Anybody want some gnarly reading?

Part of why posting on this blog has been so sporadic is that I'm working on a Master's thesis. Well, now it's almost complete. My working title is "Citizen Participation and the Sustainable City: A Case Study of Durham, North Carolina." If anyone out there wants to read it when it's done, please comment here with an email address that will accept large attachments, such as Gmail.

rain barrels and the end of the world

Over the last few months, it's become increasingly clear to me that talking about Durham's "sustainability" is at best an overly-hopeful fiction; what we really need to be talking about is Durham's declinability. There's no "solution" for the problems we are facing globally - peak oil is real, global warming is real, and standing around patting ourselves on the back for using fluorescent light bulbs or buying a Prius just doesn't cut it anymore. For all of Duke's awards for campus "sustainability," how many of you actually believe for an instant that those measures will be enough to allow them to continue with business as usual if there's no water available in the city system for anything except human survival, or gas is only available a few days a week, and then for $10/gallon?

There are lots of different predictions as to how long we have before, say, the Greenland ice sheet melts and inundates New York (not to mention the Outer Banks), or oil hits $500/barrel. However, there's always an infrastructure lag: buildings take a long time to build, transportation systems take a long time to implement or upgrade, money collected by government takes years to be allocated and more years to be spent, something with which Durham seems to be even worse at than many other cities (for a little discussion on this, see Election Dissection over at Mr. Dependable's place). So, we here in the Bull City may be on the verge of discovering the very hard way just how much we should have started doing five or ten years ago. Not to mention the extreme lack of foresight embodied by the failure of our various "leaders" to implement TTA light rail.

Infrastructure and resource allocation failure is serious business, as anyone running a water-dependent business in Atlanta right now can tell you. If sufficiently large or long-term, they will cascade into economic and social failure. Again, to pick on Atlanta: what exactly do you think will happen if six more months pass without any significant rain in the central Georgia watershed? How many businesses will fail, how many people will out-migrate? And how many of them would end up here in the Triangle, in turn increasing our water use?

The very local questions before us now would seem to be: what sort of place will Durham become as the impacts of these global issues start hitting with a vengeance? Will we put a moratorium on new developments that don't implement net-zero green building principles? What social programs will we lose so that more money can go to public transportation? Will people come together in neighborhoods and communities, set up tool swaps, start practicing permaculture, create rideshares? Or will we instead see property crimes shoot upward, distrust spread and violence become the norm?

I don't have any answers to these questions, for Durham or for anywhere. I think we all need to work as hard as possible to create the type of community we want, while still being aware that there are lots of people who won't want to do or change anything until forced to by necessity. The further ahead of the curve you are, the more you might look like a target, unfortunately. When everyone needs water, the person with ten rain barrels may have a hard time keeping all of them for himself. Given that, there's strong value in community-based solutions. If people share their rain barrels with the whole neighborhood, then everyone will have incentive to make sure they are used well (and aren't stolen!).

So, in the coming weeks, I may (or may not) talk about these things:
- the redevelopment of downtown as a post-peak urban core,
- farmland protection, food availability, and farmers' markets,
- what a successful post-peak neighborhood might look like,
- bicycling, public transit, and RTP,
- the hiring of a "Sustainability Coordinator" for Durham.

Feel free to suggest other topics.

You can discover lots of interesting things on the break room table where I work. My most recent find was a page from the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle, with an ad on it for a campus conference, "Sustainable Community Development: Does the University Have a Role?" The event was sponsored by both Duke and UNC (the School of Public Health, oddly enough), and proclaimed itself as free and open to the public.

It was last Thursday.

I never saw a thing about this conference anywhere on any Durham listserves, never heard a peep about it from my rather extensive network of community volunteer contacts. If I had, I might have taken a day off work and gone. But to my knowledge, if you weren't a member of one of the organizations presenting and/or a student or faculty at one of the schools, you would have had very little opportunity to discover that this event ever existed.

How does one live in a community, attend (or work for) a university right in the middle of that community, then host a conference about the role of the university in sustainable community development, but do nearly nothing to actually invite that community to participate? Is it just me, or is there a fundamental disconnection here?

I looked up the conference agenda, and while there were a few local organizations represented, it looks as though the event was more about sustainable community development in faraway countries.

Fascinating, that - personally, I feel that the best place to start with sustainability is where you are. Sure, somebody needs the global perspective, and I don't discount that Duke's graduates are for the most part intelligent, capable, and destined for Big Things. However, by discounting the community in which Duke exists, they lose out on a wealth of potential real-world learning experience. Of course, I somehow doubt most Durhamites are surprised to hear that Duke didn't really reach out to the greater community for a smaller free event.

