Spirit in Action
Faithful Transition Towning - Ruah Swennerfelt & Steve Chase
The topic is the Transition Town movement and the experience of Steve Chase, Director of Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability at Antioch University New England and involved with the Keene, NH, transition, and Ruah Swennerfelt, former long-time long-time General Secretary of Quaker Earthcare Witness and is currently involved with the Transition Town implementation in Charlotte, VT.
- Broadcast on:
- 15 Jul 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ While I find all of the ways that my spirit and action guests are improving the world to be interesting, today's guests come bearing information and stories that are of particularly immediate interest to me. The topic is transition. The fast-growing movement aimed at changing the way we do our lives to prepare for the impending necessities of a post-peak oil world. And we're visiting today with two environmental activists that I've previously had as guests way back in 2005 and 2008. Steve Chase is Director of Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability at Antioch University, New England. And Ruas Winterfelt was the longtime General Secretary of Quaker Earthcare Witness and is currently involved with the Transition Town Implementation in Charlotte, Vermont. And they are both part of the recently formed group Quakers in Transition. They join me in person today before an audience of the Friends General Conference gathering being held at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Ruas and Steve, welcome to Spirit in Action. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm really excited about the Quakers in Transition Project, but I need to know, first of all, what is the motivation for this? I know both of you are concerned about making the world a better place. I know that both of you have environmental concerns. Why transition? What's the motivation behind this? Well, because we need it. We're in a situation of what I consider a perfect storm of peak oil, climate change, and economic instability. They're all happening at once, and we have to do something. We could either kind of tear our hair out to go out and protest, hope that the government will make a difference, or we can take charge ourselves and do something, and that's what the Transition Town Movement is about. It's about grassroots, about people making a difference, where they live. It's about transitioning gracefully away from those fossil fuels and into a different, healthier world. Yeah, on the website for the keen transition movement, the town where I'm at, the website has a tagline, which is, "For local people concerned about peak oil, climate change, and a dysfunctional and unjust global economy, who want to respond with vision, courage, and creativity." And I think, for some people, it's hard to even think about this. Denial is so thick in that there's even a self-fulfilling desire to be in denial because sometimes it can be so painful to look at our situation in the world. On the other hand, despair doesn't seem to be a very useful way for people to think about the future or get creative, and so what I think is great about this international network of community-driven initiatives that are very participatory and are trying to involve people at the local scale to move beyond sort of oil dependency and business as usual to creating thriving, resilient communities. And so if you go online and you look up peak oil, put it in Google, you're going to find a lot of people who are just so doom and gloom. And there's some reasons for that. One book I recently read called "Blessed unrest" said that if you're not kind of depressed about the future, you have an incorrect data set. But I also think that there's so much happening around the world where people are creatively thinking through what kind of world do they want to live in and how to move there. And they don't have to wait for permission or governments to act. And I see Rua here has got what's the transition movement. If you go internationally, nationally, or local transition movement websites, they have this thing called the cheerful disclaimer. Why don't you read that? So I love it because a lot of movements that we get involved in say we've got the answer. You know, you just do this and everything's going to be okay. So the transition movement, the cheerful disclaimer is we truly don't know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this. If we wait for the governments, it will be too little, too late. If we act as individuals, it'll be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough just in time. You know, I'm really intrigued by one thing that both of you have said. And it's in the disclaimer and you spoke about it, Steve. You said it's not dependent on government. And sometimes it seems amazingly difficult to find issues on which people across the political spectrum could unite on. And then specifically, I'm thinking of people like the Tea Party and liberals. They don't normally find a lot of common ground. But the idea that this is doing it extra governmental seems to me like it would be a hook where people could come into unity on that. Of course, you have to be sharing in belief that there's an ecological calamity coming. And I'm not sure if there's a wide consensus on that. I really believe that one of the things that makes this successful in a community, it is nonpartisan. And it is about building resilience in a community. So you don't need to use the sustainability word, buzzword. You don't need to say peak oil. But you can say, how do we make our community resilient in the face of rising oil prices, climate catastrophes like Hurricane Irene when it came to Vermont, or economic instability, which we know exists. We can get nodding heads. I want my community to be resilient. Yes, this is something I'm willing to work on with you, even if we think the causes of those problems are different. And so you can come to the table with somebody who voted differently than you do and say, let's work together as partners. Does it work out that way? Does it actually happen? I think so. The one thing, it's not partisan in a political sense, but there is