natural disasters like floods rely on. However, militant groups have precluded foreign aid from reaching those affected, escalating the impacts. The press says these groups are 'associated with Al-Qaida,' but I have no way to assess this information--my apologies for the cynicism, but not long ago we were told that all revolutionary groups were associated with Russian Communists; now they seem to all be associated with Al-Qaida. To the mothers watching their children starve to death, it hardly matters.

Political, social and economic security and food security are intimately intertwined. The ancient city of Rome rioted for bread, not because the wheat crop had failed or drought had destroyed farmlands, but because Cleopatra was involved in a pissing match with the powers that be and stopped shipping wheat. The actions of the people who occupy the White House and Capitol Hill, the actions of the people they appoint to our embassies and the United Nations, the wars our nation chooses to get involved with or not get involved with, all play out on the ground not only in terms of soldiers lost on either side, but in terms of which mothers walk for weeks with their dying children to beg for food aid in a desert camp of 400,000 starving, desperate people.

The U.S. has engaged in some half-hearted intervention in Somalia over the last several decades, none of which has worked out terribly well.  Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the U.S. quickly withdrew from Somali intervention, despite declaring the situation in Darfur to constitute a genocide.  We have made the decision to commit to very expensive ongoing military action in these two locations, and not in other locations. On such decisions, people live and die.

Few if any among the 400,000 in this one refugee camp--and hundreds of thousands scattered at other camps across Africa--had anything to do with causing the violence which has shattered their lives and left them starving. Certainly the kids who are dying played no role in the global posturing and shoving matches that played a greater role in creating their circumstances than any lack of rain.

This Garden of Eden in my front yard, these rolling green fields and forests, are truly a blessing. On this glorious summer day, it seems impossible that anything could happen to take this wealth of food security and self-sufficiency away. Yet I'm sure that many wise and peaceful farmers throughout the ages have felt the same.

Please consider making a donation to the UNICEF Horn of Africa Emergency Appeal or any of the church, nonprofit or service organizations working on the effort to relieve the worst of this crisis including the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, and many local religious organizations. And plant a garden, including an extra row for the food shelf -- it is a precious liberty indeed.

Growing Tea

Growing tea herbs is about the lowest-maintenance gardening operation you could imagine. Bee balm, mint, and anise hyssop--like the Golden Jubilee variety shown here--thrive in even marginal soils, spreading to sometimes invasive proportions, which you can contain by harvesting frequently (or assaulting with the lawnmower if necessary). Lemon balm and most mints will also grow happily even in partial shade. If you are a rogue urban gardener, plant tea herbs around street trees or in empty disturbed lots (where you will not interfere with native ecosystems -- don't ever plant in parklands or healthy wild places) and harvest as they spread, but monitor carefully to make sure the plants have not been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides before your harvest.

More unusual tea herb options include thyme and sage, which makes a wonderful broth-like tea sure to sooth a winter cold (add honey and a quarter onion to each cup for a truly powerful cold fighter). Yarrow blossom tea warms you right up when you have the chills. Raspberry leaf tea is a traditional treatment to strengthen women's health. Rose and lavender blossoms sweeten the teapot with scents of summer.

Cut your tea herbs back a few times in the spring to encourage branching, then harvest again while the plants are blooming and include the blossoms in your tea for a cheery touch of color and scent. Hang small bundles of the cut herb stems (I use a small rubber band to hold them together, as wrapped string will slip once the stems dry and shrink) in a shady, airy place out of rain and wind to dry, or use a dehydrator. Just keep a careful watch on the herbs in a dehydrator, they usually only need an hour or so to dry thoroughly, and after that you are losing flavor.

Strip the dried leaves off the stems and store them in glass jars, out of direct sunlight. Use about a teaspoon of dried leaf per cup of boiling water, but feel free to mix and match herbs or adjust the quantities to taste. Save the peels from organically grown citrus fruit through the year and dry those as well, adding a chunk to your tea in winter when citrus is quite expensive to add a flavorful zing to your tea.