About a month ago I got a snapshot of what it might be like to live in a less fossil-fueled and growth-driven world. I had been working on an assignment for Shareable Magazine on How to Bring Transition Town-style Sharing into your Community and in the process contacted transition network groups across the globe to get more of an idea about the movement and its latest, most noteworthy and replicable inspirations and projects. It turned out the way it had to — the most enthusiastic response came from the people closest by, right down the peninsula from me, in Palo Alto.
My first introduction to Transition Palo Alto was through Bart Anderson, a kindred spirit who responded to my initial email with a wealth of information and wisdom. Not only did he turn me on to a range of amazing people involved with TPA — from re-skilling and permaculture wizard William Mutch to "Less Is More" author Cecile Andrews — but he set the tone for my understanding of the transition movement's essence with these words of wisdom:
The real Win comes as we develop a sharing culture in a group or community. That is, a set of attitudes and practices in which people's "Inner Sharer" is encouraged. This culture comes about through 1000s of small things, such as people bringing goodies to meetings. People offering to give things away or help with a problem. People showing appreciation for such behavior. One of the most important things a group can do is reach out and connect. It's not important that TPA have a project that no one else has thought of. What is important is that we are encouraging a community which values sharing and contribution.
It came as no surprise then that after a few emails back and forth, rather than continuing to theorize about a living breathing organism, Bart invited me to come down to their
Holiday Sharing Expo to see for myself what all the goodness was about. If I made it to their little swap meet, he would get a bunch of transition folks to hang out afterwards and share their experiences along with some food and drink. That in itself seemed like a hard to refuse offer, but what was even more seductive to me was the thought of making a day of it and completing the SF to Palo Alto trip via bicycle and Caltrain. My partner-in-muse Deb (aka
liberated spaces) — who had got me in touch with Bart in the first place — didn't have to think twice to join me for the journey.
So here it is, our day of biking the train to a swap meet, or if you prefer...
Life in a Carbon-Proportionate World
Leg 1: Bike ride from the Mission District to the Downtown SF Caltrain Station
The Holiday Sharing Expo was scheduled from 11am to 12.30pm, so we got up earlyish for a scrumptious breakfast, aiming for the 10.15 Caltrain.
After putting some air in the tires...
it was time to get on our pedal horses and greet a beautiful day in the City by the Bay.
After cruising down Valencia Street we turned onto 16th, enjoying a quiet and beautiful Sunday morning going through this industrial part of town towards the bay and the Giants ballpark.
While San Francisco is still pretty much a car-centric city like most other North American cities, there have been vast improvements in bicycle infrastructure over the last few years. Little by little and street by street, the tireless advocacy of the SF Bike Coalition has been instrumental in connecting the city with a network of bike lanes that has prompted a 71% increase in bicycling just in the past five years and is aiming for 100 miles of crosstown bikeways by 2020.
It helps of course to have a City that very much realizes how crucial a bikeable and walkable city is to meet the many challenges presented by a continued automobile culture, from pollution, congestion, and traffic fatalities to shrinking oil resources and climate change. In June 2009, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) adopted the 2009 San Francisco Bicycle Plan, a five-year master plan and ambitious roadmap meant to boost biking to new heights of safety and convenience.
It's this kind of policy and infrastructure change that is making it increasingly more possible for every resident young and old — not just hardcore car-dodging thrill seekers — to get around their city on a bike. To confirm that this is indeed happening I don't even have to look at the stunning statistics — I just look at Deb on her stylin' Public cruiser. Just a couple of short years ago, the streets of our neighborhood were just too crazy for her to feel safe and confident enough to get on a bike. Now she bikes almost everywhere, for fun and to run errands, from Rainbow Grocery all the way down to the Farmers Market at the Ferry Plaza.
If ever there was an indicator of whether a city is moving in a more sustainable direction, it's average, non-athlete folks getting on their bikes to take care of business.
Like this one...
Bike lanes are great, of course, but there are few things more exciting for a cyclist than to stop breathing car exhaust and get off the road entirely, even for just a minute. A nice shortcut through UCSF's new Mission Bay Campus provides welcome relief and gives a glimpse of what a city built for humans might feel like...
We turned north on 4th Street, which felt like a good stretch for a bike reporter self-portrait...
toward the Transbay Terminal...
and our next mode of transportation, Caltrain...
Leg 2: Bike on Caltrain from SF to Palo Alto
I don't know about you, but I still get giddy whenever I see a train. My base instinct is to rejoice at the prospect of travel and change of scene, sitting there along with all these other passengers, looking out the window and watching the world go by. I grew up in Germany where trains were an intrinsic part of getting around, but it probably wasn't until I visited India and had my feet dangle out the doorstep while cruising through endless rice fields and villages that I was turned on to the deeper poetry of moving on rails.
Here on the West Coast of the United States, trains aren't so much part of the everyday landscape, though taking Amtrak from Oakland to L.A. or across the Sierra Nevada and seeing the vastness of the American west is quite a thrill. Getting High Speed Rail from SF to L.A. will not only be a huge step in providing a less fossil-fuel intensive long-distance alternative to air travel, but quite frankly it'll be so much more fun to zone out in a spacious seat to the steady "clack, clack, clack" of a train than to be bouncing through air turbulence with your knees jammed into your chest.
But as far as already existing medium distance commuter trains, Caltrain is about as cool as it gets. As soon as you enter the station on your bike, you get the feeling they're ready for you.
It's so nice not to be the only one on a bike, it makes you feel just like a normal member of society...
