Chapter
One
A Most Sustainable Community
THE CITIZENS OF BRIGHTS GROVE, a town along the meandering Wisconsin river, thought of themselves as one of North America’s most sustainable small communities. Three generations of citizens had cobbled together collaborative projects to accomplish good things for the community, its natural environs, and its economy. At an annual celebration on the town’s commons, the mayor extolled these traditions. She said, “We must never take lightly the community spirit of this town and the well-being it provides us. I am very grateful for our accomplishments but we must never lose our humility and our respect for the fragile Earth that nurtures us.”
What was it about Brights Grove?
Award-winning public schools prepared students to uphold its vision of sustainability and to become self-reliant, productive citizens. Brights Grove parks were biologically diverse with seasonal blossoms and fragrances and green meadows to grace the imaginations of children who could safely walk and cycle and play there. Small plazas and pocket parks dotted the town center and the manicured neighborhoods. People gathered in these places to celebrate birthdays and holidays. Boulevards and lanes, shaded by stately native trees and an understory of shrubs that bloomed throughout spring and summer, harbored bike lanes and safe crossings.
Brights Grove’s strong sense of place was reflected in the charming public buildings and well-kept offices, shops, and homes. Small businesses, locally owned banks, and a vibrant farmer’s market perpetuated local wealth and sustained good jobs. Foresighted town councils provided incentives for citizens to seek energy independence. Solar panels sparkled on many roofs; wind turbines could be seen on surrounding hills. There was a mini-hydro system in the river. About a third of Brights Grove’s electric power derived from renewable sources.
Looking outward from the town’s central green, as far as the eye could see, were small farms with wood lots, grain fields, vineyards, orchards, livestock, and diverse landscapes protecting watersheds which, in turn, sustained the farms. Tributary streams and the Wisconsin River flowed beneath ribbons of riverine vegetation giving shelter to communities of mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish. Coyotes howled and whippoorwills called on moonlit summer nights as nocturnal animals scurried across the fields. In season, deer, wild turkeys, woodcocks, waterfowl, and black bear passed through the Brights Grove School Forest and Prairie Wetlands, a large acreage extending westward from the elementary school to Lake Amelia.
Midwestern travelers came great distances to walk the cobbled streets of the quaint business district with its shops and galleries. They also came to see the great migrations of waterfowl in spring and fall and to fish the rivers and streams. In summer people spread picnics and sat in their lawn chairs at the Shakespeare Festival and weekly concerts on the green. A jazz and blues fest at the riverfront attracted performers and audiences from all over the country. Visitors relaxed in the town’s locally owned hotels and inns and sampled locally grown foods and wines and sipped craft brews in the pubs and restaurants.
In all, Brights Grove was a rare place of enlightenment where people respected one another and determinedly worked to protect and sustain their slice of the natural world and their local economy. There was neither an elite upper class nor downtrodden poor. Unlike many communities in North America, Brights Grove had a prosperous middle class and had achieved some gold standards of sustainability. Brights Grove, its inhabitants were convinced, was a locally resilient community.
Then the world turned upside down. Citizens of Brights Grove looked in horror beyond their beloved town to witness terrifying things which soon rippled into Brights Grove itself. Goods on the shelves at Miller’s supermarket dwindled until the Miller family could do nothing but shutter the store. Gasoline deliveries were intermittent before drying up for good. Vehicles ground to a halt. Even when rare deliveries of gasoline arrived, they were tainted. People found their trucks, tractors, and cars failing. Without replacement parts, lubricants, and tires, vehicles became useless. The banks closed when the dollar crashed. When the electric grid sputtered and died, and the Internet, mobile, and telephone services shut down, credit systems collapsed. Control systems to sustain power from solar panels, wind turbines, and the mini-hydro system soon also began to fail. As supply chains withered and tourism ceased, inns and restaurants trimmed their services and menus until nobody cared, or came.
Those who survived the blistering summers and super storms of an increasingly capricious climate, intent as they were on growing food, had no time for community governance, churches, or the farmers market. Confronted by a climate that decimated orchards, vineyards, and grain fields, and killed chickens and livestock, many starved. Potholed roads encroached upon by weeds, autumn olive, and multiflora rose stood as grimly sculpted alleyways of browned and withered trees beyond which was no man’s land. Brights Grove School Forest and Prairie Wetlands, annually blackened by wild fires, became a sinkhole of erosion and death. Lifeless streams ceased to flow; the Wisconsin River ran dry in mid-summer. Barebones subsistence was the new normal for even the most accomplished gardeners and farmers. Survival came down to looking after one’s self and family. Community spirit had long been displaced by a mean-spirited lack of civility and lawlessness.
Exacerbated by human vanity, ignorance, and hubris, Brights Grove had fallen victim to the recurring cycles in nature and commerce. Like phases of human life from birth to death, these cycles proceed predictably and operate at many scales and time frames. The little town’s three generation journey toward sustainability collapsed under the weight of a tragically changing climate, toppling structures, and far away disintegrating financial systems. As materials, energy resources, information systems, and indebtedness became more tightly interconnected, human institutions and natural systems became more and more rigid and less and less able to adapt. The political economies of nations and international corporations and cartels, the communications infrastructure and institutions they depended on, the rapidly changing global climate and associated disease vectors all failed simultaneously.
Dependence on historic ways of doing things and reliance on inflexible institutions and structures made the world beyond Brights Grove and ultimately the town itself painfully vulnerable. Relatively small disturbances pushed everything — all the old ways and some new ones — over the cliff. The inevitable collapse had happened.
Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter named this scenario “the creative gale of destruction”.1 Collapse, he believed, of capitalist enterprises is inevitable and good, for it releases new energies, resources, and creative potential for rebirth and reorganization. Ecologists have chronicled the same story in the collapse, rebirth, and evolution of species and ecosystems. Brights Grove may be a mythical town but the progression of human and ecological systems toward an abysmal future is anything but imagined. It may become the stark reality of our children and grandchildren. What does this cyclic progression portend? Why do we fail to understand its inevitability? Can we come to understand that beyond our almost certain fate, rebirth is possible? What will come next? These are the life and death questions I seek to answer in this book.
2
In the copse of Ohio birches, he lay aside the book, and fell deeply asleep, his soul at rest in big bluestem and Indian grass. When he opened his eyes, the shade had lengthened. Clouds had gathered on the southwestern horizon. Humidity had risen. Ozone. He heard thunder in the distance. As always, he awoke pondering their plight, or was it their wealth of opportunity? As though preparing ground for tillage, he tried to clear his troubled mind, to hear himself think; to envision Kate, her life, her final note; to recall the high purpose and chaos of that fateful semester in 2013 and what had since befallen the world; and now to embrace the obstacles that daily challenged survivors.
In quiet repose, two decades after all hell broke loose, he reminded himself of the natural regeneration of this little valley. That times had been cruel for humans grabbed him by the throat every day: the losses incalculable, ineffable, his community down to a few dozen souls. He could write verses to rival Othello’s lamentation. Though the forests looked more like North Carolina than Ohio, the wild ones — the birds and soils and plants and animals, the river, and probably microorganisms and pathogens too, certainly the mosquitoes — were doing fine. Even as his heart grieved over all that was irreclaimable, it throbbed at the thought of reviving landscapes. But which of these two was more significant? Which yielded hope to abide another day? The resilience of nature, Stefan decided. If we make it, we are at best underlings in this picture.
Across the river, mourning doves began their evening coos, interrupting yet another aimless reverie and calling him to what he must do before he slept. A bald eagle flapped noisily out of an oak on the far bank as he rose and began to amble along the river toward the ones he loved.