question of some core values that I think are really important because a person could agree that peak oil and the potential of energy famines are a growing and potentially catastrophic, economically catastrophic. People can agree that climate change is real. But how people respond to it also depends a lot on certain values that we hold, because one way is, oh, well, we are going to go and take over the oil supplies of other people and get very competitive. And so for Quakers and many people of faith, the idea of energy famine raises the prospect even more of resource wars and having roots in wars. And so the alternative view of what my grandmother always taught me, which is, well, you know, people have to learn to get along and they have to learn how to share. Somebody once said, the future, if there is one, will include sharing, because we could have a war of all against all. One of the things that's true for transition, and it merged out of one of the key players was this guy named Rob Hopkins. And he was a permaculture teacher. And permaculture has three core values. And I asked the audience to think about their own faith traditions, because many faith traditions have these same core values. One is earth care. The second one is people care, and then the third one is fair share. It's not just that we have these severe challenges that we have to address, but how we address this depends a lot on the view of, well, do we want business as usual in terms of certain kinds of hierarchies, violence, or do we want to create local democracy, a real sense of kinship, and we're in this together versus every person for themselves, sort of things. So I agree with Roa that it's nonpartisan, but it's not that it doesn't have some core values that are really important. And when this came clear to me, as I remember, I was writing up the bylaws or the Constitution for the transition keen task force. And so I was looking on transition U.S.'s website, which is sort of the national hub that helps support local community. And I also was looking at the transition network, which is the international hub. And they described a situation that in Europe, there was a group of neo-Nazis that took the name, transition some community. And they were using it as a way to say, well, you know, there's going to be certain levels of austerity, and we have to learn to live on less, and therefore we have to do everything in our power to keep immigrants out of. And then they had the typical racist rhetoric that neo-Nazis have. And so that made it very clear to transition movement of that we really have to articulate our values. So now, if you go to transition U.S.'s website and you look at various constitutions, in them will be things like, we support earth care, people care, fair share. We support the universal declaration of human rights, and some of them say, when we support the earth charter, not to be contentious, but to say that there are some core values that frame how we're going to respond as communities. What makes the transition movement successful is that it is a leaderless movement. There are people who give us inspiration, there are books and all of that, but none of those people who wrote those are leaders. This is a shared leadership. And I'd say in a small community, the earth charter, the neo-Nazis, at least in Vermont and my community, that doesn't exist. So I live in a town of 4,000 people, and there we have people who have differing political views, but it doesn't have to come up in this context. So the purpose that I see, the reason I started it in my community, is because I wanted to broaden the reach of people knowing people, understanding the resources that we've got. How can we share those resources with each other, and how will they help us in the transition? And how can we have fun together? That's like a really core principle, just having fun. We must have fun together. You're not going to invite people in to have more long, dreary meetings about what we're going to do, but we're going to have fun together. Is it just that we've passed peak oil? Is that the only reason that we have to get hot on the track of transition, or is there some other timing that's really important? Why do we have to hurry so much? Why can't we just wait for the capitalist system to work it out? The market will teach us how. Do you really believe that, Mark? I'm just asking. I know that there's inquisitive listeners out there who want that answer. We are in a situation of -- I don't think of it as doom and gloom. You know, in permaculture, the solution is in the problem. The problem is the solution. So you have to fit the solution to the problem. It's kind of a joint thing. Well, of course, if there were no problems in the world, we probably wouldn't be thinking about this. But every time I get in my car and I still own a car, I'm so aware that I am spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, that I'm helping cause more global warming, that pretty soon the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air is not going to support the world anymore. Okay, enough doom and gloom? However, if I don't want to drive that car anymore, maybe I can help work on some local transportation that will allow me to bike to some bus close by, a little bus van that would take me to the bus that will take me to Burlington or something like that cause I live in the country. I see it as an opportunity. And also I want to ask the question, are we living our lives in this culture, in the United States, in such a way that everybody has the opportunity to reach their full potential? Are people really happy? Are people healthy? I don't think that we live in a culture that is really supportive or healthy, and therefore we have to do this no matter what. We have to re-examine our lives and find out how to make them really rich without all the technology, without all the human-made things. You know, I've got my computer right here. Oh, I don't want to give up my computer, but, you know, maybe I have to. Maybe that will be the way to be happier. I have to examine all possibilities. So how is it actually different than being environmentally or ecologically conscious, and, you know, having a program for that? How