​Denizen of Philip Roth’s Weequahic, Newark neighborhood. Child of the Depression. World War II “Greatest Generation” soldier. 1960s “Madmen”-era ad-man. Suburban New Jersey family man and household groundskeeper. Loving husband for nearly 60 years. Loving father to his three sons for nearly 70 years. Diligent, warm, playful, witty, kind. My father, Bernard (“Bernie”) Dwortzan, who died in his sleep on October 21, 2022 in his Boynton Beach, Florida home at the age of 98, was all of those things, each of which I will now expand on like hyperlinks in a Wikipedia bio.

Denizen of Philip Roth’s Weequahic, Newark neighborhood. Bernie was born on January 2, 1924 to Mollie and Morris Dwortzan, immigrants from Grodno, Belarus and Vilna, Lithuania around the turn of the century. He and his younger brother Herbie and older sister Florence grew up on Aldine Street in the Weequahic neighborhood made famous by Philip Roth, most notably in his novel The Plot Against America. When Bernie was six, Morris, a tinsmith, fell to his death at a construction site.

Child of the Depression. Though devastated by the loss of her husband and the family breadwinner at the start of the Great Depression, my Grandma Mollie managed to raise her three children as a single mother. Bernie ultimately attended Weequahic High School, where he joined the bugle battalion and was on the yearbook editorial board. He stayed local to earn a BS degree at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, and eventually earned an MBA at NYU.

World War II “Greatest Generation” soldier. Bernie served in the 77th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army as a radio operator in the Philippines and Japan. He received a bronze star medal for helping evacuate six wounded soldiers under enemy fire in Okinawa. His last remaining souvenir from his tour of duty in Japan was a long, sharp spear—a deadly weapon of war that contrasted sharply with his tendency to avoid conflict with family members on the home front.

1960s “Madmen”-era ad-man. After launching his career in the 1950s at Ronson, a company known for its cigarette lighters, Bernie landed a position in the 1960s as an advertising manager at the watches-and-clocks giant Bulova. You may recall that on the TV series Madmen, Don Draper and his coworkers worked at an advertising agency where they cranked out clever copy while getting into all sorts of trouble. While Bernie was also an ad-man—in his case, working in-house at Bulova—the only trouble he got into, to my knowledge, was when the actor Ricardo Montalban showed up in his Rockefeller Center office for a commercial and my father pretended to be the president of the company. Montalban was not pleased when the real president walked in. Another activity that could have gotten my father in hot water was the slideshow he produced for the annual Christmas party. Every December he could be found at the kitchen table inspecting a carousel full of Kodachrome slides. He would extract each slide from the carousel, squint at it under the ceiling light, and compose a caption that poked fun at the company’s executives and culture. He must not have ruffled too many feathers, as he was invited back, year after year, to emcee that slideshow. His stand-up comedy skills lasted a lifetime, from gigs at Weequahic High School reunions to his own retirement party in 1995. My mother often said he may have missed his calling.

Suburban NJ family man and household groundskeeper. Bernie’s work as an advertising and sales manager at Ronson, Bulova and other companies enabled him to support a family in the leafy Northern NJ suburbs of East Brunswick and South Orange. In the 1950s, he married his sweetheart Lauralee, and they had three sons, David, Alan, and Mark. In an impressive feat of conscious conceiving, each was born three years apart. Bernie was the quintessential fifties-style father, returning from work just in time to chow down on a meat-and-potatoes family dinner prepared by Lauralee. Afterwards he’d repair to his recliner to devour the evening paper and TV talk shows. On a good night, he might catch his alter ego/favorite comedian, Don Rickles, on the Merv Griffin show. On weekends, he served as our groundskeeper, mowing the lawn and picking every weed in sight.

Loving husband for nearly 60 years. While my parents doted on each other throughout their long marriage, Bernie tended to be the quieter partner, while Lauralee was more histrionic. Sometimes, when he appeared grumpy but said little, my mother would say he was putting on his “Russian face.” While Lauralee served him countless meals as my brothers and I grew up, Bernie prepared countless meals for her in her final years as she succumbed to cancer at the age of 85. My mother couldn’t say enough about how much she loved her Bernie, who she affectionately called “doll.”

