CHAPTER 6
Going Local! A Coherent Community Response
Buoyed by the initial response to our work and feeling compelled to quickly expand our efforts, in January 2006 we held a daylong conference, “Going Local! Preparing for the Accelerating Energy Crisis,” on the University of Colorado campus, which was attended by more than four hundred people (on a day when the Broncos were playing in nearby Denver). The event promised “to inform citizens about options for preparing for near-term disruptions and to encourage participating in the strategic planning process for achieving long-term community self-reliance in energy, food, and economy.” Julian Darley was a featured speaker, along with Al Bartlett, who—with a stack of aging overhead transparencies (he never used PowerPoint)—once again patiently explained how failure to grasp the exponential function could drive humanity to the brink of collapse. Another speaker was Megan Quinn from Community Solutions in Yellow Springs, Ohio, who introduced the national premiere of the film The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.25
Instead of designating myself as a speaker, I chose to be the conference’s “weaver,” providing context, as well as introducing and bridging between the speakers. For instance, I tied the issue of Y2K into the current challenge.
We sometimes get comments from people that go like this: “Isn’t peak oil just like the so-called Y2K crisis, a bunch of people predicting doom and gloom and then nothing happens? We got all worked up about Y2K, and it turned out to be nothing! How do we know this isn’t the same kind of thing?”
Well, what’s important to know about the Y2K problem is that the reason “nothing happened” is that nearly half a trillion dollars was spent around the world in an emergency effort to remediate the problem and prevent cataclysmic cascading system breakdown. We almost didn’t make it, because the remediation effort began very late; and because it began so late, it cost a lot more than it should have. But we were successful in preventing a serious problem from becoming a global disaster. We did a good job with Y2K, and you can thank the people who risked their reputations and careers to raise the warning and draw attention to the issue when almost no one wanted to hear about it.
As Matt Simmons26 likes to say, “A crisis is a series of problems ignored until they become terminal.” Y2K was ignored for forty years. Peak oil has been ignored since Jimmy Carter.
Aldous Huxley said something very similar: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Peak oil is a fact. It’s geology. We should be very wary of economists who deny or ignore the reality of peak oil.
So yes, the situation with peak oil is in some ways similar. Today, people in communities around the world are stepping forward to ensure that the energy crisis does not become an unnecessary global disaster. It takes awareness, it takes commitment, and it takes concerted action. This is an issue that cannot be ignored any longer. We don’t know if we can get the job done in time, but we’re going to do our very best.
A month after this initial conference, we gathered more than a hundred volunteers into several working groups (we were uncomfortable with the idea of committees) to explore various aspects of relocalization, including renewable energy, transportation, food production and distribution, manufacturing and employment, parallel economic infrastructure, local currencies, health care, and crisis preparedness. With all this momentum, we felt we were well on the way toward developing a viable community-based plan for Boulder County to become resilient and self-reliant, able to meet its essential needs locally. We were naive, of course.
While the planning process was getting started, we continued to hold public meetings—speakers, films, presentations—because we were convinced that public education and awareness were job one. And from these meetings, our working groups grew to a total of somewhere around 125 people. This sounds great, but actually it was a disaster. We quickly learned that it’s not possible to do strategic assessment and planning in such a large group, with people who have widely divergent understandings, are at different stages of commitment, possess greatly varying skill sets, and often have limited time to devote to the process.
As the working groups launched into the daunting task of developing a comprehensive plan, things quickly fell apart. To our dismay (and despite our best efforts), most of the groups essentially abandoned their work by the end of that first summer. Few people had the time or discipline to contribute productively to the process. And it became painfully clear that no one anywhere knew how to relocalize a community—and that, as near as we could tell, it had never even been attempted before. We were confronted with the reality that the process was going to be much more difficult than we had hoped and that it would likely take much more time than we thought we had left before collapse was upon us. Our initial excitement dissolved into doubt and depression.
We had thought that we were building an organization that would be taking on the responsibility of relocalizing Boulder, or at least of leading the effort. But the problem was that building the organization and dealing with all the drama of the organizational growth issues—the endless cycle of forming, storming, reforming, and norming—was consuming our time and energy. The real work wasn’t getting done.
Somewhere along the way, it occurred to us that perhaps we shouldn’t be attempting to build an organization at all. Maybe we should focus on being a catalyst for relocalization in the community—or maybe even just a catalyst for community.
After making that mental shift, two things happened. First, the strain of building an organization went away; the load lightened. Second—and surprisingly—our impact in the community increased dramatically.
Meanwhile, gasoline prices settled down, and lots of people got comfortable again and started falling asleep. We knew the lull would be temporary. We also knew that as global warming began to dawn in the public consciousness, attention would be diverted away from peak oil, and that we were going to face a lot of business as usual.
But, this being an emergency—a Long Emergency—we knew that we couldn’t slow down. In fact, it was clear to us that we needed to greatly accelerate our efforts. We didn’t have a big organization, since we had stopped trying to build one, but we did have a large opt-in email list, which had grown to over a thousand people—which may sound good, but represented less than 1 percent of Boulder’s population.
In early July 2006, I stepped off the cliff and finally quit my day job in order to focus 100 percent on the challenges and opportunities ahead, and I spent many hours in meetings with our core group to sketch out strategies. And I continually studied the work being done in other communities—both overseas, in Kinsale, Ireland, and Totnes, England, and in the United States, in Willits, CA; Sebastopol, CA; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Bellingham, WA; Tompkins County, NY; and on and on. Meanwhile, Post Carbon Institute’s Relocalization Network had been growing rapidly—to more than 150 communities in something like fourteen nations. I also began exploring the incredible work being done by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). After a while, I began to get the sense that something very big was happening around the country—and perhaps all over the world—that was invisible unless you went looking for it.
