Reflections on the Transition
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Meet Buffy, O'Malley, Spike, and Nimoy: 12-year-old Hannah Mckinney's urban backyard chickens.
Photo by Tatyana Ryevzina
It's been a very wintry summer in the San Francisco Bay Area—my first tomato finally ripened in early September. Summer seems to have disappeared while I've been hunkered down in the fog. I haven't attended any Transition Albany events (except for the August showing of Dirt! The Movie), although I've received notices of walking tours, planning meetings, study groups, and even an afternoon to listen to elders sharing their memories of Albany. But looking back at the past several months, I realize that the Transition Town goal of increased local resilience and self-sufficiency has been taking root within me and among people I know.
For an example, let's start with 12-year-old Hannah Mackinney. Last fall, Hannah gave a well-researched PowerPoint presentation to her dad, Paul Mackinney, to convince him to let her keep chickens in their urban backyard. This spring, in exchange for future eggs, I sketched some plans for Hannah and Paul to build their chicken coop. In July, Paul married my business partner, Tatyana Ryevzina, and I gave Paul, Tatyana, and Hannah four pullets as a wedding present. The chickens are now almost ready to lay eggs—eventually maybe as many as one per hen every day or so. They are a constant source of entertainment, always eager to sample the latest vegetable scrap offerings. They seem happy in Albany, a city where backyard hens (though not roosters) are legal, and their neighbors seem happy with them.
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Tatyana has been my food mentor in other ways. She subscribed to a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) weekly produce box long before I did. Her satisfaction convinced me to subscribe myself—and the adventure has broadened my diet and taught me to distinguish rutabagas from Tokyo turnips. Tatyana is also a proponent of home fermentation. She gave me and several of our associates instructions and cultures for making kombucha tea. She has brought me tastes of homemade sauerkraut and rye bread made from wild sourdough yeast. Early this summer, Tatyana, my hyperlocavore buddy Wayde Lawler, and I attended an afternoon workshop where we learned the benefits of fermentation and how to make dill pickles and curtido, a Latin American cabbage condiment.
Wayde Lawler, of course, is another key part of my web of food production/preservation co-enthusiasts. He shows up periodically in my backyard with seedlings to plant. If I am home, I get a chance to chat with him and learn something about horticulture. If not, I come home to see the garden transformed—the former lettuce patch converted to winter greens, say, or the pea trellises expanded. Wayde and I have shared other food-related experiences: kombucha, a visit to the chickens, apples and apple pie, plum jelly, and pickled cucumbers, beans, and radishes. Most recently, we both attended a bee-keeping class. Now I'm pondering where on my 1/10th acre lot to situate a beehive.
Finally, my business, Sarana Community Acupuncture, sustains me as I reach toward community resilience. Sarana is in the process of obtaining certification as a green business. We've replaced our incandescent bulbs, installed a bicycle rack, changed the old toilet for a new low-flush one, and posted bus schedules and signs for recycling, composting, appropriate waste disposal, and Transition Albany events. We've subscribed to a weekly delivery of CSA flowers to decorate the clinic for the past two summers. We or our clients periodically bring in excess home-grown or Full Belly Farm organic produce to put in our give-away basket. Almost weekly, my volunteer receptionist, Pam Fadem, brings me homemade pesto, bean soup, salsa, or street-tree fruit. Pam, co-author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health, is a source of all kinds of do-it-yourself information, so she was the person I asked when I wanted to know how to dry apples. Now I've commandeered the back window of my roommate's car for use as a solar dehydrator.
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Pamela's "ad hoc solar dehydrator," used to dry apples.
Photo by Glennis Briggs
I still purchase probably 90-95 percent of my food, but my environmental footprint is shrinking. My garden hasn't produced a ton of vegetables yet—at most a couple hundred pounds, even counting the apples, oranges, and my neighbor's overhanging lemons. But there have been plenty of evenings when, refrigerator bare, I've gone foraging in the backyard for something to stir-fry. My confidence in my ability to produce the things I need is increasing.
