Turns out the online flyer didn’t have an address.
I had expected more people to show up at the meeting, but it’s just Nancy and I. We’re sitting at Desert Rose, a bar and restaurant in Belgrade, Montana, that uses old fryer grease for heat, part of the environmental change Nancy thinks America needs.
She brings up the Industrial Revolution and the tech-centric self-reliance it spawned. She argues it has led us to become disconnected from our neighbors, that we now prefer to get in the car and drive to the grocery store instead of walking next door to ask our neighbors for a cup of sugar.
Without strong, resilient communities, the system falls apart, she says, which is why she’s leading Transition Streets, a program that seeks to bring neighbors together to make small household changes to help the environment.
Given the attendance, the message doesn’t seem to be resonating. Adding to the irony, I reached out to Nancy and her husband on Couchsurfing, an online social network, and they invited me, their sole participant, to the event via the Web.
Nancy says the project (one of 14 in the US, which was started in the UK) was already tested in Bozeman, and although it went well, after the meetings the momentum dissipated. Many of the people that turned up for the meetings already had strong ties to their neighbors and others were college students that moved away, she says.
The initiative requires participants to attend seven meetings and work through a binder full of information about buying local, saving water and energy, but overall, Nancy says the program is super simple.
“You don’t have to think, you just have to read,” she says.
The statement catches me off guard because, in my mind, we should be giving people empowering tools to solve problems themselves, instead of encouraging them to just take the advice of those in power.
But in the next breath, she explains that the workbook shows people how to read their own energy meters, which helped Desert Rose catch the gas company overcharging after they switched over to using fryer grease for heat.
Nancy is determined to spread the word so she’s hosting more meetups, this time focusing on Belgrade. And taking it even further, her and her husband are building an eco-village on 10 acres in Clarkston, less than an hour outside Bozeman.
Their motto, drawing on Field of Dreams, is: “If you build it, they will come.”
They’re hoping to inspire others to build small houses out of local materials, plant year-round in the sunken greenhouse, create a diverse food forest and show people that they’re “not disgusting, redneck hippies.”
I definitely don’t think that, but in having talked with a number of people that are both part of, and former members of, intentional communities, there are drawbacks to the lifestyle. One, especially if the members decide not to work for The Man, is the lack of healthcare.
“It would be nice to have a doctor or dentist on board here,” Nancy says. Plus, she wants the community to pool their economic wealth, so the young people would be paying for the medical bills of the older members keeping in mind this will be done for them when they get old.
Sounds similar to how social benefits have worked on a federal level, but it’s hard to see how it might be practical on a smaller scale, especially if young members are left to care for a top-heavy pyramid of elders while dealing with the nomadic, inconsistent lifestyle that’s become the norm for people their age.
Nancy is a massage therapist but doesn’t work that much, at least not taxable work. She barters quite a bit, a leg massage for the digger in Clarkston and a full body for meat from a local hunter.
She’d rather live with the land, than on top of it. And instead of slaving away at a 9-to-5, she’d rather go fishing. Nnacy and her husband, who have one son, are “voluntarily poor”, she says.
But that’s not to say she doesn’t have to consider money and its usefulness in persuasion. For example, she often frames the Transition Streets program in economic terms.
“I’m selling you a healthy lifestyle, a better Earth for your kids,” she says of the program, but then, as if testing my lifestyle leaning, adds: “But you can come at it from a money standpoint too; these changes will save you money.”
Because coal reserves are a main industry in Montana, most of the state has residents that “get crabby if you talk about CO2 emissions,” Nancy says. “When people only think in dollars and cents, you have to talk to them with that in mind.”
But she finds like-minded people in Bozeman, which is “a little pocket of enlightenment,” she adds. I hadn’t noticed before but the statement sounds a bit pretentious. I’m going to stop using that to talk about Austin, Texas; St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; and other liberal cities in conservative states.
“The American dream is the American nightmare,” Nancy concludes.
