Sustainable Community-Building

A topic I am interested in is the building of relationships within one's community that contribute to the sustainability of that community.

One thing I have found to be very effective is building relationships with small farmers who sell produce at the local farmers' market. I go every chance I get. Over the course of this summer and fall, I have become quite a familiar face at the farmer's market. The farmers there know me by face, a couple call my by my name, and they all know my dog. Some of the farmers are now slipping extra vegetables into my bags on a regular basis. These relationships have proved fruitful (heh) for me, and the farmers love talking about their farms to customers. They also appreciate my regular patronage, I'm sure. I'm going to ask to visit a farm or two one of these days, and hopefully one day join the ranks of the small farmers in my area. Small farmers are one of the most important groups of people you can meet, so support them when you can.

Another relationship I have begun is with a local coffee shop in the small downtown area I frequent. I like hanging out and doing work there while sipping loose-leaf tea. One day, I went to the counter and asked if they did anything with their coffee grounds and tea leaves besides throwing them out. They were delighted that I wanted to compost them and text-message me when they have a 5-gallon bucket of amazing compost material for me.

Neighbours helping neighbours will be the theme of a world that forces us into sustainable habits. What are some of your experiences with this?

My husband and I frequent the farmers market and visit locally owned coffeeshops rather than Starbucks (usually...sometimes a frappuccino just sounds good).  We purchase our tea loose-leaf from a neighborhood shop, and compost the leaves.  I don't know if I'm doing the composting thing correctly, but after years of reading, I feel I need to just do in order to make full sense of it all.  I haven't made such strong connections with the farmers of my local markets (as in, I won't be visiting their farms), but I'm on a first-name basis with the owners of one shop, and a familiar face in two others.

I'd really like to build some sort of cooperation with my neighbors.  I live in a small complex of townhouses and apartments, so it would be easy to get to know everyone on a first-name basis.  Unfortunately, nobody around here is really interested in each other.  I'll sit out and chat with the manager when I can, but it seems we're as friendly as it gets.

I support our local CSA (community supported agriculture) group not only by buying seasonal shares from a farm in my own state of Maryland, but also by being the Newsletter editor of my CSA. In the Newsletter, I try to post articles relating to how we can build more sustainable communities. For example, one of my recent articles was about how nursing schools are now incorporating urban gardening into their community health curricula. Hey! That wasn't done back in the day that I was in nursng school! :)

Another interesting idea came up this past year when a group of individuals within my neighborhood decided to create a native species network. This is a club that promotes the use of native species in gardening. I got very excited about that idea after reading the book Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy. I started doing this type of gardening and got several other LTers interested in it over on our Gardens & Books group. The most interesting result of doing this (to me, at least) was following the pictures of qebo's garden as she was able to attract many species of butterflies to her garden as well as follow their life cycles as they layed eggs and formed chrysalises, later emerging as butterflies. She had a lot more success with this than I did!

I'd love to hear what others are doing and maybe adopt some of your ideas here within my own community.

Gar Smith from the International Forum on Globalization has an energy road map to propose. It suggests in part that we all join the "2,000 watt society." "If the average Swiss citizen can manage to live comfortably on 5,000 watts (17,500 kWh per year), Americans, who presently consume 12,000, can conceivably learn, with mindfulness and conservation, to power down to, say, 6,000 for starters."

Again from Gar Smith, an organization called One Block At A Time brings neighbors together block by block to lower solarization costs.

Here's a profile on Gar Smith: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1595

This guy
http://opensourceecology.org/
Dr. Marcin Jakubowski ,
is coming to Berea College next week to speak.
I plan to stay over and attend. It will give me a chance to further meet the locals who are active in transformation.
I recommend the Open Source Philosophy video. His main point is that our economy/production could be based on collaboration rather than competition, and thus be much less wasteful.

Yeah, books are easy. People are hard. :-)

>4 MaureenRoy:

"If the average Swiss citizen can manage to live comfortably on 5,000 watts (17,500 kWh per year), Americans, who presently consume 12,000, can conceivably learn, with mindfulness and conservation, to power down to, say, 6,000 for starters."