is it different from that? Is transition just the new name for the environmental movement? Well, in some sense, that's true, in that there's, you know, if you look at sort of the origin story of the transition movement, it often puts it at around 2005, but there have been so many things going on and different learnings and social learnings around the world that are sort of built into this. But I think something that's, if not unique, it is rare, which is sure, we're facing huge challenges and not flinching from naming the challenges. But at the same time saying our response, I mean, it's good to live in challenging times. It's good to rise to the occasion. And for faith communities, the notion of right relationship that Ruah was talking about, I facilitated a community conversation in Keen that had about 60 people from six different congregations, and I think we called it climate, faith, and action. But there was a core concern that was pretty clear that I just sort of tried to articulate is, I asked people in the room, "How many people in your deepest heart of hearts want to live in a world that's spiritually fulfilling, socially just, and environmentally sustainable?" And everybody's hands went up, and it's not just a mistake. It has so much to do with the roots of our faith tradition. If you look at page two of George Fox's journal, who's the founder of Quakerism, he talks about the three main kinds of loving that Judaism and Christianity have always taught and that are really important to Quakers. One is loving God with all one's heart and soul and strength, and that I think is one way to talk about spiritual fulfillment, talks about loving your neighbors, including your enemies, and I think that has to do with social justice. And then, written in the 1600s, it was saying we have to love God's good earth and act in unity with creation. So I think these concerns are really deep in many people's hearts, certainly deep in faith traditions, and these kinds of pressures and challenges allows us to give up complacency, to give up conformity, and get creative with our neighbors, and some examples of people doing things even though they would disagree about whether gay marriage ought to be in place, even if they would disagree about who you would vote for, is in keen where we just about three weeks ago had a groundbreaking for a new food co-op. And it already has a thousand members in the town that's 25,000 people. It has a strong commitment to buying locally because over the last ten years, we've gotten, I think, close to 20 community-supported agriculture right around our area. We now have a farmer's market, we now have a winter's farmer's market, and part of transition is just thinking, "Well, what's kind of the next cool thing that we could do that would shift us to sort of responsible, safe and green energy sources?" And here's where it's different from a lot of environmentalists. With the sort of recognition we're going to have to learn to live well on the left, that all the alternatives, if you sort of do the math, and there's some dispute about this, but there's a really good chance that we're not going to have as ready a supply of cheap and abundant energy. And so all the stuff around local food in Archimedes, and that's really strong where Ruiz in Vermont, is reducing food miles, reducing the inputs in terms of pesticides, which are petroleum-based, and fertilizers, petroleum-based, and the machinery. And so cutting down the food miles and creating that resilience of -- because I think the statistic is, Ruiz, you might know this, but in a lot of major cities, if there weren't imports of food, there would be about three to five days supply before the people living in cities, and this is true of small towns. If the shelves of the supermarket wouldn't fill -- and so having increasing the percentage that you're producing locally or regionally allows you to absorb the shocks that may be coming. And ecologically, resilience is this capacity of a system to absorb shocks and keep its fundamental integrity together. And so I do think you're right that a lot of people who might disagree about all sorts of things love their town and would love to be, you know, engage as a volunteer and have public life and the joy of it. And that's one of the real positives, is seeing just the excitement of people thinking what next. And one example was when we had this community interfaith conversation. There was a small group talking, and I was sitting next to them and overhearing it, and so there were three older women from the Unitarian Church. And in our town, the Unitarian Church is this big stone high ceiling thing, and in the winter, it's a bear to heat, and it's very, very expensive. And they were talking to three older women who were from the St. James Episcopal Church, which is this big stone high ceiling church, and in the winter it's a real bear to heat. And they were just having conversations, and this was like the first time there was this sort of interfaith conversation around climate. And what somebody said was, well, how about you all at St. James come over, and we all share a worship service in the winter, and then you can turn the heat down for that whole week. And in the next week, you could turn the heat up, and we'll turn ours down, and we'll go and worship with you. And it's that kind of creativity. Once people are talking, they start thinking about things, and then they were just so excited, not just, oh, we would lower the amount of energy we use, but the sense of sort of kinship and community connection and exploring how these two communities that live within keen could work together. And it was just a precious moment. I want to add to the question about why transition and why not just any environmental movement. I think that the transition model is totally adaptable. So I went to Europe last year, and I went to 10 different countries and visited transition communities. I also went to the transition France conference and the transition UK conference. And everybody I interviewed, everybody I talked to, they did things a little differently in their community. They had the same core principles and beliefs. They had the transition handbook, and they knew that it