TRANSITION TOWNS CENTRE COUNTY

Transition Towns State College Transition Town Bald Eagle Valley

From oil dependency to local resilience

www.transitioncentre.org

Facebook: Transition Towns Centre County PA

September 9, 2010

Highlights

• Garden Starters Canning Workshop, Saturday, September 11, 11 AM to 1 PM [see below]

• Our September 23^rd public meeting will continue on the key issue of the impact of dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels. We will show Escape from Suburbia, the sequel to End of Suburbia. This film looks at folks who are beginning to address the problems of rising cost and eventual growing scarcity of oil. Although prices are currently relatively low, that is due simply to lower demand resulting from persistent recession. We will have a discussion after the video. Please join us.

• A highlight for September was last weekend’s Crickfest. We had a Transition Towns table; three of us manning the table have been through Transition Training, which has given us a much deeper insight into the TT process. Our interaction with the public was lively and non-stop, and we were able to continue the dialog with those interested in TT in Penns Valley.

• There is an update of The Transition Handbook in the works.

• Turn in unused pharmaceuticals to State College Police, 243 South Allen Street, State College, on September 25, 2010, 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. See below.

Next Public Meeting:

Transition Towns State College Film Event

Peak Oil: "Escape from Suburbia"

September 23, 2010, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Schlow Regional Library

First floor meeting room

211 South Allen, State College, PA

Crickfest

Crickfest is an annual event of the Penns Valley Conservation Association. Hundreds turned out this past weekend, including many from State College. A lot of the Penns Valley folk are on the TT mailing list. This event gives pause for reflection on the different ways they, and we in greater State College, Bellefonte and Bald Eagle Valley respond to the TT model.

There are a lot of great things going on in Penns Valley. I’ve noticed a strong sense of community—a lot of sharing and caring. There is an abundance of local food grown out that way, a lot of which finds its way to State College locavores.

PCVA provides a solid foundation for the local community and economy. We find a host of organizations and groups out there, including PASA, Pennsylvania Certified Organic, and Slow Money. There are some real advantages to living in Penns Valley, but are they ready for rising energy prices and growing oil scarcity? We might gain a small lesson in this from the closing of the gas station in Rebersburg. Next gas is six miles away but the average commute to work for those who must is 34 minutes. This is bad enough for “suburbanites,” but it is the Amish who must adapt the most to this loss of supply. We have no doubt they will, of course.

This reflection leads to a good question: What role does Transition Towns best play? Or, what do we have to offer that will make a difference?

A lot of people are saying that they have seen a rising interest in sustainability. Paul Hawken, in Blessed Unrest, saw the sustainability movement as the largest on the planet. He collected stacks of business cards from people attending his talks. That was three years ago, and the movement still grows.

What Transition Towns has to offer is coordination built into our best practice model. Next to getting more people aware of the need for energy alterna­tives is our mission to get groups talking to each other.

Centre Local Foods

Do we need more local foods? How much do we have already?

Buy Fresh/Buy Local lists 28 farms in Centre County selling locally. Some are CSAs, some market gardens, some have dairy and range-fed animals. That’s not much compared to 140,000 residents and 40,000 plus hungry students. Would another 100 acres of organically grown food be welcomed or feasible?

Local food is healthy, tasty —something we can all take pride in having available. The average American pays $3,000 (moderate budget) for a ton of food each year. All but about 20 pounds of that can be grown in our climate region. The average Ameri­can diet is loaded with highly processed starch, sugar and fat. Factory food is loaded with chemicals and exotic genetics. Factory farms and food miles burn excessive fossil fuels. We can break these bad practices and habits with local foods.

Local Foods, by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins, is a centerpiece of the Transition response. The book covers a range of opportunities from home gardens to community gardens to CSAs, etc. It is a collection of experiences from many sources—a great guide to pull together the rich resources we have here in Centre County.

Local food is good for the local economy. Even AARP is on the bandwagon. They note that buying locally keeps three times as much money in the local economy as buying at the chain stores. That’s still less than half of every dollar spent. We can do better than that if we put our minds to it. Money kept in the local economy is available for re-investment and keeps the local effort growing. That’s about the only growth that is sustainable.

The next questions are going to be where do we find the land, equipment and labor? There is no shortage of fallow land, but it can be expensive. So too is farm equipment. We are going to have to train a whole contingent of new agriculturalists, as well, and make the work attractive to them.

America prides itself on innovation. There are serious efforts all over the country to grow more local foods, including in cities. It’s not easy. Getting more acreage into tillage, even in Centre County, is going to take a robust business model. It’s going to take a lot of that Transition networking. It’s going to take investments.

Labor? Can we get people to go back to work on the farm? Let’s look at unemployment. It’s up again nationally and continuing to rise fast in Pennsylvania. Local food means jobs, both in growing the food and in businesses that supply growers. It means more jobs in processing, storing and selling foods and related products, and jobs in the growing array of collateral businesses that go hand-in-hand with a healthy local economy.

We have technology and business incubators, so why not a local foods incubator? The Transition model already talks about reskilling—helping people learn the skills needed for personal and local self-sufficiency. Why not train local people to support a local economy?

If we are to significantly increase local food produc­tion we will need to form a cooperative enterprise to get it going. It’s already there; it is only a question of getting people involved who can make it happen; who are willing to do the work to get that first hundred acres into production. Let me know how you can help: bill@transitioncentre.org.

