PHOTO: The Pine Mountain Institute, co-founded by Sarah and Paul Edwards
Sarah Edwards is an eco-psychologist, a Transition U.S. Trainer, and manages the ECO ANXIETY blogspot. She is also author of the foreword of Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse
CB: Tell us a little about your background, where you grew up, your family, and the work you’ve been doing in recent years. I know that question is really a three-part question, so take plenty of time to answer those parts.
SE: I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. We lived in town in a residential neighborhood with large lots and lots of families who also had young children. If it was daylight and we weren’t in school or under the weather, we were all outdoors.
Compared to life today our lives were simple. We were allowed to roam about the area as far as our legs or our bikes could take us. There were two neighborhood drug stores in walking distance, as was the school. After Brown vs Board of Education brought integration of the public schools, though I had no problem with that personally, racial conflict became rampant in the school and walking to and from or holding school social events was no longer safe. There was chronic fighting, some shootings and knifings, so my parents moved our family to the suburbs. That was a very, very traumatic experience, as there was literally no where to walk to and no place to play outdoors. My brother and I rode the bus to school each morning in the dark and home in the afternoon right after school was out. In a year or so my parents got me a car so I could get to high school and visit friends.
For the past 25 years my husband Paul and I have been co-writing, consulting and training on how to create balanced lives by living and working from home. That was quite novel at the time we started doing it ourselves in Kansas City, Missouri. After graduating from college and working for the regional Office of Economic Opportunity under Sargent Shriver, I got my Masters in Social Work and opened a private psychotherapy practice in my home. Soon after, Paul brought his public affairs consulting services home too.
Eventually we moved to Los Angeles, then Santa Monica, where I also had a practice and where we managed an outpatient treatment center, did in-house communication training, then began writing full time. Ten years ago my husband Paul and I moved to a small mountain community in the Los Padres National Forest, a nearby faraway place about an hour and forty minutes north of Los Angeles and east of Santa Barbara. Currently I am a PhD Ecopsychologist and the Co-Director of Let’s Live Local, a non-profit Transition Initiative. I’m also a US Transition Trainer and my husband is a US Transition Consultant. Our website is Pathways to Transition. I offer online continuing education courses for professionals seeking to understand the emotional aspects of collapse through the Pine Mountain Institute and have a local private practice doing trauma, grief, and loss counseling.
CB: When was the very first incident or event or experience that started you thinking about collapse? Please elaborate on that.
SE: In 2004 Paul and I attended a day-long conference on Peak Oil in Santa Barbara where they aired The End of Suburbia and Richard Heinberg was the keynote speaker. That day was like a bucket of cold water in the face, a whack on the side of the head, and a big wake up turning point for us both. On the way home we both agreed this experience meant our lives would never be the same. It sparked years of still-on-going changes in our home, our work, our view of the world.
CB: And then what happened? What led to the next thing and the next, and so on? What books or documentaries influenced you? Which people influenced you?
In addition to avidly reading books by authors like Heinberg, Orlov, and Kunstler, we began showing End of Suburbia and other documentaries like Everything’s Cool and What a Way to Go in our home to get our friends and neighbors on board with what would be happening in our lives. This led to the formation of Let’s Live Local (LLL) in 2005 and we became one of the early Post-Carbon Outposts. We are now a non-profit and the 11th official Transition Initiative. We have many projects going and have started many local services that didn’t exist before. There is a summary that needs some updating at http://www.letslivelocal.org/. Our newest is a beef co-op we just started with a local rancher who came to us after reading about LLL in the local paper and deciding he doesn’t want to ship his small herd of 18 cows to the big slaughter houses any more. He wants to sell his cows locally and rely on a small house that slaughters in a way he believes is more humane, where only one animal is slaughtered at a time, without stress on the cows. We’re excited about this even though we don’t eat beef ourselves. I think we have to take whatever steps forward people are willing to take and just keep walking.
In our personal lives we had to do something about our large, energy inefficient home. At first we wanted to downsize to a smaller, energy-efficient home. We thought of finding a more sustainable community to move to, visited a wide variety of locales, and put our home on the market three different times. But it did sell. Meanwhile we began making both our home and our lives more energy efficient. Everything cost far more and took far longer than we would ever have expected. But here’s a list of the kind of things what we’ve done over the past four years. We still have so far to go.
Auto:
Bought a Prius, which has cut our gas usage in more than half and we may get an electric scooter to do local errands
Electricity:
Installed Energy Smart Power Planners on appliances that use significant amounts of electricity such as the refrigerator, freezer, and other appliances.
Switched to the fluorescent bulbs
Have motion detectors both inside and outside to reduce the number of lights we need to turn on
Unplugged most appliances that use energy when off.
Food:
Buying frequently used grains like spelt and steel-cut oats in bulk.
Compost kitchen waste and use the compost to fertilize the variety of fruit trees and berry bushes we have planted.
Share -shopping with friends to cut down on our all making separate trips in town.
In process of building a cold frame with our neighbors to grow produce next Spring.
