A few weeks ago, Jon and I went to the BALLE conference to find out why our world is so unsustainable, and to see if there’s any hope. Bill McKibben gave a fantastic, extremely distressing, inspiring, and generally excellent talk on the opening night of the conference. He covered a lot of ground, but I think I caught the central thesis: Peak oil demands a continuous solution that must change where and how we live and work, the policy and culture of local farming, local businesses, and local green initiatives. All of these demand a refocus on our local community and on the things that make us happy (hint: it’s not big profit$$$). We have the power to create businesses and policies that can substantially push these changes ahead. Here are some tidbits from his talk:

• Ten times more conversations take place at farmer’s markets than at grocery stores. At the farmer’s market, people are actually talking to each other and directly to the farmers! They are trying to figure out what’s ripe, what they are looking at, and why they don’t buy local food more often. They’re connecting with their neighbors. They being a community together. At the grocery store, the typical conversation is very short and usually ends the same way: “plastic.”
• Speaking of neighbors, 75% of people in this country do not know theirs.
• Speaking of local food, here’s how the local food movement is doing: The average bite of food on the American plate travels 2,000 miles. As McKibben put it, “We are ordering take out from across the world, three times a day.”
• Meanwhile, the most productive farms in the country, in terms of food per acre, are between 8 and 15 acres, according to the USDA.

(I can track down sources for any of these stats, in case you are wondering.)

This stuff is staggering. We have a lot of work to do! As late Jane Jacobs said, “Find your place in the world, dig in, and take responsibility.”

Are you ready?