Growth / Development

On the last weekend in January, a small crowd of onlookers gathers at the edge of Brookfield Pond in central Vermont for what is – these days – a most unusual spectacle. An odd contraption of wooden beams and iron hardware stands on a patch of ice surrounded by rusted old saws and oversized tongs. A local historian narrates as two men move to the center of the ice and begin sawing. After a few minutes they use a strange fork to pry loose a block more than a foot thick. An ingenious lever system easily lifts this 300-pound block of ice off the water and lands it safely on the surface, frozen before it hits the ground.

Welcome to the Brookfield Ice Harvest. It’s one of the last of its kind - an event that’s essentially a relic, carried out by small northern towns to celebrate history and liven up the long, frozen winter.

Until WWII, harvesting ice was a necessary part of life. Before refrigerators, this was the only way that families and general stores could keep food products cold in the warmer months. The mammoth blocks of ice were stored between layers of sawdust until they melted, at which point people were out of luck until the next winter.

My husband, daughter and I watched the spectacle last weekend until our toes numbed. As we headed back toward the car my husband shook his head. “Sure seems like a lot of work when you can just open up the fridge.”

That’s for sure. But there are also consequences to opening up the fridge – and a thousand other modern conveniences – that we don’t think about. We’re so used to having things exactly when, where and how we want them that we rarely give thought to whether we could do without, or perhaps even do better without. I’m not about to ditch my appliances and head for the river with a saw and pitchfork, but the ice harvest did get me thinking about how we could embrace more of that old time ethic in our home lives and our communities, and why we should.

My Yankee ancestors have been touting a phrase for generations: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” I was excited to run across a new blog built on that concept, by blogger and writer Meg Hourihan. She’s challenged herself to buy nothing in 2012 except for what she’s used up or worn out. A great mantra and one that seems relatively easy to adopt until you’re faced with saying no to your niece’s request to buy girl scout cookies, or passing up that 90% off sale at your favorite store. But if we could all move in that direction, there’s no question our wallets, our closets, and especially the planet would be better for it.

If you’re intrigued but not quite ready to go whole hog, there are plenty of ways to start down this path. Closest Closet – one of last year’s CommunityMatters Strong Communities Competition applicants – is a unique project in Southern Maine that aims to help neighbors recycle and share, turning to each other rather than buying new. If you don’t happen to live in Southern Maine, check out the Freecycling Network – a similar concept, nationwide.

Communities often seem to do better than consumers at embracing this ethic, albeit by necessity. We’ve yet to hear about a town in the U.S. that isn’t facing budget shortfalls and cutbacks, and most places are pretty creative at making do and doing without when it comes to rec funds and school supplies. But the Minnesota non-profit Strong Towns has helped communities reexamine their decisions concerning land use and infrastructure improvements. Strong Towns’ “Curbside Chat” program and a companion booklet helps communities see why some “growth” and “progress” is actually setting us back.

Just as we want ice in July, we want bigger, smoother, nicer roads. We want new developments with views of the countryside. We want more growth, period. The problem is, the things that communities and consumers believe will make them stronger and wealthier often don’t.

I’m not a Luddite, and the message here isn’t that growth and conveniences are bad. But there are tradeoffs and there are alternatives – ones that people don’t often think about in today’s world. It is possible to harvest ice from a pond rather than pulling it out of the freezer. It’s possible to borrow that thingamajig from your neighbor’s garage rather than buying it online. It is possible to build our communities differently.

And it’s quite possible that using up, wearing out, and making do in some aspects of our lives and communities will prevent the very real possibility that we’ll have to do without in others.

I taught a class on the American Dream while student teaching last year. I gave students markers and giant pieces of paper and asked them to draw whatever popped into their minds when they thought of the “American Dream”.

Nearly every student’s paper included a simple drawing of a house—a square with a triangle roof attached, four little windows and a front door. This should not have surprised me; my drawing also had a house. But this caused me to wonder: is single-family home ownership the ultimate expression of the American Dream?

Yes, Thomas Friedman has done it again. He’s made me say “YES!” and “THANK YOU!” aloud to myself in my office.

Why? Because he’s “all stocked up on crazy,” and so am I. Friedman's New York Times Op-Ed column “Is It Weird Enough Yet?”, published on September 13, cuts to the quick of the absurdity and ignorance of recent (and past) claims that climate change is “some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research.”

I happened to be reading this column while listening to The Climate Reality Project, a 24-hour, live, worldwide stream (currently in its 21^st hour) featuring experts and scientists from 24 time zones. One of these scientists was explaining that with each degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold more water—an unsettling percentage more that I have since forgotten, or blocked out.

Photo: Michael Dorausch
I recently tuned in to our local KBCO (World Class Rock) radio station and heard Death Cab for Cutie’s new song “You Are a Tourist”. These lyrics grabbed my ear:

And if you feel just like a tourist
In the city you were born
Then it’s time to go
And define your destination
There’s so many different places to call home

Music has the power to touch people, wherever they are in their lives. Given the right moment with the right mix of experiences, lyrics can be powerful “shifts in the context of community.”

In Community – The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block writes about shifting the context of community and creating an alternative future through transformation. He claims that all “transformation is linguistic, meaning we can think of community as a conversation” (p 31).

Image: A boundary of the Living Bend site, transformed into a “linear greenstreet” with urban agriculture, native landscapes and an “integrated greenshade” featuring water catchment, solar PV and UV protection.

Fifteen years ago, Flagstaff, AZ, a small city perched on the edge of the Colorado Plateau, launched a community visioning project: Flagstaff 2020. It was the largest public dialogue ever conducted in Flagstaff, and the hot topics at the time were rapid growth and urban sprawl.

The result was a sweeping 25-year vision for the city, leading the way to some notable accomplishments:
completion of an Open Space and Greenways plan; institution of new logging practices in surrounding national forests; and a new downtown public square.

You hear a lot of talk about sustainability and the Green Revolution, about shrinking carbon footprints and maximizing solar gain, about new, innovative methods for building energy efficient homes using local or renewable or recycled materials.

You also hear a lot about how these methods can be prohibitively expensive, sensible only for those with large expendable incomes that afford them the luxury to consider their impact on the environment—unlike most other, average, working Americans.

Well, here’s a story about a young couple of Annapolis, Maryland, who have neither expendable incomes nor much “luxury” in the way of resources, time or connections, let alone cash. They have three children, ages 11, 6 and 1. One, Carri Beer, is an architect at Brennan + Company Architects, the other, Michael Hindle, a Passive House consultant who works out of their small home in Catonsville while also caring for their youngest. Read their bios here at INDRAlogic, a passive house and holistic sustainability architecture firm they co-founded.

Have you had it with trying to fend off yet another strip development proposal in your town? Are you tired of your reasons for opposing big box being discredited by those who say aesthetics are subjective and have no place in economic development or planning? That it’s a free country and you just can’t go against the market?

I’ve seen this debate played out many times, having served on the Planning Commission of my town for a dozen years.

In James Howard Kunstler’s provocative book Home from Nowhere, he wonders whether we “have the will to reimagine city and town life as a general proposition.” The phrase “will to reimagine” has stuck with me. It’s full of promise.

Residents of towns often feel constrained by existing politics or structures, and when they are given permission to claim the right to think differently, the resulting creativity and energy is remarkable. The most dramatic current examples are certainly found in Egypt and Bahrain. But closer to home, we at the Foundation have witnessed this kind of excitement in our projects.