Loving father to his three sons for nearly 70 years. As a child, I experienced my father as a steady rock on whom I could lean during tough times. While he was largely easygoing, playful and funny, he could also be hard to access emotionally. Much of his parenting centered on preparing his three sons to succeed in the material world, a focus that often left me wanting a deeper connection with him. During a retreat in Northern California led by Reb Zalman Schacter Shalomi z”l, I had a brief private audience with Reb Zalman, who dispensed spiritual wisdom in an emotionally alive way. Afterwards, I wished my father could be more like Reb Zalman. I know I set the bar high. But later it occurred to me that my father, like the biblical Noah, was righteous in his generation—one shaped by the hardships of the Great Depression, one that produced men more oriented to material success than spiritual growth. And so I came to forgive my father for not being more like Reb Zalman.

Diligent, warm, playful, witty, kind. In fact, my father embodied many wonderful qualities. He was diligent in fulfilling his work and household duties; warm and witty with family, friends and colleagues; and kind and attentive whether helping me with homework or attending to my mother in her final years. As a child, I was instinctively drawn to his gentle, playful nature, forming a strong bond. When I was four and recovering from an elective surgical procedure, the highlight of my day was when my father brought me Fruit Loops in the morning. That strong bond became like superglue sometime between the ages of five and seven, when on weekday late afternoons, I would walk past the house next door to the corner of Gulf Road and Sullivan Way, and stand by a pea-green mailbox with a Green Lantern sticker on it for up to two hours, waiting for my father to come home from work. When his 1962 Chevy Impala finally rounded the corner, his face would light up as I hopped in the car to join him for the final 30 seconds of his commute home. I was never happier.

Bernie is survived by two of three sons (me and my brother Alan), and a granddaughter (my daughter Yelena, now on a Gap Year program in Ireland). The family is grateful beyond words for my father’s extraordinary aide Marie, who attended to most of his needs in his last seven years. We can’t thank her enough for enriching Bernie’s quality of life; she has become part of the family. From Philip Roth’s Weequahic neighborhood of close-knit families, to his single-occupant home in a Boynton Beach retirement complex; from the 1920s to the 2020s; in space and in time, Bernie has experienced so much and touched so many.

During this year of mourning and beyond, I will continue to wait on the corner for him. Maybe not on the corner of Gulf Road and Sullivan Way, but in a special corner of my heart, reserved just for him. May his memory be a blessing.

Published on the Local Futures Blog, April 13, 2020 | Mark Dwortzan

The lead article in a recent edition of my hometown newspaper highlighted the efforts of a local teen and a sewing business to create 1,000 masks for area hospitals. While this is a wonderful development, it shouldn’t have come to this.

The urgent and growing demand for N95 masks and other medical supplies for treating Covid-19 patients underscores how dependent the United States has become on producers in China and other far-flung nations to keep our healthcare system—and other essential services—up and running.

Right now many of us rely on global supply chains and centralized distribution systems for much of our basic needs, from the food we eat to the energy we use to the manufactured goods we consume. But as Covid-19 disrupts supply chains and sidelines more and more of the workforce, it threatens to restrict our access to food, energy and goods. Fears of looming global food shortages have led some Americans to start planting their own gardens. Concerns about eventual power outages have prompted others to purchase their own generators. And the shortage of those N95 masks has inspired several individuals and businesses, like those in my city, to produce homegrown versions.

If we produced more of our basic needs either at home or closer to home, we could significantly reduce our exposure to supply chain and workforce disruptions. While no solution is airtight, a paradigm shift away from globalization and centralization and toward more locally resilient economies could help sustain populations in my region and around the world when the next pandemic hits.

​A growing grassroots movement is laying the groundwork for this kind of shift. NGOs from the Transition Network to the Post-Carbon Institute to Local Futures maintain that by localizing production of food, energy, manufactured goods and other essentials, we can reduce the worst impacts of globalization and centralization—pandemics, climate change, biodiversity loss and economic inequality, to name a few—and increase the chances that humans and other life forms will survive over the long term.

Economic localization does not mean sealing communities off from the rest of the world, but rather producing as much as possible of what people need as close as possible to where they live, and relying on trade for the rest. It’s a process that downscales the circulation of goods, money and people from the global to the local, resulting in more resilient cities, towns and regions.