was about community and that there were certain steps that were very helpful. They didn't do the steps in exactly the same order. They didn't do all the steps. They added some steps depending on where they live and what kind of culture they had and where they urban, where they suburban, where they rural. In a big city, there was transition Paris, and you go, well, how can Paris be a neighborhood? Well, what they did was they broke down into smaller units that were each transition communities, and then they had a hub. So Paris was a hub. Communication could go back and forth because there were shared concerns, and there were very different concerns depending on where you live. Same in transition Barcelona. I visited transition Los Angeles, they do the same thing. So from small town to big city, it's a shell, it's a model. It holds certain truths and principles and understandings, but then you do it the way you need to do it where you are. So, you know, there are lots of physical manifestations of what people do. You know, we're talking a lot of words here. Well, what do they do? So an example, one transition community in England, they had their members during the summer stealthily going through neighborhoods and looking for where pear trees and apple trees and those sorts of things were, and they wrote down the addresses. And then when it was time for harvest, they went and rang the doorbell and said, we see that you've got a pear tree, you know, in your yard. If you're not going to collect all of it, we'd be happy to harvest the tree, give you what you want, and then we want to give the rest away to people in need. And I was like, wow, this is like kind of ultimate gleaming, right? You're helping the people that have the tree, and how many people have trees in the yards where the fruit falls and never gets eaten. What a waste. That was really a clever idea. In our community, we have an asset directory. There's a survey anybody in the community can answer the survey, talks about what kind of skills and resources you have that you're willing to share with others. And then other people can say, well, you know, I'd love to have this skill. So the asset survey combines those things. It's up on our website, and anybody if I want to learn how to can or compost or scythe or sharpen tools or I need a rototiller for a day. You know, it's all on there to share with one another. There wasn't a necessary model for that. We just thought this would be good. And then we share it with others and others can do it. So I think it's that adaptability that it's not prescribed. We might not all be pacifists. You know, we might not all be anything. The same color, same religions, same political beliefs. But we can do this work together. It sounds kind of like a fantasy, doesn't it? And you know, there's one other major piece is this idea of radical acceptance. There's this belief that whoever shows up is supposed to be there. And so we radically accept one another. And what are you asked to do? You're not asked to, oh, we need you to do this. You're asked what gifts? What are your passions? What would you like to bring to this? And then you get to share those gifts and those passions. I mean, it's like amazing. Does this mean if you're a bossy person? Like, I want to be in charge, you know? Does that mean you can't be part of the transition movement? Because you're just inviting people's gifts. You've both referred to the books and the principles. Where is this codified? You mean about bossiness? Non-bossiness is one of the principles you spoke about. Some people here know me. Am I bossy? Tell them what to say. Tell them what to say. See, I'm bossy. Yeah, tell them I'm bossy. But if you're in community, you have to respect each other. And you need to be open to being elder. But I mean, Steve spoke of the neo-Nazis. They're not probably on that same page. So my question is, where are these principles of how you're going to work? Where is this captured? Is it in a specific book? Or is there, you know, there's the transition manual? Where do people look if they want to know what these principles and guidelines are? I think it's important to realize that social movements are different than sort of corporate franchises. And it's not like you buy a license to be a transition town. If it inspires you, the basic ideas and a bunch of people get together and let's try to do it. So there's a lot of local initiative and shaping in how you think best. At the same time, it is a network of about a thousand communities now that are formal transition initiatives around the world. In 34 countries. And so there are networks. There's training. And so there's a concern about quality control. There's also, you know, trainings and workshops and how to deal with difficult people. Let's face it, we're a custard species and sometimes the culture doesn't help us really think well about how to work with other people. And that's why transition often talks about, well, we need an outer transition of our community. We need to very localize our economies. We need to have an energy descent plan and figure out how we're going to use forms of energy that aren't damaging the way fossil fuels are. And also learn to live unless. So those are some core concerns with the ethical things. And the basic thing is that, you know, that may be enough to sort of guide people as they work it out in their community. And the reality has been I know of some transition initiatives where somebody has really been domineering. And they've been essentially told after a while you either need to change your behavior or we really would rather you not come to these meetings because it's not working. It's not helping. And so we're not incapable human beings of making those tough calls in a community. But there is an ethos to sort of include as many people as possible. And one of the things I like that Rob Hopkins who wrote the transition handbook in 2008, he tells this little bit of a story about, he subscribes to what he calls the theory of any way. And the theory of any way goes, we'll say climate change doesn't turn out to be quite as serious as we thought. And say it turns out alternative energy sources are going to be just as abundant and