City of Trees

(source)

This is the first in a new series I'm calling Lancaster 2030. In it, we'll be taking a look back on Lancaster from a vantage point 20 years in the future. What will Lancaster be like? How did it get to be this way (in 2030)? It's impossible to know for sure, but one thing is certain: "you've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Let's figure out where we're going, then aim to get there.

Lancaster City (PA) -- Hard to believe, but not even 20 years ago, Queen Street was twice as wide -- twice as much asphalt! I almost didn't believe it myself, but the old satellite photos are not to be denied.

Now, as we all know, Queen Street is dominated by the verdant and beautiful -- and invaluable -- Queen Forest Corridor, which itself is part of the much larger Lancaster Urban Forest Reserve. Well, that's what the planners call it, anyway. To the rest of us, who've grown up with it, tended it, walked in it, ate from it, heated our homes from it and studied in it, it's just another part of our home, our beloved Lancaster.

This is the first in a series of retrospectives on the evolution of Lancaster since the Great Transition began nearly 20 years ago. In this inaugural report, we'll look at what many consider to be the foundation of Lancaster's Renaissance -- our very own Queen's Forest.

Some history
In the Spring of 2012, the second oil shock in four years hit hard. While, in 2008, the price of oil ran up to US$147 per barrel, the 2012 price was much more muted -- not even US$130. However, with the US economy still limping through a half-hearted -- and much disputed -- recovery from the "Great Recession," and many nations around the world experiencing cascading economic crises (what commentators today call "the death throes of the infinite growth paradigm"), even a muted oil shock was a big enough straw to finally break the camel's back. Economic activity came to a screeching halt nearly everywhere. Many were declaring it a second Great Depression.

Paradoxically, this moment proved a liberating one for many older American cities, particularly Lancaster, with its access to high-quality farmland, fresh water, and relative immunity (unlike the old coastal cities of New York, Miami and, to a lesser extent, Philadelphia) from sea-level rise (though we have had our share of coastal refugees). Although the price of gasoline had dropped back below US$2, it turned out that most couldn't afford the gas at any price (and with hardly anyone buying gas, there was simply no incentive to invest in new oil infrastructure, exacerbating the problem). We were a city unemployed, and if what little money available wasn't going to food, it was going to housing and other necessities.

The boom in home gardening, which began after the 2008 financial collapse, really picked up in 2012, til it seemed like nearly everyone was growing food in any sunlit corner of the Earth they could find. Community gardens, such as at County Park and some School District property, really began to take off, particularly among renters.

Late in 2012, Mayor Gray took a decisive step when he imposed a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Though decried by the banks, this action was very popular and has been credited with averting  a new homeless crisis and preserving the burgeoning spirit of solidarity among the citizens of Lancaster.

Studies from that time show that many had less leisure time than before, yet since they were now working from home, they were reporting higher levels of satisfaction.

A brutal winter
The winter of 2012-'13 proved a devastating one. Though 2012 was, worldwide, the hottest year (yet) on record, one of the counter-intuitive effects of global climate change was that winter temperatures could be as extreme as summer temperatures. In the Northeast, the immediate cause was the disruption of Arctic weather patterns which resulted in occasional spikes of frigid Arctic air lashing southwards, coating the land in ice and snow for months on end. Compounding this was that many could no longer afford the natural gas or oil they needed to warm their homes. It was a crisis. Riots very nearly broke out at one point when, during one very cold morning after an even colder night, over a dozen sick and elderly people were found dead in their homes. The cause? Exposure.

The people were demanding action, but what could anyone do? It later came out that city staff, along with several non-profits worked feverishly throughout the winter months on a plan to save the city. "Those were some cold meetings," said one staffer, in an interview a decade later. "Even the city couldn't afford much heat and, besides, we all felt strongly we had to share the pain with the vast majority of Lancastrians, or live as hypocrites."

The Queen's Forest Working Group, or simply the Group, as they came to be known, had realized something many had yet come to accept: times had changed, and the traffic that was would never return. The city simply had too many miles of useless roadways. With most people now walking or bicycling, the streets were now eerily quiet -- and eerily empty. Recognizing the changed shape of the world, the Group hatched an ambitious plan: they would tear up half the city's roads.

