Green Options

Talk about a recipe for potential disaster.  Combine a down economy, changing agriculture practices, rising unemployment and the end result looks grim.  But here’s the secret ingredient  revitalizing and greening our countryside:  young people under 35.

Profiled in the new book, Renewing the Countryside: Youth, this new generation is making their mark on rural areas, from starting new farms to putting out their own entrepreneurial shingle in small towns. Renewing the Countryside: Youth showcases fifty case study stories, one from each state in the United States, cooking up a super-size serving of inspiration for what can be done in similar communities throughout rural America.

Renewing the Country (RTC), a Minnesota-based non-profit organization, specializes in championing such stories, telling the story of the small-scale but big impact individuals and organizations that are creatively crafting livelihoods that positively impact their rural communities. While other RTC books focus on stories within specific states such as Wisconsin, this latest book project, published in partnership with the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), uniquely celebrates rural youth.

In addition to the case study stories themselves, the engaging writing and photography also came from a team young artists across the nation. But beyond the inspiring read, this book serves as a starter blueprint for others looking to either return to or plant new roots in rural America, no matter one’s age.  Looking at these case study stories collectively, five themes emerge that identify why this particular group of young people are succeeding in the countryside:

“Follow your dreams and do what you love, creating community wealth in a living economy. Explore, listen and share. Help others see the interconnections. Realize that all the solutions we need are here now, and do what we can to help others embrace the real life and what can be.”  With an “Earth mission” like that from Brett and Tawnee Dufur, how can you go wrong with your business, or life?

The following ecopreneur profile, drawn from my ECOpreneuring book, is an example of how some of the most successful ecopreneurs follow their passions, not the profits, while navigating their often diversified enterprises that thrive with a triple bottom line.

Books, bikes, canoes. Publishing, tourism, outdoor recreation. Family, friends and fun. Like nature’s diversified geography providing the Missouri River backdrop for the scenic town of Rocheport, Brett and Tawnee Dufur’s ecopreneurial life reflects the strength in diversity. Despite the sleepy town with a population a dash over 200, 15 minutes outside of Columbia, Missouri, the thirtysomething husband-and-wife team has created a laboratory of innovative, ecopreneurial ventures that keep life and livelihood blended and blooming, locally focused, yet reaching audiences and customers well beyond the river’s touch.

Brett’s first venture started in 1995, when he wrote and self-published the first guidebook for the Katy Trail, the longest rails-to-trails project in the United States, 225 miles along the meandering and mighty Missouri River. It remains a best-seller to this day. “What I discovered is that people are hungry for the opportunity to connect with a sense of place, and that’s what this guidebook is all about,” explains Brett.

There’s been some interesting thoughts floating around the internet about rural, tacit and generational knowledge that we as a species are losing.

It seems strange to think that we could lose knowledge, especially in today’s world of information on demand, but if you think about it, certain skills and know how are hard to come by.

At the end of 2008, over one half of the world’s population lived in urban areas. Urban lifestyles come with their own characteristics and culture and so do rural lifestyles. Urban populations don’t have ready access to many of the experiences as rural populations do. General knowledge of where our food comes from for example, the simple act of gardening, knowing the planting seasons, identifying plants and knowing when to harvest; having the understanding of why bees are important, is not something that city dwellers grow up experiencing and knowing.

Based on this, I consider myself very luck to have grown up in a semi-rural area. I was close enough to a city but within easy distance to farms, lakes and rural towns. I learned many things because of this, both craft related and non-craft related and continue to acquire various tactile knowledge (err tacit, but I like tactile better) and I hope to never stop.

In a world overdosed with negativity, Jan Joannides roots for the opposite underdog, building an organization and livelihood around showcasing the positive side of what’s working right.

As co-founder of Renewing the Countryside, Joannides created a means to showcase positive examples of rural revitalization while simultaneously serving as an inspiring example of how one’s purpose and life can passionately blend.

As I write about in the Ecopreneur Profile found in ECOpreneuring, the seed for Renewing the Countryside stemmed from Jan’s master’s thesis work in the late 1990s profiling vibrant, diversified Minnesota farms and ranches. “As I interviewed these folks, I became so deeply inspired by their story and commitment to their family farms that I wanted to get these narratives out to the public, since the media often focus just on the negative decline of rural America,” explains Jan. Inspired by a similar venture in the Netherlands, she tapped into grant funding to publish Renewing the Countryside: Minnesota in 2001, showcasing 44 profiles of successful rural enterprises.

