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By Root 562 0

level to the community level and beyond, challenges us to reach beyond conventional expectations and create living examples of a richer quality of life that’s considerably lower in material consumption. Eventually, we hope we can foster the kind of political reawakening that allows us to realize the much broader social and economic changes that are necessary. If we cannot, the consequences may be dire, as even the most environmentally conscious Americans contribute to a society that consumes many times its share, and often terrorizes the rest of the world with its hubris and arrogance.

So how do changes in our thinking come to inspire and activate changes in our lives and in the wider world? One fascinating example lies in the emerging local food and Slow Food movements. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini has described how a contamination crisis in the Italian wine industry created a need to change how local wines were marketed, and eventually led to a much broader transformation in the relationship between rural food producers and affluent consumers. For the first time, the food producers moved to the center of attention, “to make up for the low esteem they have hitherto enjoyed, and rewarded for their work in rescuing a species of livestock, a fruit or vegetable, a variety of cured meat or cheese.”* Slow Food and its “locavore” counterpart in the United States have inspired many to experience the joys, as well as the challenges, of eating closer to home and knowing precisely where our food comes from. But neither movement can survive if it is reduced to just another elite fad, along with high-priced “green” products and “green” fashions. Local food advocates need to fully realize the potential for changes in personal taste to also systematically transform the underlying social relationships. We can no longer allow ourselves to be cast as mere “consumers” of the earth’s bounties, nor continue permitting large commercial interests mediate between our communities and the people who grow our food.

Participation in growing our own food is also an important step. Gardening is already the most popular pastime of Americans, but the evolution beyond gardening for aesthetics, to a fuller and richer engagement in feeding ourselves, has only begun. Growing one’s own food is, in Michael Pollan’s words, a way to “heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle identities as consumer and producer and citizen.” So here in Vermont, people are building modest greenhouses, transforming lawns into food gardens, and returning hillsides that were mowed for mainly aesthetic reasons back into productive grazing land, where animals eat grass, feed the soil, and ultimately become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We have the highest proportion in the country of food that is purchased directly from farmers. At the same time, farmers’ markets are also doubling and tripling in numbers in many urban areas, a profoundly hopeful sign.

Similarly, some of my friends in the building trades are creating a whole new approach to natural building. While “green building” today often means massive, institutional buildings with sophisticated temperature control systems and all manner of newfangled synthetic materials, Vermont’s new generation of natural builders is working almost entirely with wood, straw, clay and mud. They are experimenting with innovative truss systems and even mixing their own chemical-free paints. They’d much rather work with whole logs, with all their imperfections, than with factory-cut dimensional lumber. These are important steps beyond the world of mass production and consumption that has put humanity onto such a collision course with the cycles of nature.

My community is far from perfect. In Vermont we still have neighbors who live in a parallel universe of McMansions and SUVs, or struggle every day to make ends meet in leaky old houses, or in trailer parks. The cost of living is becoming prohibitive for many, and speculators continue to drive land prices into the stratosphere. But the urge to