Paxus Calta
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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 the Central 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.
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[edit] 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, where he served as a student member of the Board of Trustees and as a member of the Quill and Dagger society. After which he worked as a software designer, helping to found and ultimately selling two small software consulting firms. In 1982, he changed his name to Paxus Calta. 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 moved to the Netherlands and worked for The World Information Service on Energy (WISE) in Amsterdam.
Calta was invited by a Czech deep ecology organization, Hnutí DUHA, to run the international campaign against the Temelín Nuclear Power Station 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 his partner Hawina Valkenburg (Falcon) moved to Twin Oaks Community in the United States.
[edit] Political activism
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Calta was active in efforts to stop nuclear power plants from being built throughout the Central Europe. 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-International Atomic Energy Agency 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 Central 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 Böll Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green Party. Hnutí DUHA invited Calta to be the lead international anti-nuclear campaigner after he left WISE.
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 Central and 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.
[edit] 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 an active member of Twin Oaks Community since 1998, serving as the group's recruiting manager since 1999.
Calta manages fundraising for the youth literacy program called the Reading Window School, based in Louisa VA.
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.
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 co-teaches a class on "How to Design a Revolution" at the Living Education Center for Arts and Ecology (LEC) in Charlottesville, Virginia,
[edit] Family
Calta 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. Calta's mother, Louise Flansburgh, is the founder and president of Boston by Foot, which gives architectural walking tours of the city of Boston.
Calta, Hawina, his partner of 13 years, and another adult male all are co-parents to Willow to whom Hawina gave birth in 2002.
[edit] References and external links
- "The Activist (English translation)", Die Zeit, October 27, 1994.
- How he chose his new name
- Sailboat story
- Debate with Hans Blix
- Chernobyl 10th anniversary campaign website
