BioDiverseCity Land Co-op

There’s a new term out there, one that’s quickly entering common usage: “resilient communities” as one definition suggests, it has to do with a community’s ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in areas including energy…

Here in Portage County, what have local leaders at the County Board level been doing to make our county communities resilient with respect to energy? If you’re scratching your head, searching for something in your memory on this topic, you’re right. Not that much is being done to prepare for the coming decline in petroleum motor fuel product availability (gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, kerosene, jet fuel) which is part of the global peak of oil production problem. This problem is so far, not on the radar screen for the Board.

The problem of peak oil has not, in my memory, been publicly admitted by any of the County Board supervisors, nor by the current County Executive.

One hopes that candidate Patty Dreier, with her extensive connections into the sustainability movement in our region, will have some plan, some political programme, to deal with this problem.

One County Extension fact sheet notes this about County governments in Wisconsin:

“(Sec. 59.03(2) Wisconsin Statutes)…This home rule authority has allowed county government to gradually expand as a regional government in areas such as recycling, water quality management, transportation planning, and zoning review, but only in cases where a municipality or group of municipalities have requested the county to do so on their behalf through voluntary agreements.” (From this Extension fact sheet).

Note that there is one major area–planning for re-zoning–where our County Board and Executive could be preparing us for the disruption promised by the arrival of a) even higher price spikes in oil prices than we saw in 2008, along with b) frank shortages of many products. Peak oil will impact us far more than in the prices we pay for these refined products, once we reach the stage where there is no gasoline (or diesel or anything else) available at any price at your local filling station.

The County Board could be hard at work in completely overhauling the zoning codes in this county, by taking a leadership role in convincing municipalities–cities, villages, townships–that it is in their interests to abolish the old pattern of city centers and “bedroom towns.”

The “bedroom town” is going to have to quickly become a distant memory if we are to have any “resiliency.” This material was already well-covered in the film End of Suburbia. Portage County has its share of bedroom towns, many of which fit the definition of “food deserts.” A town like Rosholt fits several categories of desert: food desert, hardware & home improvement desert, drug/pharmacy desert, auto parts desert, etc. A family has to pile into the car (more likely, 2 or 3 cars) and head off to Point to get many of their needs met. How is this going to play out when petroleum depletion starts to hit home?

You can use your imagination. You can also use it to imagine a much different pattern, one that might work better in peak oil conditions. Higher-density housing patterns, housing co-operatives that perhaps share 20, 40, 80 or more acres useful in food production, for woodlots and wildlife habitat, but with housing sited densely on just a few of those acres, perhaps owned by many unrelated people, held in common. That would be one alternative, not currently in zoning Sharia law.

After putting the current zoning code through the shredder and using the shreddings for mulch or compost, next the zoning committees could take a look at the restrictions on ag land. Perhaps owners of smaller parcels could be allowed to pursue agriculture, from 5 acres on down to less than an acre. Perhaps family farmers could be allowed to site several family members’ houses on their property, without having to carve it up subdivision-style. Already-denser areas such as Merryland Drive between Rosholt and Polonia could be encouraged to develop in unincorporated municipality style, bustling with new start-up taxi and ride-share services, particularly those catering to seniors lacking mobility. If fuel is going to be scarce, we’ll have to learn to share.

In cities, villages and townships, the restriction against conducting a business from one’s home is a throwback to the heyday of the suburbs and the bedroom town, not at all adaptive to the coming era of declining fuel supplies. The zoning codes need to be rewritten so as to allow people to combine business pursuits with their living quarters, so as to provide stability and resilience in both the housing patterns, and the small-business sectors.

From the end of World War II, this bedroom town pattern has been okay with planners at local levels of government. It seemed to work well. Real estate salespeople and developers prospered. The landscape took on a kind of fairy tale look, with houses perched nicely atop kettle moraine landscapes, with gigantic lawns spread out before them. This was the era when employment was provided by giant corporations–many of which have completely pulled out of much of the United States and have relocated production entirely out of the country.

In the depths of the current recession, with 400,000+ people filing new unemployment claims each week, the outmoded dependency on large corporations to save our local economy stands out starkly. It is as if local governments were living in a fog of wishful thinking, magical thinking, eternal optimism based on “the way we were” back in the 1950s.

It is often said (way too often, in fact) that small business is the engine of economic growth, growth in the number of new livelihoods as people take risks and provide themselves their own job by starting up a new business. Yet zoning laws prohibit many people from starting up these businesses using their homefront as storefront. Perhaps the idea was that mixing business with bedroom town would lower the property values. The deflation of the housing bubble seems to have done much to lower property values, all on its own momentum.

In Stevens Point–and many other Portage County municipalities–you aren’t allowed to put a greenhouse in your yard, at your home. Anyone who might want to start a small-scale eco-agriculture business can’t do the startup from home.  The zoning ordinances may have been written to protect larger-scale businesses against the threat of small-timers getting a foothold and perhaps contending on the basis of better quality or service or lower cost. Or, it would seem that would be one motivation for such zoning restrictions.

But if growing local food on a serious scale is considered, such restrictions have got to go. Green Giant is not going to be spearheading the local foods movement, I hope our business/govt. leaders realize.

As we approach an era when motor fuel is going to be absurdly expensive, and oftentimes, downright unavailable at any price (even absurdly expensive), it would seem prudent for our local government officials to start to get a handle on this peak oil issue. I attend any number of “sustainability”-oriented talks, film showings, forums, informal meetings, and whatnot, yet I never see Stevens Point City Council members, nor County Board members, at these sorts of events.

I take that to mean that these leaders don’t regard sustainability as an issue even deserving of their thoughtful attention, nor for engaging with other citizens in meaningful discussion about them. Perhaps it is because there’s been no executive leader guiding the overall direction?

Except, of course, for Patty Dreier, candidate for County Executive. That’s one more reason I’ll urge you to vote for her for County Exec. in the April elections.

Bobby G

Stevens Point WI

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Biodiversity, Co-operation, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, ecology, subcultures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.