And they'd begin with Queen Street.

Though brutal, the Winter of '12-'13 was mercifully short, with Spring coming a full two weeks early. This was the Group's cue. They quickly unleashed over three thousand residents in a massive public works project -- tearing up twenty feet of road down the entire length of Queen Street, from just north of the bridge over the Conestoga to the train station in the north. Many workers were paid in food, which the city and county had begun to accept in lieu of the old US dollars for property taxes. Many more, though, joined in for the sheer joy of tearing up the macadam, and the satisfaction of doing something with their hands for the greater good. The city then used a substantial portion of its ration of diesel fuel to haul in nearly 30,000 cubic yards of top soil, compost and mulch. And then they began to plant trees.

A forest born and a city reborn
Half-planned, half-wild, Queen's Forest became an icon for a city reborn. The plan was for the forest, stewarded by a corps of trained permaculturists, to provide food, fuel, stormwater management, cool air in the increasingly hot summers, wildlife habitat and a salve for a city in deep need of healing.

In just a few years' time, the planners and foresters expected the new Queen's Forest (the core of a planned city-wide system) to provide a substantial portion of the city's heating needs through a combination of a new centralized boiler system and the production of synthetic gas, or syngas, from sustainably charring biomass from the forest. The syngas would be a nearly 1:1 replacement for the now hard-to-get natural gas.

The next few years were tough, but the spirit of self-help and community action cultivated in those early days proved resilient.

Amazing how much a simple idea can change things, isn't it?

What Should We Do?

Soil-building is one of the answers.

There will be no great leader, this time.

Many have commented that a mass mobilization, on the scale of World War II, is what we need, right now, to prepare for peak oil and preserve a habitable climate and biosphere. There are a number of logical and practical issues with this notion.

First, no one in a position to be a leader -- say, the President, a member of Congress, a Governor, a respected (hah) national news correspondent -- has shown either (a) any understanding of the magnitude of the crises we face or (b) any inclination to be an actual leader on these issues. Instead, we get nonsensical screeds on American "exceptionalism," which I must put in quotation marks due to the fact of its not being either a word or a remotely coherent idea.

Second, the analysis of some very intelligent and thoughtful people (see, e.g., the Hirsch Report) has shown that we would need a WWII-scale mobilization twenty years in advance of oil peaking to successfully avert a peak oil-based global economic and political collapse. Since peak crude oil was five years ago, in 2006, and we are now at the final edge of the "undulating plateau" of oil production, this opportunity was lost nearly 25 years ago.

Third, we have already left the geologic epoch known as the Holocene (from holos = whole, and cene = new; thus: wholly new), which began about 11,700 years ago, and during which we had the steady, stable climate which permitted human civilization to develop for the first time on Earth (anatomically modern Homo sapiens first appeared over 200,000 years ago, and behaviorally-modern humans first appeared about 50,000 years ago). The Holocene is over; we have now entered what geologist call the Anthropocene (from anthropo = human), an epoch characterized by the global extent and impact of human activities on the Earth. This new epoch will be distinguished by (among other things) an increasingly chaotic climatic system, leading to regional and possibly global food shortages, the inundation of human settlements by rising flood waters, continent-sized Dust Bowls in North America and elsewhere, tens or hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, political and economic collapse, regional unrest, disruptions in the shipment of vital materials (such as food, energy, minerals), etc.

(source)

As an aside, I will note that part of the reason for this chaotic climate change is that we have already blown past the global carbon budget by at least 40, if not 90, parts per million (ppm). Present concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere stand at about 390ppm. For at least the past 400,000 years, those levels never went much over 300ppm, and the current rate of increase (2ppm / year) is about 10,000 times the natural rate. Just as with our oil addiction, we have missed our deadline for keeping atmospheric carbon at safe levels by over 20 years.

In other words, in almost ever sense, we have overshot. Too many people consuming too many resources dumping too much pollution and waste into a finite global ecosystem. Every year in which we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere, just as every year in which we fail to ween ourselves off of our oil and lifestyle addiction, is another year in which are digging our own collective grave.

Cheerful, huh?