According to Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of Local is our Future, effecting this transition will require both top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Top-down strategies include restructuring tax codes, trade agreements, the financial sector, economic indicators and other pillars of globalization to promote strong local and regional economies. For example, replacing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) would reframe progress to include the social, environmental and economic well-being of communities.

Bottom-up strategies build local resilience through place-based initiatives such as community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, neighborhood-scale renewable energy projects, and local business alliances. Examples of such initiatives where I live include the Newton Community Farm, the Newton Community Solar Share Initiative and the Newton-Needham Regional Chamber.

Implemented both top-down and bottom-up, economic localization efforts could increase our chances not only to survive but also to thrive. Shifting the focus of our activities away from the global marketplace and toward our homes, communities and bioregions enables us to cultivate deeper, more enduring connections to the land and people around us. Such connections can serve, in turn, to reinforce local resilience networks.

As we confront an unprecedented pandemic and its impacts on our health, economy and way of life, we can either double down on globalization or accelerate localization. Our choice today may well determine how resilient we will be when the next pandemic strikes.


This post originally appeared in The Newton Tab, the local newspaper of the City of Newton, Massachusetts.

Image: Bobbin of thread. LaNora Shepherd ​

A participant in a City Repair place-making workshop once said, “What good is freedom of assembly without a place to assemble?” Here volunteers come together to repair an intersection in Portland, Oregon. (Photo courtesy of City Repair)

On after-work dog walks through my West Newton neighborhood, I see dozens of cars but few pedestrians. Less than a handful cross paths with me on the sidewalk, our interactions seldom going beyond the averted gaze, the perfunctory wave or the quick hello. Even in Dolan’s Pond, the closest patch of woods, waterfront and wildlife—a rare green space that I had imagined would be a post-rush-hour mecca for the deskbound—these walks are largely solitary affairs. As I commune with my canines and marvel at cardinals, red-winged blackbirds and other avian visitors to this nature sanctuary, I wonder where the humans are.

I imagine most of them are hidden in the usual places—behind workstations, dashboards or big screen TVs. Vacant sidewalks are typical of bedroom communities like mine, where many adult residents spend their most productive hours elsewhere doing work that in no way intersects with the life of the community. Away on weekdays, not much in evidence on weekends, and rarely seen operating without the aid of a mobile device, few develop strong ties to the land and people in their neighborhood.

In Bowling Alone, Harvard University Professor Robert Putnam estimates that every ten minutes of commuting reduces social connections by ten percent. With most adult residents of my hometown—myself included—at work or in transit most of the time, it’s hard to feel rooted to the community and invested in its future. To change all that, I thought of simple things I could do, from holding a block party to volunteering with local organizations to scheduling a town meetup. But as I searched the web for options, a more holistic, durable solution emerged.

Making the Neighborhood More Neighborly
The idea took shape in 2001, when City Repair in Portland, Oregon, an urban planning consultancy, organized the city’s first annual Village Building Convergence (VBC), now a ten-day event planned by thousands of volunteers that’s like a block party on steroids. By day, neighbors and visitors co-create or renovate small, permanent public spaces at 40 sites around the city where they can gather together, enjoy community-based art, or tend a permaculture garden. By night, they attend a community dinner, workshops, talks and a music festival in exchange for a small fee that supports the daytime artistic and ecologically-oriented “place-making” activities.
 
In one neighborhood, homeowners contributed a corner of their own property as a public gathering space replete with pizza oven, bench and community bulletin board. Another VBC project, which started out as a mural and bench at a well-travelled intersection, morphed into the construction of street-side compost bins and community gardens.
                         
Other cities with ongoing Village Building Convergence events include Asheville, North Carolina; Burlington, Vermont; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Olympia and Port Townsend, Washington; and Sebastopol, California, which held its first VBC in 2014. Projects included street murals, community kale patches, a children's fairy village and a decorative bus stop bench. The Sebastopol VBC also featured SEBtalks, inspired by TED Talks, on “The Heart and Mind of the Community,” and a daily “open village” where people could network, swap used items and get their bikes repaired.
 
