Green Options

Last night, Scott Kellogg from the Rhizome Collective spoke at Charis Books in Little Five Points. He talked about permaculture and taking back the word sustainability.

[Creative Commons photo by Chad Hanna]

Marketers and large corporations have co-opted the word sustainability to sell products. It’s come to mean expensive bamboo counter tops and organic cotton bedding. We need to take back that word to its original meaning. Sustainability is living within your means. It’s closing the waste cycle and finding ways to turn trash into something that’s usable again. Last night, Kellogg talked about some ways that Rhizome is accomplishing these things. Ways that we can, too!

The Rhizome Collective operates out of a warehouse in Austin, Texas. Their mission is “to build the world [they] want to live in” through community organizing and education.

When the Collective got started, the warehouse where they work was centered on an asphalt courtyard. They pulled together to remove the asphalt and mulch the land. Now, the Rhizosphere Educational Center is home to a garden, rainwater harvesting, a polyculture pond, micro-livestock, and solar and wind energy collection. By designing these systems and living sustainably and through their workshops, they hope to help educate other communities about self-reliance.

“Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.”  - Charles Kettering

Whoever said a sustainability was impossible?!

Sustainability, impossible?!? That kind of negative thinking is nowhere to be found among the members of the Rhizome Collective in Austin, Texas.  They see a problem with the way we are currently living, and damned if they aren’t going to fix it!

Rhizome Collective chose their name based on the meaning of the word rhizome–

“An expanding underground root system, sending up above ground shoots to form a vast network. Difficult to uproot. “

–and the name couldn’t be a more perfect fit.  Rhizome Collective distinguishes itself as an exemplary resource center for sustainable efforts across the country, offering workshops, consulting and now even a book for others who wish to start up their own deeply green community.

What makes Rhizome Collective special?

Just one look at their Virtual Tour makes clear: Rhizome Collective is thorough and well-researched about the work they do.  They are also optimistic that the knowledge of natural systems can be applied to make the world far, far more sustainable than it currently is.

Furthermore, Rhizome Collective operates on what some would argue is likewise a “forward-thinking” model–a consensus-based, anarchistic (or “direct democracy”) organizational model.  Their hopes for environmental justice mirror their efforts for equality and fairness in organizing, too.

Sustainability in action

Anyone in the Austin area has probably heard of Rhizome Collective through its two-year transformation of the seemingly hopeless Grove Brownfield problem in the Montopolis neighborhood of Austin.  In just two years, the team of over 175 volunteers turned a decades-old landfill and illegal dumping site into an open space, on its way to remediation and reuse.  This outstanding accomplishment was honored with a major grant from the EPA Brownfield Cleanup Award, and Rhizome Collective’s emphasis on reusing the brownfield’s debris in creating an “environmental justice park” on the site garnered even greater praise.