ThinkLady

Turn off, tune out, drop in

Article in Boston globe this a.m. about young professionals giving up digital gadgets and getting along just fine -- thank you very much -- without them. Discusses benefits, downsides.

These young adults say being less digitally connected means they are actually more connected to an inner life, doing things they truly enjoy, and to each other, raising lots of provocative questions about how society in general views the real meaning of being connected.

Along with pocketing mounds of that precious commodity known as time, they're also using less energy and stuff.

Money quotes:

"A small group of people are reacting to what is overload," Whybrow says. "They are fascinated by this initially . . . but after a while, they find it erodes time as opposed to saving time, and time is the only thing we've really got that is our own. If you become consumed by new technology and forget you are fundamentally creatures of the natural world, you do end up diminishing your life."

"It's not that I don't like doing these things," Alan says. "It's that I like them too much, and have a hard time setting limits. And then I feel frustrated at the end of the evening when I haven't accomplished or learned anything."

"I feel a little bit like a prisoner to it," Seaward says. "It's very useful - there's no denying that - but I think we also lose something. The more things become fast-paced, the less able we are to understand complex arguments, to concentrate on long artworks, like a symphony, or read a long novel."

Rebecca Norman, 22, lives in an apartment with two other seniors at UMass-Amherst. They have no television. Norman sends texts only if it's urgent. She tried Facebook briefly but opted out. "I find the whole thing very voyeuristic ..."

I can certainly see several sides in this issue. The Web and its applications can be great tools, i.e. the work of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, Sustainable OKC, Oklahoma Sustainability
Network, all depend in varying degrees on the digital world.

Working in the communications industry as I do demands digital and techno savviness, which can be incredibly enjoyable (for many reasons), which also means it can be soooo addictive, argghh. I hate that ... when human nature is so ... human.

The idea of running counter clockwise to the mainstream norm is also beguiling, appealing. My guess is we all dream of and yearn for a simpler life at some point in the hectic scramble that tends to be our modern lives.

Developing a balanced routine maybe part of the answer to the equation. How do we do it? As we use all these digital tools, when do we cross the line into unbalanced and unhinged?

I try to make myself turn it all off - computer, TV, music, cell phone several times a week and just sit and listen to the world for five minutes. I take a walk in my garden and pull weeds, watch the bees, sit in the grass. And periodically I make myself just walk away from it all on weekends. It's useful.

What are your tips and thoughts on finding balance in a digitally driven world?

Got resilience?

A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the man-made world we have imposed upon it.

- Chip Ward, “Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case for Resilience

Oklahoma’s storm season is upon us. We watch clouds boil and roil, hope and pray for rain versus hail and tornadoes, and while we may joke about Gary England’s drama, as anyone living

in these here parts knows, the season is no joking matter.

When the tornado sirens blow, most of us know our take-cover routine like we know our own phone number. We head to hidey holes, closets, basements and storm shelters with family, friends, pets, memorabilia, emergency radios, flashlights, water and food in tow. We watch and listen to some of the best meteorologists in the nation track threatening weather in stunningly detailed Doppler radar. We know the meaning of wall clouds, hook clouds, vortexes, the difference between a tornado watch and a warning, and of course Oklahoma children learn the Fujita scale long before they have any idea about do-re-mi.

Yes siree. When it comes to tornado season, Oklahomans have the warning-planning thing down.

This friends, gives me hope for the future.

If we can plan and prepare this thoroughly for Mother Nature’s annual spring tantrums, I’m hoping we can apply the same can-do, innovative spirit to the broad and deep energy challenges we face. That means first thinking more deeply about what a community really needs and how those needs are met.

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement and author of “The Transition Handbook: from oil dependence to local resiliency,” notes one of the key characteristics of healthy communities is resiliency. According to Hopkins resiliency is …

“ … the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.”

The primary point here: a change or interruption in one part of a system doesn’t take down the whole. Resilient communities

have food, transportation, shelter, water, health, cultural, and education systems that are self-sufficient enough to provide for essential needs regardless of mounting chaos. When you pair resiliency with sustainability, you have a community that’s ready to face the future.

So what does resilience look like in real life? In communities and homes it refers to our ability to not collapse at the first sight of oil or food shortages, or in the case of the threat of a pandemic, ergo the current swine flu, to be able to respond with adaptability to disturbance.

To help illustrate the concept, Hopkins does a little contrasting and comparing below. Note: Just because an activity doesn’t add resilience, doesn’t mean it should never happen; Hopkins is suggesting that we think beyond the norm, think beyond even sustainability, and add resilience to the planning equation.

So have you got resilience? What are your ideas for making your home and community more resilient and less vulnerable to abrupt change in an increasingly complex and volatile world?

