Changing Gears

I was fortunate to connect yesterday with an interesting couple from Bloomington, Indiana who made a stop in Northfield. Andy Davis and Melissa Henigechanginggears-web.JPG are in the midst of a cross-country bike tour from their hometown to San Francisco. Their trip is being documented on their website, Changing Gears: Shifting Into Sustainability. They describe their project as “the story of two people from Bloomington, Indiana who want to make their town a more sustainable place. It’s a TV show, a movie, and a blog about biking from Indiana to California to learn about that transition to sustainability.”

Biking buddy (and ArTech board chair) Joe Pahr of the Northfield Bicycle Club alerted me to these intrepid travelers yesterday after he bumped into them at Blue Monday and talked about ArTech’s photovoltaic project, on which I have been a consultant and equipment provider. I invited Andy and Melissa over for a cold beverage last night, and they ended up pitching their tent in my back yard and spending the night.

Last night and this morning we talked at length about sustainable community development, their hopes for Bloomington, sustainability efforts here in Northfield, and innaresting folks they have met en route. A couple of the businesses they mentioned to me which I haven’t heard of, and sounded particularly intriguing, were Timbergreen Forestry, a holistic sustainable forestry/milling/wood products/flooring operation near Spring Green, WI, and an innovative and highly productive and profitable Indiana family farm operation, Moody Meats. moody-meats.jpg
This morning they’re off to connect with Griff Wigley of Locally Grown Northfield at his Blue Monday corner office, film an interview with Joe at ArTech, and then head north on their bikes for Quality Bicycle Products in Bloomington (MN), “the shop behind America’s bicycle shops.” I just may have to sneak out for a bike ride with them…

Written by By Bruce Anderson on July 2, 2008 at 7:01 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

The future may not be what you think: Light summer reading

No day is complete for me without bed-time reading. I like to keep my reading diverse: I’ll go on a fiction jag for awhile (I was introduced to TC Boyle a few years ago, for example, loved the first novel of his I read, and subsequently read all of his novels in short order), then switch to non-fiction/biography/history/whatever before returning to fiction for awhile, and so on.

This spring/summer I’ve enjoyed both the historical fiction (The Contract Surgeon and The Indian Agent) and non-fiction (Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch) of South Dakota author Dan O’Brien. The novels are set in the early reservation days of the Lakota culture of the Black Hills region; Buffalo for the Broken Heart chronicles O’Brien’s struggles to establish a bison ranch in the Black Hills 110 years or so after the buffalo (and the buffalo-dependent cultures of the Plains Indians) were nearly exterminated. Fascinating reads all.

Perhaps the most engaging and thought-provoking reads of the summer thus far, however, have been a pair of jeremiads by social critic James Howard Kunstler. kunstler-image.jpgKunstler is probably best known as the author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993), and was featured prominently in the movie The End of Suburbia (2004).

The Kunstler books I read earlier this month both address peak oil and its possible effects. I’ve read numerous references to and excerpts from The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century since its publication in 2005, but didn’t read it until after I read this year’s Kunstler novel, World Made by Hand. The future envisioned by Kunstler in The Long Emergency is not pretty, and it’s not far off, either, in his view. Kunstler explores the consequences of a world oil production peak, coinciding with the effects of climate change, resurgent and new communicable diseases, water scarcity, global economic instability and warfare. He concludes that things ain’t gonna be pretty: in a nutshell, we have been having a global party fueled by cheap fossil fuels (oil especially) for roughly the past century, and the partyers are going to crash hard, soon.

I don’t embrace every element of his vision fully, but I think he raises critically important issues that are not being addressed realistically, even today as oil prices fluctuate between $130 and $140 per barrel. At the time his book was published (April 5, 2005), oil prices were at $57 per barrel. This seemed like an alarmingly high price at the time, as oil had fluctuated in the $10 to $25 per barrel range throughout the 1990s. Now, Goldman Sachs analysts predict that oil is likely to rise to between $150 and $200 per barrel soon and the top energy analyst at Germany’s largest bank says “Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy.” Kunstler seems eerily prescient in some ways, reading The Long Emergency three years down the road.

Kunstler’s novel World Made by Hand is set in a near future (2020 to 2030, roughly) in which multiple catastrophes have come to pass and the wheels have come off the global buggy. LA and Washington DC have been nuked by terrorists, throwing the US government and global trade into death spirals at the same time that global oil demand has exceeded supply to the extent that resource wars are triggered, pandemics have wiped out a significant percentage of the human population, and the industrial project is generally off the rails.

