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People In Your Neighborhood
by Polly Howells
Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, in her seminal work Coming Back to Life, outlines the inner work that each of us must do if we as a species are to transition from what she calls the Industrial Growth Society to the Life-Sustaining Society. She outlines four necessary steps on our spiral of grief, growth, and reconnection: Coming from Gratitude, Honoring our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes, and Going Forth. In 2008, author and ecologist Trebbe Johnson, following the spirit of the second and third of these steps, founded Radical Joy for Hard Times. Once a year, on summer solstice, this organization sponsors the Global Earth Exchange, an event at which people all over the world go to places they care about that have been damaged, tell their stories there, and make a bird out of materials they find on site.
On June 20, 2015, as part of this worldwide Radical Joy experience, nine people from the Hudson Valley towns of Woodstock, Glenford, Saugerties, and West Shokan—Transitioners all—gathered in the woods of Saugerties to honor a piece of land that has had a long history of wounding, dating at least back to the middle of the 19th century. On a stream tributary of the Plattekill Creek, this spot is the site of a gunpowder mill that was built in the early 1800s and violently exploded on May 25, 1854, killing seven of its employees and destroying the town that had grown up around it. The fame of the explosion spread far and wide during that century via a well-known ballad written and sung by the itinerant Bard of Saugerties, Henry Sherman Backus.
For thousands of years before Europeans arrived here, the Esopus people made their summer encampment in these woods, migrating yearly from their Hudson Riverbank winter homes. In the early 19th century, there were more people living in this now completely wooded area five miles west of Saugerties than in the village of Saugerties. Strategically located on the Hudson River, Saugerties was then a prominent industrial center, and gunpowder was an important commodity, promising security and power to westward-moving settlers. After the mill exploded it was never rebuilt, since the once plentiful hickory trees on the stream’s banks that were burned to make charcoal, a necessary ingredient in the manufacture of gunpowder, had all been cut down. Later in the 19th century the forest was again clear cut to provide firewood for the brick factory in Saugerties, on the ruins of which Diamond Mill presently stands.
So those of us who gathered in these woods on the afternoon of June 20, 2015, were standing among trees that were probably third growth, the banks of this little stream having been denuded at least twice since the first settlers came. Many stone walls of the original six mill buildings still stand, though crumbling, and the sluiceway through which rushing water powered the mill wheel is evident.
Honoring the former native inhabitants of this land, we began our ceremony standing in a circle with a bow to each of the four directions and to the elements of earth, air, fire, and water, all so prominent on this piece of land. We then took some time to wander in silence, letting ourselves notice and feel whatever came up for us. Some of us, sitting on that almost 200-year-old stone wall or on the shore of the stream, felt a distant rumbling through our bodies, imagining that explosion 160 years ago. There was a deep sadness as well as a quiet beauty in these woods, twisted pine trees growing through, on, and under the crumbling walls, some of them exhibiting mysterious holes and tunnels through themselves.
After about 45 minutes we returned to our circle, bringing with us found objects that had intrigued us on our walk. Out of these objects we collaboratively constructed a bird, the signature artwork Radical Joy encourages. We made our standing bird out of decaying bark, pine cones, daisies, rocks, bones, mushrooms, and berries, and then took out our phones to photograph the bird and ourselves behind it. One of these photos was sent to the Radical Joy website, where it has joined the stories of the 60 other ceremonies happening across the globe on that same day. We drummed and sang, offered our bird as a gift to this land, and then slowly made our way back to the road.