Good Sheppard Lutheran Church

High on the list of local food security accomplish­ments is the Good Sheppard Lutheran Church community garden. Members of that and other congregations came together to plant and tend a one-acre garden on church property. The produce goes to local food banks. This great effort opens the door for other faith groups to use their land and built-in management ability to open community gardens. These gardens can be used for charity, for individual plots for members and for community outreach. They don’t have to be big: ten, twenty or so plots could make a huge positive difference in a community.

Appreciation is also due to Ferguson Township, Council and planning office for adapting their zoning to accommodate a community garden. This, too, opens the doors in other municipalities.

Back to “Environment”

A lot of us who are now in the sustainability movement once called ourselves “environmentalists.” Before that we were “conservationists.” That trend simply shows an evolution of the threats we are facing to both life in general and our personal lifestyles.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring made us more conscious of the threats of environmental toxins. There are thousands of chemicals still released into the environment, not to mention those used in foods and food packaging. A recent U.S. study emphasized that there are tons of toxins in coal ash beds all over the country. Drywall is now made from coal ash and we’ve seen the result of that recently.

Studies have identified nearly 300 potentially harmful chemicals in umbilical blood of human fetuses.

“Hazmat” is now a well-known new word in our vocabulary. We see every day on the highways trucks with signs warning of dangerous chemical content. Spring Creek watershed, the State College source of water, could be just one such wrecked truck away from devastation.

We count ourselves lucky in Centre County that Marcellus Shale is not in our back yard, but we need to remember that we are surrounded by it. Our nation’s capital could be the ground zero of toxic drilling effects. Three great watersheds from Marcellus country (and coincidentally, three great food sheds) flow into the Chesapeake and the D.C. water supply.

Resistant pathogens are bugs that grow not only in hospitals but also on farms and in the general envir­on­ment. Feedlots, particularly pig and poultry farms, are breeding grounds for virulent resistant strains, as we have recently learned.

Microorganisms are highly adaptable and can survive great extinctions. In fact, the more we try to erase them, the faster they adapt. That includes those in our homes. Disinfectants and strong antibiotic chemicals can have the wrong effect. Adapting the human immune system might help, but the human immune system is facing its own challenges from environmental toxins.

Another threat to our local water supply comes from pharmaceuticals dumped into toilets. These include “endocrine disruptors” which are “chemicals that may interfere with the body’s endocrine system and pro­duce adverse developmental, reproductive, neuro­logical and immune effects…”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is coordinating a National Take-Back Day Initiative. We can help by bringing all unused pharmaceuticals to the State College Police, 243 S. Allen St., on September 25, 2010, 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.

New Transition Handbook

The Transition Handbook became the best practice model of a rapidly growing movement that started in the UK just five years ago. It was published in 2008. Now there are over 300 official Transition Towns in sixteen countries, 74 in the U.S., two in Centre County.

At the recent Transition Conference in England, TT founder Rob Hopkins said they had learned a great deal in the last two years and it was time to move to the next level. The updated Transition guide is based on pattern language, a highly successful way of presenting ideas in architecture, computer engineer­ing, education and now Transition.

Transition is not the work of just one brilliant leader. One of our principles is “collective genius.” A draft of the new handbook was published in the conference program and Hopkins told the Transition community to “have at it.” When completed next spring, this new publication will reflect the collective experience of thousands of Transition Town participants and friends of the movement.

Hopkins was quick to point out that this new publication will not be one-size-fits-all but a model for each Transition culture to adapt to its own needs. That could be a whole country or a local community.

Garden Starters Demonstration Garden

The rain barrel workshop was a great success. For a fraction of the store price participants went home with a 55-gallon rain barrel all set up and ready for use.

Short notice for those of you only on this list: We are having a canning workshop with Bob Hutchison on Saturday, September 11, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM at 2929 Buffalo Run/Rt. 550, Bellefonte.

Bob is a local gardener with over 30 years of experience in organic gardening and home canning techniques.   Bob’s father taught him how to plant onions, tomatoes, beans, and other vegetables, as well as the value of growing and preserving food.  When Bob and his wife purchased their first house in 1978, he started his own backyard garden and subscribed to Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine.  After a few years Bob started canning his homegrown produce.   Initially he followed his mother’s canning recipes but soon developed his own.  Bob currently cans venison, spaghetti sauce, stewed tomatoes, salsa, beets, beans, and several varieties of hot and sweet peppers.  According to Bob, there are few things more satisfying to a home gardener than opening the pantry door and seeing all the good food you grew waiting for the table! 

We need to plan for this, so please RSVP Sarah at Clearwater (237-0400) or Bill at bsharple@comcast.net. Look for the sign at the entrance to the farm, a large cardboard “pressure cooker” with “G S” on it.

Garden Starters will also be at the Spring Creek Day Family Festival at Millbrook Marsh on October 3^rd, noon to 5:00 PM. There will be food, music and activities for the family. We will build a raised bed garden and plant a cover crop which will add nutrition to the soil.

You can find information about Garden Starters at

http://www.clearwaterconservancy.org/GardenStarters.htm

and on the Garden Starters Facebook page.

PA IPL Kickoff

Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light, a faith-based environment group that started in State College, is celebrating its official start at the Penn State—Temple football game with an eco-tailgate, film festival, first annual meeting and many other special events on September 24-25^th, 2010. Check

the following link for details:

http://www.paipl.org/index_files/kickoff.htm

Transition Social Network

http://transitionus.ning.com/

http://transitionus.ning.com/group/transitiontownsstatecollege

http://transitionus.ning.com/group/transitiontownbaldeaglevalley

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