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As a young man growing up in this wonderful state I've seen the growth of the local area around me. I still recall the farmlands when I first moved to Pasco county nearly 10 years ago. Now they are all gone, replaced by rolled out lawns of Bermuda grass, cul de sacs, and neat rows of similar looking houses. I recall as a young man building some of those homes: installing windows, replacing dishwashers with custom brand new dishwashers, adding water softeners to neighborhoods far away from any development, with the closest road being I-75. Yes I grew up in the boom that was the post 9/11 years.

I'm 24 years old now, recalling the remarkable growth that I've seen over those years working on the growth in Pasco gives me reflection. Reflection on George W. Bush's speech where he mentioned for America to go shopping. Yes I, too, got caught up into the fantasy of an easily accessible credit card line and a brand new plasma screen TV. We Americans consumed to our hearts content on easily borrowed money, second mortgages, and home equity loans. I don't know how many times I've recalled seeing ads for debt consolidating or a new book proclaiming how to get out of debt. Easy money creates easy consuming. Now looking back I notice the hypocrisy. We are still currently at war in two nations for a greater length of time than even World War II. Yet at home, we bought up brand new homes and filled them with brand new things only to turn around and get rid of them when a brand new thing of another product came out. We became gluttonous as a nation.

Now in 2009, with another 500,000 jobs gone, a few more trillion added onto our ever growing debt, a few more million homeless and hungry, a few more soldiers committing suicide in the military, I can't help but think our society has gone insane. We have lost all the things that made us moral and strong. The American dream that our forefathers built up is turning into an American nightmare.

There is another way. A transition to another culture. It's already beginning: We are using less electricity, producing less carbon dioxide, more people are riding bikes than ever before. America is learning again how to be frugal, how to garden, how to reconnect with family/friends/neighbors to rebuild their communities. We are slowly gaining the consciousness that for too long we've built up a throw-away society. One that values people as much as plastic plates. We treat our world like a garbage heap or a thing to be mined until exhaustion. Is our society content with a pacific island made of plastic? I don't think so. We need to transition our culture away from the childlike consciousness of wastefulness and wanting to a more adult-like and wise culture that values the next generation. We need a permanent culture. A culture that strives to create a world providing for the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

What does such a culture look like? It's of my opinion that it all begins with food. The vast majority of human beings on this planet spend hours in pursuit or production of food. We Americans consume 30% of our oil through our food production alone. I was in an office store the other day and noticed that even there they sell food. We make food so readily available with hardly any work or input so that we don't notice how difficult and time consuming the production process really is. After getting into gardening the past months, I've begun to be aware of the pace that nature likes to take. We are living in life at warp speed, our easily accessible food allows us that luxury. If we just slow down, grow and preserve as well as cook our own food we could begin to enjoy the pace that nature gives us. Enjoy a family meal instead of a fast food drive thru. We could utilize the established principles of permaculture. A design method that incorporates ecological thinking to create systems that take care of themselves and produce no waste.

The next step is assuring that no more growth is done onto our wetlands. Already we are in a drought due to ever increasing sprawl what we need less of are lawns and more food. A conversion process is already underway in St. Petersburg and New Port Richey, and more farmland could be converted by tearing down foreclosed homes utilizing the water infrastructure for watering. If we utilized the growing spaces between our homes and condensed our urban areas to walking communities we could utilize the space we have to grow our population but not increase our carbon footprint. If we don't control our growth we could go from this:

To this:

The choice of where we head is currently being developed by governments and corporations. What if it was held in the hands of the people? A collective vision of Tampa Bay, a transition to a Tampa Bay Area less dependent on fossil fuels. We must take a stand against Senate Bill 360 to make sure that it is utilized for its original purpose. The Community Renewal Act, as its called, should be utilized to redevelop areas into walkable communities and recreate areas to form communities that aren't dependent on the cars for their daily lives. We can envision a Tampa Bay Area with a transition away from fossil fuels and toward sustainability. There is a network of interlinked communities forming in their local areas to avert climate change and build resilience to the end of cheap oil, Transition Towns.

How can we create a Tampa Bay area like the one I describe? By networking a group of dedicated people towards a holistic vision together we can work on behalf of the environment that sustains us all. The best way to do this is to host events to all interested parties and do a open space meeting. The City of Tarpon Springs did such an event recently where, instead of having one speaker talk about one subject, the meeting of people breaks up into separate groups and interacts around specific subjects. The group rejoins and discusses what they learned and then develops plans on each subject. This highly interactive and dynamic way of hosting meetings which allows people to view different ideas and incorporate them into a holistic vision. Solar technologies, energy efficiency, LEED architecture, permaculture, walkable/bikeable communities, electric vehicles, all came forth from the Tarpon Meeting but there are other ideas that could be incorporated into this vision as well.

We need a vision that we as a region can break up and work on in our own individual communities. Incorporating a broad range of people and a large base we could create projects or neighborhoods that retrofit themselves into becoming sustainable. One concept is working on the premise of reciprocity: allowing large volunteer forces to come out to volunteer or donate money towards that specific project with the agreement that the same would be asked of that neighborhood. We could tear down derelict neighborhoods/urban centers and reconstruct them in a new urbanism vision, and retrofit lawnscapes to be foodscapes. What if the 50% of the water we use on our lawns was drastically reduced and made to create 100% of our food locally?

We must shift our culture to one that's more permanent. A good friend of mine who is a carpenter said to me, "We worked ourselves out of a job". I don't see that. There is plenty of work left to be done retrofitting our wasteful society into something else. I see the ability of us coming together to form a new vision of the Tampa Bay Area, putting to work the thousands and thousands of people that are currently out of work, and rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities along a new permanent culture vision.  We must fight for a future worth living in by putting people back to work creating that future. This doesn't take any new technologies or new power plants. This takes a group of committed people seeking a permanent culture.

Peace and Love,

Eric Stewart

Director of Code Green Community

www.codegreencommunity.org

Follow me on Twitter: @code_green