Durham Farmers' Market: Not Quite a Bullseye, Yet

Seems like every day I hear of a new "green fad diet." First there was the Hundred Mile Diet, aka "eat only what comes from within 100 miles of you." It's an interesting concept, and certainly helped the notion of local food get into the cultural memespace, but to me it doesn't really seem to be based on much of anything in particular in the way of sustainability principles, like, a bioregion, or how far a farmer can drive to reach a market on a reasonable tank of homebrewed biodiesel. Here in the Somewhat Flat Part of NC, there seem to be a lot of farmers still operating near our urban areas, but in places like Phoenix, 100 miles doesn't even get you out of the desert.

The Hundred Yard Diet sounded more like a cross between extreme permaculture and some sort of scavenger hunt through my neighborhood (do we have 100 houses with gardens in their yards? no, I don't know either), neither of which really seemed to have the potential meet my needs. I'm a woeful gardener, despite repeated attempts. In the last 3 years, the only things I've successfully grown have been a few scraggly peppers and one pumpkin. Of course, I'm still trying, but there's a long long long way to go before I could reasonably feed my family for even just one week out of the gardenspace at our house.

The Bullseye Diet actually seems like the most reasonable to me: simply strive to get your food as close to home as possible. Given the huge improvements in the Durham Farmers' Market in recent years, it seems as though at certain times of the year, it might actually be possible to create a week's worth of meals using only foods obtainable from there... however, this past weekend, we discovered a glaring hole in DFM's general midsummer food selection: namely, fresh fruit. There simply wasn't any.

Now, in the fall, I've seen apples at a few places, and certainly Lyon Farms will sell you plenty of strawberries in season... but it doesn't seem as though any of the farmers are working at the type of year-round crop diversity that would create a truly broad culinary palette for local food aficionados. Where's the pears, the plums, the grapes? What about melons and unusual berries? What about getting multiple varietals of foods, and doing staggered plantings to stretch the availability season of a particular food type?

Also, I noticed that no one at the market had any kind of grains whatsoever. Kind of hard to have breads without grains... At least there's a couple of bakers there, but where did they buy their supplies? I bet it's not from within 100 miles. :-)

Of course, one can't always expect to find the same assortment of food at a farmers' market as at a chain grocery store, and that's part of the beauty of these "green" diets - to really do any of them right, you have to re-localize your thinking about food. Some things simply won't ever be grown in marketable quantities locally, or at least not without significant inputs of energy that aren't sustainable in the long run. However, I would hope that, in a post-Peak Oil community, the area farmers would be doing all they could to broaden their marketable selection with locally-growable crops that fill a certain "food niche" once imported from different climates - fruit, grain, late harvest vegetables, etc.

The Durham Farmers' Market rocks - but it isn't quite ready to support full-on Bullseye (or Hundred Mile) dieters... yet.

Start Here

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to the Endangered Durham blog. If you haven't read it yet, go and do so now, the rest of this can wait. Plus, it's essential background for why this blog exists.

In my opinion, Gary at ED has done a fabulous job of exposing the many ways in which planning and urban development in our little city has gone sadly awry in the past, and continues to be a gigantic mess today. Between the fiascoes of "urban renewal" and an utter failure to incorporate into policy any awareness of the complex interconnections between the "feel" of a place, its history, and its long-term sustainability, the government of Durham today shows little change in its policies or procedures from the "destroy-it-to-maybe-make-it-better" past.

However, it seems as though people all over the city are waking up on their own, determined to create better places in their neighborhoods and to put forth a new vision of what Durham could be. And that's the point from which I begin this blog.

In many of my posts here, I want to take a step into the future, to explore the area and look at what people are doing to make better - and more sustainable - places to live, here in the urban soup of the Bull City. In an ideal future, what could Durham be like? What needs to change to make that happen? And what might happen if we don't change? what does "business as usual" right now mean for Durham's future sustainability in a post-Peak-Oil, global-warming world?

Perhaps most importantly, though, I want in these posts to chronicle my own involvement in the perpetual process of building a better, more sustainable life for myself and my family, here in this urban community. The personal is always political, and all the more so in a world system on the verge of collapse and reorganization. How are my individual decisions affected by the decisions of the community around me? What is my role in the bigger picture? What decisions can I make, what steps can I take, here and now, to help create positive change?

Will it be enough? I don't know. Join me for the journey, if you want, and perhaps we can find out together.