Perhaps more relevantly to the students who filled the room, our school, as a diverse residential community, provides a fertile environment within which to build meaningful reforms for the outside world.

As taken as I am with the idea of “home ground,” I asked the students in the workshop to map their own communities, taking the following questions into consideration:

What are the characteristics of this location that make it a “place,” and not simply a landscape?  Where are the schools, cultural resources and green spaces?  Where does your food come from, and how much of it is grown within 100 miles?  How “walkable” is your hometown?
I was astonished to hear the variety of their answers, but also the degree to which they were not able to identify places of cultural worth, much less find a way to walk to them.  Admittedly, this seminar represented a small sample size, but these were students from the suburbs of Boston, the bedroom communities of Seattle and Atlanta, and even a high-rise neighborhood in Seoul.  It is never an easy task to train a critical eye on the landscapes we pass each day on our way to work and school, but even thirty minutes of focused reflection reveals some deeply entrenched issues afflicting all communities.

Next up in the seminar plan was a look at the work of pioneers seeking to identify and solve these problems, creating healthy, resilient communities on the foundations of broken landscapes once scarred by toxicity and neglect.  PBS’s series “Design E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious” offers a wide variety of episodes on the full spectrum of designers, activists and entrepreneurs working to create the sustainable communities of the future.

We viewed the episode on Affordable Green Housing,which examines the work of Jonathan Rose, who partners with community groups in New York City to develop affordable housing solutions that will strengthen the community, provide access to young workers and families seeking to remain in the communities they love, and offer healthy alternatives to the stifling housing options traditionally designed for big cities.  Oh yes, did I neglect to mention that these developments were beautiful, too?

The development of this aesthetic sense is something that the architectural and design elements of the “green” continuum seem to have understood from the start (not unilaterally, but certainly with respect to the designs that endure).  Those who do it well take into account basic human needs, like clean air, well-lit spaces, access to greenways and integrated community resources.  By extending this focus to include biophilic design, we apply a very simple leap of logic: why mess with creation … design with nature in mind, and as nature intended.  Rose’s central idea regarding cities is also elegant in its attention to our role within a larger ecosystem.  The richest community systems are polycultures, deriving strength and resilience from their diversity.  Unlike the massive corn monocultures that dominate our dangerously unstable food system, diverse biological networks are better equipped to evolve and meet the needs of changing climates and home grounds.

On the city level, this hypothesis extends to the idea that diversity is not simply beneficial, but essential to the health of a community. Why shouldn’t our less fortunate neighbors enjoy clean air, healthy buildings and walkable neighborhoods?  Aren’t these things more on the level of fundamental rights than trappings of privilege?  It’s not much of a reach to see that promoting this sort of resilience in the poorest communities enables far-reaching benefits for residents of all racial and cultural backgrounds.

We who work and live in residential school communities, while traditionally seen as isolated on islands of privilege, have a central role to play here as well.  I see the residential school as the ideal sustainability laboratory, with the resources, intellectual curiosity and youthful energy both to apply strategies for resilient living, and to innovate beyond the bounds of what is currently considered possible.  In our classrooms and on our campuses,  fascinatingly intricate networks of relationships evolve each day. We accomplish our business in confined spaces, share resources, and grow through close contact with diverse peers.

I hope to consider this question of sustainability, diversity and the resilient residential school in the future, as the future may well require all three characteristics in any successful community.  There are many, many committed folks working on high school and university campuses to promote sustainable community growth, and I plan to devote at least some of this space to publicizing these successes.  May we all work diligently to prove that our  communities, commonly thought of as ivory towers, are in actuality the true agoras of innovative exchange.

Were the fallout from this sudden crisis not so tragically pervasive, one could see it as a fascinating litmus test for the resilience of local economies.  While folks on both sides of the lake scramble to concoct stopgap fixes, it would behoove the rest of us to tune in and pay attention.

