Collective Gardening and lawn care - Ms Kitty's report

When the oil shock first hit, many on the island were in the habit of letting commercial gardeners come and mow the lawn and trim the bushes. The oil shock brought that to sudden stop as for the most part the gardeners simply stopped showing up. It wasn't the highest priority in most peoples minds but at the community meetings a breakout group did form around this issue. Many front lawns were converted to gardens and a lot was learned about growing and storing food. For some however taking on the task of gardening was not possible. What developed in most of the participating neighborhoods was a hybrid sort of collective that both gardened in collectivized front yards and also mowed lawns with electric lawn mowers as appropriate, (it turned out that there was some electric garden tools in someones garage in virtually every neighborhood .)


Another area of great success reducing the use of gasoline started as a skill share workshop for Hybrid owners here on the island. Originally they started with a practicium on driving technique to get he best mileage ( Hybrid drivers were getting very differing mileage and it turned out that driving technique is critical). Soon however the focus turned to conversion of the cars to "plug in's" that acted as pure electric cars , at least as far as the first 20 miles or so , and further mileage was obtained by adding additional battery packs and or rooftop solar panels. At present about 50% of the actual car traffic on the island is now some form of Hybrid car. Electricity still seems to be available there have been only a few failures of the electric network so far. A small scale industry has sprung up here making chargers and retrofit kits for Hybrid vehicles. Some are being exported to other areas however this is not growing quickly because of a shortage of raw materials and high shipping cost.

The Constant Gardner world without oil

Reporting from an urbanized island somewhere on the west coast.


My apologies for not reporting in sooner , but I'll try to catch up quickly:

Initially when the oil prices became an obvious issue I wasn't attending the local community meetings and such so I'll have to report only what others told me....

Some of the ideas at the weekly community meeting revolved around self sufficiency and organic gardening and these were somewhat implemented when some empty lots and city property was turned into community plots
An intriguing idea was proposed to restore the islands streetcar system, but nothing has come of that yet.

Later when the oil crisis started to kick in here locally the community meetings became a bit of bedlam , fortunately a couple of experienced facilitators showed up , who revised the structure into what is called a spokescouncil structure ( http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/Commentary-StarhawkDirectDemocracy.html ), and meetings are getting more done with better overall sense of participation.

The new structure of the meetings produced a lot of good results via breakout groups and educational workshops. In a later post I'll describe the workshops on hybrid car modification and how lawn and landscape care was transformed from a noisy gasoline based business to a community based electric powered activity .

Electricity has not been a problem so far , however there is no local generators , there was a proposal some time back to build a garbage burning generator on the island , which was vigorously opposed at the time . Some small emergency generators were located on a nearby military base but may be of limited usefulness.

One shocking new development that is affecting some, is the sudden ending of ground service by the US Post Office , no clear reason has been issued for this action though some speculate that it is because of anticipated future unrest, others suggest that there are problems in parts of the country already that we are not being told about. All international mail now is only accepted for air shipment and most of the domestic rates were dramatically raised in such a way as make the air and ground service essentially the same! http://www.usps.com/prices/

Some small protests occurred in front of the main post office and are still continuing occasionally. Some local businesses are desperately seeking alternate shipping arrangements for their goods.

Another area of concern is WATER , the island receives all it's water from the mainland and concern is that if the electric grid fails that the water supply may be cut off as well. So far there has not been workable plan to address that problem.