maybe more abundant. Do you really going to feel so terrible and really bad that, oh, now we have more local democracy and now, you know, kids know how to grow food and are more self-reliant. Oh, you know, I learned how to make a cob house. My life has been ruined because of that. And so part of it is that these are skills of a decent culture in life anyway. So the sense of urgency, I think, is there, but it is also appealing to people about a sense of being connected to the land and to each other. And I just want to read something that in New England Yearly Meeting of Quakers, there's a group called the Young Adult Friends Working Group on Climate. And they did a statement that has really impacted New England Yearly Meeting, the Regional Association of Quakers, because it's really resonated with people. And their first statement is really poignant, which is recognizing that our lives are caught in a system culture society that exploits people in the planet and leaves us spiritually wanting. And then it talks about what they yearn for. We yearn for community that is intimately dependent on the earth, on our neighbors, and our own self-reliance to provide our basic needs and allows us to see the consequences of our use of creation. And my sense, and I'd love to hear your take, is that the transition movement is growing out of that recognition that the way we're living has huge geo-physical constraints. But it also is not working out that well for a lot of people in terms of happiness and well-being and basic security and this yearning for something where we take care of the land and ourselves and each other in an intimate sort of local way. I think resonates with a lot of people regardless of whether they're registered as Democrats or they're registered as Republicans. I agree. I think that that is the yearning and I think that's what we're finding when people come to events is that they are yearning for something different. So I think you asked about the listeners, how do you get started? Well, you can go to transitionnetwork.org, which is internationaltransitionus.org, which is national, and then you can go to QuakersInTransition.wordpress.com and find some networking of friends that are involved in this. You can buy the transition handbook first published, then transition companion, which just was released this last year. And there are some other books, the transition timeline is another. So there are tools out there, very practical tools. If you are interested, you can get on the transition US website and look for trainings. Trainers. Steve is about to go get trained to be a trainer. And so we're going to have like in New England, probably 12 trainers that would be available to do these weekends. You will find them and you'll be able to organize in your community such a training. This is going to be a for training launch. This is for people wanting to launch a transition group. After that, at some point, a new training now is called Transition Thrive, which is you've got your group, you've been at it for a few years. How do you go deeper? How do you go to the next level? When I visited transition communities like in Scotland, they actually were incorporated and they were doing community business. They had community bakeries. They raised the money in the community. There's actually a wonderful book called The Town That Food Saved. And it's about Hardwick, Vermont and the very creative ways that they used community funding and federal and state funding to start things that were important for that community. So they're actually in England and in Scotland, they are moving forward in that way. So that's kind of this thrive. What do we do? And the thing about governments in a community, it's very important to partner with your town or city government. So in my community, a couple of us made an appointment, went and talked to our select board about what we were doing. We're already partnering with the Conservation Commission and the Energy Committee in the town. But we wanted to partner with the select board and all of a sudden they said, "We've got two projects for you right now." And it was one about, "Hey, too many parents are driving their kids to school and everybody's paying for school buses." And it causes a huge traffic jam at the central school, and what can you do about that? And the other one was help us get a recycling center that would come once a month, you know, a transfer station kind of roving thing. And could you do that? And we're like, "Yes, so they gave us some real practical things to do and they were delighted that we were willing to tackle it." So our first task is going to be how do we make writing the bus really cool so that kids say to the parents, "No, no, don't drive me. I want to get on the bus." Good luck on that one. Good luck, yeah. Yeah, right. The other thing that you brought up government, and you had mentioned that before, Mark, that I think there's a distinction to be made between if we wait for government, it won't happen fast enough. But that's different than saying there is no role for government in making things better. Certainly at the level of international treaties, certain national policies could help facilitate this. And so it's not an anti-government stance per se, it's just sort of, we're ultimately responsible. And we can wait around for other people to do it for us, but let's just get going at the scale we can do. And that would likely, as that mushrooms and more and more communities are doing this and engaging in this process, it likely will capture the attention and certainly in places where it's more advanced it has. In Keene, one of the things we have is just an awareness building is that we have something called Transition Tuesdays, and so we have community conversations once a month or maybe some films. And we had this great film called A Convenient Truth, which is about Kurutiva Brazil, which has done some amazing things around recycling, around public transportation, affordable housing, encouraging entrepreneurship for small businesses. So what we did is we showed that movie, and because we feel that people need to see as much or more a sense of what's possible, what people are already doing than the dire