Is this per PERSON or per HOUSEHOLD?

I don't have any electric bills handy from when I lived in my house, (and they've probably all gone off with the paper recycling by now), but as of the end date of March 21st on my most recent electric bill, my usage for the previous year was 2,140 KWH. I'm not sure how much my usage would get upped by my use of the laundry room in the complex, or for pumping the water thru the heating baseboard.

My usage in the house was definitely higher since I had a washer and dryer right there to use, and I was also on a well so had a pump for water, and the heating was hot water baseboard, so there was a pump for that.

Oh, let's please move this to a new thread focusing on just utility use comparisons from country to country. I would love to see the averages and use those figures to measure my own progress in reductions. I recently saw a statistic about water use comparisons which I'll try to locate.

And welcome to the group rastaphrog!

Has anyone started a tool-lending library? We've recently built a community garden, and a shed and the next logical thing is for us to start a tool lending library based on this:

http://localtools.org/

I'm also selling shares in a neighborhood pick-up truck.

enevada, here a list of upwards of 100 tool-lending libraries. Nothing in Nevada yet, but if you show this list to your local county government, perhaps yours could be the first jurisdiction in Nevada to start one:

http://www.ask.com/wiki/List_of_tool-lending_libraries?o=2800&qsrc=999

From an April 9, 2013 NYTimes blog, here's a heads-up about less watering that produces more crops. Large farms don't like it because it's labor-intensive, but it works just fine for smaller growers. Its comments section, attached below the blog entry, is also worth a read.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/for-farmers-in-bihar-a-simple-solution...

Here's another open source coperative endeavor:

http://n55.dk/NEWS/omninews.html

I am cross-posting (from our Zeitgeist thread) a textbook that has its 2nd edition being published in July 2013: Planning for Sustainability: Creating Livable, Equitable, and Ecological Communities. This new 2nd edition sounds like a major reworking and expansion of the original title.

I'm not sure if I've posted this before, but this is a directory of Transition Towns in the USA:
http://www.transitionus.org/initiatives-map

You can search for groups in your part of the country and maybe find international links too.

I attended my first meeting at Sustainable Berea. I met like-minded people, got some garden starts, heard about plans for this October's Solar Tour, ate some FAABULOUS blueberry cobbler. The meeting had perhaps a dozen people; fewer than I had expected, and none of the life-style committed people I've already met. I hope personalities and politics do not detract from the functioning of the group.

This is not my personal experience, but one I read about that has stayed with me. In her book The Good Good Pig, Sy Montgomery mentions that all her neighbors would save their food scraps for her pig -- who started as a tiny runt but who (I think) grew to be 600 (900?) pounds. Which meant he ate a LOT of food. Just imagine how much food waste that kept out of the landfills! And because the author is vegetarian, she gave Christopher the Pig a veggie-only diet also.

I have only recently started composting on a very small scale, and it's taking forever to get even one small batch of "finished" dirt, but I love not throwing my food scraps away. I plan to ask the next-door neighbors on both sides if I can use some of their stray yard waste, as I have trouble finding enough brown/dry materials to add to my compost.

I've begun snatch and grab operations on trash day, as my personal waste stream is so small. I nabbed a huge bag of clippings that I added to the bare soil hilling my potatoes last week.

Here in Portland, ME some entrepreneurial types launched curbside composting - after they presented at our library Garden and Composting Workshop , I became a customer. The idea is that you build up 'compost equity' - leave your bucket on the curb, and eventually fresh compost will be delivered back to you. There is a fee, but also volunteering opportunities for those who can't or don't want to pay - there is a pretty well-established bartering culture here in Maine, long live the frugal Yankee.

http://garbagetogarden.org/

There was a scene in Dirt! the movie in which an entrepreneur was composting huge amounts of garbage for re-sale, and the camera scene implied that lots of stuff not normally thought of as compostable was part of the pile. I'm considering shredding some types of paper to add to my pile. I do want to be careful not to add any questionable compounds.