But self-sufficiency, I realize, is a misnomer. What I am aiming for is local sufficiency. While I am marginally better at providing for myself, my gradually accumulating “locafficiency” is very much dependent upon people I see day-by-day. We feed each other's enthusiasm for sowing and building, harvesting and preserving. We share knowledge as well as produce. Transition Town Albany has sown the seeds and helped us connect, but we—my business associates, clients, friends, and neighbors in wider and wider overlapping circles—are the ones creating the Transition movement. It's happening, even while I've been hunkering in the fog.
Pamela O’Malley Chang wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful actions, as part of a series of articles on Transition Towns as seen from Albany, CA. Pamela is co-owner of Sarana Community Acupuncture and is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine.
Interested?
- Read more from Pamela O'Malley Chang's blog on Transition Town Albany.
- Can You DIY?: Sweeten with honey, darn a sock, learn what your grandparents knew.
- Seeds of Resilience: Climate change, peak oil, and a stalled economy: The Fall 2010 issue of YES! Magazine shows how people step up in uncertain times to create a resilient way of life.
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Reflection on human population dynamics....
Human population dynamics will become a topic of open discussion soon, that is certain. Global gag rules will be eschewed rather than promulgated. When that time comes, I trust it is not too late to make a difference in the lives of our children, who are probably going to be unimaginably victimized not only by the arrogance, folly and greed of their elders but also by their cowardice.
Lester Brown reminds us now that "civilization's foundation is eroding". He and we pay careful attention to the distinctly human-driven symptoms of what ails us and report them everywhere; but when will we examine the possible causes of the ailment itself and report findings of what appears to be a non-recursive biological problem? If the human overpopulation of Earth is the problem, when is extant scientific evidence of human population dynamics to become the object of rigorous scrutiny, careful analysis and professional reports?
Many too many experts possess scientific knowledge of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth, I believe. They have remained electively mute. They know and could do better; they have both the tools and the empirical evidence at their fingertips; they are abdicating their responsibility in raising awareness of the those that still do not yet see and understand the human-induced aspects of the global predicament looming before humanity.
Many experts have had a multitude of opportunities to comment on human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth in professional conferences like those sponsored every four years by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and in an array of speciality journals dedicated to human ecology, population biology, human demography, etc. The experts have uniformly refused. Their abject failure to respond more ably to the challenges presented to humanity in our time is woefully inadequate and inexcusable. It would be unfortunate if the silence of so many was ever construed as giving consent to this ignominous behavior.
Let us look for a moment at the human population dynamics research by Hopfenberg and Pimentel on human population numbers as a function of food supply. The evidence in their article, Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, is correlational data. The evidence appears to indicate the presence of a non-recursive biological problem; the independent variable is the food supply and the dependent variable is human population numbers. What could this correlation mean? Well, if we stop and think about it, it would reverse the widely shared, consensually validated and culturally syntonic idea that human beings are increasing the food supply to feed a growing population. According to prevailing thought, human population numbers is the independent variable and food is the dependent variable.
Perhaps a correct understanding of this relationship has potentially profound implications for the future of life on Earth. Whether human population numbers is the dependent or independent variable is what matters. The correlational data from Hopfenberg and Pimentel indicates the former. Human population numbers is the dependent variable. Since 2001 I have stated that this evidence from Hopfenberg/Pimentel provides us with the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics. This evidence directly contradicts data from many sources that indicate human population numbers is the independent variable.
Except for the human species, no other species increases the food supply for its consumption. Other species live within the carrying capacity the Earth and its environs provide them for existence. If human beings are actually driving food production, and not the other way around, then we humans are truly exceptional. And if we choose to believe we are exceptional with regard to our population dynamics, then I believe we are no longer speaking of scientific evidence but rather in logically contrived, ideologically forced and culturally biased terms.
Will a professional in a field of study with appropriate expertise please point to the peer-reviewed, published research that supports the hypothesis that the population dynamics of human beings is essentially different from, not common to, the population dynamics of other living things? Where is the scientific evidence for such human exceptionalism in the population dynamics of the human species to be found? While much preternatural evidence has been presented as if it was acceptable evidence of human exceptionalism, I can find no adequate science that indicates human population dynamics is different from the population dynamics of other species.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this perspective.
Sincerely,
Steve