These hands-on projects and community gatherings have led to a more connected Sebastopol, says Sebastian Collet, a Sebastopol VBC organizer who once worked as City Repair’s Placemaking Coordinator. “Through casual conversation I met four or five people who all live on my street,” he recalls.
 
Reclaiming the Commons
According to Mark Lakeman, principal and co-founder of City Repair, which has facilitated or inspired independent place-making projects in more than 50 cities in the US, Canada, Australia, India and Brazil, VBC is part of a growing effort to reclaim the commons in cities and towns designed more for automobiles than pedestrians.
 
“We raise awareness of a fundamental issue of placelessness that is endemic to the urban and suburban landscape of the USA,” says Lakeman. “We also motivate and support these communities to creatively engage the situation by planning and designing, funding and permitting, building and maintaining these various kinds of ecologically conceived gathering places. All of the projects promote design literacy, so people come out of the process with new tools and strengths for being creative problem-solvers in their own lives.”
 
The epitome of an urban retreat, Village Building Convergence could be just the antidote for bedroom communities like mine that can be as sleepy by day as they are by night. Whether developed through expansion of existing local programs (such as Newton’s annual day of service that brings neighbors together for building, painting, planting and cleanup projects) or started from scratch, a VBC in my hometown could be a game changer.
 
Over time, those dog walks might grow less solitary, peppered by impromptu conversations that go way beyond the quick hello. It may take a lot longer to get back home, but that’s a price I—and I suspect the dogs—would be willing to pay.

Reprinted from Cognoscenti: Thinking That Matters (WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station):
Thu, Feb 26, 2015 | Mark Dwortzan

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I used to look forward to winter. Especially those extraordinary days that began with the sonorous, spine-rattling sound of my hometown’s school-cancelling siren. Energized by the prospect of the snow day ahead, I’d join my brothers or friends in the neighborhood to build forts and snowmen in front yards or sled down pristine hillsides. All while marveling at the look and feel of a gray, barren landscape suddenly gone white.

During this winter’s spate of major snowstorms, however, I’ve chafed at the first mention of an upcoming blizzard or other “plowable event.” Now snow days mean long hours clearing the white stuff off the driveway, cars, sidewalks, steps and rooftops. Not just once in a while, but once a week or more. Child’s play for an avid outdoorsman, but a bit daunting for a 50-something commuter who spends most business days sitting on his duff behind workstation and windshield.

While recovering in a recliner after one shoveling marathon, it struck me that I and millions of other suburban dwellers in Greater Boston — along with legions of plow operators — had toiled for hours in the service of the motorized vehicles upon which most of us had come to depend for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, without this collective sacrifice to the automotive gods, most of my neighbors would be hard pressed to get to work, the grocery store, the doctor’s office and other life-support systems not easily reachable by public transit, bicycle or foot.

Thoreau once wrote, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” If he were alive today, he might have extended the line to apply to asphalt roads as well. Whether our transportation of choice is the train, automobile or bicycle, we are inconvenienced if not immobilized every time a critical mass of snow is dumped on the thousands of miles of high-maintenance roads that form the skeleton of Greater Boston and other metro areas.

So how can we begin to reverse the curse of road-dependency in suburbia, and the snow removal headaches that go with it? How might we bring more of the goods and services we need to survive and thrive within walking distance so we won’t always have to clear our driveways to reach them?

Curbing our addiction to life on the road may seem like a radical proposition, but citizens of Massachusetts are already taking steps that could help move us in that direction. These include:

Mix it up. Smart growth policies in a number of Massachusetts cities and towns promote the development of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that integrate open space, housing, business offices, shops, municipal buildings and other venues. For instance, in 1988 a strip mall in Mashpee in Cape Cod was converted into Mashpee Commons, a mixed-use, mixed-income, town center where residents attend to many of their needs on foot. Caveat: these policies can take years to implement.

Live off the land. Likeminded neighbors can reconfigure their block into an ecovillage — a walkable, environmentally-friendly, intentional community where residents strive to produce and access as much of life’s essentials as they can on the premises. Since its founding in 1978 in Shutesbury, Sirius community, the northeast’s longest-standing ecovillage, has made great strides in bringing the production of food, energy and housing back home. However, some residents commute to jobs outside the property, so there’s still a need to dig out.