We came home with a renewed respect for the capacity of Earth to regenerate, to heal its old wounds, and yet at the same time to hold and reveal the secrets of what human beings have done to it. We acknowledged the implicit violence of our industrial civilization and vowed we would continue working to build a new society that honors and protects all life forms.
radicaljoyforhardtimes.org
by Caroline and Kirk Ritchey
Four years ago, after meeting at a Transition Town training, a group from the Woodstock area began holding gatherings and film screenings, marking the beginning of Woodstock Transition. These events provided information about global challenges and presented empowering alternative models. Only 15 months later, over 380 town residents attended our dynamic community forum, the Woodstock Transition Festival. A dozen working groups were formed, each with a particular interest and a willingness to gather information and to take action to build resilience in Woodstock. (The article Woodstock Garden Share in the April 2015 issue of CWN detailed the evolution of one of these groups). In the subsequent two and a half years, the working groups have undergone mission rewrites, name changes, consolidations, dissolutions, and new formations. They have experienced successful collaborations and celebrations, frustrations and a few misunderstandings, and countless delicious potluck meals. Today we are moving forward and keeping the long view in our hearts and minds.
After we rested up from all the fun work to put on our festival in September 2012, we realized that although the Transition Town Movement provided guiding principles and suggested ingredients, there were still many undefined aspects of our initiative. What constitutes membership? How do we make decisions? Do we have any rules? The Wednesday Night Group formed to create a structure to facilitate and support the growth of the Transition Movement in Woodstock. We met in the Woodstock Library weekly for six months to produce our very own constitution. Deep bonds were forged during this period of intense engagement about how best to codify our values. We happily celebrated the implementation of our constitution, eager to redirect our efforts into our working groups. While there was some sweet sadness about the dissolution of the Wednesday Night Group, we knew many of us would reconvene at our monthly Working Group Council meetings. Council meetings provide a forum for keeping abreast of the activities of all Woodstock Transition’s working groups.
The Woodstock Organic Waste (WOW) working group was formed in early 2013, with the mission of lowering the use of plastic by local retailers. After WOW learned that Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA) has an industrial composting facility that processes organic waste into valuable compost for local farms and gardens, their vision expanded to support the establishment of an organic waste hauling system. WOW volunteers now organize the separation of compostable trash at the weekly Woodstock Farm Festival. In April 2014, WOW inspired the Woodstock Town Board to adopt a resolution requiring all town facilities to separate their organic waste for composting, and requesting all local establishments to do the same. WOW’s ultimate goal is ambitious, and a small, dedicated group perseveres to see it through to fruition.
Working Group Support offers support to other working groups. They practice the art of listening, and they study tools for effective group process and conflict resolution. They cultivate their own inner capacities to respond rather than react to changing conditions on our planet. Members of Working Group Support deeply appreciate their weekly meetings where they explore the practical skills, as well as the inner transition, required for us to work together.
Green Energy works to increase energy efficiency and the use of green energy technologies. The Group informs town residents about state-sponsored programs that help us make our buildings more energy efficient. Green Energy has collaborated with RUPCO to enroll homeowners in free NYSERDA Home Energy Assessments. An event co-sponsored by Catskill Mountainkeeper explained how to purchase electricity from Green ESCOs. This summer, Green Energy will be partnering in Woodstock with Solarize Hudson Valley’s neighbor-to-neighbor outreach program to expand solar electric energy. Look for more events that inform local residents how to decrease energy use from fossil fuels and save money.
Woodstock Transition is a young volunteer organization comprised of self-organized working groups. We have touched on a few of the groups and their collaborations with other local organizations here, but there are many more. And we have more ideas than we have time and energy to implement. It is easy to fall prey to focusing on what is not happening yet, but so vitally important to celebrate and share what we have accomplished.
All working group meetings and the monthly Working Group Council meeting are open to anyone interested in joining or observing. The full list of working groups with contact information and subscription to our email list can be found at WoodstockNYTransition.org. We seek to tap the creative energy of our neighbors and ourselves to build a resilient community, and to have fun along the way. Come find out more about us at our monthly Working Group Council Meeting, the first Thursday of every month at the Woodstock Library, 6:30pm!
by Janet Asiain
Transition Towns in Ulster County have developed in a variety of productive ways over the last few years. One of the most successful initiatives is in Woodstock, where a number of working groups are actively envisioning a sustainable future and creating the changes needed for it And one of the most successful of these working groups is the Woodstock Garden Share.