Champlain itself looms as the iconic symbol of the region.  Inscribed upon the landscape as the glaciers retreated, the Lake unites geologic, anthropological, and economic history into a living document.  With a diverse watershed composed of tributaries that cascade from the Adirondack and Green Mountains, and even across the political border with Quebec, Lake Champlain is the pulse of the region.  Its fertile valleys support a robust agricultural tapestry that has pioneered a viable, “buy local” movement– a great hope for food reformers worldwide.

As integrated as the Lake’s ecosystems are, the closure of Crown point brings into stark focus the intimate interconnection of the economies on both shores.  Now that the stream of bridge commuters has dried up, the Bridge Restaurant’s business has cratered.  One local farm now must negotiate a 100 mile detour to manage cattle herds in two states.  Middlebury College and Porter Hospital are struggling to accommodate New York-based employees who once relied on Crown Point as an easy conduit to work across the border in Vermont.

While the Departments of Transportation and various other Powers That Be in both states scramble to devise an alternative solution, residents reopen their ledgers and hope, calculating the sacrifices necessary to survive until the conduit returns. If any of those in charge fear that the outage will become indefinite, they are fretting privately; the common understanding is that life will return to normal eventually … or whatever passes for normal these days.

Those of us residing elsewhere in the country would to well to take note of the precarious nature of this petroleum enabled codependency.  In a very strange–but very fitting– way, the Crown Point Bridge looms as a symbol of peak oil transition, of a sudden, disruptive monkey wrench jammed into the gears of cheap convenience.

At some point in the future, we will all face a hiccup along this order of magnitude.  While it may not mean a longer commute — as it currently does for the folks who must now cross Champlain by boat, or drive by way of the lake’s southern terminus– it could be that an already costly commute becomes prohibitive.  These will be harsh realities.  Without a resilient, local economy to fall back upon, the failings inherent in this age of convenience will quickly become apparent to even its staunchest apologists.

So while we might work assiduously in the short term to reinforce the pilings of our rotting structures, concrete and otherwise, let us not forget the essential work of fortifying community.   In many ways the dialogue percolating in the local forums of Essex and Addison counties is no different than that emanating from the rest of the country.  I join these citizens in hoping for a swift return to stability; they have endured their share of uncertainty already.   May we all realize, however, that a return to normalcy is simply a quick fix.  Only by redefining “normal” will we find true redemption.

Finally, a bridge worth crossing, whenever we can get to it.

“An agrarian economy rises up from the fields, woods, and streams–from the complex of soils, slopes, weathers, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed.  The agrarian mind is therefore not regional or national, let alone global, but local.  It must know on intimate terms the local plants and animals and local soils; it must know local possibilities and impossibilities,  opportunities and hazards. It depends and insists on knowing very particular local histories and biographies.” — From “The Whole Horse” 1996 in Citizenship Papers

These are advantages, some might say efficiencies, that a globally scaled economy cannot possibly capture.  We’ll have to learn how to see and think locally again if we are to prepare a truly resilient economy for the sort of durable recovery that can heal the wounds wrought by the past model of boom and bust cycles.

For more on Berry, check out Br. Tom Murphy’s excellent aggregation of Berry’s work, as well as a great clearinghouse of environmental links: Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky.  As Murphy points out, Berry vociferously defends the virtues of the the pen and the page, rather than the keyboard, as a means of written expression.  In production and philosophy, Berry is something of a Luddite (if I can apply the term with great affection, rather than in its traditionally pejorative sense), so there is some irony in blogging about him.  In light of his predilections, a better starting point might be your local library, where you’ll find that the following is an excellent primer: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Like Mr. Berry, I’m a staunch believer in the sacred value of a good day’s work.  I’m off to the reading room now, because I find myself a bit short of that benchmark today.

