Ark Valley Voice: Transition is Steadily Gaining Traction by Sterling R. Quinton

Great coverage of the last Transition meeting at the Ark Valley Voice:

Consider this: The year is 2030 and the globe is beset with difficulties unimagined by previous generations. Many communities across the Nation are struggling to deal with changes in their standard-of-living and the issues generally associated with second-world economies.

Chaffee County’s modest municipality of Salida, however, has become a Mecca for academics and community planners. Developments which are creating havoc across the country: protracted fuel shortages, empty grocery shelves, widespread joblessness, rising ocean tides, and enduring wars, caused a group of idealistic, action-oriented Salidans to plan for and preempt such eventualities back in 2009.

Read on!

World at Gunpoint by Derrick Jensen in Orion

Check out this article Merry found in Orion:

The point is that worldwide ecological collapse is not some external and unpredictable threat—or gun barrel—down which we face. That’s not to say we aren’t staring down the barrel of a gun; it would just be nice if we identified it properly. If we means the salmon, the sturgeon, the Columbia River, the migratory songbirds, the amphibians, then the gun is industrial civilization.
[...]
Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world—are not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened. They’re not going to care what sorts of excuses we had to not act (e.g., “I’m too stressed to think about it” or “It’s too big and scary” or “I’m too busy” or any of the thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.

They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They’re going to care whether the land is healthy enough to support them.

Read the whole thing; then let's get going.

Tips for a Green Kitchen from Clotilde at Chocolate and Zucchini

In the second part of her green-your-kitchen contest, Clotilde's readers submitted more tips:

1. Buy Local and Seasonal
2. Reduce Food Waste
3. Reduce Packaging Waste
4. Reuse Packaging and Containers
5. Eat Fewer Animal Products
6. Grow Your Own
7. Compost
8. Avoid Using Disposable Paper and Plastic Products
9. Bring Your Own
10. Save Energy
11. Conserve Water
12. Use Natural Cleaning Products
13. Share

Here are the results from part I of the challenge.

What tips can YOU share?

The Story of Stuff

"From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns (click to download the movie). The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever."

Here's an excerpt:

Tour of potential backyard CSA locations

Hello friends and family of the Salida Backyard CSA,

We are getting more offers of land all the time, which is very exciting. I feel it will be very easy for us to bump up to eight gardens in our second season when we have our funding online. For this season, we are trying to decide on two sites that will be the easiest to build and maintain, and be good representatives of what we're up to. It think the best long-term plan is to cluster sites around downtown Salida as much as possible. This is why some sites which might have great gardening attributes, like Lum Pennington's, are not on this short list.

I've gone to most of the sites that I have gotten contact info for, and narrowed them to five potentials, which are of bike-able distance apart (an important long-term consideration of what sites we choose.)

So we will start closer to the river and work our way west, here's the tour starting at 9 am Saturday the 9th (tomorrow!):

301 Scott St. Steve Duhane

(from the 1st and F stoplight, head east down First until it turns the corner and becomes Oak. Take a left pretty quick on Dodge, and the next right onto Scott. The property is on the right near the end of the street. We will distribute maps of the tour here.


View salida backyard csa options in a larger map

104 Wood St. Angela Damman
246 Blake Arden Trewartha and Read McCulloch
146 E. 6th Laurie Newman
638 I St. Rhiannon Larsen

Please give a quick reply to this email if you're planning to come.
call me with any questions, last-minute issues: 207-0069

Thanks,
Eric

Grants available for New Energy Communities

Hey folks, while on the way to somewhere else, I stumbled upon this info:

The Department of Local Affairs partnered with the Governor's Energy Office (GEO) to offer a new program in 2008 designed to:

• Maximize energy efficiency and conservation;
• Enhance community livability;
• Promote economic development in downtowns; and
• Address climate change by reducing carbon emissions.

The New Energy Communities Initiative rewarded local governments working collaboratively to position their communities at the forefront of the state's New Energy Economy. The program directed approximately $10 million in Energy Impact Assistance funds to (maximum of $2 million per project) striving to create integrated, vibrant and sustainable communities. By bundling existing GEO energy efficiency and conservation programs and offering them in a packaged format with DOLA financial and technical assistance programs, the initiative created a comprehensive strategy for promoting local sustainable community development efforts.

