This is not a farm.

I’m not sure any Vermonters are following me, or if any Vermonters have power/internet at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of resources I just found for anyone seeking information, or with information to share. Vermont isn’t getting a lot of national media coverage because only half a million lovely people live there, but tropical storm Irene is doing a ton of damage. I’m not sure exactly why, is it the topography, or the fact that the storm hit more directly than in NYC?

• A facebook community page: Vermont Flooding 2011: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vermont-Flooding-2011/212455332141871
• A Woodstock blogger, Julia Carlisle: http://woodstockearlyworm.wordpress.com/
• On twitter: Search hashtag #vtirene, or hashtags for the area you’re interested in, like #btv for Burlington, or #uppervalley for the Dartmouth-White River-Woodstock area.

A number of VT’s beautiful covered bridges have succumbed to the floodwaters, and numerous roads are washed out. There’s a lot of frightening footage out there…I just wish the best for my co-workers at Chelsea Green (our email server is apparently down which doesn’t make me feel good about our office and archives of all our amazing out of print books).

It strikes me as pretty ridiculous that a few days ago I was worrying about the lack of water out here in Los Angeles. I think mama nature would like me to learn to be a little more zen about this kind of thing. Something along the lines of Murphy’s Law. Whatever can happen will.

My seeds just made it to LA! I was so sad when I realized I’d left them in the pile of things to be sent to us later by my partner’s very helpful parents. In the insanity that is moving a whole family (of two queers and a dog) long-way across the USA I couldn’t even remember where I’d put them. In a box. Some box. Somewhere…

I wanted to start my balcony garden NOW! Or I mean, a month ago. So I bought some crappy Lowe’s seeds and threw them in some crappy Lowe’s soil (I’m a snob, sorry). They’re doing great (because yes, despite my snobbery, ginormous ag-industry does know how to impregnate some soil with some tasty nitrogen…probably better than my ardent but amateurish composting attempts akshully…), but I wanted my Fedco seeds, my High Mowing Orgaaanic seeds, and the seeds I’d saved from last summer’s bolted brassicas. Waaah!

Anyhow, whining’s over. Now I just have to find out how viable these suckers are after the steamy trip across America in a Post Office truck.

Fertility FTW!!!

Oh, and I need to find some containers. Cheap containers. Or free ones! I haven’t found too much good dumpsterage around Claremont yet…Anyone with tips, please shoot them my way.

I came across this article a while ago. Today I’m doing research in preparation for promoting a new book on the Transition movement, and I came across it again. It’s a haughty screed by Alex Steffen of the sort-of now defunct but very awesome and optimistic WorldChanging organization.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010672.html

I finally figured out what bothers me about it. It’s his elitist snobbery, utterly poo-poohing the efforts of Transition folks. Like this:

The Transition movement seems saturated with what Michael Lerner called “surplus powerlessness” disguised as practicality. All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse… and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap.

He means this to sound credible, even important…but it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s yet another extremely privileged person blaming the victim.

News flash buddy. People do feel so disempowered and disconnected from their neighbors and from the resource streams that sustain them that a seed exchange or clothing swap can truly be a life-changing experience. It’s not okay to call that pathetic.

At first I agreed with Steffen, thinking, Oh yeah hm, it’s true, a kids clothing swap won’t save the planet. We need to think bigger. We need like, some experts to come save us with new technologies and stuff…waitaminute!

NO! No no no, Alex Steffen. We do not need more smartypants know-it-alls telling us what will save us, or inventing what will save us and then selling it to us. We need exactly what Transition offers. We need to come together in small groups and rediscover what it means to be earthlings, animals and humans. We need to feel what it is to find power in the seemingly small but radical acts of growing food and helping one another without corporate middle men taking our money along the way. This article sniffs disdainfully at how Transition groups

offer a way to step out of emotional paralysis by saying “just go ahead and do something, anything.” Part of it is intentional: groups spread more rapidly when the demands placed on their members are minimal.

But I’m telling you, that emotional paralysis is real. Maybe you don’t know. If you’ve never been emotionally paralyzed, you’re not special, you’re not better than those of us who have been. You’re LUCKY. You should be grateful, but you should not be so dismissive of empowerment.

To me, Transition is about more than just peak oil and energy crises. It’s about a more holistic sort of community well-being. It’s about happiness. Who can shake a stick at happiness? This guy, apparently.

The article quotes some prominent Transition folks, mis-characterizing them as “gleefully” awaiting the apocalypse. Again, like most of the article, it’s just mean-spirited, and ignorant of the privileged mindset that created it.

Peak oil and climate change, as ideas, really can do crazy things to people when they start to understand them. The two are intertwined in the origins of Transition, and I know from my own experiences that you can’t consider them seriously without suffering a bit of a revelation. Peak oil and climate change CHANGE the game as we’ve been playing it our whole lives (I’m 28). They change the game our parents, our grandparents, and their parents played. We don’t have an especially good grasp of history, we millennial humans, so that means we’re entering into a completely unknown and terrifying reality. Nobody knows when, or how extreme it will be, or how fast, but it’s coming, and it’s scary.