consequences if we don't do something. So we showed that, but then we brought in somebody from the city council, we brought in the city planner, and we bought somebody in from the county conservation district to talk about the ways that city and county government are already engaged in the same concerns that the transition movement has and seeing themselves as partner, and telling great stories. And some of it was just simple about the solar panels on our city hall put in, but the city planner said, once you start thinking like this about where can we find creative things, everything starts looking like an opportunity. And so he described how in the water treatment plant, water rushes in, and then all of a sudden they realized that rushing water is untapped energy. And so they put these little micro turbines that come in, and now the entire water treatment plant is off the grid, the water going into it that needs to be treated powers the whole thing. But what we were trying to do is showing the role in that movie, which is it wasn't so much a lot of changes sort of bubbling up at the grassroots level. In this case, in the city in Brazil, it was a very progressive mayor and lots of very creative city planners. And so it showed how that level of thinking and action can make a huge difference. And so we showed that, and then we sort of lifted up the work, the sort of untold story in many ways about how creative and how supportive the keen city government and the county is. And so our work in keen, which is a little different than some communities that are sort of starting from scratch. But when the transition keen task force got started, there's about 30 groups that are doing transition related work, whether they call it that or not. And so it would have been so inauthentic and bossy and arrogant to come in and say, "Well, we have the model." Rather, what we realized is that the model was already emerging, and we wanted to lift it up. So we've created a website that's not just sort of one organization's website, but there's different people from various local organizations, our blog authors, and they post events. And so it's become sort of one-stop shopping, but it shows the creativity of many different groups, many of which pre-existed the transition keen task force. But our idea is just to hold up this work and encourage other things. And one thing that's happening in our town that was only peripherally related to the work that the transition keen task force was doing, but it's all part of a piece. And we arranged a transition Tuesday around this, is there's a group built on the notion of barn raising is going to go, "How do people get together? Learn how to do solar installations on their home." And then the people who help with that in sort of this blitz to get it done, then they're listed in order and then they just go around and they help various things. They're called energy razors rather than barn razors. Once this is part of the conversation and the consciousness in the town of, what are cool opportunities and what's the skill you have? And what's the one little thing you could add that adds value? It's kind of exciting. You're listening to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeade. I'm your host for this Northern Spirit Radio Production website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Come to our website and find our archives of seven years now. It was seven years ago that I interviewed Rua way back at the very start of Northern Spirit Radio. So there's been a lot happening in those past years. You'll find links to all the organizations like Quakers and Transition. You'll find Transition US, all of that on northernspiritradio.org. You'll find a place to post comments, which is really helpful. We need to hear from you to know how we can serve you better with Northern Spirit Radio. Likewise, you can make donations and that's a good way for you to help us. And if our program is not broadcast in your town, talk to someone. Again, we're speaking with Steve Chase and Ruis Winerfeld. They're both active with a group called Quakers and Transition, Quaker Earthcare Witness. Steve's been teaching at Antioch College for a long time, Northeast Version, but it changed its name, didn't it? What's it called now? Antioch University, New England. Antioch University, mea culpa, mea culpa. I grew up Catholic. So, I'd love to hear some more practical examples of what Transition Community looks like. I need to know about the nuts and bolts before I can commit to this. Because actually, in Eau Claire Friends meeting over in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I live, the meeting has been talking about what we can do to move this forward. It seems a rising concern. So we need some ideas of nuts and bolts. So I want to say before a nut and bolt, just one thing that Transition Communities want to unleash the collective genius in the community. So you think about that. That includes everybody, this inclusiveness, and that the fact that when we do come together, it's kind of like the spirit that dwells among us when we're in worship. That there's something more than the parts. Some of the practical pieces are to have awareness raising. That was a question you were asking earlier. You know, well, how do we know we need to be doing something? So having speakers come in to talk about some of the issues, showing films that will give people an understanding of the situation that we're in. So this awareness raising is a very important piece. Another important thing is a reskilling, the great reskilling. Reskilling is learning some of these things that we've lost over the generations, canning, keeping poultry, keeping goats, siding, sharpening tools, repairing things, how to make things last longer, composting. You know, those sorts of things that are darning socks. I mean, how many people know how to darn socks? Darn it, I don't know yet, but that's one of the workshops that we're going to have. Quilting, knitting, whatever it is that is of interest that is practical. So that's another piece of it is this great reskilling. Another thing is that this is not all like nuts and bolts. The arts are very important part having a community. How do we share