The program has three areas of focus:

Greening Public Facilities –

Assist county and municipal governments to upgrade, retrofit or develop energy efficient public facilities such as county courthouses, city halls, public works facilities, libraries, judicial facilities and community centers.

Greening Downtowns –

Provide technical and financial resources for energy efficient upgrades/retrofits, streetscape improvements and downtown revitalization.

Greening Homes –

Provide the necessary technical resources to aid local governments in both educating homeowners on programs to incorporate energy efficient upgrades/retrofits and adopting model building codes to ensure that new housing stock meets higher energy efficiency standards.

A program like this could help convince our local elected officials that now is the time to make bold green statements... More info here.

Small things are the roots of vast and powerful ones

By Merry Cox

Whether or not you’re struggling for anything worthwhile, life is always a challenge. People have to choose what they are going to struggle for. Resilience is worth the struggle.

The future depends on a whole lot of little things.

When you do it piece by piece, a little at a time, it turns out that the big struggle for a resilient town isn’t really such a day-to-day struggle at all. Small things are the roots of vast and powerful ones.

It is easy to forget how important the “little stuff” is - easy to think that your little garden doesn’t matter very much. But we should also remember the exponential power of saying “no” and doing for ourselves. The corollary of the fact that every calorie of food takes 10 of fossil fuels is that every stir-fry or salad you eat from your garden saves 10 times the oil as the calories contained within it. The fact that almost every packaged ingredient uses 7 times as much energy to create that packaging means that your choice to buy bulk oatmeal just saved 7 times as much energy as the package contains.

In 1944, American Victory Gardens grew as much produce as did every vegetable farm in the country - fully half of all US produce came from home gardens. And while no one was self sufficient, together they created an enormous impact. Every bite of food you grow, every bite you preserve, every bit of waste you reduce is a contribution to a larger project - keeping everyone fed. Every bit of compost you add to your soil, every bit of organic matter, every tree you plant is a contributor to a larger project - storing some of our emissions in soil, so we can have a future.
Every seed you plant multiplies and produces a hundred, or a thousand more seeds for next year (not to mention the food). Every time you point out that you are storing food and preparing for a different future, even if people don’t get it, a seed is planted somewhere in the back of their minds, where they realize…people kind of like me think about this stuff. (We need a seed savers class and a seed exchange.)

Plant Something: A seed, a transplant, a tree, a bulb, some mushroom spores - could be in the earth or in a container, but the point is to green the world a little more, and plant useful plants everywhere you can.

Things to plant now: Peas, carrots, radishes, beets, onions, chard, kale, spinach, lemon balm, sage, thyme, French tarragon, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, pansies, Johnny jump ups, California poppies, regular poppies, yarrow, chamomile, butterfly weed…

Harvest Something: It could be something you planted, something growing wild or something you glean from someone else’s fields, but the idea is to try and make the best use of the food around you.

Preserve something: We have a long season where not too much is growing. That’s when preserved food steps in to fill the empty spots, so you can still eat locally and sustainably without relying on the industrial food system. You could be canning raspberry jam or hanging up bunches of wild thyme to dry. (We need to do a solar food dryer class, and a class about root cellaring.) You might be putting potatoes and carrots in a cold place, or braiding garlic to hang in your kitchen. Everything you do to make yourself food secure is one less thing you need to rely on corporations for. Saves money too.

Reduce Waste: We throw stuff away, but where is away? We cannot be independent from energy companies and supermarkets if we don’t make the best possible use of what we have. We waste more than 25% of the food we purchase. We waste even more packaging and energy. And every time we do that, we take fuel that future generations will need and throw it away. We warm the planet, fill up landfills and add pollution to our environment. Living sustainably means making sure that we keep waste to an absolute minimum - that we find ways to make sure that everything we possibly can gets used wisely and well. Try to buy things with less packaging, and make sure you are composting all our food waste, or feeding it to some creature - worms, chickens, etc.

Learn a New Skill: For a long time, we’ve been able to simply throw things away, not thinking about the ecological, economic and personal costs of this way of life, but no more. The ability to make our own, fix our own, build our own, mend our own, tend our own and grow our own may be essential as we face an economic, energy and climate crisis. Get a skill. Share a skill. Trade your skills for someone else's skills. So many of the things people used to know how to do for themselves have gotten lost over the years, as corporations have taken over the production of everything. It is time to relearn how to darn a sock, build a raised bed, make a quilt or fix your own clogged pipes; how to stretch a meal for 4 to feed 6, how recognize a medical emergency and how to sing on key. Anyone out there willing to offer a classes in knitting, basic electrical repair, weatherizing homes,etc?

