Island Ingenuity Tour!

In past articles, I’ve always stressed the importance of being resourceful.  That means being actively and creatively involved in arriving at solutions for all the problems and situations that arise in your personal world. It requires a lot of curiosity about how things work, knowing how to use tools to fabricate things, how to think "outside the box". Buying just the right thing to serve a need or provide a service is the bare minimum. Growing or devising something from your immediate surroundings is better, and making something useful from something that you were about to pay to dispose of may be the best. Sometimes solutions have a simple elegance that is beautiful to behold. Almost always, it involves overcoming an imaginative barrier that you may never have noticed. It usually involves doing some research or learning a skill. In my mind, it is being an artist of the best sort: somebody that is capable of producing something beautiful as well as useful.

Never have we had a greater need to reimagine and recreate our world. Our fossil fuel addiction is leading us into a climate-changed world that will turn our economy on its head. As the economy is disrupted, so will be our social stability. Expect that supplies of the things we need will be scarce and expensive. Our financial nest egg may prove to be much less useful than our ability to be useful to ourselves and our neighbors. In addition, the trend toward relying on our cars to tell us where we are, and our I phones to supply all the answers is a precarious situation indeed. Relying on the economy to provide for all our needs has allowed us to forget how to live on this planet. The more of us who are able to take care of ourselves the more stable and constructive will be our adaptation to the new world that is certainly coming. That’s resilience.

We don’t all have to learn all the skills to provide energy, food, shelter, and clothing for ourselves. That is something the survivalists, who intend to make their stand out in the middle of nowhere, have to worry about. The beauty of living in a community is that we can each contribute one or two skills and rely on our neighbors to provide what we can’t. However, we have to know that we have a comprehensive set of skills in our community. We need to do a skills survey on our islands to see what our capabilities are right now. Then we need to identify what is missing and start to fill in those gaps. Personally, I think that achieving this will be a lot of fun and, using Sharon Astyk’s adage, it will be good to do "EVEN IF" none of the dire predictions above come to pass.

Would you like to be more self sufficient in your meat and/or vegetable needs all year around? Would you like to cut your energy bill in half or more by creating some of your own energy and making your house more efficient? Would you like to lower your water bill by providing more of your own needs from rainwater and recycling your graywater? Would you like to see your trees turned into lumber or beautiful craft material? Might you live in a place where you could have a water system in which water was the only moving part and gravity the only power required?

The First Annual Island Ingenuity Tour, on Saturday, September 22, from 10 am to 3 pm, will give you the opportunity to see all of these activities and more, and to talk with owner/builders of the these systems. There are 16 sites in all, five clustered in town for a walking tour, five clustered to the north for a 9.6 mile bike tour from the Farmer’s Market, and six sites to the south on a 13.6 mile circuit from the market. Of course, you don’t have to go by bike, but we encourage you bikers out there to take the opportunity to show us how to save money on transportation. Download maps and site descriptions at islandgreentech.org or pick one up at the Market on 9/22. See Susie Kalhorn’s article in this paper for more info.

Hope to see you on the tour!

Comments or questions?
terry@vashonloop.com