Cross posted with revisions from Minnesota 2020’s Hindsight Blog

I spent my time in the Twin Cities this summer with Summer of Solutions. Since that summer, I’ve been thinking about intersections between the abstract concepts of “the economy” and “the environment” and the communities where these ideas become realities. During my fall semester at Macalester, I’ve been spending time at an internship for Minnesota 2020, a progressive non-partisan public policy think-tank in the Twin Cities, and I have the opportunity to write about moving Minnesota’s economic policy forward.

of  ago, Will Allen from Growing Power Inc (Milwaukee, WI) spoke at Macalester’s campus at a fundraiser dinner for the Women’s Environmental Institute. It was awesome. In the audience I recognized the faces of Cities organizers, activists and entrepreneurs that I had met through Summer of Solutions. Allen’s speech and got me thinking about how permaculture could go statewide and mainstream, so I got to write about it for MN2020:

The turn toward blustery and freezing weather this week signals the end of harvest season here in Minnesota and the beginning of even more Californian, Mexican and South American imports. Meaning that multi-national agriculture corporation owners will benefit from more of our food dollars.

The world’s warmer regions certainly have an advantage when it comes to year-round food production. Large-scale agricultural methods could not support any crop through a Minnesotan winter.  But thanks to innovative and sustainable growing techniques, fresh salad greens grown in Milwaukee and fresh tomatoes grown in southern Minnesota are becoming an affordable option for consumers.

At most grocery stores in Mankato, Rochester and the Twin Cities you can find Bushel Boy tomatoes, grown in Owatonna, Minnesota, on the shelves all winter long. Bushel Boy grows its tomatoes in greenhouses without pesticides or herbicides. Bees pollinate the tomatoes and predator insects eat any pests that appear. Because Bushel Boy’s produce doesn’t travel thousands of miles to get to a grocery store, these local, vine-ripened vegetables have better nutritional value than their artificially ripened counter-parts.

Over in Milwaukee, Growing Power Inc, a non-profit urban farming organization, takes sustainable, job-creating food production a few steps further. Growing Power’s intensive urban farm design combines raising fish, livestock, poultry, and fresh produce with solar panels, compost, and an anerobic digestor that generate enough heat and electricity to power green houses through the winter. At their Milwaukee location, a two acre urban farm employs 35 full-time staff; generates revenue by selling compost, meat and produce; and offers classes and workshops for folks in the neighborhood. Growing Power unites sustainable food production, economic development and social justice.

Bushel Boy and Growing Power set examples of what year-round farming in Minnesota could look like. Both use efficient, common-sense methods that support the local economy and produce healthy and more cost-competitive food year round. There is still a long way to go before we can make these  systems a widespread reality. The first step is to recognize that economic development takes many forms, including through local, innovative and sustainable agriculture.”

I will continue to think about ways to communicate what I learned and experienced during SOS this semester…Check out MN2020’s blog or website!

Last summer I had the privilege of participating in an amazing Twin Cities Summer of Solutions Program. While I knew this was really a special experience it wasn’t until recently that I’v realized just how well SoS has prepared me to work as a solutionary.

Last weekend I had a chance to give a presentation about one of our Summer of Solutions (SoS) projects at the Northland Bioneers Conference along with several other SoS participants. This conference takes place all over the country and includes thousands of participants. Revolutionary thinkers from around the country talked about pioneering ideas to make our earth more sustainable.

My presentation was about Cooperative Energy Futures, an energy efficiency co-op that works to create community powered energyefficiency as a first step on a pathway towards a Green economy. Throughout the summer I realized that we were doing groundbreaking work, but it really wasn’t until the Bioneers conference that I realized that this work is truly on par with what some of the greatest leaders of our day and age. We are not a just a group of youth, innovators who are contributing to the cutting edge of the global systems thinking we need to pull us out of crisis.

While I have always been confident in my ability to do good work I have considered myself inferior to the “grown up” world.  SoS taught me that I don’t need to wait to make an impact until I’m done with school and that my input and work is just as significant and needed as anyone else’s. I am no longer afraid to take on commitments because I don’t think I can do it, instead I try my best and ask for help when I need it, and in doing so I’ve surpassed what I thought I was capable of.