The Garden Share was launched at the Woodstock Transition Town Great Unleashing of community energy in September 2012. Several Woodstockers in attendance found themselves drawn together in an affinity group that quickly found a common purpose: the production of sustainable food for the community to meet present and future needs. To this end they actively network with local farmers and promote home gardens; "Why mow when you can chew?" asks Craig Barber, one of the founders.
With about 80 members now on their mailing list, the group meets monthly to support each other, share information and skills, and network, sometimes at potlucks at one another’s homes, often upstairs at the public library. They frequently extend invitations to the general public to learn about sustainable practices, inviting speakers with expertise in permaculture and/or other aspects of sustainable food production. Ellenville’s permaculture guru Andrew Faust has shared his knowledge with the group, and this month’s meeting on April 8 will feature Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library.
Supporting each other includes cutting costs and ensuring quality by ordering seeds, starter plants, compost, soil amendments, and other gardening supplies together. Acting on the Transition principle of supporting local businesses, they recently made a group order of seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, whose Hudson Valley Seed Freedom Zone the group is committed to support. A Seed Freedom Zone protects the rights of farmers and food producers, preserves biodiversity, and refuses to recognize any law that illegitimately mak
es seed the private property of corporations through patents and other means.
Also in the interest of seed sustainability, the group promotes the harvesting of (organic) seeds from members’ gardens and has recently established a seed exchange at the Woodstock Library, where gardeners can contribute seeds left over from their own planting or harvested from their own gardens. Anyone is welcome to take what they can use (and hopefully contribute back to the seed exchange at some point). The “Take, Grow, Give” project has placed packages of envelopes of seeds and seed sharing information booklets in the food/gardening section of the Woodstock Library.
The Woodstock Garden Share actively partners with local farms in the area, including Whirligig Farm, Great Song Farm, the Long Spoon Collective (a Saugerties Transition Town working group), Four Winds Farm, and Clove Valley Farm. The initiative has invited speakers from these farms and others to speak at Garden Share meetings.
The group has also offered a number of outreach events, “how to” workshops on container gardens, building and planting trellises, and rotating garden crops, for example, and plan to continue and expand these offerings.
Among their visions for the future is the connecting of people who have land but no garden with people who want to garden but have no suitable land.They also hope to find and develop public spaces where food could be grown and available to the entire community. They’d like to attract some energetic young people who want to learn to garden, both in public and private spaces. One member’s dreams include building a community greenhouse for all to use.
Woodstock Garden Share continues to welcome new members, both experienced and novice.
You can get more information on the Woodstock Transition Town Facebook page as well as at the website woodstocknytransition.org.
by Pamela Boyce Simms
Public scrutiny and feedback are welcome and essential in the Transition movement. Learning, broadening our reach, and the healthy evolution of the movement are all fueled by constructive feedback. Transitioners know that they don’t have all of the answers. Creating a global web of localized resilience-building initiatives is a massive, open-ended social experiment. Listening deeply and responding to feedback can help the Transition movement hone the appropriateness of its actions in the alternative-creating adventure on which we’ve embarked.
In its critique, The Transition Movement: Questions of Diversity, Power and Affluence, The Simplicity Institute sets a mirror before the Transition movement, offering Transitioners an opportunity to take stock of their eight year resilience-building journey, and consider pathways forward.
The Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub (MATH) welcomes this opportunity to self-refine by coalescing regional Resources Persons to engage with issues raised in the critique in a monthly teleseminar series. An overview of the series: The Maturation of a Social Movement, A Regional Response to A Critique of the Transition Movement, was offered on December 4. There will be follow-up phone conversations with MATH teleseminar panelists on January 6 and 8.
