Montpelier: Transition Town Meeting

I just returned from the Montpelier Transition Town Meeting where Transition Town Handbook author Naresh Giangrande from Totnes, UK spoke about how to transition to a post peak-oil community. It was very much about relocalization, addressing the community as a whole. A couple interesting points he brought up:

1) He uses human happiness metrics as an indicator of success (along with lbs of CO2 emissions averted).
2) For those who don’t have access to land to grow their own food, he and his team are matching up people with land and would like it to be worked with people who don’t have land and are willing to grow things. Pretty cool solution.
3) He noted that “common or shared things” will become more important, like garden spaces, tools, etc.

For my readers not in Vermont, oh gosh how I wish you could’ve seen the folks who attended. They were the best of Vermonters: The Cynic from Barre, the mustache-wearing soft spoken fellow who wore a black hat and coat and carried a long walking stick with colored string wrapped around the end of it, the bright-eyed wrinkly old farmers with no teeth left to articulate their questions, the alert high school activist, the 20-something bearded fleece wearer who reeked of pot when he came in, and my friend Nicko the heirloom tree farmer. There were a lot of suspenders, flannel, and fleece. I don’t know why I find it important to note what everyone was wearing, except for that perhaps it does give us a sense of identity and shared culture – which I hear will be important in the post-carbon society.

I do have one bone to pick with Mr. Giangrande, which is specifically about what a transition town is. He said it was a community that used “much less” energy and “much fewer” resources than what we do now. I disagree. I’m shooting for sustainability.

At least two friends have asked me in the last month “What is sustainability? Everybody talks about it, but I’m not sure I know what it means”. Fair enough, I think it’s overused, but here’s what I mean:

In order for a process to be sustainable it may only take resources at a rate that they may be replenished, and if the resource is non-renewable, then it shouldn’t be taken. This seems rather negative, let’s spin it more positively: A sustainable community uses resources at a rate that can be sustained indefinitely because they are harvested less than or equal to the rate at which they are replenished. Hm. Does that make sense? That seemed to take more words than I had hoped.

I would like to see some metric of success developed around that.

Class blog: why isn't Experimental Physics blogging?

It's been about a week since I assigned my experimental physics students to post on their blog, and well, they no one had. A few people left comments, but that's it. So today I opened up that conversation, why weren't they posting? What should we do about it? Is it something that people still want to do? Admittedly it was a little scary to put that out there as a question: "Is this something you guys still want to do?" And to my delight and relief they said, "Yes, but let's start over."
"So how should we start over?"
"Well, I know you showed us on the projector how to post, but honestly, it goes in one ear and out the other just to watch it - errr in one eye and out my ear. I have to do it. So I say let's go down to the computer lab and all post, and then we'll know how to do it."

Brilliant. Thanks to Ben for completely reading my mind and proposing exactly what I was hoping to do.

So I had them ALL post something about peak oil - the content we had just barely covered, so this was a way for them to apply to their lives what they'd just learned about - and the answers were fascinating, funny, and unexpected. For the first few (ones I read while they were still in class) I asked them to edit their punctuation/grammar, but the later ones I just couldn't get to. I think you can really tell who's I caught and sent back for fixing and those I didn't. We really need to work on writing in this school :P

Anyway, it was encouraging to me that they all posted today, and perhaps tomorrow I'll put an assignment out there to read people's posts and comment on someone else's thoughts. I wonder if they will do it on their own time.