As I said above, and for the reasons already outlined (plus many more besides), don't expect any person purporting to represent that entity known as the United States (or most any other "nation-state") to take any proactive steps on these issues. Don't expect anyone to exhort you, or your neighbors, to take up any great national cause that might effectively meet these foolishly self-imposed threats. You've got no one but yourself, as hard as that sounds. At most, you've got your immediate geographic community; hopefully, that community is organizing, as Lancaster is, around a Transition movement that recognizes the present importance of these issues, and is seeking ways to meet them positively.

So, you've read the above and you agree on the three following propositions: (1) we are in for some hard times ahead, (2) no one is going to help us but ourselves and maybe our friends, and (3) we need to start working now. So what do we actually do?

The bottom pyramid doesn't look terribly stable, does it?

There are very few things I know for sure on this subject, but thanks to some pretty clear statistics this is one of them: start growing your own food. As I showed in a presentation on October 24, 2009 (the 350.org Global Day of Action and Eastern Market's first annual Green Fest), the United States has a woefully inadequate supply of farmers right now. Over 170 years ago, in 1840, before the advent of industrialism and widespread use of fossil fuels, the world had a basically solar-powered economy. The sun shown, grass and trees grew, and humans and animals ate food that had been cultivated with human and animal labor in a basically (though not entirely) closed-loop system whose driving energy source was the sun. At that time, 69% of the population of the USA, or 11.7 million people (out of 17 million), was directly involved in farming. In 2008, nationally, that percentage was below 0.62%, or 1.9 out of 304 million. In other words, we had more farmers in 1840 than we have now. Since it is pretty clear to most observers that this extraordinary feat has been made possibly by basically free energy, in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, it becomes clear that one of the pressing needs we will feel as that free energy disappears is for more farmers -- and farm animals -- to directly work the land.

As a supporting statistic, I will note that, for every one calorie of food you consume, approximately 10 calories of fossil fuel-based energy (primarily oil and natural gas) was required as an input. Or, to put it another way, Americans consume, on average, about 400 gallons of gasoline-equivalent annually to produce our food. It also turns out that a barrel of oil is worth about 11.3 person-years of labor. The amount of energy we shovel into the US food system is thus equivalent to about 33 billion person-years of labor (or nearly 5x the population of Earth -- just to feed the USA). If that sounds like a lot, you're right.

Left: nutrient-poor oxisol. Right: an oxisol transformed into fertile terra preta using biochar. (source)

All is not lost! The first step in solving your problem, as they say, is recognizing that you have one. Well, we can check that step off the list. Step two is knowing where you need to get. Well, I would say, in the context of this post, "where we need to get" is a place that has a sustainable food supply, which means we need more farmers working the land directly with the help of domesticated animals and very little, if any, fossil fuels. This will mean, among other things, much smaller farms; but that's ok and even good, because it has been shown that small farms produce more food per acre than large farms. We also need to reduce and then stop emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and then move to start taking carbon out of the atmosphere (to get from 390ppm CO₂ to under 350ppm). Well, damn! Our idea of de-urbanizing and putting more people back on the land as farmers will also help with that as well, as it has been shown that good stewardship of the land and husbandry of animals can actually build topsoil, which means that small farms could actually become carbon sinks rather than carbon sources (topsoil is a reservoir of carbon), especially if they make use of biochar. Might we actually see a return to a stable climate? Well, not in your lifetime, but maybe in your grandchildren's. We need to take the long view on this one. After all, it has taken well over a century to utterly erode the Earth's life-support systems, and it'll probably take much longer than that to restore them. And restoration ought to be our mission.

How likely is all this? Not very, if you're waiting for someone on high to tell you to do it. Doubly unlikely, if you think you can sit idly by doing what you've always done while waiting for your neighbor to take care of all the hard work. Nevertheless, it is possible. If step one is recognizing the problem, and step two is having a vision for the future, then step three is getting there (or maybe having a plan for getting there, followed by getting there, if you are a planner like me).

So how will we get there? What will you do? I look forward to your thoughts.

Hurtling Towards the Wall

(source)

If anyone ever wonders why I seem to obsessively forward on information of this nature (in the Transition Lancaster newsletter), a little reflection should provide the answer: it is simply impossible for a human being to maintain his sanity and believe himself to be alone in his knowledge. I am following a compulsion buried deep in my evolutionary nature.