The Mid-Atlantic regional network, comprised entirely of engaged Transitioners in seven states, generates pragmatic, positive, alternative-building activism in response to climate change, resource depletion, and economic contraction. Fourteen of the thirty-nine Mid-Atlantic Transition initiatives are located in New York’s Lower and Mid-Hudson Valley, Capital District, Tri-County, Mohawk Valley, and NYC subregions. Teleseminar listener feedback contributes to keeping our work grounded, providing public perspectives on strengths and deficiencies and potential pitfalls and windfalls that exist within, and lie ahead of, the Transition movement.
MATH will fold listener feedback into the ongoing process of building an ever-adaptable operating system for its regional network. Feedback helps MATH 1) enhance fluidity of communication, and the responsiveness of our regional work to needs as they arise in the moment at several scales; 2) affirm and create practices that sustain Transitioner vigor, enthusiasm, and passion for the work region-wide; and 3) cultivate a voracious Transitioner appetite for self-transformation and self-awareness in order to gauge ongoing operations effectiveness.
Diversity
The Simplicity Institute accurately depicts the Transitioner demographic as predominantly white, educated, post materialist, middle class, small community people. This information isn’t offered as inherently good or bad, but as the prevalent, de facto reality within the movement. That being said, we in the Mid-Atlantic, a region that incorporates the most highly diverse and population-dense corridor on the planet ask: How does that Transitioner demographic reality impact the reach and relevance of our work? The juxtaposition between the current Transition population and the demographic mix in the Mid-Atlantic region prompts us to explore:
• Whose resilience are we concerned about, and to what end? i.e. Transition to what, where, by whom, for whom?
• Should Transition be more explicitly concerned with social justice?
• Does inclusion in Transition mean assimilating others into our way of viewing the world?
• How do we encourage diversity without “othering” and perpetuating social stratification?
• How might we fold community power dynamics conditioned by ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic stratification that shape relationships into our work?
• How can we honestly look at and skillfully work with various levels of vulnerability between communities, and competing interests within communities?
On the other hand, attempts at all-inclusivity that stem from a lowest common denominator approach could dilute the movement’s impact by valuing “the stretching process” itself over actual meaningful change.
Power & Control Dynamics vs. Non-Hierarchical Balance
• Is there too much top down steering of the movement through the Transition Network and/or national hubs that runs counter to the grassroots driven modus operandi? (Consider this in juxtaposition to the movement’s need to preserve cohesion, coherence, and some semblance of mainstream recognition.)
• Is relocalization capable of solving political as well as environmental problems?
• Are we making a strong enough distinction between “unhealthy localism,” i.e., romanticized insularity, isolationist, protectionist exclusion (to be avoided); and “healthy localism,” i.e., inclusive, intentional, open, relational, connected (to be embraced)?
• Can acts of resistance and micro-transformation destabilize macro-systems?
• Can we dispassionately analyze political power without becoming embroiled in politics?
Affluence or Not: Consumption Patterns and Taboo Topics
Do Transitioners with one foot in the old paradigm and the other in the new gingerly side-step the latent tensions around issues that might alienate people from our “big tent” movement? Here are some:
• Are we directly addressing the fact that consumer capitalism created our current predicament (acknowledging all the ideological associations that loaded term might have for Americans)?
• Are we addressing the reality of downsized material consumption lifestyles on the horizon?
• Are we skirting the issue of ecological damage wrought by continued meat consumption. If yes, what is the projected impact of continuing to do so?
• Can self-organizing Transition communities “ignore capitalism to death” by building a new economy in the shell of the old?
Pamela Boyce Simms is a Transition Trainer with the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub (MATH) of Transition US. This will be the last “Transitioning…” column in Country Wisdom News. For more information or to register for MATH events and teleseminars, visit transitionmidatlantic.org.
by Marie Doyon
In 1912, textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts staged a three-month picket, to protest for fair pay, tolerable working conditions, and good quality of life. One young woman in the picket line carried a sign that read “We Want Bread, but We Want Roses Too.” This line, adapted from a James Oppenheim poem, has greatly shaped the attitude and language of labor protestors for over a century since the strike in Lawrence.
