Many of us want to add resilience to the communities we currently live in. We don’t want to move.
However, that’s often very difficult. It’s particularly difficult if you live in an urban community that’s mired in a swamp of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can quickly turn a challenging but promising community project into a waking nightmare that achieves far less than what it could or should.
Example: Seattle’s Friends of the Food Forest
Here’s some of the bureaucratic hurdles a small group of people in the Beacon Hill area of Seattle faced when they attempted to add some food resilience to their neighborhood. What did they plan to do? They came up with the very smart idea of building an edible food forest on 7 acres of sloped and unused grassland (think highway median grassland) adjacent to the nearby public park.
For those of you that don’t know what a edible food forest is, here’s a quick primer. A food forest is essentially a special type of wild garden. What makes it special? It’s designed to be a self fertilizing, self regulating ecosystem that automatically produces nutritious food without much human oversight. The process of designing a forest or a garden this way is called permaculture. See the diagram below for more detail. I’ll dive into permaculture thinking and design more in the future.
Now that everyone still reading has an idea of what a food forest is, let’s get back to the story. Excited about the potential of the project, the “Friends of the Food Forest” started the process of getting authorization to build it. That process started three years ago. Little did they know how much bureaucracy they would run into. Here’s a partial list of the bureaucrats and interested parties the “Friends” had to bring to the table for every decision (more detail):
- Public Works.
- Parks Department
- Department of Neighborhoods
- P-Patch
- Professional design team (required by the Parks Department)
- Water Quality Department
- State Department of Health
- Police Department
- Beacon Hill Community Group
It took the Friends three years of meetings, wrangling, and raising funds to learn which parts of the bureaucracy wanted a place at the table and to negotiate a way to appease them. Fortunately, the “Friends” team was tenacious. They kept at it until they achieved success.
They have been given the green light to break ground.
However, as is always the case with so many bureaucratic stakeholders, the final design for the project was based on lowest common denominator. The design is definitely much less ambitious than that initial vision, but it’s definitely better than nothing at all.
Final thoughts. I’m not sure how many people have the time or the stomach for a fight of this magnitude or duration — and this was in a “progressive” city that had declared 2010 the year of urban agriculture. Also, given that these food forests take many years to mature, time and effort may be better spent on locations that suffer from much less bureaucracy.
Your bureaucracy lite analyst,
John Robb
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{ 25 comments }
Great post. This is the key issue for growing RCs. How to conduct OSW (or diplomacy) with the establishment for food, education, energy, banking. This is where the networks are really needed. Growing vegetables (however enjoyable) is a matter of organizing ‘train the trainer’.
Thanks Brian.
LOL. Really. ROTFLMAO. Talk about synchronicity. This morning I had coffee and pastries with a good friend of mine, the former mayor of a neighboring town and involved for a long time with sustainability and resilience at the local and state levels. To sum up key points from a long-ranging conversation (and I will come back to the importance of just these kind of meetings as essential nodes in the construction of a truly resilient community), these were the things we agreed on based on substantial bodies of experience:
*Bureaucracies of any size have no incentive to change their way of doing business.
*B’cies exist to enforce or ensure trust (that someone will help if you’re being robbed, your house is on fire, that your food and water are safe to eat/drink, that your children are being well educated) because most people don’t know who provides those services and/or they are unable/unwilling to provide or arrange for those services themselves. One of your previous posts discusses trust among locals as the glue of resilient community; our opinion, based on years of trying to work within the system to effect change is that if you tore out the structure and got everyone talking to each other, it would work a whole lot more efficiently.
*It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission when it comes to implementing resilience.
*Trying to change bureaucracies through traditional (or non-traditional) means is largely a waste of time and resources better spent finding ways around, through or in spite of bureaucratic interference.
It may be best to, as much as possible, ignore the bureaucracy, for as Dmitri Orlov has pointed out in several of his discussions, they are increasingly ineffective in terms of enforcing their regulations, and when they do it’s largely a show piece (such as sending SWAT teams to raid *Amish* farmers, or issuing citations to force someone to remove their food plots from their front yard, or ticketing homeless people for riding bicycles on the sidewalk).
Back to the value of conversations and meeting people to create the social network that comprises the true hidden spine of a resilient community: you have a local preparedness instructor/PR guy/writer sitting in a sidewalk cafe having coffee with a former mayor/local-state resilience/sustainability instructor who are joined by the shop owner, who is a traditional (Old School scratch baker) who is also a 4×4 enthusiast, shooter and preparedness advocate, and we’re discussing how one of us (the former mayor) intervened to help someone who just had a medical episode in the coffee shop. That incident, those coffee meetings, the social networking that comes from that and the sharing of skills (match making the baker with a new space to open a baker, the local instructor taking the others out to shoot, reviewing first aid experiences/training/kit together) — that’s how resilient community is being built, at least from my grass roots viewpoint.
Not in trying to change bureaucracies that are broken beyond repair, or kowtowing to people whose salaries we pay.
Just my two cents worth — now I’m off to more coffee meetings…
cheers, m
ps: John, when are you going to have *your* kaffeklatsch?
Marcus,
That’s an excellent post. Thanks for sharing that.
How do we start thousands of these?
JR
I definitely need to start mine.
Most welcome, John.
How to promote that? Hmm. Identifying evangelists and providing them with the means/resources/education to go out and spread the word would be a top down approach; encouraging people to do that themselves from the bottom up would be to plant seeds/memes through this particular vehicle you’ve created, reinforced with select case studies, and maybe, if you wanted to be more formally analytical about it, a social network graph based on interlocking skill sets and interest pursued for the love of it (hobbies, passions etc.) so that people could make a checklist and start looking out side the box of their current social network.