From the Inter Press Service in Paris:

PARIS, Jan 24, 2011 (IPS) - Despite repeated warnings by environmental and climate experts that reduction of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is fundamental to forestalling global warming, disaster appears imminent. According to the latest statistics, unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions.

It would be a mistake to regard this as hyperbole. We know, for instance, that sea-level rise this century is almost certainly to be in the multi-meter range, meaning a minimum of around 20' from present levels; this will inundate most every major metropolitan center in the US, from Miami to Boston. Flooding is already devastating many coastal communities worldwide. We know that a continent-sized Dust Bowl is growing now in the heart of North America, not to mention Africa, Asia and Europe. The world's coral are being driven to extinction -- and they have been present on Earth for over 540 million years. Occupying less than one-tenth of one percent of the world ocean surface, reefs nevertheless shelter around 25% of all marine species. Many of the world's peoples depend upon reefs for food, not to mention flood protection and tourist dollars.

Thank God for the economic collapse:

[Global greenhouse gas emissions], measured as equivalent to carbon dioxide, reached at least 32 billion tonnes last year, only one step below the most pessimistic scenario imagined by the IPCC in 2000: 33 billion tonnes of CO2.

The results for 2010 were conditioned by the present global economic crisis – meaning that under normal economic circumstances, the numbers would have been higher. In other words, total consumption of energy in 2010 would have been worse than the most pessimistic scenario the IPCC formulated ten years ago had the global economy been in better shape.

And more on this century of challenges:

According to the newest IPCC estimations, global temperatures may rise as much as eight degrees Celsius [14.4°F] by the year 2200.

Levermann explained that the temperature difference within an interglacial period, such as the one we are living now, have historically reached about five Celsius degrees.

"The transition between these temperature extremes lasted some 50,000 years in the past," Levermann said. "But at the present rate of [greenhouse gas emissions] we are reducing such a transition by 50 times."

He added that the rapid rising of global temperatures could provoke extreme weather catastrophes that humankind won’t be able to survive.

"The rising frequency of weather extremes, with their enormous social and economic consequences, would not allow public budgets to recuperate, nor give societies the time to breathe again," Levermann said. "Nor would insurance companies be able to compensate for the damages."

Levermann echoed earlier warnings that climate change could destroy countries such as Bangladesh, cities situated near the oceans, such as New York and Amsterdam, and make large parts of Africa uninhabitable.

"Climate change would destroy drinking water supplies, agriculture, habitats, and provoke giant waves of migration and mass mortality," he explained.

Levermann compared the consequences of global warming to a wall hidden in fog. "We cannot see the wall, but it is there. And we are driving at the highest possible speed towards it."

And people wonder why I seem so concerned. I will blog later on the efforts some are making to put us on a WWII-type footing to deal with this appropriately. Strict energy rationing and a rapid transition to a fossil fuel-free way of life would be good starts. Local transition movements only set the stage for this move to very necessary nation- and global-scale efforts.

The Story of What Could Be

It won't be easy. (source)

I wrote this originally back on July 4. Though most of us have forgotten about the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and the catastrophic and seemingly endless oil spill that resulted, the legacy remains, and will continue to remain, for decades. This story is about what that legacy could be, if we wanted it badly enough.

In the beginning, there was an oil spill. The worst spill in the history of spills. The worst spill imaginable. Unlike past spills, this one came  from a bottomless cup: the Earth. During the worst of it -- and every day seemed the worst -- the people of the world sometimes felt the Earth was bleeding out every last drop of oil. A wound, that's what it was. Not a spill, but a wound -- an arterial cut so deep we sometimes felt the Earth itself would die. Or that we would die. We wished for death -- of ourselves, of the other, of the person responsible--

--But this isn't that story. This is not a story of death, nor murder, but of redemption. This is a story of healing. It begins with anger, rage, pain, despair, it is true, but that is only the beginning.

So we have a wound, a deep wound. It was -- and is -- a terrible thing. No one would wish for this wound, for any reason. But it woke us up to the fact that it was and is but one wound among many. It stood up alongside the raping of the forests, the poisoning of the atmosphere, the destruction of the top soil and the desertification of our souls as but one of the great crimes of Man. This wound was simply so large it finally could not be ignored, as much as we would have liked to.