Stephen’s Angry Mob Will Crush AIG

The nature of the protest hasn’t necessarily changed. Then, as now, populism sought to assert the rights of the downtrodden against a corporate culture that had infected the political system, narrowing the spectrum of debate to economic solutions that perpetuated the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few.  Unfortunately, we are rapidly losing touch with the utilitarian spirit that once defined the movement, as citizens are, in increasing numbers, no longer rooted in the land.  In fact, the contemporary uproar over the failure of AIG and the financial system writ large only underscores the failure of the populist revolt of the 19th century to create meaningful change in the complexion of the American landscape.Cities grew as they absorbed rural residents in search of manufacturing jobs; small farms were swallowed up by the rise of consolidated agribusiness.  Corporate culture grew beyond political boundaries to become the latest incarnation of Colonialism.  This is an obvious oversimplification, but the gist of the issue is this: as our lifestyles became more comfortable, and our retirement funds continued their upward climb, we lost sight of our civic obligations.  We were too busy acquiring useless junk to adorn our nests of leisure and diversion.  In so doing, we surrendered a vital measure of control to corporate interests.  Now as media outlets search for a new straw man to raise each week, and the public hungers to widen the circle of scapegoats at whom to direct our frustration and vitriol, we fail to see the real culprits behind this historic collapse.

It’s us, folks.  There is actually an ‘I’ in A.I.G.

Contemporary beacon of Agrarian thinking Wendell Berry manages to frame the case with elegant simplicity in his essay, “The Total Economy.”

“What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.  What has happened is that most people in the country, and apparently in the ‘developed’ world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all their food, clothing and shelter.  Moreover, they are rapidly increasing their proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of ‘service’ that were once carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities.  Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.”

The griping, grousing and rage is all useful, as long as it does not occlude our vision of the painful truth here.  We ought to be angry at the destruction of our landscapes and communities — our home places.  We ought to be fearful of the burden that we pass to our children, but not in the context of some petty partisan sniping over the price tag of a bailout.  Who will bail out our stressed ecosystems and dangerously narrow food system?   Who will bail out our friends and neighbors when we have lost the traditional idea of a neighborhood to a sprawling myopia of malls and big box stores?

As much as corporate greed and selfishness has produced this swamp of worthless derivatives, we are complicit in the wreck of the financial system by the very same motivations.  In our reckless consumption, we have enabled this mess.

The time has come to put the pitchforks down and pick up something more useful.  Pick up a library book and learn something new about the world.  Pick up a neighbor during a time of distress.  Pick up the phone to call your elected officials, and make your voice heard again.  Pick up a mirror, and look deeply at the world you have created.

We have a (rather bleak) estimate of the world’s true carrying capacity from climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warming-could-cut-population-to-1-billion/

And another shout from the escalating cacophony of alarm on our vastly broken industrial food system.  Pigs with MRSA.  Sounds like a really, really, awful horror flick, only this one’s the real deal, kids. Nicholas Kristof uncovers some disturbing consequences of antibiotic use in livestock operations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/opinion/12kristof.html?scp=2&sq=MRSA&st=cse

This second tidbit is reason #3,475,392,865 why a) we need to do a much better job of educating the public, and schoolchildren in particular, regarding the provenance of its food and b) “outsourcing” food production to centralized, impenetrable feedlot fortresses far remote from customer bases severs this country’s valuable agrarian heritage.

What to do? For starters, vote with your food dollars.  Knowing where my food comes from more than justifies any added expense.  Should a critical mass of consumers (which this humble scribe believes must be more than the current constellation of regular Whole Foods and Co-Op customerdom) begin moving away from companies that adhere to simple bottom-line production cost models, we’ll begin to see the some substantive change.  Perhaps more boardrooms will come to see the virtues of triple-bottom line business models, and responsible corporate citizenship.

Still fed up?  Do what the Egyptians did; have an organic beer.

Over at Grist, Tom Philpott serves up the third installment of his series on organic suds: Brewer’s Dozen.

Kudos Mr. Philpott for showing the love to Middlebury VT shop Wolaver’s , but where is Peak Organic Brewing? Jon Cadoux and the boys at Peak mix up a mean brew … the Espresso Amber they served up at the Vermont Brewer’s Fest was quite tasty and Fair Trade Certified to boot.