There is a deeply satisfying quality to creating something with your hands, something that takes time. How gratifying is it to feed a gathering of loved ones with food you made from scratch? How rewarding is it to paint the interior of your home? How different does it feel to receive a gift that is handmade? Our culture has always had an understated respect for blood, sweat, and tears, which persists today even as we move away from a lifestyle and an economy that encourages, much less necessitates, us to produce most of the goods and produce we consume.
But there is something honest and true about the process of creating something ourselves. Somewhere deep down we know it is good—good for our hearts, good for our muscles, good for our minds. And yet we’ve reached a point that such practices are widely considered vintage or novelty, if not just outdated and inefficient.
Some people are making a strong push for old-world skills to come back into the foreground, and not in a facetious, hipster-ish way. The Transition movement, which strives to adapt communities’ practices and attitudes to prepare for life in a post-fossil fuel society, involves relocalizing the economy and detaching from the unsustainable corporate consumerist model. Rob Hopkins, pioneer of the movement, envisioned one of the key ingredients for Transition would be “The Great Reskilling.”
Hopkins writes, “A key consideration in scaling up to a more localised economy is addressing the fact that we have lost, or never learnt, many of the skills that such a shift would require. While fostering a culture of social entrepreneurship and its role in creating a strategic local infrastructure will be essential, its realisation will require a huge reskilling, a shift in the focus of existing education and training, not just in terms of local food initiatives, but across the board, particularly in terms of energy and construction.”
Reskilling is, in essence, re-equipping ourselves with skills and knowledge of yesteryear. The (practical) collective wisdom of our species has been clouded over, but it has not been lost entirely. There are pockets of people all over the world still saving seeds and growing food by hand; constructing homes from cob; shearing, spinning, and weaving wool; brewing beer in their basements. By relearning these skills, we are tapping back into our rich cultural and technological legacy. And we are taking back our power. If the power turns off and the gas stops flowing we can still do these things, which makes us resilient.
In Michael Pollan’s book Cooked, he writes about the general view in our modern specialized consumer culture where “‘leisure activities’” should involve consumption, whereas any activity that involves production is leisure’s opposite: work.” He observes how, from our transactional mentality, leisure activities are something you don’t want to outsource because you derive pleasure from them, whereas anything that companies have figured out a way to do for us (and market to us) becomes work, something we should pay to avoid having to do ourselves.
Pollan goes on to examine how home cooking, in its new status as an optional activity, finds itself at a curious and confusing intersection of work and leisure, production and consumption. He suggests that the experience of such an activity has to do more with one’s approach (passion, obligation, intrigue, reticence, etc.).
I think this understanding can be expanded to incorporate all activities taught in reskilling. Before, people tilled the land by hand because they had no other option. With hoes and rakes in hand they were using the most state-of-the-art technology available to them. As technology evolved people seized at new tools to make their work easier, faster without thinking of the long-term impacts of shifting their practices. Now we have the boon of hindsight and the opportunity to willingly take back up our old tools, with the recognition that our more ancient practices were better connected to the earth, less harmful, more sustainable, and fundamentally empowering.
Reskilling is not an abstract, far-away thing. Workshops and classes are happening regularly throughout the Transition network. In Ulster County you have an opportunity to participate in some reskilling activities at the Common Ground Harvest Celebration at the Stone Ridge Orchard on October 26. This “new kind of country fair” will feature reskilling booths with local craftspeople teaching skills like woodworking, blacksmithing, seed saving, beekeeping, and wild crafting (making creams, tinctures, and other products from wild plants).
So before you dismiss Gran and Gramps’ old-fashioned, slow-cooked way of doing things, take a minute to think about the multiplied impact of our modern practices a couple generations down the line. Think about the satisfaction and fulfillment that awaits you at the other end of that handmade project.
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