Go virtual. In mid-February, Eric Convey, web editor of the Boston Business Journal, made a compelling case for an off-road activity that puts the workplace literally at our fingertips: telecommuting. But while telecommuting has returned some workers to the home front in recent years, their ranks are extremely thin. According to Global Workplace Analytics, a mere 2.6 percent of American employees consider the home their primary place of work. Could the winter of 2015 be the spark of a telecommuting revolution? 

Apply heat. If all else fails, we can always resort to the good old American techno-fix: retrofit roadways with radiant heating that melts snowflakes on contact. The Veron Company in Marlborough offers energy-efficient, low-maintenance radiant heating systems for driveways, walkways, roofs, gutters and downspouts. Innovative, yes; cheap, no. According to Angie’s List, installation costs for a 20-by-50-foot driveway can run more than $15,000.
While clearing the first big snows, I considered other, simpler ways to dodge the driveway dig. Should I move closer to public transit? Become an instant bicycle enthusiast? Hire a snow removal service? But by the fourth storm, it occurred to me that the least stressful way forward might be to simply adapt to the new normal of frequent major plowable events.

For now, I choose to adapt. In fact, I already have. Having cleared 100 inches of snow since the start of the winter, I figure my snow-hardened body is primed to handle whatever comes its way. The next time it snows enough for a school-canceling text to appear on my cell phone, I plan on welcoming the onslaught.

A three-foot blizzard? No biggie. Freezing rain on top of that? Bring it on! Before you know it, I’ll be so good at this that I’ll even have energy left over to join my 10-year-old building snowmen, sleighing down hills and marveling at the sheer beauty of it all.

 Reprinted from Cognoscenti: Thinking That Matters (WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station):
 Thu, Jul 31, 2014 | by Mark Dwortzan

Whenever I buy grapes imported from Chile, fill my gas tank with fuel sourced in the Persian Gulf, or select underwear made in Thailand at a department store headquartered in Minneapolis, I can’t help but wonder how much longer we can all go on like this. That our survival hinges on the economic vitality of countless far-flung suppliers  of food, energy, clothing and other essentials gives me pause. So does our reliance on cheap oil, natural gas and coal to deliver that stuff to our doorsteps and keep us warm, cool or plugged-in once it gets there. Not to mention the equilibrium of our planet’s climate, now threatened by the relentless combustion of all those fossil fuels. One of my greatest fears is that, someday, our remote-controlled, global commodity delivery system will collapse, and we’ll all have to scramble to meet our basic needs.

It turns out that I’m not alone. United by concerns about Peak Oil, a warming planet and global economic instability, some 27 groups throughout New England — part of 151 groups in the U. S. and 477 worldwide that have formed since 2006 — are taking collective action to transform their communities into walkable, locally-resilient “Transition Towns.” Such efforts empower residents to produce and consume more of life’s essentials where they live, all while minimizing their reliance on fossil fuels. By shifting their hometowns from a global to a local economy through urban farming, community-owned solar power stations, local currencies and other grassroots enterprises, these groups are advancing an alternative, post-carbon world that’s more ecologically sustainable, economically robust and socially cohesive than the one we currently inhabit.

One such initiative, the Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JP NET), the only one of its kind in Boston, has been in operation for three years. Among other things, JP NET volunteers have turned a formerly vacant, crime-ridden lot into Egleston Community Orchard, a garden space where apple trees, raspberries, chard and other crops are grown sustainability. The Egleston Farmers’ Market, another JP NET-backed project, has brought hundreds of people of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds together to buy local produce, listen to live music, and meet their neighbors.

The majority of Transition Towns, in fact, have expanded or repurposed green space for local food production. In Healdsburg, Calif., volunteers have converted residential lawns into vegetable gardens — replacing sod with raised beds of everything from squash to kale. Other groups have generated their own renewable energy via rooftop and community photovoltaic and wind turbine systems. A Transition initiative in the South London district of Brixton spearheaded the city’s first community-owned solar power station atop a public housing complex, netting enough electricity last year to power 10 homes. Such efforts are reducing not only residents’ carbon footprints, but also the amount of toxins that end up in their air, water and soil.