After an easy swipe of the Clipper card we're heading out to the platform...
And get on one of the two bike cars...
The double decker design allows us to strap our bikes on the lower level (and yes, those bike cars fill up during weekday commute hours)...
and get comfortable upstairs along with everybody else...
I think what people often forget when they think that giving up their cars would be such a sacrifice and life would go backwards is all the things that we gain when we get out of our cars. Yes, you might lose a little bit of flexibility, independence, and speed (though being faster by car is less and less assured the more people have cars), but I would argue that the things we gain are much more valuable:
Time to read or get some work done...
or just an opportunity to relax or watch the world go by...
There's just something grounding about sitting on a train that makes the idea of everyone sitting in their own 4,000 pound box of steel, plastic, rubber and all kinds of precious metals really overwhelming and out of scale.
Leg 3: Holiday Sharing Expo
"The biggest contributor to happiness is social ties, and competition undermines this. So my focus is on "community conversations" where people come together looking for answers to their issues and the experience is a barn raising rather than a battle. This approach to learning helps create a "shareable" world view as well as inspires people to work for the common good."
- Cecile Andrews, author of the forthcoming Living Room Revolution and Less Is More, Slow Is Beautiful, Circle of Simplicity
We got off at the California Ave station, riding west toward town and our destination, the parking lot behind the
Common Ground Garden Supply and Education Center on College Ave.
Extra unexpected bonus: A walk though the California Ave Farmers Market...
The German in me had to stop at the Kraut stand, of course...
A few minutes later we arrived at the Sharing Expo. Before we could even fully enter the parking lot, we were greeted by Tom Kabat, a local bike builder who had set up a makeshift bike shop, offering free bike repair to cyclists in need.
While I had just gotten a tune up at my favorite bike shop in the city, Tom was kind enough to put a little air in my tire, something I'd failed to do in the morning.
We spotted Bart in the sunlight, chattin' it up with some folks...
He turned out to be just as kind, generous, and intelligent in person as he'd been in our email exchanges. He invited us to look around and check out the scene while he'd get some TPA folks together that could join us for a lunch chat.
There was lots of stuff being swapped.
From books and crafts,
fabrics and plants,
to clothing,
toys,
and Christmas cookies,
the sharing spirit was palpable. But just as Bart and Cecile had alluded to in our correspondence, the deeper meaning of it all wasn't so much about the exchange of stuff, but the exchange of humanity. That became clear when we meandered over to the other end of the parking lot to say hi to Herb Moore, who introduced us to his Scrapophony of instruments made from glass jars, tuna cans, and PVC pipes...
to a set of old keys...
We talked a bit about music and how it helps people focus on what's really important, like being creative and having fun without too much stuff. Herb said that a lot of what the transition movement is trying to do is work away from the mentality of consumerism and find other ways to get your needs met.
It doesn't mean that we all have to live like monks, as the next scene showed...
but that we cherish the things we have, take care of them, and use them wisely.
Lunchtime was approaching rapidly and Bart had spread the word that we were going to continue the conversation at a nearby cafe. And in fact, what followed almost felt like a Transition Cafe, whose top guideline is "whoever shows up are the right people."
Well, these are the people who showed up to talk about their dreams and hopes for a more conscious, kind, and resilient humanity that will have to emerge from the unprecedented and brief era of cheap oil and quarterly profits.
It was really refreshing to get people together with the intention of talking about things that matter, both in our personal lives and in the world. And it wasn't that everyone agreed on everything, what was important was that we all agreed to get together to share our different thoughts, concerns, ideas, and hopes. It just seems that too often in this industrialized world we are alone in our own heads, and just being able to air out the accumulated mind debris in our heads helps to come up with new insights and paths forward that we didn't think possible on our own.
William Mutch sums up the transition spirit in his description of the transition cafe:
We're not looking for whose approach is right, or best, but for intersections and commonalities. How do we come together, despite our differences, to help heal ourselves and the world we call home? How can our differences become pieces of a puzzle instead of bones of contention? An ancient name for a similar idea is "under one tent", wherein representatives of as many religions and spiritualities as possible would come together to share and create together. We just do so "in one cafe."
Leg 4: On our way home
Looking at
the terrifying math of climate change, it's easy to get caught up in the numbers, become carbon counters, and be paralyzed for fear of doing anything that might add more CO2 into the atmosphere. Concepts like
post-carbon or
zero-carbon, while referring to a net-zero CO2 balance where we don't emit more than is being sequestered, are too often taken as absolutes. The oft-heard hypothetical "even if we stopped putting any carbon into the atmosphere today" is not only physically impossible to achieve for the living, breathing beings we are, but the mere proposition of such a goal is an invitation for guilt, hopelessness, and despair.
To me, a more achievable and desirable goal worth striving for would be a carbon-proportionate world. And while it's no doubt important to take big immediate action on reducing the most egregious and gratuitous sources of CO2, transition thinking seems to be looking deeper and further, at how we can live fulfilling and constructive lives in such a carbon-proportionate world. Seems to me that if we are going to drastically reduce the wasteful usage of cheap fossil fuels we will also need to have a positive vision of how and why people would benefit from such a change. And I think the answer has much more to do with things like conversation, friendship, and inspiration than material possessions and convenience.
With those thoughts we said good-bye to our new friends and frolicked down the streets of Palo Alto...
to Caltrain where I got to leisurely finish this awesome book...
and back home to our neighborhood, where we were treated to a picture perfect ending to a picture-perfect day...
o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o
all photos by sven eberlein
crossposted at a world of words