The enthusiastic response to this book led Jan, in partnership with her husband, Brett Olson, to found Renewing the Countryside as a non-profit organization in 2002. Its mission is to strengthen rural areas by championing and supporting rural communities, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, activists and other people who are renewing the countryside through sustainable and innovative businesses, initiatives and projects. “After all,” she says, “rural America is abundant with prospering enterprises as diverse as colors in the rainbow.” Brett leads the creative side of the organization, developing innovative public education strategies and campaigns.  It’s through our work on the Rural Renaissance book that my wife and I discovered this innovative non-profit organization, an organization that had its pulse on the revitalization happening in rural areas and the net migrations afoot from urban and suburban areas back to rural areas.

Mopane worms are critical to nutrition and income generation for most households in those rural areas in Africa where the mopane tree grows. However, climate change and over harvesting of the worms as one of the few income generating opportunities in rural areas are threatening the species’ survival.

Mopane worms are the caterpillar stage of the Emperor Moth, Gonimbrasia belina, which feed almost exclusively on the mopane tree Colophospermum mopane. The mopane worm harvest in South Africa is estimated at $40 million a year, of which approximately 40 percent goes to producers who are primarily poor rural women. In addition to the income generated dried mopane worms can contribute significantly to rural household nutrition mainly through their 53.3 percent dry weight digestible protein content.

I live in a very remote region of far Northern California. I have always dreamed of owning an electric car or plug-in hybrid, as we live off-the-grid with energy to spare to charge a car’s batteries.  The problem is I do most of my driving on dirt roads, and four wheel drive is required at times.  Some of my neighbors have cars, in addition to their 4WDs, so I have dreamed that I could drive a Prius.  Last week, while getting my 4WD repaired in town, I was given a Prius for the day.  This was my chance to test it out and see if it would hold up to my mountain life.

One of the inconveniences of having your car repaired when you live in the country is it is an all day event.  Stuck in town, there is nothing to do but shop and/or see a movie, but I didn’t want to do either of these things. I also didn’t want to drive the two and half hours home to test out the Prius, so I drove to Whiskeytown National Recreation Area and went for a seven mile hike.

The drive to Whiskeytown gave me a chance to see how the Prius would handle a little climb at high speeds. It had enough power not to get lapped by a log truck, but it didn’t have the same acceleration I was used to with my 4runner. I could live with that for the improved gas mileage; however, once I got off the highway, it was a different story.

In many parts of Africa, climate change threatens to unravel women’s lives putting paid decades of efforts aimed at improving women’s lives and livelihoods. Unfortunately, women in rural areas lack of knowledge on the imminent dangers posed by climate change.

Despite the fact that women living in poverty are the most threatened by the dangers that stem from global warming, they also key actors in ensuring their communities’ ability to cope with and adapt to climate change.

In general, women lives are more intimitately connected to the environment more than men. Oftentimes, men tend to be away in the cities while the women look after children and work on the land in rural areas.

Many women depend on the ecosystem for food, energy, water and medicine, the very ecosystem which is threatened by the specter of climate change.

Author’s Note: While I usually report on green building developments in the Pacific Northwest, today I am examining green building trends in my own geographic region, Southeast Ohio. The architect for the LEED project discussed below is my husband, Don Dispenza.

Nationwide, there are currently more than 12,000 building projects pursuing LEED certification. But in economically depressed regions, there are still only a handful. For example, in Southeast Ohio, defined as an eight-county region in the Appalachian foothills, there are only two registered projects on the USGBC website. In areas such as this, which have a minimal amount of new construction overall, increasing a project’s cost by building green is rarely considered.

An exception is the Chamberlain Office Building in Athens, Ohio. The building’s owner, Russell Chamberlain, is a local real estate agent whose desire to build green stems from his own personal value system, and also from the belief that that investing in LEED certification will differentiate his company as being a progressive one. The project is expected to achieve a LEED Silver rating.

Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life: New Society Publishers, 2004Editor's note: Welcome to the Weekend Review, another addition to our weekend lineup. Each week, one of our writers will review a book, film, event, multimedia product, etc., that will relate to your quest to green the good life.

Ever dreamed about quitting the nine-to-five routine, getting out of the city or suburbs, and moving to a little farm

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