music? How do we share our creativity? A deepening. The inner transition is as important as the outer transition. How do we deepen our understanding of the need for transition? How do we deepen our relationship to Earth so that we know why we want to protect it or her? What is it that will help us deepen that? We do these nuts and bolts kinds of things to get us ready for something called the great unleashing. And the great unleashing is where we've done all this work ahead of time so that people understand what the problems are, have learned a lot of new skills and know each other, have had fun together. Oh, I forgot to say both of us forgot to say the initiating group forms and then plans for its own demise. No one gets to control this thing. It doesn't belong to somebody or some group of people that plan it for the future. So the initiating group goes through these practical learning kinds of things. We have this great unleashing and at the great unleashing people come and share what their passions are, what their concerns are for the town and smaller groups form task groups. One person's going to work on transition, another person. Ah, one thing I want for my town. We haven't had our great unleashing. I want a community pub. Our town does not have a central place where people can come and just hang out, have fun, breakfast, lunch, dinner, community meetings, whatever it is. I want that. So I want to work out. That's what I want to do after getting out of the initiating group. I want to work on a community pub. So to have these various task groups that then divide up and do this work and then you have a communications hub that can help with everybody knowing what everybody's doing, but then the initiating group disbands. And so the leadership kind of disperses. One of our neighbors in Putney, Vermont, they've just gone through a great unleashing and so there's still a core group that helps do some coordination, but it's representatives from the various working groups in the town. And so some of the people who are on the initiating group are still on it, but a lot of people are new. And in Putney, it's interesting. A lot of the people are small business people that have really stepped forward. And this notion of relocalizing the economy to make it more resilient and thrive is really important. And so in my community in keen, we have the Hannah Grimes Center for entrepreneurship. And so it's a nonprofit center that's a business incubator. They also run a store for locally produced goods. And we have now over, I think this is the third or fourth year. We have the Menadnacht by local business association and we're now at 147 businesses and they've defined what a local business is and it's not a publicly traded corporation. One of the things that's so important with transition is really exercising our visionary muscles. And so we were asking this group of business leaders, what do you want the business community to be like in 20 years? And what do you want Menadnacht by local to help? And I was all prepared to raise this radical notion. We might want to think about an alternative local currency that in several communities that has been very, very helpful. And so I was just sort of waiting my turn. Lots of people were speaking and this, you know, one person who owns the local bookstore said, "Well, you know, I think we should really think about this whole notion of alternative local currencies." And a bunch of other people are going, "Yeah, that's really in somebody else's shadow. Yeah, we'll call it Menadbucks." After the big mountain that's in our region, that our region is named for, Menadnacht. And now there's more and more thought of, well, you know, small businesses and local businesses are great. And having them locally owned is important. But with the food co-op, which is going to be owned by the consumers, what about producer co-ops? Is the structure of business conducive one way or another to really serving the public good and serving the community? And so it's looking more and more that the vision that people are looking forward is this sort of mixed economy of some municipal owned things. A lot of small businesses, including producer and consumer cooperatives, and it's just this slow building process. And the one other thing I would want to say about vision is one of the things that I heard that some of the Brits did is that they involved their school children. And so the curriculum was how to use this social media and digital recording devices and, you know, teach them hands on. The idea was to give them a news program that they would do. And so transition folks got involved with that project. And so what they did was they said, "Okay, let's have the students create news programs from 2035." And so they'll be reporting on what's happening in the future. Let's just make the assumption that the future is a pretty nifty place to live and unleash the kids on that. And so you're involving young people and thinking well about their town, but thinking is that they have sort of the right to imagine a great town and that that's encouraged by adults. And that together we'll try to make it happen. And I just think that's a beautiful story. You know, I've got conflicting internal optimism about this. I mean, part of me says this sounds like the world I want to live in. I'm excited about the ideas of community, of local businesses, of places where I go into and I know where this food or this tool or whatever came from. That's very exciting to me. I like the idea of eating wild foods, knowing that I can eat from the pear tree down the street, et cetera. All of those things sound great to me. But I'm aware that that is way out of the mainstream of American society. You talked about local businesses and I said, "Well, does this mean that McDonald's is going to fight it?" Because that's not a local business. What about the people who moved to the city because they like the anonymity of the city where every neighbor doesn't know your business? You know, if we have to become more community-based, what about that part of American society and probably world society that is so resistant to small townways, if you will? Are you hopeful that as a nation and as a world, this is really