Paxus Calta
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Paxus Calta 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 Loeb]), in which he detailed a successful campaign to overthrow Bulgaria's leader launched by an 18-year old [link]. He remains active in contemporary movements against nuclear power and in US radical politics.
Biography
Calta was born as Earl Schuyler Flansburgh, or "Sky" as a nickname, in the mid-1950s. Calta studied 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 [link], 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 moved to the Netherlands and worked for The World Information Service on Energy (WISE) in Amsterdam. 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 Volkenberg (Falcon) moved to Twin Oaks Community in the United States. Calta has a personal [webpage]Political activism
Throughout 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 appropriatness of protest as a political strategy [link]. 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 [link], 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 Research 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.
Lifestyle activism
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. (Not all Twin Oaks members believe he was the key influence, nor do all members necessarily endorse having more young and/or politically active members.) 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.
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 diseminates "Fingerbooks" (small handbooks) on [Consensus], designing revolutions, and intentional communities. Calta co-teaches a class on "How to Design a Revolution" at the [Living Education Center for Arts and Ecology] (LEC) in Charlottesville, Virginia,
Family
Calta, and Hawina [link], his partner of 13 years, and another adult male all are co-parents to Willow that Hawina gave birth to in 2002. He is the son of Earl R. Flansburgh, a retired successful Boston [architect]. He is the older brother of John Flansburgh, of rock band They Might Be Giants and according to a TMBG fan site, John Flansburgh has stated that the single "Boss of Me" is about Calta [link]. Calta's mother, Louise Flansburgh, is the founder and past president of [Boston by Foot], which gives architectural walking tours of the city of Boston.
Quotes
'"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 destine 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 you ability?"' From personal webpage [link]
"I'm convinced community is the answer, I'm just not sure what the question is." From Washington Post article on Twin Oaks [link]
"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].
"The antidote to globalization is replacing the materialist mindset with one which encourages sharing."
"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.
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