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Making A Case For Simple Life In A Small Town
Garrison Keillor, The Baltimore Sun
I bought a jar of elderberry jelly and an armload of rhubarb at a small-town festival last week, simply because the seller was a slender, fair-haired, luminous beauty who happened to be Amish, sitting, demure in a black bonnet, at a table beside her horse and buggy.
There was a time I would’ve pitied her for her stern upbringing and all the deprivations thereof, but nowadays I tend to pity the children of heedless parents. Great romantic visionaries who leave a trail of messed-up progeny and embittered lovers. The Amish focus on the scriptural admonition to be “in the world but not of the world,” a religious discipline based on prepositions which leads them into their stubborn fetishism, which sets them apart and makes them a tourist attraction, which they cannily exploit – and this young beauty sat, eyes averted, a devout 19th-century girl in the midst of plaid-shorts, cell-phone-toting, drive-by, feel-good America, and did a brisk business in rhubarb and elderberry jelly, $4 a jar.
You look at the Amish and you see the past, but you might also be looking at the future. Our great-grandchildren, faced with facts their ancestors were able to ignore, might have to do without the internal-combustion engine and figure out how to live the subsistence life. Maybe someone will invent a car that runs on hydrogen or horse manure, or maybe people will travel on beams of light like in old radio serials, but the realist in you thinks otherwise.
Fred Thompson, a vanity candidate for president, goes around sneering at the notion of global warming, pointing out that Mars is heating up too, but nobody who has read the scientists’ latest report on climate change is in a joking mood: It says that the situation will get a good deal worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better, and nobody knows just what “worse” means in this case.
The matter of greenhouse gases has to be addressed, and it won’t be while the country is stuck in the disaster that is Iraq. The way to get unstuck is for some intrepid Republicans to get off the bus and put their shoulders to it and push. It needs to back up. The Current Occupant has driven it into a mudhole and is spinning the tires. Human lives are being tossed away carelessly, a country is bleeding, and the big man behind the desk is dishonest, incoherent and incompetent. He might do well as mayor of this little town, but he might also turn the water department over to his buddy from high school and order the police to search the cars of visitors.
As it is, it’s an idyllic town. A classic townscape: tree-shaded boulevards, blocks of frame houses with spindle railings on the porches, lovingly kept up by families who feel cheered and encouraged by the gentle ornamentation, the humane scale of things. They endure the same uncertainties as you or I, the same shocks of mortality, are as capable of crankiness and outright absurdity, but the classic small town speaks of a steadiness and everyday valor that anchor our lives.
I know a woman who has spent the past year on airplanes. Her husband has a good job in London. An old mother is dying in Nevada. Her children are scattered. She is overseeing the construction of a house in Montana. Her wrist was broken in a car crash, and now doctors have found a dark spot in her brain that needs investigation, and yet she complains less than any 14-year-old you ever met.
There are bandits and demagogues and red-eyed zealots and destructive visionaries out working the main roads, but back here in the little towns and hoods, the country survives on steadiness and some innovation.
I made rhubarb crisp, but used less sweetening so as not to smother the tartness of the fruit, and it turned out well.
Onward.
Garrison Keillor’s is the host of The Prairie Home Companion. His e-mail is [email protected].
(7 June 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Haul your non-recyclables on your back for 2 weeks? Ugh
Lisa Stiffler, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The cat poop stays at home. But all the other non-recyclable, non-compostable trash that Linda Carlin generates is toted from home to work and everywhere else she goes.
Carlin is participating in an experiment to raise awareness about garbage. For two weeks, she has to carry all the trash she creates with her.
“At first I was like, ‘Sure, that’s fun, no problem,’ ” said Carlin, a senior design analyst at the Seattle office of frog design Inc., a product design and consulting company. More than a week into the effort, she had to upgrade from a backpack to a bigger bag. The experiment ends Sunday.
Carlin is hauling around used dental floss, Q-tips, a prescription bottle, dryer lint and a pen that exploded in her purse. There’s packaging from a store purchase, caps from plastic bottles, plastic wrap and a plastic foam egg carton. She was chagrined to realize that the sample of a muffin she grabbed at a Starbucks was in a plastic cup.
“I’ve been calling all of these companies” and challenging their use of extra packaging and non-degradable products, Carlin said.
The experiment was started by a colleague at work and tracked in a blog called “Trash Talk.”
(7 June 2007)
Not surprisingly, the prolific Sharon Astyk has something to say about trash: Dispense with Disposables.