Heat:
Sealed air leaks, using caulking, weather stripping, expanding foam, and insulating foam gaskets behind outlets and switch plates on exterior walls.
To keep heat from escaping from through our windows, we have had an e-coating film applied to our windows.
When our propane bills got over $400 a month, we installed a pellet stove to heat our 1st floor. We had a pocket door installed at the top of our 1st floor stairs so heat from the stove will not go upstairs (unless we have guests) and we no longer heat two rooms on the 1st floor and two rooms on the lower level. One of first floor rooms is now our “cold room” where we store fruit, vegetables, wine in the summer, and most of our pellets.
When our propane bill climbed over $800 a month, we installed a second pellet stove that heats our office on our lower level as well as our first floor, particularly since we cut an opening in our master bedroom floor and now have a radiator grill that allows the pellet heat from below to directly heat our master bedroom. The combination of the two pellet stoves now gives us an alternative heating system, allowing us to eliminate use of our propane-driven, radiant heat furnace except on the very coldest of winter nights.
Some would say that little things like this don’t make enough difference to matter. But the savings alone do matter to us and, though possibly it’s too late for such things to prevent a collapse, they can slow it and give us all more time to make the still larger changes we need to make. A recent article in the LA Times, “Los Angeles Residents Reducing Power and water Use,” shows just what a difference such little things can make.
You, Richard Heinberg, Dmitri Orlov, Kathy McMahon, Sharon Astyk, the Peak Moment TV’s Yuba City Girls, Janaia and Robyn, Linda Buzzell, Rob Hopkins, Allison and Dave Ewoldt, and always Nature, and Connect founder, Dr. Michael Cohen, have all influenced me on this journey.
CB: As you were finding yourself on this journey, did you sometimes kind of look in the mirror and ask yourself, “What on earth am I doing?” Did you ever wonder if you had lost it or taken leave of your senses?
SE: I have often felt like I’m living in two worlds. One where everyone seems to think everything is just fine and I have to operate in that world because it is still much of the daily world I live and work in. Then there’s the other world that’s always sitting on my shoulder, a world in which I know everything is already different and will be getting a lot more different, totally different, sometime in the future. It is such an odd feeling. I always get this feeling when I read the newspaper. In one section of the page there may be a major story about severe climate change and in the next an article on alfresco kitchens and multi-room patios which are now in vogue for outdoor entertaining. So to me it seems that it’s a whole lot of other people who have lost their senses.
CB: How have your family members responded to the changes you’ve made? Have you had conflicts with them around your changes and if so, how have you dealt with that?
SE: Gratefully my husband and I are on the same page. We are supportive of each other and working together to make changes our own lives and in the community. Each of our families is small and all are far away. Our son lives in Northern California and has as growing awareness of what we’re facing. My mother is 91 so I really don’t want to concern her with collapse. But she is a historian and fully aware of the economic side of what’s happening. She talks to me about it often as paralleling the path of ancient Rome. She hopes she will die before things get too difficult. I understand this because I know she lived through the Depression as a child and then through WWII as a young parent. The stock market collapse has already made life harder for her as she living on a shrinking fixed income.
I have attempted to talk to other family members via e-mail and on occasion when I visit in person. But they are not interested in or aware of collapse issues. Once when I broached the subject, one of my in-laws asked me, “Is this a California thing?” They have made it clear they do not want me to send any more articles or web links on such topics. So I don’t.
I fear a couple of my close friends think I’ve gone off the deep end. Even some who were interested and involved at the early stages when we began showing the documentaries. About half of my friends who were involved early dropped out once we began discussing what this all might mean for us here in our community and what we could do. Two seem to be on the verge of coming back, though. I have other friends who think I’m too negative and snap at me when I bring up any collapse-related topics. They believe talking about such negative things will contribute to bringing them into the world.
Fortunately, though, I have a wonderful circle of friends both online and here in Let’s Live Local who are very aware and supportive of each other.
CB: What kinds of emotions have you experienced on this journey? As you are doing what I call “staring collapse in the face”, what kinds of feelings emerge? How do you manage those feelings?
SE: Oh, my. Now here is a question! Every emotion in the book. I get angry that our leaders can be so blind and allow themselves to be controlled by those who can only continue to benefit if we stay on the suicidal path we’re on. I get sad about things that I know are not important in the larger scheme of life, but that I will miss in a nostalgic way. The myths we’ve all lived in. The myths I grew up with. The kind of frivolous, carefree, and naive fun we once had. The myths I even helped to perpetuate in my work in years past. Every so often I am gripped with a gut wrenching fear of having to leave our home and mountain community, not having a place to live, and probably most of all, not being able to get the medications that keep me well. This usually passes now though because I think of my age. I realize that in the larger scheme of things, I and the things I think I need, are not all that important and that’s OK, because this is the consequence of our collective history. I work to focus on gratitude for I am very grateful this very day and every day for the many blessings in my life of friends and meaningful work, a wonderful love and partnership with my husband, and a beautiful home in the most beautiful of forests.
