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.

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.