In grade school, my daughter had gerbils, and did her science project on measuring how much paper waste they could convert to garden supplement.

I so applaud the garbage to garden type activities, helping to sensitize the average person.
Our community had a communal pig farm fed by weekly garbage pick up. That was in the 1920s.

To Milotooberry,

Here is another volume of an academic book, but it sounds like one of the best yet on the transition topic, so it may be worth the time and expense of tracking down:

From 2009, The Transition to sustainable Living and Practice is the name of this volume in a series. (This title is volume 4.) Advances in Sustainability and Environmental Practices is the name of the series. This is a pricey volume or item ($114.95), probably because it has been produced as a textbook, or at any rate as an academic offering. But I think that it is of exceptional interest because the topic of the transition to sustainability is one on which very little has been written as of July 2013. Publisher is: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, which is now in the process of changing its name and online platform. At this moment the link is:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/books.htm?issn=2041-806X&volume=4
The authors of volume 4 are Liam Leonard and John Barry, and this books weighs in at 212 pages.

Forthcoming in 2013 and 2014 are the following that should be able to help a lot with your interest in building relationships within the community:

July 4, 2013: Outdoor classrooms: a handbook for school gardens.

July 25, 2013: Planning for Sustainability: creating livable, equitable and ecological communities.

July 30, 2013: GreenTown USA: the handbook for America's sustainable future. Authors are Thomas J. Fox, Daniel Wallach, et.al.

Aug. 15, 2013: Earth user's guide to teaching permaculture.

Sept. 2013: The Hidden Potential of Sustainable Neighborhoods. Author is Harrison Fraker.

Dec. 1, 2013: Blessed by Less: clearing your life of clutter by living lightly.

April 8, 2014: Plastic Purge: how to use less plastic, eat better, keep toxins out of your body, and help save the sea turtles.

"Sustainable community building" has to also include the people who work on small farms. These workers are a population typically hidden within the quickly growing locavore movement. A new book that explains the history, current status and needs of this population is Labor and the locavore. Here is a book review of that title by independent journalist Karl Grossman:

http://portside.org/2015-02-02/locavore-movement-overlooks-farmworkers

That publisher, UC Press, has a tradition of publishing in-depth titles on the subject of farm labor. That tradition developed following the emergence of the best-selling Grapes of wrath, written by a California native son, John Steinbeck. Here are 572 other UC Press titles on farm labor:

http://www.ucpress.edu/search.php?cx=003468885755146690115%3Aomb6ogek1s8&cof...

New in March 2015, the USDA is offering grant money to any small-scale local farmers, Ag organizations or other local food suppliers. The grant application deadline is in May 2015:

http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDAOC/bulletins/f833f3

From March 2015, a new title from the interesting US publisher Timber Press focuses on the community garden movement in the USA:

http://www.timberpress.com/books/start_community_food_garden/joy/9781604694840

Start a community food garden

Thanks for the suggestions, @Indybooks! Keep them coming. They look like great resources.

My church has recently converted some of its yard space into a nice community garden, even establishing it as a 501C-3 nonprofit entity so that it endures beyond the time given by the first wave of participants.

I'm now living on a farm property that I plan on turning into a business once I get the plan worked out and do my market research. The fruit and nut trees will take some time to bear enough to sell, so I'll be preparing, researching, and networking in the meantime. I have found that there are many others out there who wish they could get involved in developing sustainable communities; once I mention projects I'm working on, they really light up and express their interest.

2wonderY, I have read and heard of many examples of would-be sustainable communities that were undone by differences in politics, philosophies, etc. It would seem that many of these groups lack a fundamental, shared core philosophy that might otherwise serve to keep them together. I am wondering if religion (since I am a Christian, I understandably have some skin in the game on this topic) could serve as that binding force. Of course, this force has not proved to hold communities together in countless cases, but it could help by offering a set of common values that members of a sustainable community can fall back on in times of disagreement. This is, I think, one of the things that has served to make many religions so enduring in human history. I'm sure there are others who could unpack this much better than I can. I do, however, have some experience with a religious community that has many attributes of a so-called sustainable community, and I have learned a great deal about community dynamics firsthand through this. If anyone is interested in this, I could share more.