Work on Community Food Security: None of us can be secure if our neighbors are going hungry, either morally or practically. So we work together on making our communities more secure - this could be as simple as talking to a neighbor, family member or co-worker about why we store food and how to get started. It might mean making donations of money or goods to local food pantries, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens, or helping out a neighbor in need directly. We could be supportive of our community garden, or help a friend start her garden, recruiting members for a new local CSA or Co-op. Donate food that you grow to Caring and Sharing. Help Tony Madone (207-2737) with his Farm To Table project. Give over your backyard to Eric Belsey’ Backyard CSA (207-0069).

Regenerate What Is Lost: We’ve stripped the earth, and stripped the social and communal structures of our lives that support us, and support our future. Thus, we can’t just do less damage - we have to do more repair. To give our society a future, each day we need to put a little back into the system, making it a little richer than before.

What does that mean? It means that we make sure we’re adding organic matter to our soil even as we’re growing vegetables. It means we don’t just plant a tree for each one we harvest - we plant an extra one as well. It means we let some areas of our yard grow native plants to make space for native pollinators. (See NY Times article on natives plants.) How about planting the strips of land between the sidewalks and the streets with native plants? It means we reach out and tend a little space that belongs to no one; protect land that is already wild. It means we try a little harder to enable a decent, humane and just future.

Small things are the roots of vast and powerful ones.

Backyard CSA update from Eric

If you are new to our idea: we are planning to use backyards and other unused spaces in Salida to create a Community Supported Agriculture multi-site farm.

Our first meeting was a great success. Thanks to Tia, Dave Bowers, Matthew Clark and Lawton for your help, and to everyone who came and shared your ideas, reactions and singing voices. (Yes, this is a singing movement, refer to the inspiring 2007 documentary Pete Seeger: the Power of Song for what this means. Happy 90th birthday May 3rd Pete!)

The next step is to tour the properties we have on our short list so we can choose the first two demonstration gardens we are going to do this summer. We are deliberately starting small to get our feet on the ground, and because we are starting late in terms of the real farming season. The properties not chosen will be first in line for consideration next season.

I will collate all the sites and map them this week, and then I would like to ask anyone who is interested to join a tour of them this Saturday, May 9th at 9:00 am. It would be nice to do this tour by bike; the distances on the map will determine if this is feasible. I would like to be done with this tour by 11:30-12:00 at the latest. Please let me know if you're planning to come.

In selecting sites, it's important that the homeowner or landlord envisions being there for at least three, preferably five years to make our energy and money investment in infrastructure pay off. Of course, life is unpredictable and things change, but most people should be able to guess if they're about to move or if they're settled for a while.

In the inspiration category, here's the website for the similar Boulder effort, Community Roots Farm. They've been at it 3 1/2 years and now have 13 sites. I'm trying to arrange a consulting meeting with their lead organizer Kipp Nash to shorten our learning curve. Also, there is a term for what we're planning, it's called SPIN farming.

Please be in touch,
thanks,
Eric
207-0069

Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus

I love research like this--the kind that helps us understand where changes in terminology and focus can significantly improve our effectiveness; read on:

To build support for legislation, environmental marketers are literally changing the terms of the climate debate.

By JOHN M. BRODER, New York Times
The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming.” The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.”

[...]

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.

Read the whole article here.

Details about our next Transition Initiative meeting

This meeting is at the library at 6:30PM, May 7th; come and help us create our sustainable Salida vision.

Imagine... It’s 2030.
Salida has successfully transitioned to a lower energy, more localized economy. As such, we have become the model for all other Colorado towns engaged in their own transition processes. People come from far and wide to be inspired by our achievement.

Your job is to act as their tour guide.

Your designated group (i.e. food, energy, building, waste) will have twenty minutes to design a ten minute walking tour to introduce the rest of the group to the fantastic developments the have made Salida so resilient to climate change, peak oil and economic instability.

We will divide up into groups at 6:40PM. PLEASE, OH PLEASE be on time so we can get going on designing our tours!

Tools needed: paper and pencil (as well as your prompt presence)