WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

Over the past two days I have had the pleasure of visiting a couple of small towns in Oregon - Mt. Angel and Silverton. It has been a truly inspiring and insightful visit. Some people may have heard of Silverton when they elected their latest mayor, Stu Ramussen, the first openly trangendered mayor in the United States. I met Mayor Ramussen by chance in the local bakery, where he held the door open for me and welcomed me to Silverton.

But it wasn't just this experience that made me want to write about my trip. This small agricultural settlement has more lessons about real community than a shelf full of New Society Publishers' books! Electing Stu Ramussen alone demonstrated their open-mindedness, but my friend also shared a story about the recession.

A local business in town was very hard hit and could not pay its staff. It announced in a letter to local paper that it would shortly have to close its doors. In my jaundiced view of cut-throat American capitalism, I assumed that was the end of the story, but it was not. The community rallied around the business owner and lined up to take volunteer shifts to keep the business open. And this was not the first time they had done this - another business woman who had been recently widowed also found people volunteering to keep her shop open while she got back on her feet.

In near by Mt. Angel, the town was preparing for its annual Oktoberfest, a celebration of its German heritage which swells the town population of 3000 to 100 times that amount. But as I walked through the busy preparations, past the Bavarian Haus restaurant, the loud speakers attached to the lamp post were blaring out a popular Mexican tune! 30 percent of Mt. Angel's population is Hispanic.

Next, I turned my head just in time to catch sight of two nuns zipping past in a Prius. In addition to German and Hispanic heritage, Mt. Angel is home to the Mount Angel Abbey, a Benedictine monastery and school, which was moved permanently to Mt. Angel in 1884.

I found this mix of religious, political, social and cultural beliefs and the tolerance it generated to be really quite amazing. But I think, increasingly, this is what small town American will become - less insulated and prejudiced and more open-minded and accepting. It is something I think we could all be better at.

One of my favourite eco-artists, Franke James, has a new visual essay up on her blog about how to be green and glamorous. Like all of Franke's other work, this essay takes a fun approach to a serious problem - in this case the ridiculous over-proliferation of consumer goods (such as clothes) in North America.

I know that it's been years since I purchased clothes that were new instead of "new to me". (Except for rain gear - as a year round cyclist I make an exception for that.) Here on Gabriola we have a fabulous organization called GIRO (Gabriola Island Recycling Organization) that accepts donations of used clothing and household goods and then resells them at fantastically reasonable prices - kind of like an ongoing garage sale. Over the years GIRO has probably kept literally thousands of items out of landfills, and helped people save enormous amounts of money at the same time. Going to GIRO on Wednesdays and Saturdays is an island ritual (and a social event too).

What steps have you taken to counteract the waste inherent in our "throwaway" society? Tell us about it in the comments below!

Sharif Abdullah is the author of The Power of One and the founder and director of Commonway Institute. The following entry is reprinted with permission from his blog. Thanks Sharif!

The Spiritual Society

[This was written a few Christmas seasons ago:]

It is so easy to fall back into the rut — naming the old society. Protesting the old society. Lamenting the old society. Struggling to reform the old society. Thinking that if we could only get rid of the old society, we would then have a the society of our dreams, our ideals.

This past December, I was sitting at one of my coffeehouses ( not my favorite, but one that makes great eggnog lattes). I was reading a good book, and was in the middle of the buying frenzy on 23rd Avenue. Suddenly, I realized that I was depressed.

I tried to analyze my feelings. I wasn’t a part of the buying frenzy around me; I don’t really participate in the “Xmas Thing”, so I don’t have any seasonal guilt, angst, etc. I thought for a moment that I was “homesick” for Sri Lanka — after all, I do spend half of my year there. But a quick internal check said that I didn’t want to be in Sri Lanka. I didn’t want to be ANYWHERE.

That was a sobering thought. There was no society, no country, no city I preferred to inhabit. I didn’t want to be in the land of shallow materialism, where success is measured by how much litter we leave. I didn’t want to be in Sri Lanka, wondering whether the guy at the train station smiling at me is distracting me from a pickpocket doing balance-of-trade, or making a sexual overture for a different type of balance of trade, or was just being friendly. I didn’t want to be in Prague, or Kampala, or Hong Kong, or anywhere else. I had no home.

I’m not being overly melodramatic. I have enjoyed my time back in the States, experiencing cold, actually enjoying chipping ice off my car in the frozen mornings. My feeling is that all of us have a core to retreat to in the face of all of the madness coming at us from all sides. We go home, pull in the walls around us, hopefully with someone who feels the same as we do, and retreat from the yawning emptiness all around us.

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Today we have a guest post from Albert Bates, author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook and director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology and the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Tennessee. Thanks Albert!

After a busy year teaching natural building and permaculture at The Farm, I am getting ready for my Fall tour. I spent August in the Yucatan preparing an all new road show featuring robotic Mars rovers, creeping mats of intergalactic fungi, avenging dolphins, and delightful collapse scenarios following peak oil and mortgage foreclosures. It isn't all doom and gloom, there is a Prestige for this magic trick, wherein the artist escapes and has a lovely dinner of tsubu-tsubu and dandelion wine. While I was composing, a Category 5 hurricane knocked at my coconut-wood door, forcing me to high ground to ride it out. When that passed I kayaked the Straits of Cuba and confirmed first hand what I had predicted in my books -- that sea level changes come not with a whimper but a bang, in storm events that reshape coastlines and rivers. August pronouncements by James Hansen, George Monbiot and others suggest that sudden change is not the exception but the norm when it comes to climate. What is happening now is like the rap of the stick in zen: instant enlightenment.

Image credit: Albert Bates

For the next week or two I will be touring Ireland with Davie Philip and Rob Hopkins, and then back for a Table Talk at the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia, a seminar at Omega Institute, and the Southern Festival of Books, among other stops. A 30-minute radio interview during the morning drive time in Orange County, California is up here. Magazines like Plenty and Vanity Fair have come out with recent photo stories on the Farm and the extended interview I did in Culture Change is seeing some syndication in the blogosphere. My walking tour of the Ecovillage Training Center here is still gathering eyeballs at Current TV and several of our workshop participants have posted clips of strawbale, earthbag and cob to YouTube.

For tour dates and links to more streaming files, YouTube videos, and interviews, please visit The Great Change.

Best to you,

Albert Bates

Today we have another guest post, this time from Cecile Andrews, author of Slow is Beautiful. Thanks Cecile!

We know we’re in a crisis on many fronts. In particular, we’re faced with climate change, war, and the increasing loss of freedom and democracy in the United States. In my book, Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure, and Joie de Vivre, I’ve talked about how our lack of time is a key issue in all of our major problems. Some look on this issue of “time poverty” as a lesser issue: We’re faced with such dire problems, how can you talk about long work hours?! But if citizens have no time to inform themselves, engage in civic discourse, or get involved politically, there will be no changes. Our increasingly long work hours can undermine democracy and our work to save the planet.

But there’s another “hidden”issue as well: the decline of freedom of expression in the work place. In Slow is Beautiful I tell a story about the president of my community college, where I was an administrator for many years, chastising me for criticizing the chancellor of our system. I wasn’t fired, but disgust with his treatment contributed to my decision to quit.

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