It woke us up; and, like dreamers rudely awakened, we sat as in a daze, gazing at our works -- and a terrible fear grew. We had destroyed the Gulf, bled it dry. Nothing could be done, we thought. In our despair, we imagined an endless welling up of oil. We were not far wrong. Oh, these were bad times.

--Yet, I spoke of redemption earlier, and healing. Can you see it? It is germinating -- right there, in the fear and despair. Some might tell you that nothing good can come of such things, but they have this to say for them: they begin the process, the necessary process, of stripping away illusions. At first, in our fear, we tried many things. Anything we could think of to staunch the flow of oil. "Top hats", "top kills", "junk shots", giant hoses and centrifuges to vacuum it up. Meaningless to you, I know, but to us, briefly, they were everything: we placed all our hopes in these strange techniques, these magics. They all failed. When they failed, as they must have, we tried blame. We blamed the corporatists most involved in the catastrophe. We blamed the bureaucrats who let it happen and the politicians who failed in their sworn duties. All this was right, and just -- partly. In the end, we couldn't help ourselves, we continued to point fingers, pointing on and on till none were left to be singled out but we ourselves. Who purchased the oil so drilled? In plastics, pesticides, pseudo-foods, dish detergents, children's toys, gasoline for our mammoth cars and heating oil for our gargantuan, far-away homes, our make-believe castles. We purchased the oil, bought with blood and destroyed livelihoods and crippled ecologies. We burned it and poisoned the air and acidified the waters. We came to understand that, even without the endless spill, the oceans were under such aggressive assault they had mere decades left, anyway. We came to realize that we, that we were the ones. We caused the spill.

Many shook their heads, they denied, they fought, they justified... but eventually all that fell away. When the visible poison swept through the Florida Keys and on to the Atlantic, nothing sufficed. Justifications could not stand before that endless spill. It stopped mouths and quelled hearts. There was silence, but for the tide; silence, but for the weeping.

***

From that silence sprang a new resolve. We came to know that our only path forward must begin with a realization -- an acknowledgment -- of failure, the utter and absolute failure of modern industrial civilization to protect and preserve the foundation of all things -- the land, sea and air. That path continued with the deep determination to restore and repair. We had lost all possibilities for happiness, for happiness depends on happenstance, on chance, on good fortune, and those were nowhere more to be found. But we did find joy, the unfathomable, ineffable joy that comes from good work righteously pursued. Our work to restore the Earth -- and our proper places in it -- required almost all the energies of humankind. We began with the Gulf. As you know, children, that work continues, two and more generations removed from the final cut that woke us up. Many more it will continue -- but it progresses. We believe that one day it will be restored, and work tirelessly for that day.

Though that work took (and is taking) longer than we had initially hoped, we no longer sought the counsel of despair, and instead put our hands and minds and spirits to work elsewhere, everywhere -- repairing, restoring. What else was there to do? Nothing. But there was nothing else we wanted to do. We rebuilt the soil, planted trees, cleaned the streams, the rivers, the estuaries -- all water became sacred to us again. ...We left. That was the most important thing, in many ways. We left places we never should have been in the first place, and shrunk our right places that had grown too large. The cities became comprehensible again and the countryside had stewards again, and in between -- wilderness.

Couldn't resist.

The work goes on, and will continue forever. What is to be done with the toxic waste, the radioactive poisons? Nothing but to guard forever. Sufficient cause to continue to exist. What is to be done about the upended mountains? Nothing, but to wait for the Earth to shrug her great shoulders. More than sufficient cause to continue to watch and protect. The cleared forests? We plant trees wherever we can, always with great consideration for their placement in relation to others... but we know it will be many generations -- hundreds if not thousands of years -- before they can truly restore themselves. We certainly cannot do that, yet we can help, we can speed the process.

This, as you know, is our joy. It is our reason. Our Great Purpose: the Restoration. What else is there? Nothing. What else could we want? Nothing.

Go now, children, play; an old man needs his rest.

