Asian Longhorned Beetles Infest Hardwoods

Courtesy Christie Mole

During Transition Milwaukee’s Power Down Week in June 2010, members of the Wisconsin transition initiative built a cob oven and baked pizza and muffins. (The group reports that their baked goods were delicious.)

The pace of change is accelerating, and much of it is neither encouraging nor hopeful—as is seen most recently in the devastation caused by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But at the recent Midwest Renewable Energy Association’s Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair in Custer, Wis., the world’s largest and longest-running energy education event, a workshop focused on the transition initiative. The transition initiative, a rapidly spreading global movement to move communities from oil dependency to local resilience, recognizes new ways to prosper while reducing carbon emissions that are, in part, causing climate change.

The workshop tent was packed with people who are forming a transition initiative in their communities or who are eager to start one. Speaker Bill Wilson of Midwest Permaculture painted both a positive and alluring vision of tomorrow for the audience, sharing how citizens are exploring new, less energy-intensive ways of living that are positive and nourishing. Transition initiatives build societal resilience by re-localizing how we obtain food, energy, housing and livelihood, he says.

Christie Mole, a long-time Milwaukee resident, is a founding steering committee members of Transition Milwaukee, which launched in January 2009. After hearing Wilson facilitate a “Training for Transition” talk for transition initiatives in another community earlier this year, she decided to attend the transition initiative workshop. 

“I’m deeply interested in these issues and recognized that the transition initiative could be an effective and inclusive way of mobilizing people from all backgrounds and interests, from urban beekeepers to urban farmers to green builders,” Mole says.

As part of the 12-step Transition Town process, communities implement practical projects known as “visible manifestations.” During the 2009 Memorial Day weekend, Transition Milwaukee partnered with the Victory Garden Initiative to kick off Victory Garden Blitz. They built as many gardens in schools, front yards, churches and public spaces as they could. Hundreds of people were touched by Transition Milwaukee through this event, and many joined the cause on the organization’s social-networking site, where they have an opportunity to interact with one another directly.

“I’m blown away by the caliber of the people involved with the movement,” says Mole, her infectious spirit and ebullience one of the likely reasons the Milwaukee transition initiative has grown so quickly.

Most recently, in June 2010, Transition Milwaukee sponsored a Power Down Week, filled with workshops that included everything from canning and home preserving to soap making—all key skills needed in the “great re-skilling” (another of the 12 Transition Town steps). 

“We measure our success by those people who powered down in at least one way that week,” Mole says.

As the longest-running transition initiative in Wisconsin, Transition Milwaukee’s numbers have swelled to more than 300, creating an opportunity to help localize efforts neighborhood by neighborhood. 

“Milwaukee is such a large community,” Mole says. “We wanted to build a name for ourselves then perhaps set ourselves up as a hub. Since we’ve attracted more members, we can move the initiative out into the neighborhoods, where more time and energy can be used in even more local ways.”

For urban farmers, the transition initiative will sound remarkably familiar, given that it’s an outgrowth of permaculture design principles and ethics. According to permaculture founder Bill Mollison, wastes become resources within the permaculture design system, productivity and yields increase, work is minimized, and the environment is restored. As with permaculture, the goal of the transition initiative is to transform the present consumption (and growth) model into a creation model based on sustainability.

The bottom-up approach to the transition initiative is refreshingly honest in its call to action.  The grassroots organizers and trainers are quick to admit that it’s a social experiment on a massive scale. The appeal of transition initiatives is understandable: If we make the changes ourselves, it’s unlikely to have the far-reaching community-wide effects needed, but by acting as a community, change is attainable.

“It is worth remembering that it takes a lot of cheap energy to maintain the levels of social inequity we see today, the levels of obesity, the record levels of indebtedness, the high levels of car use and alienating urban landscapes,” writes Rob Hopkins, author of The Transition Handbook (Chelsea Green, 2008) and co-founder of the Transition Network organization. “Only a culture awash with cheap oil could become de-skilled on the monumental scale we have.”

If nothing else, Transition Milwaukee has become one of the growing numbers of places where skills, kindness and generosity have become the tools for community conviviality. 

“We all have had those peak oil moments—that discovery of what’s happening to our planet,” Mole says. “Transition initiatives, for me, led to the discovery of all those people in my community who have come together to solve some of the problems by applying our collective genius. That’s what makes me feel complete.”

 

The number of farmers’ markets has nearly doubled in the past 10 years.

“Locally grown” is a buzz phrase that is no longer reserved for the conscientious consumer. Veteran farmers’ market goers and organic-cotton-tee-wearing yuppies alike are giving local products a more thoughtful glance before making their produce purchases.

Despite local produce being all the rage, there’s still a lot to learn about local food systems and how they operate, which prompted a study on the topic recently released by the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

Surprisingly enough, researchers found that locally marketed food is produced most often on small farms near urban areas.

These farms, where, according to the 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture, the farmers will package, transport and distribute their own produce, are concentrated in the urban corridors of the Northeast and West Coast. This is most presumably because of the ease of access to urban consumers in these areas, says Steve Martinez from the Food Markets Branch of the ERS.

Although the researchers didn’t look at growth of locally marketed produce in other areas of the country, counties in the Great Lakes region also seem to be hubs of local fare, sporting high numbers of farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture. 

However, there’s evidence of a rising demand for locally produced food throughout the country. Both the number of U.S. farmers’ markets and sales resulting from direct-to-consumer marketing have nearly doubled in the past 10 years. The number of farmers’ markets topped out at 5,274 in 2009, according to the USDA Agriculture Marketing Service, and farmers’ direct-to-consumer marketing equaled about $1.2 billion in sales in 2007, according to the agriculture census. Also, according to the National Center for Appropriate Technology, the number of CSA operations, which were nearly unheard of in the mid 1980s, totaled 1,144 in 2005.

But down to the big question of the day: What is local?

“In terms of distance between production and consumption, there is no consensus among consumers as to what this distance is,” Martinez says. “Consumers may associate other characteristics with the local foods definition—which may or may not be related to distance—such as products that are fresher, [are] produced in an environmentally and animal-friendly way, strengthen community ties, and support small-scale farmers and the local economy.”

Legislators have also failed to agree on an official definition. The 2008 Farm Act adopted a definition of locally or regionally produced food being less than 400 miles from farm to market or within the state of production. However, this definition mainly affects federal programs that provide loans for rural development, says Martinez.

Individual states are instituting their own definitions of “locally grown” produce. In May 2010, the governor of Maryland, one of those states focusing on providing a clear definition of local agriculture, signed an agriculture bill that would allow the state to define the word local as it relates to the sale of agricultural products.

“The definition of ‘local’ that retailers use varies wildly, so there is no way for a consumer to know from one store to the next if they mean 100 miles or 1,000 miles as local,” says Sue duPont from the Maryland Department of Agriculture. For Maryland consumers, 400 miles could be North Carolina, New York, et cetera. We think (and are currently surveying consumers) that people think of local as closer than that.”

An advisory committee will meet with Maryland’s agriculture secretary in August to discuss the definition. The law will take effect next year, once the definition goes through the public comment process, says duPont.

Whatever the definition of “local” may be, the federal government is taking action to increase access to local food, says Martinez. The USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, for example, is working to connect consumers with local producers.

“As part of the initiative, existing USDA programs will be used to assist in establishing food hubs to overcome challenges faced by lack of distribution and processing infrastructure,” he says.

Perhaps this will translate to access to more local food in farmers’ markets and beyond.

How do you define local? Tell us on the Urban Farm forums.