On the economic front, some Transition Towns have introduced alternative currencies that drive consumers to local businesses. In 2012, JP NET distributed the Boston Bean, an alternative five-dollar bill honored by various JP merchants during the winter holiday season. Transition San Francisco introduced Bay Bucks in 2013. According to economist Michael Shuman, every dollar spent locally produces up to four times the economic benefit — in terms of jobs, income and tax revenue — than a dollar spent at a chain store.

“Time Banking,” another common form of local currency circulating in Transition Towns, enables participating residents to earn a “Time Dollar” for every hour of services they provide. Members of Transition Sarasota’s Common Wealth Time Bank exchange Time Dollars for services like childcare and home repairs.

Transition initiatives are not only shoring up financial capital, but social capital, as well. Groups from Liverpool to Palo Alto have hosted “Transition Cafes,” informal gatherings to discuss such topics as renewable energy, transportation and climate change. Others have incorporated community-building into more hands-on activities. Australia’s Transition Newcastle organized a “Transition Streets Challenge to encourage neighbors to work together to use less water and energy and generate less waste.

A newly found inter-connectedness may be one of the greatest benefits of going local and weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels. In his book “Deep Economy,” Bill McKibben writes of farmers’ markets, “The market begins to build a different reality, one that uses less oil and is therefore less vulnerable to the end of cheap energy. But, more important, the new reality responds to all the parts of who we are, including the parts that crave connection.”

One lawn-to-garden conversion at a time, one local currency transaction at a time, one farmers’ market conversation at a time, Transition Town residents are laying the foundations for a more resilient, post-carbon world. Collectively, they give me hope that, even if the global economy doesn’t hold up in the long run, we’ll be just fine.

I want to go local not only due to growing concerns about fossil fuels, climate change, and economic instability, but also because the best times of my life have been in walkable communities with substantial green space, social engagement, meaningful work opportunities, and/or an enduring sense of place. Communities like

·        East Brunswick, New Jersey, where I spent my formative years walking unsupervised to Lawrence Brook Elementary School, playing for hours in a sand pile in my backyard, showing up at friends’ houses without having to arrange a playdate, and knowing nearly everyone on the block; and South Orange, New Jersey, a traditional green village where many of the shop owners knew me by name, and where kids often attended the same schools as their parents before them.

·        Ithaca, New York, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, leafy college towns with scenic parks and waterways, local farms, vibrant main streets dotted by bookstores and cafes, and diverse cultural amenities. Designed to be pedestrian and bike-friendly and bolstered by strong local economies, college towns like these have a lot to teach us about post-carbon living. 

·        San Francisco’s Cole Valley neighborhood, where I lived in a garden apartment and walked to work near Golden Gate Park. On a typical workday I would run into friends or coworkers on my way home—on the sidewalk, in the Real Food Company grocery store, at the Tassajara Bakery, and at other local businesses.

·        The ancient, 3200-foot-high city of Safed in Northern Israel, where I participated in a work-study program in which I helped build stone walls of a children’s park and painted rooms for immigrant families. Not once getting behind the wheel for three months, I enjoyed a daily routine of green mountain views, unplanned interactions and leisurely meals with program participants and neighbors, study of a millennia-spanning religious tradition, and work aimed at improving the quality of life in the community for generations to come.  

I want to go local because I love immersing myself in walkable communities like these where people have easy access to nature, neighborhood, and the work of their heart, and/or the larger history of which they are a part. And I want more of the world to experience the joys of living in such places.

I believe the most promising way to make that happen is to transform our cities and towns into post-carbon, locally resilient communities. The more we produce and consume locally, the more we come to know and treasure the land and people around us, and the more we experience work as a way to serve the land and people we love—for now and for future generations. Oh, the places we can co-create!

It happens with alarming frequency in bitter cold winters like this one. I’ll be taking my dogs for a walk in my suburban neighborhood, passing one large single-family home after another, and no one on the sidewalk but me, when it strikes me that there’s something wrong with this picture. On the surface, everything appears just fine: the neighbors are either ensconced in their oil or natural gas-warmed homes, or have driven away in their gasoline-powered cars. But out of sight is a remote, global network of petroleum and natural gas excavators, refiners and distributors upon which the entire neighborhood depends, and that’s what worries me. On those solitary dog walks, I can’t shake off a nagging concern that someday that network will collapse or prices will rise so high that we’ll have to scramble to find a way to stay warm and get to work, the supermarket and other places unreachable by foot. 