Building a sustainable community in Monterey County, California:

http://www.sustainablemontereycounty.org/2015/08/

Too cool! In Paris, France, they went free of cars and trucks on a Sunday. Imagine your city without cars and trucks one day a week ... ask your local officials to do that!

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/09/26/uk-france-carfreeday-idUKKCN0RQ0EZ20150...

Community building for farming families:

http://www.willitsnews.com/lifestyle/20160309/connections-bloom-at-farmers-conve...

Starting in 2006, the English village of Ashton Hayes, in Cheshire (nearest big city is Liverpool), set a goal of going carbon-neutral. Their website which discusses their methods is:

http://www.goingcarbonneutral.co.uk/

The NYTimes story on the transformation of Ashton Hayes, Monday August 22, 2016:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/science/english-village-becomes-climate-leader...

Other titles from recent years that have a lot to say about the building of sustainable communities:

The Upcycle, April 2013. Toward an Urban Ecology, July 2016.

December 2017: Especially at some winter holiday parties, in some circles it is still popular to ask guests to bring a "White Elephant" gift. So my question for you is, is there such a thing as a sustainable white elephant gift? Note --- the gift should be a thing, not a person, because at no time do people like to be lectured, least of all during the winter holidays.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this question. To all, a Happy Hanukkah, Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwaanza, Happy New Year ... Happy Everything!

In addition, if you plan to see the new Star Wars movie, be aware that some movie theaters, to mark that occasion, are offering free group photos in their lobbies: Your group photos will be flanked by 2 storm troopers. You can be prepared for that by wearing a Jedi costume to the theater ... that way, the darkness in the photo will be balanced by the light. Back at ya, Disney.

>29 MaureenRoy: I don't see why -- in theory -- it wouldn't be possible to give a sustainable white elephant gift. I mean, I've participated in white elephant gift exchanges where the whole idea was to bring something you found in your basement/attic/garage that you didn't have a use for but maybe someone else might (with bonus points if it was weird and/or amusing), and I don't know how you get more sustainable than regifting things that would otherwise end up in the trash. But it depends on the group -- people interpret "white elephant" in so many ways. Sometimes it means gag gifts, sometimes it means nice inexpensive new items, etc. For gifts under $10 I think there would be plenty of options (non-petroleum-based soaps, fair trade coffee/tea, rechargeable batteries, hand-crank flashlight, reusable travel mug, power-saving devices, ornaments from a local craft fair, etc.)

What a great list of ideas, thank you. A friend of mine on another social media site suggested the following. (Our price limit was "under $20.00.") Link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074NQLRTF/ref=sr_ob_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1514304020&...

Add Denver, Colorado to the list of sustainable community builders:

https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/03/why-rooftop-gardens-cool-cities/

I've spent a bit of time in Colorado and found quite a few progressive little communities there. Boulder springs to mind.

Off topic completely, but Denver also has a huge and very good model railroad store, which strikes me as being pretty progressive!

Railroads -- agreed ... one US presidential candidate in the last 20 years made a point of doing his campaigning by rail because rail travel is surprisingly sustainable.

In the Zeitgeist thread in August 2018, be aware that one recommended title touches on communities: Carrots don't grow on trees: building sustainable and resilient communities, by Robert Turner ... publisher is Discovery Books LLC.

In September 2018, a newspaper article (and research report link) explains what San Francisco bay area communities are or are not doing well regarding sustainable living:

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8736177-181/these-bay-area-cities-have

I attended a community meeting this week concerning flood recovery. (Elk River had a 1000 year flood in 2016) The conversation was deliberately wide-ranging and transportation was a topic. As a slight outsider, I was surprised to hear that a sizeable number of residents who can't afford cars or who no longer have licenses (from DUIs, etc.) have turned to bicycles to get everywhere - work, shopping. And not just in town, but out into the hollows, which are steep! If local government can incorporate that fact into planning and development, that would be such a positive, in so many ways.

