Small is Possible. Lyle Estill

Housing Ourselves

       Fueling Ourselves

       Financing Ourselves

       Educating Ourselves

       Entertaining Ourselves

       Healing Ourselves

       Governing Ourselves

       Conclusion

       Bibliography

       About the Author

Acknowledgments

      In 1981 George McRobie published a book entitled Small is Possible. He was a colleague of E. F. Schumacher, the visionary economist who wrote Small is Beautiful, a term which was coined by his teacher, Leopold Kohr. McRobie’s book is out of print, and reads like a catalogue of projects that have embodied Schumacher’s wisdom.

      I’m a fan of both Schumacher and McRobie. This book is coming from their tradition.

      I need to acknowledge the people in this book. They are real. Their names are their names. And these stories about them are merely told by me. In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Stephen Leacock pretends his characters are not real people. So does Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi. I love both Leacock and Twain, and though some will surely claim this book belongs in the “fantasy” section of the bookstore, it’s my take on the reality of our small town.

      I should acknowledge Ingrid Witvoet at New Society. Before this was a book, it was an idea. I first bounced it off her in a snooty bar in Washington, DC after a long day at the Green Festival. Ideas need encouragement like hers to become manuscripts, and manuscripts take work, like hers, to become books.

      I need to thank Julian Sereno, the publisher of the Chatham County Line for putting so much energy into keeping his newspaper afloat, and I would like to thank Mark Schultz, my editor at the News and Observer, who convinced me that community newspapers are the last bastions of independent thought. He once said, “If you can make energy sexy, you will be on to something.”

      I also need to thank the Fitzgerald family for lending me their house on Oak Island where I could work in peace. I am indebted to Pamela Bell and Jonathan Marvel for inviting us to their place at Southampton — a place where I could write and the children could run wild simultaneously. Jonathan served as a tour guide during our stay on Long Island, and in between nature expeditions, he illuminated the self reliant threads of that community. His insights into life in New York City, and summer in Southampton, have influenced the thinking in this book.

      Stayce Leanza deserves some thanks for her creation of the map. She is an old roommate of mine at Moncure Chessworks and she is a fun inspiration to work with. And I need to thank McCayne Miller for helping me with software and for being so fun to talk with, and to look at. I also need to thank “The Women of Building One” for letting me hang out in their midst.

      My own family needs acknowledgement for enduring the process of my writing these stories.

      Sometimes I felt like one of the “primitives” in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, who erect a bubble like force field around their army. My bubble for this book was at the kitchen table, keeping out Lego blocks and Playmobil figures. It isolated me from the movies, piano, and guitars playing in the next room. I am grateful to my wife Tami for her wisdom, which dictates that apart from the occasional smear of marmalade on the keyboard, our kitchen table is a fine place to write a book.

      I would also like to acknowledge Tom McCarty. He passed through our town once, and like a current day Alexis de –Tocqueville, published his observations online. Our bio–diesel plant did not impress him. He’d seen much nicer operations. But he found our small town fascinating. He was intrigued by the sheer number of individuals running around on locally produced biodiesel, and by the vitality of Chatham Marketplace which was overflowing with locally produced food during his visit. His comments served as the genesis for this book.

      And finally I would like to thank the readers of Energy Blog, who have commented, fed back, and encouraged me to keep telling stories about these characters.

Introduction

      I once heard a story on National Public Radio about how delicious it is to eat a deep fried turkey, and I was intrigued. I started deep frying turkeys on special occasions and started wondering what to do with all of the left over fryer oil. I was exposed to biodiesel, and started using the waste vegetable oil to make fuel for my tractor.

      The story of Piedmont Biofuels, which took Rachel, Leif and I from a barrel in the backyard to the corporate boardroom is chronicled in my first book, Biodiesel Power: The Passion, the People and the Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel. It ends just as we are about to embark on building a commercial bio–diesel plant. By now we have finished that plant. We converted an abandoned industrial park on the edge of town into a thriving enterprise that manufactures and ships four thousand gallons of biodiesel a day.

      By day I work at Piedmont Biofuels. As I was writing this book, I spent my days moving gallons of fuel into the world, and my nights moving words into this book.

      But this is not the continuation of our story. Our story gets a chapter. While ours may well be an amazing project, it takes place inside the context of a dozen more.

      Time changes every story inexorably. By the time Bio–diesel Power came to market, everything had changed. When I referred to it as “obsolete,” my editor at New Society, Ingrid, corrected my description to “a snapshot in time.”

      By the time this book arrives in bookstores, people will have fallen in love. And people will have moved away. And people will have died. And people will have traded in their partners for different models. Which means that this book too, is a snapshot.

      In his book The Great Turning, David Korten lays out a vision based on five thousand years of human existence that states we are at a place where we can choose our destiny as a species. We can either continue on in our imperial ways on the road to ruining our garden planet, or we can begin “The Great Turning” toward a sustainable earth community. At the heart of Korten’s thinking is the idea that we need to change our stories.

      Unbeknownst to me, I was happily doing just that by publishing entries in Energy Blog. I was pushing out hundreds of vignettes — on everything from the visiting Fire Marshal to policy discussions to the time Rachel took a “golden shower” in used vegetable oil.

      And remarkably it developed a following. Faraway readers came to identify with the real people in my life as if they were characters in a fictional tale.

      This is non-fiction, folks.

      This book gets some distance on biodiesel and takes forays into a broader world that is our small town.

      I’m not an economist. But I have been wholly engaged in one sort of business or another in Chatham County for the past eighteen years, and for this book I have trolled those businesses (and others) for stories which might tell us something about how we can participate in the Great Turning of which Korten speaks.

      I also think this book is partly an answer to some of the questions James Kunstler lays out in The Long Emergency. He is curious about whether or not we possess the vernacular knowledge to survive in the face of resource depletion and societal collapse, and in as much as this book is an investigation of his questions, the overwhelming answer is “yes, our community will be just fine.”

PART I Funky Town

       Gotta make a move to a Town that’s right for me Town to keep me movin’ Keep me groovin’