We Are the Ones We Have (Been Waiting For)
GreenStar Marketing Manager
(This is an article about the recent BALLE conference, written by an attendee. Romano is part of Local First Ithaca through our local cooperative grocery store, GreenStar.)
Everything is going to change. The question is whether we let the changes play out in increasingly destructive ways or embrace the deepening crisis as our time of opportunity.
—David Korten, BALLE founding Board member
As we go to press, crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at an estimated rate of more than 210,000 gallons a day. And it is about to spread to some of the most vulnerable habitats in our country. Already the foul-smelling, brown and orange blobs and slicks are coating the reeds and grasses of the delicate Mississippi Delta marshes like melted chocolate. The “accident” has put one of the nation’s largest sources of seafood, and the entire workforce of that industry, and the families and children who rely on it for food, clothing and shelter at risk. 110 species of migratory songbird depend on the wetlands directly in the path of the oil. By the time you read this, 200 million gallons are likely to have been spilled, enough to coat the entire coastline of North America and South America. That illustrates the size of the slick, which in actuality is headed straight for the Gulf Coast and is likely to hit the Florida Keys, then travel up the eastern seaboard of the US.
British Petroleum, a multibillion-dollar, multinational business, is responsible for this calamity, which has already claimed 11 lives.
Our federal government is responding in the same lackadaisical way that it responded when Wall Street took our retirements away and when Katrina took one of our greatest cities away. Essentially it is doing nothing. Sadly, the words of Sarah Palin, perhaps the unlikeliest of sages, may begin to ring true. It would be fair to ask — how is “that hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?”
The truth is, we need the government to come down hard on Big Businesses when they are harming average folks. But Big Government won’t do that because Big Business and Big Government depend on one another to survive. Why would either group give up the enormous privileges the other group bestows upon them? It just isn’t in either one of their self interests. So we can’t continue to “hope” for change. We must act.
So what do we do? What can we do? After all, Big Business and Big Government have an awful lot of steam in that engine of theirs, how could average people ever hope to derail it? Well, the truth is they can’t. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there is something we can all do.
Last month, several hundred people met to discuss exciting new alternatives to the sad misrule of corporate greed and corrupt and unresponsive government. The Eighth Annual Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) Business Conference was held in Charleston, South Carolina and GreenStar was one of the few food co-ops represented there. The BALLE conference program states a simple mission: “together we can support the emergence of a new economic system, one that supports life.”
These people are not high-concept/low output types. They hail from diverse, high-powered backgrounds in sustainability, farming, economic development, environmentalism, cashless exchange, monetary theory, green industry, philanthropy, activism, food security, permaculture, local business, non-profit, renewable energy and cooperatives. Many have left top positions in government, city planning, community development, law, urban development, media, manufacturing, entrepreneurship, investment banking, finance, urban planning and telecommunications. All of the members have come together to make real things happen in their communities at the level of real people living real lives. They believe our economy should be based not at the level of multibillion-dollar corporations, but at the local level. These are people of action and with the work of their communities their ideas become realities.
BALLE attendees toured the Noisette neighborhood in North Charleston, where a large segment of a former US Navy base was purchased by an independent local group and developed into an interdependent web of businesses and neighborhoods that include a progressive recycling/green manufacturing business that takes recycled waste from the surrounding neighborhood, like glass and vegetable oil and oyster shells from restaurants. They process the glass into products that range from glossy countertops to flooring, all the way to pervious materials that can be used to make green, permeable roadways. They recycle restaurant oils into biodiesel that is used to fuel the boilers of the organic brewery that is part of the same green business district. The oyster shells are cleaned and returned to the ocean, thereby maintaining the biocycle in the local waters.
Up the road is a green roof plantation, where living, leafy roofing panels are grown and used to make living green roofs that maintain a temperature that is almost 30 degrees cooler than a conventional black roof and 20 degrees cooler than a conventional white roof. The green business district houses more than 60 cutting-edge green businesses — design companies, building arts companies, environmental agencies, art galleries, engineers, planners, a sports apparel manufacturer and a biodiesel producer. All are housed in LEED-certified modular style buildings where each tenant can take up changing amounts of space dependent upon need. A beautiful, Beaux-Arts style powerhouse is being converted into a massive civic center.