Both Damned and Saved; or, The Inner Transition

I hope not. (source)

There are many types of transition we must go through to reach the better world we all believe -- or want to believe -- is out there. I consistently return to the conclusion that the most important, most fundamental transition, is the internal (psychological) one. Using less energy, walking and bicycling instead of driving, eating locally and more efficiently (i.e., having a higher vegetable/meat ratio), reducing waste, and composting (etc.) are all important, yet they're all insufficient. Completely. Even all together, they will not even come close to sufficing in the face of everything we know is happening in the world. To me, the true value in these actions lies not in the actions themselves, but in the mindsets or worldviews these actions help to foster. Riding a bicycle, while valuable as a money-saving, pollution-avoiding and health-promoting endeavor, to me finds its true worth in re-introducing us to the joy of using our own bodies and the beauty of the changing seasons -- and to the understanding that the fundamental crime of driving a motorized vehicle is its quiet theft of these experiences from us. It's theft, in essence, of our humanity.

When you know the joy of bicycling, the inner tranquility that a healthy diet promotes, the satisfaction of a near-empty garbage can, you begin to realize how unnecessary are so many modern "conveniences". Not just unnecessary, but actively obstructionist towards a fulfilling life. And that is when Transition becomes truly possible.

Part of the transition is facing up to very difficult facts. In an ideal world, we would have no urgency and could simply amble along the road towards a better world for the simple fact we saw it as a better world. But in the world as it is, we must, in fact, run towards this better world because the one we're leaving behind is crumbling, and threatening to take us with it. I speak, of course, of the twin drivers of the Transition Towns Movement: peak oil and climate change (with a dash of economic crisis thrown in for fun).

This particular post derives much of its motivation from two forces: a speech by Mari Margil of the PA-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) on the harsh reality of the state of the global biosphere, as well as a recent special issue of the Royal Society (the world's first scientific body) on the effects of a mere 4°C (7.2°F) of global warming, which could happen as early as 2060. As a practicing planner with an undergrad degree in math and physics, I am well aware of (a) the stark scientific case for why we're all (almost) screwed and (b) the pathetic political case for why (almost) nothing can be done about it. In a fit of depression, I wrote a short, sarcasm-rich version of this post which I have since deleted. I had made the cardinal sin of forgetting to look at things holistically -- looking only at our collapsing biosphere, I had forgotten about peak oil! You see, most of the worst-case scenarios with respect to climate change and global ocean death require something called "business-as-usual" emissions, which rely on a business-as-usual economy. Thank God for peak oil! Without growing oil consumption, the economy can't grow, and without a growing economy, emissions can't grow -- and, in fact, the prime likelihood is for some deepening economic depression that leads to global economic decline if not outright collapse; in this tangled web we call the global economy, the collapse of one major player can only lead to the collapse, sooner or later, of all the others. So we're saved! By collapse. But maybe there are other options....

It is fitting that we should be both damned and saved by our profligate use of polluting fossil fuels, particularly oil. But the extent to which we are saved rather than damned depends utterly on our willingness to make smart decisions now, while other options remain, rather than wait for the unsympathetic laws of physics to decide for us. It is a guarantee that we will not like the ways in which Mother Nature unilaterally restores the natural balance of things. I would like to believe she'd prefer us as active partners in that restoration, rather than passive victims of our own malign neglect. I know I would.

We have fallen under the influence of the strange conception that "sustainable" means "what I'm doing now, but better", where "better" means "more." What we're doing now -- collectively -- is the problem. What we desire is inconspicuous, painless incrementalism, where what we need is radical transformation. 4°C warming by 2060 -- that's a death sentence for the human race. And the fact that the only politically feasible option we have for averting that cataclysm is political collapse points to the extreme level of dysfunction we have reached as a people.

So what are the other options? I return to where I began with the imperative of the internal transition. The major problem is our expectations for the future, which are out of all sync with reality. They are also all out of sync with ourselves -- our hidden humanity. We've allowed ourselves (collectively) to be lulled into false notions of how the world is. The extent to which we are saved rather than damned depends on our ability to make this internal transition, to deny what we think we know and accept the truths of the world as it is. All else follows.

Transition Lancaster Newsletter #51, with much interesting news.

Fabulously Fridgeless Was, Indeed

Kick it to the curb!