I’ll take a full glass in a glass-half-empty-world any day.

Whatever you think about the man’s body of work, this take on the current market correction is a revelation.  Refreshing is hardly a strong enough word.  Call this a hiccup, recession, or depression.  Call it whatever you will.  Just don’t miss the powerful lesson on markets coded within the collapse.  Friedman is one of the only mainstream voices I have seen questioning the assumption not that America will recover to its current economic heft, but rather whether it should.

A potent question.  One that ought to be on the lips of more citizens, legislators and captains of industry.  Its an uncomfortable idea.  However, this notion pales in comparison to the discomfort we can experience by continuing down the path of unsustainable growth for growth’s sake — the sacrifice of our community integrity to the shallow cost equations of the corporate bottom line.

With luck, we can look to the local, inverting Friedman’s thesis of a flat world.  The demand for corporations who look for net zero with respect to inputs and outputs can only be fulfilled by corporations who, in Wendell Berry’s formulation, are accountable to their home ground, and their neighbors.  So while obstructionists like columnist Charles Krauthammer decry the attempts of the Obama administration and progressives in Congress to use the economic crisis to legislate a recovery, producing “the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime,”  I have but one thing to say.

It’s about time.

Enter the Sustainable Dozen.  These folks comprise a diverse slate of candidates advanced by “Food Democracy Now!” an organization dedicated to advancing sustainable food policy in the office of the USDA.   We’ve heard a chorus of voices  in recent months, with Michael Pollan’s “Farmer in Chief”,  an open letter to President Obama, being foremost among them.  True: Farmer Barack might not hop behind a Roto-tiller to plant a victory garden atop the ruins of the rose garden, as Pollan suggests (alas); what he might still do is act decisively to institute a prescient and critical national security policy measure– a sustainable overhaul for our food system.

You can play too.  Sign the petition to send the sustainable dozen, or some portion therof, to Washington: http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/ .

It might not be manna from the heavens, but it’s one step forward from the mega-farm corn monocultures currently on the menu at the supermarket.  That’s change I can believe in.   Or change in which I can believe.

Now, back to filling out my application for Undersecretary of Grammar.

- Henry David Thoreau

It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a dog along, either.  When not chewing household items into unrecognizable shreds, dogs remind us of simplicity, and the importance of stopping to smell the smells every now and then, so to speak.   Yesterday morning, I was lucky enough to pause in a little scrub pine grove as champagne snowflakes fell during a sudden squall.  Houston was tracking rabbits, their darting movements suddenly frozen, and wonderfully legible in the crust that had begun to harden atop last week’s snowfall.

Snowfall, with its tendency to dampen and insulate sound, produces a unique and transcendent stillness.   I stopped to listen, because we are offered lessons like this a million times each day, but rarely possess the necessary patience to wait to be taught.  Little wisps of sound drifted into earshot–flakes alighting on the dried leaves of young oaks.  The oaks have paused for the winter.  Come spring, they will resume their ascent, up from the understory  to the roof of the forest, such as it is here in the sandy pine barrens of Cape Cod.

There in the suddenly loud silence, I began to notice the contrasts.  One age of a forest giving way to the next, last year’s leaves nourishing the promised green of spring.  What to make of this peaceful, alternate offseason reality we manage to superimpose on the landscapes that will teem with summer visitors a few months hence?  Is it tragedy or bliss?

All the way home, Houston and I followed the tracks.  Rabbits, who usually cover these grounds fleeting and unheeded, left the history of their foraging along the edges of the brush.  When the temperature plunges to the single digits later this week, their prints will be frozen into a primitive script and preserved beyond their rightful time, yielding up their secrets to those with the patience and the mind to decipher them.

I’ll save these thoughts for another walk, if for nothing else than to warm my insides when the dog dallies too long in the execution of his business, and the winds make unreasonable demands of my exposed flesh.  It’s time to the head back to the house, so I return the woods to the animals, who have undoubtedly been eyeing me from the brush, wondering if I will ever leave.