“We all need to go looking for it,” I wrote for a public talk. “It’s there, a renaissance of the human spirit that’s manifesting as what we called ‘A Renaissance of Local.’ We need to study it, connect with it, become part of it.”
Our efforts to create an organization to relocalize Boulder had largely been abandoned, but one of the early working groups had been remarkably robust and productive: the local food working group. Composed of several experienced and metrics-oriented gardeners who had been growing most of their own food for years, in 2006 the group estimated that with the current state of agriculture in Boulder County, only about twenty thousand people could be fed from locally sourced food. This was a shocking realization—our population was around three hundred thousand—and it underscored our food insecurity. But they then looked at the upside: at what could happen if we converted all available farmland to growing food for local consumption, if we converted all the lawns and golf courses and parks to food production, if we got people to raise as much food in their yards as possible—that is, if we did everything we could think of, including utilizing the best bio-intensive production methods and reducing our calorie intake to about two thousand calories a day. If we did all that, we might be able to feed as many as 185,000 people—62 percent of the county population.
These tentative numbers—that is, the perspective they gave us, along with our understanding of how peak oil (later dubbed Peak Everything by Heinberg) was inevitably going to impact our local food supply—helped to convince us that we needed to focus our efforts on food localization in Boulder County.
By the fall of 2006, we knew that the impulse to relocalize our community was simply not going to work. Our best alternative, we suspected, was to focus solely on localizing our food supply in Boulder County. We proposed to the remaining members of Boulder Valley Relocalization a single self-organizing working group for this purpose. We also outlined some specific short-term projects that the group could focus on, based on real needs that we had come to recognize. These included
• increasing the number of gardens in our community by 100 percent;
• working with local farmers to increase community supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions by 100 percent;
• enrolling two hundred people in permaculture courses;
• developing three new community greenhouses; and
• organizing volunteering at local farms to increase production and reduce labor costs.
By that time, many Boulder Valley Relocalization members were experiencing burnout. For them, these projects seemed far too overwhelming, simply out of reach. Leadership tensions splintered the group, and in the fall, we knew that Boulder Valley Relocalization had utterly failed and would be no more. What we could not see was that the seeds for accomplishing the goals we envisioned had already been planted and that the work would be done in ways that we could not foresee.
Meanwhile, Lynette Marie and I found ourselves facing a greater sense of urgency than ever before, but no organization had coalesced to take on the task of leading our community forward. As winter set in, we knew only that we didn’t know what to do but start over.
Faced with the challenge of reinventing our organization, we were driven by a stark realization that came from beyond the world, in a teaching delivered through Marshall Vian Summers: “Your work here now is to preserve human freedom and to establish yourselves in the universe as a free and independent race. If you fail, then all that humanity has accomplished will be lost. All the teaching, all of the true spiritual understanding, all of the art, all of the culture, all of your advancements can be lost. Impossible, you say? Well, think of all the human cultures that have disappeared even from your world. All that they established is lost, leaving only a few traces.” In our innermost being, we knew this to be true.
We also recalled the story of a longtime student of Buckminster Fuller. Sometime in the last few years of Fuller’s legendary life, the student asked, “What do you see when you look out into the future?” Bucky replied, “Unprecedented hardship.”
In presentations, we had often shown a cartoon that featured two young boys, seriously overweight, downing pizza and cola in front of a television set (or computer monitor). One of them says to the other, “What do you want to be if you grow up?”
We knew that something was being asked of us that we had not quite grasped. We were on the threshold of something we could not quite see.
It’s significant that somewhere along the way, Julian Darley came to view our organization as the leading example of a relocalization effort in the nation and wanted to promote us as such. This was flattering, in a way, but it was also terribly unsettling. If we were the strongest example of a relocalization initiative, the movement was certainly in as much trouble as we feared.
Our new strategy was to do the unthinkable, maybe the impossible. Our goal was a man-on-the-moon project—a relocalized economy in an energy-constrained future. We thought it might take a decade and formed a for-profit social venture that would spearhead a county-wide effort. With an ambitious business plan in hand, we were able to secure a small amount of startup capital from an angel investor and some initial sponsors, which made it possible to put a few of us on staff with a salary (a victory for sustainability).
We launched our campaign—Boulder County Going Local!—on March 15, 2007, at a big downtown event at a facility lovingly called Republic of Boulder. We expected maybe seventy-five to one hundred people, but more than 250 people came out that night. We had thirty speakers, each given two minutes—our early partners, supporters, and sponsors—and I outlined what the campaign was all about.
Behind this campaign is the understanding that we must learn to reweave the fabric of fundamental connections and relationships that have been at the heart of human civilization from the beginning. We must learn to reconnect with the earth, with the seasons, with our biosphere, with each other. We must rebuild our relationships with those who live in our neighborhoods, with those who grow our food, with those who produce and sell the goods we need, with those who supply the services we require. And we must do it all locally as much as possible, rebuilding local living economies. Only through profoundly local living can we curtail our profligate consumption, end our contribution to global warming, and restore balance and sanity to our planet.
Our communities are being called to quickly become largely self-reliant, to develop the capacity to produce locally our most essential needs. The longer-term vision is that such relocalized communities will naturally trade their surpluses interdependently with surrounding relocalized communities, forming self-reliant bioregions that trade surpluses with each other. This will be a radical and welcome shift from the tangled web of codependent relationships that we call a globalized economy.
This transition to a local living economy will take some time, even though we don’t have much time. We are all called here to make this transition possible.