I'll have photos soon, but I just wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who attended our first-ever Fabulously Fridgeless event with Jonathan Colon. I think I can speak for all in attendance when I say: truly, truly fabulous. What a fun night.

We made tortillas from scratch just using flour, water, kale and herbs. They were simply delicious with a sprinkling of honey, sea salt, steamed collards and crisp greens --- all fresh, all local (the salt was from Maine).

Then we made squash gnocchi, also from scratch, using a roasted neck pumpkin, flour and herbs, made extra-delicious by a just-made stock from the vegetable scraps, crisped kale, Northeast sunflower seed oil, and more of that Maine sea salt.

Jonathan also took a moment (just a moment) and showed us all how to make fresh pasta. The ease and speed with which he prepared fresh food for thirteen people was truly a joy to behold.

Topped off with a few glasses of wine (some local, some not), we enjoyed the good company till late into the evening.

Given the success of the evening, Jonathan and I are interested in doing this again, possibly on a regular basis. If you're interested, let me know by emailing me at TransitionLancaster(at)gmail(dot)com.

Small is Sustainable

(source)

I had this epiphany while on a walk a few weeks ago, but have been too busy till now to write it down. It is dovetailing with my renewed appreciation for planning, which is, by nature, an incremental art. I was pondering the ever-unfolding economic collapse, and arrived at the conclusion that having limited resources might actually increase the odds of making "sustainable"^* decisions.
This is a point easiest to explain by counter-example (if "small is sustainable", then is large unsustainable?). Consider the national highway system. It took (and is taking) the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars to build and maintain that monstrosity. Only a large, centralized body with access to vast resources (and apparently untapped reserves of hubris) could have conceived of something like that, let alone have built it. And the building of it is one of the many drivers that has set our nation, literally, on the road to ruin.

^*I am uninterested, at this time, in defining the word "sustainable."

So: small is sustainable. With limited resources, one is forced to be creative, resourceful... small. If a mistake is made, terrifying amounts of wealth are not extinguished thereby; it remains a mistake, rather than a catastrophe: one is free to learn and try again. If one succeeds, then others, also of limited means, may learn of that good practice, adapt it to their particular circumstances, and try it themselves. Their success -- or failure -- contributes to the breadth and depth of our collective well of wisdom.

Many small groups experimenting is much better than one centralized entity pooling resources from a large area and rolling the dice. I would not suggest it is never advisable to pool resources, but I am asserting that this ought to be the exception rather than the rule. And just because I'm a hopeless romantic who loves lost causes, here's one exception: universal, single-payer healthcare. This would support small solutions by granting working people and entrepreneurs the freedom to try and fail and move on if and when they choose; there would no longer be a need to stay in a job out of fear of losing all-important health coverage. This enables small enterprise in another way: it lifts the burden of one of the heaviest costs of business, which is caring for employees' health. This is but one example of risk management which, in general, is a sector that benefits from the pooling together of large groups.

Smallness is resilient. The failure of one does not precipitate the failure of another; to the contrary, it may stimulate their improvement by the example of what not to do. Further, the failed, having committed relatively few resources, and presumably surrounded by non-failures, may recover with less delay. Smallness also, by nature, is less interdependent (and more, but not completely, independent). Smallness can't draw on limitless territories for natural and human capital: it must make do with what is close at hand. This contributes to the diversity of experimental solution-finding, but also limits the small's vulnerability to drawn-out resource chains. Consider our situation today, when, by a hilariously perverse (perversely hilarious?) turn of events, the Pentagon finds itself reliant on Chinese rare-earths for key components to its "advanced" weapons systems. Not so "advanced" when they rely on the goodwill of a creditor and powerful economic competitor, eh? Smallness doesn't have that problem... and not least because it probably wouldn't be in the habit of dropping "smart" bombs on some faraway desert to secure the oil it doesn't need.

So, smallness is resilient. But what about the case of systemic failure? This would most likely be the result of neglecting the advice above and tending too far in the direction of centralization of resources and power. As this seems to be where we're trending, however, the question may be worth essaying an answer: in the case of systemic failure, save what's worth saving, discard what's not, and start again. It wouldn't be the first time.