>34 MaureenRoy: Trains are pretty sustainable (and lend themselves well to electrification**), and rail is probably the best alternative to air freight for overland shipping.

However, long-distance passenger rail travel is at present often thoroughly impractical, at least in the less-densely populated parts of the US. This Colorado native has vivid childhood memories of several cross-country Amtrak journeys gone badly wrong because of late/cancelled trains and missed connections and the general difficulty of getting from point A (Denver) to point B (St. Louis) when they aren't located along a standard route. And since the 90s the number of passenger routes has dwindled even more. During my childhood Union Station in Denver was already in its twilight as a passenger rail station; today it has been converted into the central station for the regional bus/light rail transit system.

One thing I love about living in Germany is the well-developed rail network. It's incredibly efficient and in many cases more convenient than either flying or driving. The US already has much of the necessary physical infrastructure (used mostly for freight traffic), but in other respects it has a very long way to go, and the challenges that need to be overcome before people start seeing train travel as a viable alternative to flying are pretty substantial. Obviously the distances are an issue -- the scale is simply completely different than in Europe, and that's not a small problem. But there also need to be a lot more routes, running more frequently, and there we have a bit of a catch-22: people won't use the trains unless they're convenient, but the routes won't get expanded unless there is already high demand. Probably the first step will have to be to expand local and interregional commuter rail and then start creating routes connecting these regional networks.

>33 John5918: It's funny, I don't necessarily associate model railroaders (I grew up with one) with progressivism. I'm sure some of them are, but I suspect the phenomenon also draws heavily on a certain bygone era and the romanticization of the American West and that's something that could easily appeal to conservatives, too.

** Much of the content may not be new to anyone here, but I want to mention the volume energie.wenden, which contains some very good overviews of the challenges for transitioning away from fossil-based energy in all sectors (power, heating, transportation, etc.). The book is a companion to a special exhibition on energy transitions at the Deutsches Museum (a science and technology museum in Munich, Germany) in 2017/18. Presumably some or all of the content will be put online at some point due to open-access requirements of the German government, but for now I believe it is only in book form.
Disclaimer: I translated most of the volume into English, so I have a bit of personal pride in the end result, but I do not receive any compensation for sales of the book.

>37 spiphany: I don't necessarily associate model railroaders (I grew up with one) with progressivism. I'm sure some of them are, but I suspect the phenomenon also draws heavily on a certain bygone era and the romanticization of the American West and that's something that could easily appeal to conservatives, too.

Indeed. I suspect model railroading spans the full political spectrum. While it often does hark back to the past (my own model railway under construction is loosely based on Africa when I first came to this continent in the 1970s), there are also a lot of very modern model railway layouts.

October 2018: Norway becomes the first country on Earth to ban deforestation. The story that moved me to tears. Link:

https://www.ecowatch.com/norway-becomes-worlds-first-country-to-ban-deforestatio...

>39 MaureenRoy: deforestation

The title escapes me--I'll post when it comes to me--but there's a book you would enjoy, if you haven't already. It traces how civilizations such as Japan, Easter Island, and Hispaniola (Haiti & Dominican Republic) persist or failed depending on how they use their resources, almost always forests. Shoguns of Japan made good decisions, as I recall, as did Dominican Republic. Easter Island and Haiti not so much.

ETA: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Margd and everyone, I did read Collapse about 3 years ago. It is compelling, however several other scholars have published new data since then on the potential reasons for the failed civilization on Easter Island. So, the book Collapse is *not* the definitive theory on Easter island's history.

