ri190410 Farm Game - Building card decks

Building a deck of cards puts me in the mind of playing a farm game. It’s a collectible card game and board game based on several game metaphors such as Monopoly, Go Goals, Farm Game, Magic the Gathering and others. To win this game I must invent it. Or, if I cannot invent it, I must keep trying.
Like my father, who was a farmer, and when disasters struck his crops or the animals he cared for, he kept trying. He asked that the phrase, “He tried” be engraved on his headstone. And so it is.
In evenings I read other peoples’ memoirs. Lately I have been reading the memoir of Paul Allen. Besides the lessons I can use in writing my memoir – things like style, voice and structure – I find little insights I can apply to winning this game I’m calling Farm Game.
For example, there was an exciting turning point in Paul Allen’s story when he was showing a potential buyer of the software which he, Bill Gates and another programmer wrote with the manufacturer’s limited hardware in mind. One keystroke decided the future of Microsoft, and the keystroke (in fact it was before keyboards were part of computers, so it was not a key but a toggle switch on the first Altaire microcomputer) resulted in a reply on screen: 7168 – a reference to memory size necessary to load the program.
Thus it is with winning – by inventing – this card game based on real farms in Africa.
One must know the scope, or size, of the project. This is not a software project, but a dynamic, time-based project based on the end game – sustaining Earth’s human and other life sustainability. The Other Life, in this instance, is the life of the bee.
(There is a new book by an American bee expert: Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas D. Seeley.)
It is helpful to know the UN has established a structure for collaboration – 17 principles they call Sustainable Development Goals. Development in this case is understanding the importance of bees to Earth’s human (and other) life sustainability. I add an 18^th card, Printmaking Access.Print, after all, is the technology of communication. Without print we would not have the technology today that is both good and evil. Communication is being used to destroy Earth’s human and other life sustainability; it can also be used to save what is left of Earth’s human and other life sustainability.What I hope for (and a structure for collaboration is like an insurance policy for hope*) is a demonstration of how printmaking can help bees.

The seventeen cards of the UN Sustainable Development Goals plus the 18^th Card, Printmaking Access.
In correspondence with the CEO of a farm cooperative in Botswana, I suggested that an investment club in the USA, based here in Seattle, might be one way to help save and promote the success of her farms honey farming. She said I was a good idea. Do I follow through?
In Paul Allen’s book, he said, “Few things worth doing can be done alone.” He said one must find others and make the thing to do a crusade. So far, I have found others who are willing to help, despite that they have little information to go on. There is Ron Kenyon, who shared his network in finding temporary living space for the visiting CEO from Botswana, Rewana Ka Nduchwa. There’s my friend Carl Chew; and I have met our guests’ first hosts – Lloyd Hara and Liz Anderson.
I have in mind to seek a connection or unlikely marriage of printmaking arts and crafts to the mission of this “investment club.” Frankly, its because I have nothing else to offer in this attempt to mesh farming with art, what I call agriculture/culture-culture. More specifically, apiculture – bee-farming