Report from Second Annual Economic Localization Conference

In 2006, I heard a member of the Willits Economic Localization Action Group speak at an event in Santa Rosa and became curious about what was going on up in Willits.  When I heard about the conference last April, I knew I had to go.

The setting was supreme, tucked away at the Brooktrails Lodge amongst the redwoods just outside Willits.  There were about 60 people attending, many in small groups representing other localization groups.

Undergirding all the information communicated was a heartbeat of growing community, through stories of love and friendship, comedy, humor, poetry, song, dance, organic and local food.

It is difficult in deciding what to share about my experience of the conference and what to leave out.  As always, there is too much to share it all well.  Three weeks have past since the conference and my writing this article, and while I took copious notes during the event (except while eating and dancing, of course) the parts I share here were deeply imbedded into my memory and heart from the start and need no notes to aid in their recollection.

Here are some of my highlights.

There was a 100 year-old woman in attendance.  Yeeaaahhh!!!!  Here’s to life!

Peter Russell, keynote speaker (author of Waking up in Time and photo to the right) spoke of the triple bottom line, which includes environment, economics, and society, and then added a fourth, consciousness.  Peter made many points that I resonated with regarding the challenge and necessity of liberating our own consciousness from hypnotic states.  For example, our ultimate goal is peace of mind.  People want and need to know how to feel at ease, at peace.  However, the traditional culture is saddled with the belief that our inside state is determined by what is going on in our outside worlds.  And as a result, culturally, we have become addicted to things.  We know how to work the outside world.  It is the inside world where we often get lost.  Some key words Peter used were “letting go,” “surrender” and “forgiveness.” 

Creative and appropriate use of technology offers many possibilities on the road toward relocalization. Many individuals at the conference shared their inventions and technologies in demonstration of a wide variety of elegant solutions to some of our most pressing problems. I mention just a few.

The EBC Company (Edward Burton, Phil Jergenson, and Reinhold Ziegler) is an inventors’ workshop in Willits that turns mature ideas and concepts into reality. Their design mission has been to turn waste into products.  While they displayed, discussed and demonstrated numerous environmental technologies, the one that stood out for me is how a grove of redwoods can be harnessed to treat human sewage, with the added benefit of removing thousands of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, as well as the economic value of a renewably harvestable redwood forest that can be used to make valuable tree products. 

The second technological innovation that sparked my interest was electric farm tractors. Stephen Heckeroth of Albion, CA, is currently the only commercial manufacturer of electric farm tractors.   I currently work on a farm in Sebastopol where a major focus is developing fossil fuel alternatives to meet the farm’s energy needs.  Significant improvements have been made in battery technology that now make it possible to run a  two-row cultivator on one of Steve’s tractors all day,  a 72” mower for 6 hours and a 48” rototiller for 4 hours.  This technology, combined with improving solar panes for battery recharging, offers great promise and flexibility in addressing agricultural energy needs.

If any of what I have written has sparked your curiosity, a dynamic group of woman who refer to themelves as the Yuba Gals and produce a weekly half-hour television series on peak oil and positive responses to energy decline called Peak Moments, videotaped this year’s conference [see Janaia Donaldson's article in issue #62].  Contact them to inquire when the DVD for the 2007 Economic Relocalization Conference will be available to ship and  you will see a lot of what you missed and much more than I am able to share here.  (http://www.peakmoment.tv/misc/aboutus.htm ).

 John Taylor lives in Sebastopol and works at Laguna Farm where he helps design, build and maintain the farm’s infrastructure, as well as manage a new internship program.  He can be contacted at mythiclove474@yahoo.com .