But, Nancy is just one of a new generation of dreamers I’ve met, ones who want to see continued migrations back to the country, back to small communities, back to collaborative economies.
*Names have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
Thats pretty good but the people in rural Montana, Wyoming , South and North Dakota + learned to live off the land and not expect our government to help out much a long time ago. It is great that your new found friends are doing the same to some degree. Don’t tell me she is working and not paying taxes on her earnings? OMG what has this country become?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Atta girl!
The concept of ‘intentional communities’ is an interesting one in that I think these things have always been there, but they formed around things like churches and ethnic groups. If you look at the history of immigration in this country, there plenty of examples of people choosing to group together around specific concepts, and in some cases, it led to intermingling as say Catholics from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Southern Europe settled into communities around churches. Today we still see intentional communities around immigrant groups and they form communities to help each other out with money. I forget the term, but in some restaurants, the workers will all contribute tot a savings fund and then on a rotating basis, each individual gets the whole pot.
What’s interesting is this idea of forming communities around the concept of shared ideology (which some might argue is the founding idea of the U.S.), and pooling economic resources. Do you think, though, that it is necessary to be ‘poor’ to do so? Couldn’t these communities pool resources, create items of trade, and build wealth? I guess money changes everything.
My one reservation about these kinds of communities is that they are not immune from politics. I know one person who was run out of one with her kids. I am not sure of the details, but I know it was uncomfortable. I think the other thing is that like a company or anything else, it depends on having people who actually contribute. How do you deal with slackers?
You are right that people need to be encouraged to think, but are there some things that are better put on autopilot?
One last thought in this disjointed ramble — is it appropriate to only measure resources in terms of money? I put this to an economist who was talking about people selling bottled water for high prices after a disaster and essentially positing that price hikes after a disaster were fine because they more efficiently distributed resources. There are a lot of problems with this, but the question I asked was if the resource a person has is time, then why shouldn’t that confer an economic benefit. But I suppose it could be any resource — time, tomatoes, physical strength, skills, etc. Money was once just a medium of exchange, but now it seems to have taken on the appearance of having actual value in and of itself. I am not sure that is the best thing.
I have tons of notes on intentional communities, many around the same ideas you express here. I chatted with someone that lived in a community that had it’s own industry and made money for the whole group. And recently in San Diego, I met a couple people that lived in shared housing, semi-intentional community but one guy with a pregnant wife, deciding he needed a job in the city, because while there’s a ‘money is the root of all evil’ mentality, he has to work in the way the system demands for his family. So no, you don’t have to be poor… That is just Nancy’s sentiment.
Things better on autopilot: breathing. 😉 You know, I’m glad you brought this up, because now I’m remembering a conversation I had in Pittsburgh about how the pocket computing systems are going to lead to kids not really needing to know multiplication tables or all the state capitals. And instead of focusing on rote learning, we’ll start focusing on problem-solving… which should lead to even faster advances in (hmmm… everything? tech, medical, etc).
And now thinking about that… This is what I give always as an example of why social media is positive, because I already know what all my friends are doing, so when we get together, we don’t have to do all that small talk bullshit, but can really get right to the meat of the conversation. But my ideas there come from Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better.” You should definitely check that book out!!
“This is what I give always as an example of why social media is positive, because I already know what all my friends are doing, so when we get together, we don’t have to do all that small talk bullshit, but can really get right to the meat of the conversation.”
I’d never thought about social media in that way. I always thought of it as a passive and impersonal way as opposed to actually talking to that person one to one, but maybe that’s because I usually feel more comfortable that way.
I too would like to live a life of voluntary simplicity but struggle to balance that with the necessity of needing at least some money to pay for basics and have the security of healthcare (somewhat easier here in the UK). There’s a great article about dispelling the ‘cabin in the woods’ dreams us millennials are dreaming about: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/06/cabin-fantasies-reality-oliver-burkeman
Social media can definitely be impersonal. I think many of us are still trying to figure out how to use it and where it should fit in our lives… Thanks for the link!