Personal Information:

My story is one of a peace and environmental activist-turned-peaknik. When I was an undergraduate in 1990 at Iowa State University in Ames, I began hearing more and more about "acts of aggression" by an "evil dictator" named Saddam Hussein. His "unprovoked" attack on the sovereign nation of Kuwait was trumpeted in the media as the worst possible offense to the "New World Order" -- which then-President George Bush seemed to define as one where the will of the globe's sole superpower (a.k.a. the U.S. of A.) was to be universally obeyed.

The onslaught that followed tore at my soul. Here we were, berating another country for its violence while simultaneously bombing it back to the Stone Age. I was ashamed, saddened, and angry. And so, I got involved. I joined the student newspaper, organized with a new campus group called People for Peace in the Middle East, and spoke out in favor of good faith diplomacy to resolve the conflict.

Why when similar acts of aggression were occurring throughout the world, was our military singularly trained on Iraq? Why had we armed Hussein to the teeth in the 1980s, sitting idly by as he gassed the Kurds, only to turn on him several years later? Over time, I began to see that our country's voracious appetite for oil was what was really driving our foreign policy. We needed an obedient government that would keep the oil flowing -- and we were willing to kill for it.

That understanding led me to begin exploring our society's uneasy relationship to the environment. Why were we hell-bent on consuming resources like there's no tomorrow? And what gave us the right to use them for our exclusive benefit? To explore these questions, I changed my major to cultural anthropology and environmental studies. I was mesmerized by the world of organizations, movements, and ideas that were emerging to shift our world toward a more socially just and sustainable path.

Knowing of all the amazing work that was being done in California to address this challenge, I packed up a U-Haul truck and left Iowa to pursue my dream of becoming an environmental activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. After a bit of canvassing in the mid-90s with Clean Water Action, I found a home at Earth Island Institute where I worked for three years as a writer, researcher, and activist for the ReThink Paper project, which promoted tree-free papermaking fibers like hemp, kenaf, and agricultural residues from the fields. In 2001, I was co-founded Grassroots Globalization Network, one of the key organizers of the World Sustainability Hearings held in Johannesburg as part of the U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development. I later worked as the Program Director for Circle of Life, a progressive environmental, social justice, and spiritual activism group founded in 1999 by the well-known tree-sitter Julia "Butterfly" Hill.

While at Circle of Life, a tenacious and persuasive guy by the name of David Room convinced us to review a movie called End of Suburbia for our newsletter. I was already keenly aware of our over-reliance on fossil fuels and how our society was living beyond its means. But I still held out hope that a combination of renewable energy resources and new technologies would allow us to shift seamlessly to a sustainable economy. I seriously believed it was merely a matter of political will. End of Suburbia shattered that idea by driving the point home that no amount of harnessable renewable resources would compensate for the vast concentrated energy provided by oil and natural gas -- both of which were soon to go into progressive decline. What's worse, our entire infrastructure -- agriculture, transportation, power generation, construction, water processing and distribution, manufacturing, etc. -- was utterly dependent on fossil fuels. This dependence was -- and is -- truly the Achilles Heel of modern civilization.

Eventually, I joined David Room for a brief stint as a program coordinator for Post Carbon Institute. Together, we co-founded a new project called Bay Area Relocalize in order to assess the potential for bringing the sustainable production and distribution of food, water, energy, manufacturing, and other basic goods back to our communities and surrounding region. Now called Bay Localize (http://www.baylocalize.org), the project has become a full-fledged organization working on a range of projects and initiatives that seek to build a more self-reliant, sustainable, and socially just Bay Area.

While no panacea, we believe that localization offers one compelling means of bringing our lives back into balance with our local bioregion. Indeed, localization can be an evolutionary process that positively transforms our lives and culture. With the right incentives and initiative, we believe we can cultivate local assets, make many of the things we need on a daily basis, and ensure equitable access across communities. While we may not be able to produce all that we need locally any time soon, localization would restore some semblance of balance between local production and imports, thereby ameliorating some of the social and environmental costs of the globalized economy and providing a launch pad towards a more sustainable future.

Should we choose to accept it, our task now is preparing for energy descent, which will require us to localize our lives and economies. We must re-seed our regional landscapes with locally grown (and locally eaten!) food, re-connect work and family life, and create strong, enduring communities that honor and affirm everyone's inherent value.

We can begin by producing and distributing more of what we need locally, creating plenty of meaningful vocations and interconnected business opportunities that increase community self-reliance. In time, this re-weaving of locally-centered lifeways will also allow us to retrench from imperial scheming for control of the world's resources and veer us off our dangerous collision course with ecological collapse. The eventual rewards to be gained from localizing our economies in ways that bring us all closer to one another and with all life on this planet are as yet unfathomable. They may very well be the most exciting, spiritually fulfilling days thus far in human experience.