He creates an interesting world in which folks in a small community in upstate New York have reverted to a “world made by hand,” and are in the process of creating a workable way of life that can be sustained in a post-fossil-fuel, post-apocalyptic world. As with The Long Emergency, I certainly am not confident Kunstler is describing the world we will be living in soon, but I think he has important insights which mainstream American society would do well to ponder. I think it would be a healthy thing for Northfield’s civic leaders to think about and discuss the issues he raises. When our civic leaders are busy creating 530-acre industrial parks three miles out of town on a state highway, it is clear to me that these civic leaders are not contemplating the issues Kunstler raises in any serious manner. Northfield’s future may not be what our civic leaders seem to think it will be…

Written by By Bruce Anderson on June 25, 2008 at 2:27 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Inspiring cohousing conference and Fenway to boot!

I had a great time in the Boston area June 12th through 15th at the 2008 National Cohousing Conference. I learned a tremendous amount from cohousing pioneers who have been working in the cohousing trenches (some for 20 years by now), living their ideals, and spreading the enthusiasm about this innovative approach to neighborhood living. I also met folks from around the country (and Canada and England) who are more or less in the same mode I am: learning as much as possible about how to make cohousing happen in their home community.

I had the opportunity to talk at length with several of the founders of the US cohousing movement: Jim Leach of Wonderland Hill Development Company (Boulder, CO), and Chuck Durrett and Katie McCamant katie-mccamant-receives-cohous-award.JPGof McCamant and Durrett Architects (Berkeley and Nevada City, CA).

Katie and Chuck literally “wrote the book” (Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves) introducing cohousing to North America in 1988. I had a chance to eat dinner with Chuck and Katie, talk about Buffalo Commons Village and the forming group here in Northfield, and picked their brains about how to avoid pitfalls and bring a successful cohousing project to fruition as expeditiously and successfully as possible. Katie received the Mid-Atlantic Cohousing Developer of the Year Award at the dinner.

Equally wonderful was a late afternoon and evening spent in venerable Fenway Park, green-monster.JPGone of baseball’s true shrines. For a lifelong baseball fan who has never been to Fenway, and who still mourns the loss of old Met Stadium, it was an idyllic four hours or so. It was also a great game for the Red Sox nation, with a grand slam from Mike Lowell, two two-run homers, and a raucous win.
All in all, what a great way to spend a long weekend!

Written by By Bruce Anderson on June 24, 2008 at 8:27 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Cohousing group is off and running

A group of about 20 households is now actively investigating the possible cohousing projectguiding-principles.jpg I’ve blogged about (Cohousing: A new living opportunity for the Northfield area? and Buffalo Commons Village: Enthusiastic response to cohousing concept). The group is diverse (Minneapolis 20-somethings to Northfield-area retirees), energetic, and brings talent, experience and broad resources to the table. After an initial exploratory meeting (see the presentation from the meeting here), two walking tours of the possible site, and a getting-to-know-each-other-a-bit-better picnic, I’m excited about the possibilities.

The group will be meeting every two weeks, beginning this Tuesday, June 3rd as it plunges into what could culminate in a new type of living arrangement for the area within the next one to several years. Anyone interested in learning more about cohousing in general, or this project in particular, is encouraged to attend any of the upcoming meetings. This Tuesday we will be gathering at the Oddfellows Park pavilioncohoconf08.gif at the intersection of Forest Avenue and Madison Street on Northfield’s rockin’ west side (5:30 for a potluck dinner for any so inclined and available, to be followed by the meeting from 6:00 to 7:30).

I’m also excited about the 2008 National Cohousing Conference which I will be attending in Boston from June 13-15. I’m looking forward to coming back with valuable information and contacts which should help in our local planning efforts. Stay tuned for more…

Written by By Bruce Anderson on June 2, 2008 at 6:31 am | Posted in Cohousing | Comments (2)

My niece’s Big Fat Scottish Wedding

I (and about 175 other guests) had a great time at my niece Birch Carlson’s weddingbirch-and-locke.JPG this past Saturday. Birch (resplendent in traditional white) married fellow Northfielder Locke Perkins (dashing in full Scottish regalia, including a kilt, sporran and sgian dubh) in a beautiful ceremony in the backyard of parents Randy and Lois Perkins (at left in photo below).

families.JPGIn a true small-town touch, virtually the entire assemblage processed from the Perkins’ backyard to the reception in the backyard of my sister Gwen and Birch’s step-dad Dave Hagedorn (upper row middle in photo), with percussion instruments of all descriptions in full throat. (Also in the photo are Birch’s father Richard Carlson and step-mom Natalia at right.) I had the great honor of driving the newlyweds the roughly one mile from the wedding to the reception at the head of the procession, pedaling a betjakbetjak-fun2.jpg (an Indonesian variant of the cycle rickshaw). This amazing rig was rented from Ryan Billig, who fell in love with these traditional conveyances while living and studying the gamelan in Indonesia, and had the betjak shipped back to Minnesota upon his return. Ryan is a Minneapolis musician who plays in the Brass Messengers with my brother Scott.

I can just see a fleet of betjaks cruising the streets of Northfield, with drivers plying passengers with tales of historic Northfield…

Written by By Bruce Anderson on May 27, 2008 at 1:31 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)