I am starting to realize while this personal growth is great what will be more important is passing on this confidence to my peers.  By helping others start doing work to improve our world in a way they feel passionate about I hope I can become part of a global solution, one that grows and blossoms over the years to come. In a world facing massive economic, social and environmental challenges we need strong leadership from the youth that will inhabit this plant after our current leaders have passed – SoS is one incredible program that is helping create that leadership.

Cross-posted from It’sGettingHotinHere.org

This is a call.

On the basic level, it’s very simple; it’s a call for youth leaders all across the country who are ready to dig down into the grassroots and work with people in their communities to create solutions. We’re looking for leaders who want to plan a summer program next summer that will start, grow, and expand green ventures at the community level that meet the needs of our neighbors (food, housing, transit, energy, jobs), show the world what is possible, and start to out-compete the dirty energy systems that run our world.

You’re in? Just find a friend who agrees and APPLY HERE. Priority deadline midnight 10/24 – just give us a heads up if it will take a bit longer.

Need more background? Check out this video by my co-worker Matt Kazinka, read the background info in the application, or check us out at www.summerofsolutions.org

But really, this is about a lot more than running a cool program next summer. This is a call about changing the game for our economy, our communities, and our climate.

Continue reading →

This summer, I realized what empowerment means: wanting something you deserve but can’t have, and to be shown how to get it for yourself.
This could be civil rights.
This could be education.
Or it could be a green job.
 
Do we want green jobs, really? Have we fully, deeply, and comprehensively come to understand the deprivation we experience daily: our immediate need for money, being forced to acquire money in unsustainable ways, use it to buy food that’s almost poisonous, take jobs with no concern for us, other people or the planet…it goes on and on.
My swirl of confusion in SoS Fayetteville may be caused by one simple oversight on my part: we don’t really want green jobs, because we don’t realize how much we need them.
We have television sets and cookies, how could American youth ever be deprived? For one thing, when presented with the tools of empowerment, they ignore them.

authored by GELTer Ayoola White

Over the course of our time in Highland Park, we GELT-ers have had a variety of learning experiences: permaculture lessons, visits to nearby farms, a lecture about the danger of nuclear power, and tutorials on home weatherizations. In addition to those classes, we’ve been taking a seminar entitled “the Freedom Movement”. In this seminar, we have discussed the history of slavery, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Poor People’s campaign.

To the untrained eye, this seminar would stick out like a sore thumb when compared with everything else. After all, our overarching goal is to create a model green economy in Highland Park. What do the civil rights battles of the past have to do with the environmental struggles of today?

In actuality, social and environmental concerns have salient intersections. After all, the most disadvantaged people in the world—women, people of color, citizens of the Global South, and disabled people—will be affected first and most severely by climate change, pollution, rising ocean levels, and the like. These groups have struggled and continue to endeavor to gain political efficacy, just as blacks, women, Chicanos, and indigenous peoples did in the ‘50s and ‘60s in the United States. Attempts to solve environmental problems must take into account human communities in order to succeed. Sadly, not everyone realizes this necessity. As one workshop facilitator at the United States Social Forum noted, news regarding environmentalism covers two topics almost exclusively: politics and polar bears. People? Not so much. How can the human population as a whole deal with environmental crises if a substantial portion is so encumbered by pernicious, institutionalized forms of negligence and discrimination? The lessons from the Freedom Movement offer tools to ameliorate the situation.

In our Freedom Movement class, we’ve sharpened the valuable skill of defending our ideas. One exercise we’ve practiced is to create a short thesis—25 words or fewer. Then, we must defend that thesis for ten minutes against probing and difficult questions from our peers. With this exercise, we have to keep cool and think on our feet, much like the countless civil rights activists who made arguments for equality to people who vehemently—and sometimes violently—resisted the encroachment on their unearned privileges. Certainly, the stakes aren’t the same, but I personally appreciated this opportunity, since persuading irreconcilables to recognize the reality and urgency of climate crisis is such a burdensome yet necessary task.

Nonviolence is another key concept we’ve explored. Although environmental activism is not typically considered to be as aggressive as other forms of activism (hey, we’re treehuggers, not tree mercenaries, right?) it is vital to remember that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, “Hate multiplies
 hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” We, as environmentalists, must be proactive, not reactive. Moreover, we must make connections to other movements, not simply notice parallels between them.