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.