At other times when I see us making progress here in our community like with our pellet and organic produce co-ops, I feel elated and excited and motivated. At other times I feel discouraged because people have to put so many other things in their lives ahead of making the desparately needed changes we need to make in our lives and in our community. Some of the things that come first seem frivolous to me and I wonder, don’t they get it? But usually their priorities are understandable. Some people are really struggling to keep afloat. Nearly everyone is working long hours, often into the night to keep the roofs over their heads. Many retirees who once had time for community involvement lost money in the stock market and have had to go back to work full or part time. Others are losing their homes. People get ill, have accidents, have to devote time to older parents and children … and worst of all, some have to move away because they can’t find work or afford to keep their homes. When lots of such things converge at once I feel very alone, like it is all on me to somehow keep all our efforts going, but fortunately before long someone will call or e-mail me about an extra effort they are doing or an idea they want to work on, or a breakthrough they’ve had and I feel grateful again. I’m amazed really, that our work here has a life of its own. It just happened today. Someone wrote to say they have donated the cost of the park rental for our October 24th 350 event!
CB: I’m wondering what the role of community is in your life. It’s a lonely, if not hostile, world out there if one is talking to most people about collapse. Where do you get support?
I already mentioned the extensive support structure I have here in our community and in my online communities – ecopsychology boards, the other ecopsychologists who I work with as faculty in our online Ph.D. program, other eco-nomic practitioners, and colleagues like yourself.
Having always lived in cities where I never had a sense of community (except perhaps in high school) until I moved here, I was astonished to discover what it means to live in a real community – both the good and the bad, the ease and challenge of it. At the same time, to some degree I think our community, perhaps like others, is more split now than at other times. I find there are those who still have a lot of money and have no clue about what’s going on. They keep raising assessments for more golf carts and hosting fancy social events. Then there are those who are awake and busy changing how they live, sometimes hindered by local rules and regulations. There are those who are severely challenged because of the economy and don’t have time for anything else but to keep their heads above water. Those who are new-agers. Those who are fundamentalist Christians. All with their own views of life that are more front and center now because of the sense of impending crises that looms over us all.
I believe that in this period of time the challenges of the collapse are accentuating our differences and further separating us. Things we once could cover over lightly and be one community with greater ease have grown into wide fissures that make bridging differences harder. I first began to notice this after the 2000 election. Suddenly people who had socialized easily together before, no longer could or would. And it’s become still more pronounced since. I often say to those who get frustrated at times trying get beyond all these differences that we have to focus on tolerance and have very long arms to reach around and embrace everyone.
On the other hand, the transition programs we’ve started here are bringing people together across all these divides, sharing in activities where none of these concerns are relevant or discussed, i.e. the many wood pellet co-op subscribers and the organic produce co-op subscribers come from all groups and all views, but we don’t really know how our views are alike or different because we just want to enjoy these new aspects of our community.
CB: Not everyone would say that they have a spiritual path or perhaps any interest in spirituality at all. Do you have a connection with something greater, and if so, how has it informed your life and the changes you’ve made? As you know, because you wrote the foreword for it, I’ve just published a book on this topic, Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse because it became so clear to me that just as collapse has enormous energy, food, climate change, healthcare, and other implications, it is the consummate spiritual phenomenon of the twenty-first century. I also wrote the book to provide a roadmap for preparing emotionally and spiritually for collapse.
SE: As you know, I love your book. I have a very deep nature-based faith. It definitely has shaped my willingness to see and accept what is actually happening and has given me tools to use in my personal and professional life. Nature spirituality and philosophy is truly a godsend because it enables me to make sense of a nonsensical world. I understand that everything that’s happening is a natural result of our unnatural way of life. Gratefully it also enables me to have a concept of what a different kind of life we could create if we followed the principles of nature. They guide me in doing what I can in my life and in helping our local community to create such a way of life. I have daily nature practices I draw on.
CB: What is your passion these days? What gets you up in the morning and gives meaning to your life?
SE: What gets me up in the morning and gives meaning to my life is both the exciting projects we keep working on and the forward progress we’re making on the one hand and on the other hand the unending beauty of the forest, and life with my husband, our dog and my friends.
CB: I have just one last question for you. I’m wondering if you can comment for our readers on life purpose. That is, what have you come to understand as your purpose in life at the present time? What did you come here to do?
SE: I just had an extended conversation about life purpose on an ecopsych board I belong to. It’s a wonderful topic to reflect upon at this time. I believe I am here to continue finding my purpose day to day. I do not believe I have “a” purpose that was set sometime in the past or sealed in stone somewhere. I believe, as Viktor Frankl pointed out to me rather sharply when I couldn’t quite grasp it, we have to “find”(to use his words) our purpose as it unfolds moment by moment, seek it out in the ever-evolving, intelligent self-generating web of life of which we are part (not his words).
CB: Please add anything else at this point that you’d like to say that I may not have thought to ask you about.
SE: Just to thank you, Carolyn, for inviting me to reflect on these questions. I have enjoyed articulating and sharing them and find value of doing so.