going to be the thing that catches on? Or is it just because it's necessary that will happen? I personally think it's a mix that many people already are going. That's kind of, "Yeah, I want to live that way. I want a vibrant community, vibrant local economy." But the other thing is that if you're living in crisis-prone times, you are going to have so many opportunities for teachable moments of people realizing the way we're doing things isn't working. And hanging onto it is likely to make our lives worse and worse and worse. So maybe we should try something different. Oh, I hear these people down the street are doing X. It's sounding a little more interesting to me now that we've had this whole series of brownouts or big problems that way that I think the combination of desire and necessity can be pretty helpful in increasing the percentage of people who will engage with some urgency. And hopefully there's enough of a percentage within those folks who are also doing it out of a sense of sort of joy and exuberance and how far can we take this? So I want to say that a lot of this is already happening. The idea of food miles is really understood in cities as well. There are thousands and thousands of farmers markets in cities. In New York City, people there are really excited about having farmers markets and being able to draw their food from some 50 or 100 mile or 200 mile radius, which is terrific. I think that block parties, block parties have been happening for a long time. People do like to get out and know their neighbors. It is comforting. If you don't want to have everybody know your business, it's not about that. But you would like to know that if you're needing something that you could go knock on a neighbor's door, maybe you're right in the middle of cooking dinner for a big dinner party and you find out that you don't have any flour. You ran out. You know the person next door down the street that you could just go knock and borrow some flour from. It's not intrusive. It can be so helpful and so comforting. What if I fell? Wouldn't it be nice to know that somebody would notice that I didn't walk out on my usual to pick up the paper and the paper is still there and they might check on me? So I think the potential is there and I think it's already happening. I think people are awakening to the old model, you know, of the isolated life and nobody knows anybody and it's changing. Even the co-housing, there's urban co-housing. Well, people in co-housing know each other and all their business away more, but there's a lot of urban co-housing that's going on. So it doesn't have to be that extreme, but it can be a neighborhood of four or five blocks that kind of get together regularly and support each other. A story about the power of necessity and rising to the challenges on transition Tuesdays, one of the films we showed was called the power of community, which is about how Cuba, once the Soviet Union collapsed and they stopped importing oil, had this intense necessity. And so there's a situation, I think it's in '89 or '90, where they start calling it the special period. And so they have, in one year, a drop to having 56% of the oil that they had the previous year available. They have 75% less pesticides. They have 75% less fertilizer. And Cuba has the most industrialized agricultural system in Latin America, in terms of sort of monocultures, high mechanism, lots of inputs. And the basis for that way of farming completely fell out. And so they had a situation where they were looking at are people going to starve. I think people lost like 28 average of sort of 28 pounds in the first year. And so they had to figure out are we going to have certain people who have connections, be able to eat, and then people who are super poor and not. And so they had huge practical problems. And there were a small cluster of agronomists in Cuba who had been saying, well, we should really think about how to do organic agriculture and multi-cropping. And some of them were very attracted to permaculture notions. And up until then they had been marginalized because the government and the society didn't need them because they had cheap and abundant energy sources. That falls out. And all of a sudden these people are put to the center of, well, you explained to us how we have to transform. And Cuba, it's a very powerful movie is so they convert it to it's the biggest national conversion to organic agriculture that's ever happened. But they also, there's in Havana, there were I think 10,000 community gardens were started during this period. And people in Havana get, I think, over 60 to 70% of their food from a five mile radius. And so they dramatically changed the food mile situation. They dramatically changed the inputs in a small impoverished island nation. And so when we showed that, I mean, first people said, yeah, but they've got a much longer growing area. And we talked about that, but people were going, okay, there's a small country pushed against the wall by geopolitical forces, but it's similar. It's a case study of what different peoples around the world are going to experience. And they pulled it off. They figured out a way to feed the people by transforming, by transitioning from an oil dependent agriculture to a much more localized or organic one. And to me, we just have to multiply those stories and tell those stories and encourage people that they really can make a future worth living. That is a wonderful way to end this spirit and action. I want to thank you both. Steve Chase, you've been teaching changemakers for so many years now. Yeah, I should do a quick plug for the Advocacy in Social Justice and Sustainability Program, two year masters program and activist training. At Antioch University, New England, I'll put a link on northernspiritradio.org. Rua, you've been such a faithful steward of quicker earth care witness of change. Anyone who can get their household down to two bags of garbage per year deserves a loud round of applause here. [applause] And yes, I remember that from seven years ago when I interviewed you. Thank you both, Steve and Rua, for joining me for spirit and action. Thank you Mark and all you do. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.