What I’ve found is resilient community has to have people who are willing to cross self-imposed lines and talk to people outside the box — the grizzled veteran who meets with his friends once a month to talk about guns, shooting, hunting and political interference with his Constitutional rights has a lot in common with the tattooed, pierced non-violent guerrilla gardener who gets together with her friends to discuss increased yields, avoiding regulators and political interference with her right to grow good food. But *someone* has to take the time to recognize that common ground instead of the differences, and then match-make and foster the relationship.
My friend the ex-mayor and I call ourselves “Connectors.” Our job is to find people and match them up and broker the meetings. There’s tons of sociological studies on that social function; the thing is to leverage that as a tool in the service of resilience.
Find Connectors. Give them a road map. Get out of their way and let them figure out how best to get there. LGOPs.
My two cents worth, anyway.
cheers, m
Luckily, it is much easier to influence your local elections than it is to influence state or national ones. Democracy actually works better in smaller situations.
One note on public food forests. We have a lot of naturally occurring ones up here. We just call them forests. We get ramps, fiddle head ferns, berries, and all kinds of other foods from them. But I often see areas where people have come in and over-harvested. It’s very important to teach people to leave enough behind so that enough comes back each year to keep it all going.
Scott, Teaching moderation/consideration in a world built on greed/distrust is definitely an educational burden. It’s fixable. JR BTW: Greed is the pursuit of wealth at the expense of all other human values. It’s not a good thing.
As a former political science major, I can pass along the classroom wisdom that “a bureaucracy’s primary job is to perpetuate itself”. While its stated reason for being created and the functions it is designed to perform are always important, these reasons occupy only a close second place behind its primary purpose.
Alan, It’s also a tough opponent when the needs of the community change. JR
Which is harder to grow: a food forest? or a tribe?
A tribe!
That’s why people don’t want to move. They want to stay near their family (and/or other tribes).
To achieve wide rollout, the RC will have to make the advantages of resilience obvious for the people to which one is already connected. Naturally, those who “get it” first will be ahead of the curve. Those who are more resisting, more tied in to the current system, or just stiff-necked, will be easy pickings for parasites (economic, governmental and criminal). Today, what “resilient community” looks like is a bunch of techno-hippies in a cob house on a run-down farm. (ie: no offense Marcin, love your work.) What I am waiting to see is something more like a community* that has deliberately added a layer of resilient organization over it’s existing framework.
That is replicable!
(note: That community* may be defined socially (as a church), geographically (as a neighborhood/town), or family, or business campus, or whatever tribe you care to define)
jf
JF,
Concur that a tribe is more important. I think we’re well past the early examples you mention though. I’m hoping we can package up the experiences and ideas required to do that in this online community.
JR
Wonder what would have happened if they went the guerrilla gardening route — would any one in authority even noticed or cared? Add elements here and there over a number of years.
CA, I thought about that too. The problem is that the parcel is grass that is mowed by the Parks Department. So, anything they grew would be cut. JR
Engage then workers from that department not to do their job on that parcel. Low-level people often better hear common sense, logic and stay on side of humans.
AT< Harder to do that now, but it will be a good strategy as things progress. JR
Few people will be lucky enough to find themselves in an ideal location for an RC. Probably the first step is re-location, that’s what I had to do.
Better to get forgiveness than permission. And a few concrete barriers / spikes in the ground might deter the mowers.
Richard, I live by this: “Better to get forgiveness… ” Most don’t. However, there are better ways that injuring a lawn guy. JR
Agreed, make friends with the lawn guy and he’ll probably mow around your deal especially if your flowing him some food. He may know a better spot for a project too.
This recent Venture Beat article which explains how to build successful software development teams and services reflects a lot of what it takes to make a community resilient. Just thought anyone getting their hands dirty with building communities from the ground up should check this out.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/29/how-to-build-a-developer-community-from-scratch/
Glumling. Useful article. Thanks. JR
Here is a timely post on right to farm laws that attempt to reform bureaucracy.
http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2012/02/facing_the_zoning_monster.php
One small word in defense of bureaucracy, it was developed consciously to replace the patronage systems where loyalty to a specific oligarch or clan was the means of collective action and organization. So yeah, it isn’t optimal but it is better than feudalism.
However, in an age of declining resources and growth, bureaucracy can become neo-feudalism once governments are captured, like finance has done worldwide.
The more interesting question is how resilient communities can break the bonds of neo-feudalism with something better. The best answer right now is Orlov’s stealth/gray man is the way to stay safe.
PS> Concur. Bureaucracy isn’t inherently bad. It’s just that it is going to be a barrier to change, at the rate/scale and type that we need. What we need to do is well outside of their comfort zone. JR
Hi All:
I’m new to the resilient communities blog, and resilient communities in general. I really like how this blog is not just a place for for people posting their observations on the doom and gloom of our current political/economic malaise. There are plenty of blogs focusing on those subjects. Instead it sees like this blog is for doers – folks who recognize our situation and come up with creative means to thrive in sub-ideal situations. I look forward to contributing what I can.
When’s this kaffeklatsch? If no date/place has been set I’d like to suggest Bloc11 in Union Square Somerville. It’s a bank-turned-coffeehouse with lots of space and strong brews. Sometime next week???
Thanks David. You get it. I’m pretty much available next week. Dmitry? Anybody else?
JR
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