July 2019, from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Could America’s farmers—a demographic seen as religious and conservative—be a secret weapon in the climate fight? Farmers and environmentalists have found common ground in the burgeoning soil health movement. http://bit.ly/2xnEBYJ

July 2019: A blog with many new examples for transition community building:

https://www.arkessa.com/smart-cities/

July 28, 2019: A way of community building I had not thought of:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/114492368/skycity-to-put-climate-change-guide-i...

‘Ecosystem neighbourhood' to be built on old Paris rail site

A new carbon neutral and nature-based neighbourhood designed by SLA and Biecher Architectes is to be built on the site of a former rail depot in Paris, France.

The so-called “ecosystem neighbourhood” is designed to ensure that its constituent parts interact and work to benefit each other. For example, renewable energy generation will power amenities that will link up green spaces...

During pandemics, maybe people over-buy toilet paper (TP) because of uncertainty over how much TP they actually need. So now there's a new free TP calculator:
https://omnicalculator.com/everyday-life/

An online magazine just published a long list of black-owned bookstores in the United States:

https://lithub.com/you-can-order-today-from-these-black-owned-independent-bookst...

Both in and beyond the United States, it would be so interesting to see the range of books on sustainability in bookstores in both developed (some would say over-developed) and developing countries.

As of June 2020, pandemic effects on the US food distribution system:

https://thefern.org/2020/06/covid-19-shows-no-sign-of-slowing-among-food-system-...

The artists' views of regenerative agriculture:

https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/art-reg-ag.shtml

At long last, studies confirming the mental health benefits for children growing up in green spaces are being conducted:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-discover-a-major-lasting-benefit-o...

Online, community sustainability depends on the security and privacy of your own internet connection. Courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), here is a free list of best computer privacy practices:

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/basics

Webinar conference on regenerative agriculture hosted by the one and only UC Davis:

http://cecolusa.ucanr.edu/?newsitem=86979

Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way

An excerpt from the book:
Things don’t magically appear because it’s convenient for you to think they do. Things come from somewhere. These things require materials. There are costs associated with extracting these materials. Those costs are paid by someone. Even if you really want a groovy, solar-powered mass transit system, the materials still have to come from somewhere someone else lived until their home was destroyed so you can have what you want.

If we want to understand how and why a city—and by extension, an industrial civilization—can never be made sustainable, it would be nice to have a shared definition for WHAT A CITY IS. Not many people (including, ironically, urban planners) understand what a city is or how it functions.
We define a city as people living in high enough densities to require the routine importation of resources. This distinguishes cities from villages or towns which support their populations from nearby lands. (As an extension of this, a civilization is a way of life defined by the growth of cities, among other features such as agriculture, standing armies, bureaucracies, and hierarchies of unjust power.)

As soon as you require the routine importation of resources to survive, two things happen. The first is that your way of life can never be sustainable, because requiring the importation of resources means you’ve denuded the landscape of those particular resources, and any way of life that harms the landbase you need to survive is by definition not sustainable. As your city grows, you will denude an ever-larger area to sustain the city.

Let’s get specific: Where do you get bricks for your city? Where do you get wood? Where do you get food? Where do you get copper for electric wires? Where does sewage go? (Well, in the case of New York City, it used to be dumped in the ocean, but when that was stopped by EPA, New York sent it to Colorado, and now it sends it to Alabama, where, “It greatly reduces the quality of life of anybody that this is around,” according to Heather Hall, the mayor of Parrish, Alabama. “You cannot go outside, you can’t sit on your porch, and this stuff, it’s here in our town.”) Where does electronic waste go? Everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. Bright green fairies don’t bring goodies in the night and simultaneously remove All Bad Things.

This is a pattern we’ve seen since the rise of the first city. The pattern is not an accident. Nor is it incidental. This is how cities function.

One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. How many thousands of years of cities devastating landbases do we need before we recognize this pattern?

This is a real question.

The second thing that happens is that your way of life depends on conquest: if you need this resource and people in other communities won’t trade you for it, you’ll take it. If you can’t take it, or you refuse to, your city will dwindle. This, again, is how cities have operated from the beginning.