Transition accepts this and works with it. It doesn’t gleefully await the destruction that’s bound to come with any abrupt energy collapse. What can be done about that anyway? I guess that’s where the Transition stream diverges from the Alex Steffen stream significantly. The Steffen stream sees a technological messiah coming to save us all, and the Transition stream sees the world more for what it is (I think).

That world is full of citizen-consumers with hardly a lick of power to their names, even if they are educated and fairly affluent. Votes don’t matter, protests don’t matter, nothing matters. But home does, and family does, and neighbors do. And love does. And compassion does. And you know what? Food does too. Transition starts from these simple bases and builds…well, whatever the community needs.

It isn’t hegemonic, it isn’t high-tech. It isn’t prescriptive, and it doesn’t look the same from town to town. That’s the true beauty of it. Transition is merely people, coming together to find their power and how to determine just a little bit of their own destiny. This is something culture at large and politics at large have failed to offer us earthlings.

But we’re starting to figure out how to take it back.

Early this morning, early for a Saturday, we got in the creaky Volvo (still tired from the 3500 mile trek across the USA long-ways) and set out for Van Nuys to help my sister move to her new apartment.

The voyage west was easy. The 210 freeway was quiet most of the way into town, and a rare phenomenon enveloped us: true fog. At least I think it was. It seemed too low and cleanly grey to be smog. It seemed damp and cool like fog. It obscured our view of the foreboding desert mountains that hug the city on its northern and eastern sides. It lent an element of softness to the ridiculously risky task of automotive transport (What did you do today? Oh, I threw myself and my beloved in a metal can at 75 miles per hour down a cement chute filled with other metal cans traveling at erratic, sometimes even greater speeds. Oh, and it was foggy.).

Where I’ve been living the past few years you can drive the length of the state and pass less than a hundred cars on the highway the whole time. That drive would take about three hours, and you would spend almost the entirety of it in the right lane unless you really needed to pass someone. Then you’d venture out into the left lane for just as long as necessary, and return safely to the right—the only lane for Vermonters. When I first started driving in Vermont I thought this was odd, and cute. When I first drove in a snowstorm in Vermont I realized that it wasn’t weird, it was simply the only safe way to travel in those conditions. The right lane is more heavily traveled, so it stays more free of snow and slush. A hump of greasy ice builds up between the lanes, and a very easy way to get into an accident is to attempt to pass someone by traversing that hump, which often will cause your fast-moving car to slip, dovetail, and spin uncontrollably until you collide with another car or tumble down into the median.

Oh, but driving in Los Angeles is so very different. I knew this. I’ve been here before, and I was dismayed then too, at how ubiquitous an experience is the traffic jam. Why are all these people here? Why NOW? 

This morning our drive to Van Nuys was traffic-jam-free. There was a little excitement as various freeways intersected and merged with ours, and ours split off into others. But I grew up in a sunbelt city, and spent formative adolescent years learning how to play nice in traffic, so I did the freeway merging auto dance without too much gnashing of teeth. The Volvo’s trusty thermometer told us that it was a mild 66 degrees outside, and with the soft fog around us it felt just fine. We helped my sister disassemble her Ikea bed and move it a few miles away into a bigger apartment. We spent some time eating birthday cake and laughing, talking about movies and silly people, then started to make our way back home. We stopped at Del Taco, the cheapest not-too-unhealthy fast food on earth, and re-entered the freeway wormhole.

That’s when the worry started.

I’ve felt the same kind of thing each time we’ve driven across this city. It’s a bit like nausea, and a tightening in my stomach, accompanied by an acute feeling of dismay, and a faint despair. I didn’t feel it this morning in the fog, though. Which gives me a clue as to what’s causing it.

I’m worried about this place. When the sun shines down on it—this bizarre desert mecca—the miles of pavement bake and crackle in the heat and dryness. There are millions of people here, and millions of acres of land…but hardly a scrap of it is green (not to mention the fact that hardly anyone owns any, or rather, that only a few own most of it). For the first time in my adult life I see vacant lots and I do not want to turn them into gardens. For the first time since I started developing an obsession with urban food production I see gardening as a curious way to waste water, and here water is what matters. Driving along the freeway, now clogged with hundreds of others, and now unshrouded by fog, with the thermometer showing 88 degrees instead of a temperate 66, now it feels dangerous. Now it feels like a trap. And all around us are dust-colored buildings, and teetering palms with spiked leaves poking at the bright sky. Buildings advertising cars, and studios, and towns. Stacks and stacks of people drinking gallons of scarce water in this dry, dry, hot, hapless place!

Granted, I’ve got east coast eyes. I grew up in Florida where the air itself can hydrate you. I moved to New York City which is surrounded by rivers. I moved to Vermont where in the summer water flows across the rocky land ecstatically, jumping down streams and into lakes. In the winter the whole land is embraced by a solid cap of water in the form of snow. The land is sparsely populated by people and buildings. The rest is just green. Lush, riotous green (in the summer).

Natives to this place probably see very different things while driving across, trapped in the freeway flumes. They probably don’t even see the freeways as traps, honestly. I admit that I’m paranoid, and see with emotion clouding my perceptions. I know.

But I’m still worried.