Kicking the Outsourcing Habit

There’s good reason for this concern, particularly in the case of oil. To prepare for severe shortages, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has stored enough oil in four sites in the Gulf of Mexico to sustain this country for 36 days. The current inventory is 695.9 million barrels, or 36 days of oil at current daily US consumption levels. Even if that oil turns out to be enough to get us through the worst of oil crises, what will we do in the long run, when, as many scientists predict, supplies of relatively cheap, easily accessible oil run out? Or in the short run, if a natural disaster makes it impossible to transport oil from the Gulf of Mexico to other parts of the country?

This is exactly what happened in November of 2012. Within three days after Hurricane Sandy’s winds subsided, gas lines not seen since the 1970s formed across the New York metropolitan area. Sandy also downed countless trees, leaving millions without power. The hurricane drove home not only how vulnerable our built environment is to major storms, but also how much we’ve come to rely on distant suppliers for energy as well as for food, clothing, household goods and other essentials. Ironically, this outsourcing habit is powered by the combustion of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal, which yield carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to global climate change, which scientists peg as the likely cause of today’s rising frequency of severe storms.  

Transitioning to Post-Carbon Living

Angling to kick the outsourcing habit amid concerns about Peak Oil, a warming planet and economic instability, some 26 groups throughout New England—part of 146 in the U.S. and 470 worldwide—are now in-sourcing instead. They’re working to transform their communities into walkable, post-carbon “Transition Towns” that are well-prepared to survive and thrive without relying on nonrenewable fossil fuels. Raising awareness, collaborating with multiple stakeholders and taking concerted action, they’re striving to build local resilience by empowering residents to produce and consume as much as possible of life’s essentials as close as possible to where they live.

One such Transition initiative—the only one in Boston—is Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JP NET), a three-year-old organization that has launched or supported several projects designed to cultivate local, equitable and sustainable agriculture, energy and transportation systems, manufacturing and building, business and capital, and other critical community resources.

Examples include the Boston Bean, a JP NET-produced five dollar bill honored at selected JP merchants last winter to boost the local economy during the holiday season; Egleston Community Orchard, a formerly vacant, crime-ridden lot that neighbors converted into a garden space where apple trees, raspberries, blueberries, chard, kale and other crops are grown sustainably; and JP Green House, a passive solar-heated, highly insulated demonstration home near the Forest Hills T stop that maintains an average indoor temperature of 63 degrees in the winter.

Reclaiming the Neighborhood

As JP NET volunteers work together to advance these and other initiatives designed to wean JP off of nonrenewable fossil fuels, they are also transforming their community into a greener, more neighborly place, where more and more people are engaging in meaningful work to improve the quality of life for themselves and future generations of residents. The result is a more cohesive and deeply rooted hometown that connects everyone to their land, their neighbors and the larger history of which they are a part.  

Dakota Butterfield, coordinator of the Boston Bean and an activist for Legalize Chickens in Boston, observes that while fossil fuels, piped in from remote sources, have improved so-called living standards and increased mobility, they have also enabled the citizens of industrialized countries to live remarkably isolated lives, whether in their cars, cubicles or single-family homes—rootless lives disconnected from the land and people that surround them.  Lives symbolized by the empty sidewalks I so often encounter with my dogs during our neighborhood jaunts. “We don’t need each other anymore,” Butterfield laments.

By shifting our cultural paradigm from outsourcing to insourcing—from globalization to relocalization—we can overcome this isolation while dramatically improving the capacity of our communities to survive and thrive. To transition today’s global fossil fuel network to tomorrow's locally resilient network of post-carbon hometowns, we’ll need to work together, from the neighborhood to the bioregion level, to cultivate and promote local, renewable sources for food, energy, housing, commerce and more. As a result, as I take my dogs for walks around the block, even in the dead of winter, I will hopefully run into more neighbors, and run out of those nagging concerns about the future of the neighborhood.