Just dropped in to see what condition my transition was in

If you’re interested in the Transition movement but haven’t had time to read The Transition Handbook or visit the Web sites, you can thank writer Jon Mooallem and the New York Times for a terrifically reported, detailed and erudite article, “The End is Near! (Yah!)” (love the title) that provides a comprehensive portrait of this burgeoning movement.

Many, many provocative jewels here. Pros and cons fairly presented and questions raised (and we should always be asking questions!). Lots of food for thought in the whole magazine issue too, which has a green focus for Earth Day, but this story in particular reminded me of what good journalism is and can be … a reflection of society to educate, provoke thought and stir our souls.

Money quotes:

· What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” … The movement wasn’t going to unify everybody in Sandpoint, he said: “I know that’s their dream, but I just don’t see it happening.” But it was inspiring for Reuter to watch the group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism of self-governance.

· … as Reuter saw it. “Government used to be the place in our community where people came together and made civic decisions,” he told me. “That’s what we should do again, and that’s what’s going to bring us back together: not having government be this force somehow outside of us, that’s bearing down on us or annoying us, but as a force that we actually embrace and want and that does what we want.”

· For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.

More highlights from the story:

· But those living on the land, whether out of a left- or right-wing ideology, do have a lot in common, including an astounding amount of resourcefulness.

· When I asked her later what she made of the exercise, Hellar told me: “First of all, I’m not a good-feelings, touchy-feely kind of person.” She added, “People wanted to talk about where we can put community gardens, how can we make our downtown more viable.” John T. Reuter, a Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that when Berta told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room, counting up the people he knew Transition just alienated.

· Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.

· Karl Dye, head of the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told me, “All the things Transition’s doing basically line up with what we’re trying to do, which is create better-paying jobs.” He saw a lot of promise in Lanphear’s group, though he also said: “If you start a business to produce food locally and there are opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you’re going to do it. You may believe in Transitions and local production and local consumption, but hey, man, we’re still Americans.”

· A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”)

· Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.

· The vibe was much more Alice Waters than Mad Max. (Jeff Burns, a local food activist who joined the food working group, was a conspicuous exception. “Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”)

· Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”

· “The genius of the Transition message, as I see it, is that it takes what we should be doing to avert these crises and turns it into something that sounds inviting and

positive and uplifting,” Richard Heinberg, a Transition U.S. board member, told me in Sebastopol … Heinberg said he worries that Transition risks losing people in the elation it inspires. He has been debating with Hopkins whether, in addition to devising a long-term descent, Transition should emphasize preparing for disasters that Heinberg says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like volatile gas prices or “being sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather disruptions.”

· I was also surprised by the degree to which Transition members were intermixing with city authorities. Shortly after the Great Unleashing, Shelby Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an early Sandpoint Transition Initiative board member alongside Kühnel and Lanphear, was appointed to the town’s planning and zoning commission — a significant position, because Sandpoint was writing its first new comprehensive plan in 30 years.

Whole article here. Transition Town OKC project here ::: www.goinglocalokc.com.

Chemical panty twist and honest growth

Couple of highlights from recent readings:

Organic White House Garden Puts Some Conventional Panties in a Twist

La Vida Locavore highlights Mid America CropLife Association's (MACA) miff fit and their Orwellian letter to our First Lady about her organic garden. MACA is another thread in the tightly woven web of big corporate ag machinations. A sampling of the corporations

represented on MACA's board of directors: Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer CropScience, Nufarm. According to SourceWatch, CropLife America

is:

" ... a trade association representing the manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. It was formerly known as the American Crop Protection Association, and before that as the National Agricultural Chemicals Association.

CropLife America's rhetoric, and its name, indicates a shift in the pesticide industry's rhetoric and approach to public relations in the last decade. "CropLife America's mission," says its Web site, "is to foster the interests of the general public and CropLife America member companies by promoting innovation and the environmentally sound manufacture, distribution and use of crop protection and production technologies for safe, high-quality, affordable and abundant food, fiber and other crops."

The pesticide industry hopes to be know as the "crop protection" industry. The image it presents is one of a hi-tech, efficient, responsible, and green industry that is already thoroughly regulated to assure the safety of its products. While the industry quietly pursues an anti-regulatory agenda to assure no pesticides would be removed from the market, its trade association claims its aim is to "promote increasingly responsible, science-driven legislation and regulation."

and

"CropLife shares office space with Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment (RISE), a lobbying and public relations trade organization for the pesticide and fertilizer industry."

In "(No) Drill, Baby, Drill," New York Times columnist Tom Friedman riffs on Costa Rica's holistic approach to environmentalism and economic growth. I liked this:

" ... if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

That bit about honest growth - brilliant! Thank you Tom Friedman! Any bets on how long will it take for our state legislators to understand this concept?