Nearby, the local retail district includes local beer pubs and natural and local foods restaurants. Clothing made from recycled fiber is sold on the same street and local services like hair cutters and massage therapists round out the offerings. This has already become a destination from other neighborhoods in town, but there is a plan for more LEED-certified green residential housing to be built in a park-style setting originally designed by the famous Olmsted brothers of Central Park fame. In addition to wildlife refuges and smaller mini-parks the city has purchased the waterfront as part of the plan, and a public waterfront walk and park has been built, affording waterfront access to all residents, not just those who can afford the price of waterfront property. There is also an amphitheatre, an “innovation center” and a prison re-entry program.
There literally isn’t room to tell all the details of this exciting revitalization at Noisette, but suffice to say that in 2008, Natural Home Magazine named it one of the nation’s “Top 10 – America’s Best Green-Built Neighborhoods.”
But how can this type of green urban model and the others like it, in cities all across America, change the face of business? That massive engine continues to barrel down the track. What BALLE hopes to achieve is to set another train rolling on another track, one that is life-affirming and beautiful, profitable and fun. Because as Annie Leonard, the author of The Story of Stuff, pointed out in her keynote speech, “We’re trashing the planet, we’re trashing each other and we’re not even having fun doing it!”
The simple plan BALLE has is that folks will just start jumping off of their train and onto ours, because we’ll be doing better stuff and ultimately having better lives.
The most moving presentation of the event was that of Lily Yeh, a tiny woman whose personal inner light allowed her to bring art to the most troubled of Philadelphia’s mean streets. Her patience and compassion allowed her to rally a community that had seen entire blocks demolished and vacant buildings abandoned to drug dealers. After five years of trying, she somehow convinced even the most hardcore drug dealers to stop their lives of crime and join her in creating African art, angels and warriors from the broken bits of glass and the broken lives around her.
Not satisfied with transforming streets filled with drugs, murder and prostitution to streets of art, public pride and community ritual, Lily moved on to Rwanda, where she helped that nation face the horror of the genocide that occurred there. She literally buried their dead, inspired the people to design and build their own incredible memorial space, to face and mourn their devastating losses with screams and tears, and then led the survivors toward their awaiting future. Her Taoist concepts of light balancing darkness allowed for two simultaneous projects there, the genocide memorial, and the mobilization of the survivor’s village.
Alone, Lily led the survivors of this genocide from stunned isolation, immobility and starvation, to become a joyous community that feeds, clothes and houses itself. She helped them develop a range of industries from textiles to clothing design, culminating in the actual manufacture of their own solar panels which they use to power their homes and light their celebrations. Alone, she had found a way to heal the soul of a savaged nation. She said she was not able to do these things because she was courageous, just that she was afraid of becoming a coward. By the end of her talk she had taken the entire auditorium through sobs and tears, ultimately elevating them to a joyous, sustained standing ovation.
Ithaca is a community that is not afraid either. We will continue to take on the oil companies when they want to do their dirty fracking in our beautiful backyard. Ithaca is a community that has always spoken back to power, and now we are an official BALLE city, too. Over 80 businesses are taking part in Local First Ithaca, our local BALLE Chapter. GreenStar is one of its founding members and is active in its operations as well.
There is so much already happening in our town, that when we begin to make the connections some of these older BALLE networks have made we will begin to stretch the boundaries of how people in cities live, too. In so doing we will perhaps be able to learn new ways to inhabit our communities that make big oil companies obsolete, we will create more business models that create capital for real people, not corporations. We will then begin to address the needs of all our citizens and raise the living standards of those who currently just don’t have enough. When our energy comes from the sun or the wind we’ll never need fear it spilling into our oceans.
Already, that’s a train that has left the station, with a whole lot of people on board.