Localism and some thoughts on Social Change
LuÃs de Sousa, The Oil Drum: Europe
A few days ago I attended a talk by Professor David Hess, entitled “Rethinking the Sustainable City: Exploring the Potential of Local Social Enterprises”. It gave me a lot to thought about on the social questions raised by the Hubbert Peak, and how energy (or the lack of it) can shape the future of our Society. Less energy will likely mean less travel and more local networks. Reshaping our Society to the local level might seem both good and inevitable, but what problems may we encounter doing so?
…The talk by prof. Hess was organized by a group of Sociology PhD students, from a kin Faculty, integrated in a series of thematic sessions; this one was called “Other Habitats”. The session call had the following abstract:
The problems of global warming, resource depletion, persistent pollution, and habitat destruction suggest that human civilization is no longer adapted to its global habitat. The technology for achieving a transformation to a more sustainable relationship with the environment already exists in the form of green buildings, renewable energy, public transportation, and sustainable agriculture.
However, the implementation of the transformation is proceeding at a very slow pace, and it occurs alongside ongoing growth of environmental deposits and withdrawals. This talk examines the argument that an economic system based on the large, publicly traded corporation with its emphasis on short-term growth creates a growth logic that is not adapted to the global ecology.
The emergence of the localist movement in the United States–around small businesses, nonprofits, and local government agencies–is examined for its potential to generate a more liveable human habitat and an economy that is more adapted to life within the planet’s carrying capacity.
“Resource depletion” is a term hard to resist, especially when associated with someone with the curriculum of prof. Hess.
These subjects, that I’ll give you a bit insight, are covered in prof. Hess’ latest book, “Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry”, from which the first chapter is available online (here – pdf).
(5 June 2007)
The Oil Drum has also just posted the related essay by Jason Bradford: Relocalization: A Strategic Response to Climate Change and Peak Oil.
Sustainability Network Newsletter (445-KB PDF)
Elizabeth Heij (editor), CSIRO (Australia)
Contents:
End of the Sustainability Network – why, and where to from here;
Is recycled water really safe to drink?
Poor outcomes for children and youth a negative indicator for the future of our society;
Noah’s reminder to the “Low Countries”;
Sustainable cities: a new blueprint;
‘Enlightened Agriculture’;
Shrinking the ‘food miles’ radius;
Greed, overconsumption and morality;
Climate change is not the only issue;
Feedback on: The biology of global warming; Variability of renewable energy; and base-load electricity generation.
(5 June 2007)
Sadly, this is the final issue of the Sustainability Network Newsletter, a monthly publication by Australia’s CSIRO that was several years ahead of its time. In her parting essay, Elizabeth Heij writes:
Looking around, I see many of us thinking about sustainability – we may even be involved with it in our professional lives – but, whether as a result of inertia, complacency, the entrenched social systems around us, or a mixture of all of these, we are collectively doing very little personally in our homes and lifestyles. Actions such as replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents and installing low-flow shower heads barely scratch the surface and, furthermore, are consumerist solutions based on trading new goods for old. They fail to tackle the very basic issue of our reverence for the natural world and behaviour towards it. When change occurs at this more intrinsic level, it can radically transform for the better both our own wellbeing and our environmental footprint.
…So this new frontier is where I hope to invest future effort – at the grassroots level – networking with individuals who need information and ideas to help them change their lifestyle. It can’t be through CSIRO, which remains committed primarily to industrial and scientific research in areas of prime federal government focus.
Michael Shuman On Rebuilding Community: Local Economic Development
Global Public Media
Attorney and economist Michael Shuman is the Vice President for Enterprise Development for the Training and Development Corporation, based in Bucksport, Maine.
In Part 1 of this candid interview, Mr. Shuman talks about the paradigm of RE-building local communities in the face of a world of diminishing resources like oil and natural gas.
In Part 2 he discusses his own conceptions of our current economic development model and the problems small, local businesses face.
In Part 3, Mr. Shuman explores local (community-based) money and stock exchanges (something that was more of the norm a century ago) and helping small businesses reacquire a foothold in a world that’s increasingly — and unsustainably — becoming over-globalized. Choose any of the three video interview segments by clicking the links below. The entire interview in mp3 format will be available soon!
Michael Shuman is author of five books including The Small Mart Revolution and Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age. He has written numerous articles on the relationship between community and international affairs. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post.
(2 June 2007)
