The Highs and Lows of Striving for Climate Resilience

by Rob Wheeler of The Farm Tennessee, USA

Just imagine, trying to create climate resiliency in a world that is seemingly hell bent on creating climate catastrophe and disaster, it may feel at times like an almost impossible task. So much to do and comparatively so little resources to do it with. And yet we have to keep going and trying. For our children’s, and their children’s, and even our own sakes.

A year and a half ago we started this journey, joining in with 19 other ecovillage communities in an effort to begin planning and moving towards climate resiliency at a time when humanity is moving rapidly towards climate breakdown. I did not know it at the time, even though I have been deeply engaged in energy, climate change and UN sustainable development processes for well more than 25 years now, but what I learned in this climate resiliency process is that we are much closer to climate breakdown than I had thought. Let me explain.

The Farm is one of the oldest and most established intentional communities or ecovillages in the US or really probably in the world. In 1971 a bunch of hippies left San Francisco and the Haight Ashbury’s Summer of Love experiences in a caravan of old school buses and vans to drive across the US looking for a new home. This was the time of the “Back to the Land” movement and they were looking for land that they could buy cheaply, a place in the country where they could grow food and build houses, and where they could establish a spiritual community based on “Peace, Love and Brown Rice”. They were “Out to Save the World” as it said on the head board of the lead bus.

They landed on a piece of land near Summertown, Tennessee and settled down; and then the real work began. In the early years the community swelled from a couple of hundred people to more than 1500 with a number of satellite communities being set up around the Eastern US as well. It was hard to grow enough food, or should I say nearly impossible, to feed them all. Now we are back to around 230 people of all ages, though with an aging population with around 2/3rds being over 60, a K – 12 Farm School, one of the best known and most respected Midwifery Centers in the world, a Book Publishing Company that publishes and sells over 400 different alternative lifestyle books, any number of other small and holistic health and wood working businesses, and the EcoVillage Training Center – where I live.

Early on in this process we created a community timeline of everything that had happened or been done during the last 50 years on The Farm that we thought related in some way or another to climate resilience. And not long after we started we did both GEN’s ecovillage impact assessment and a climate resiliency assessment, along with the other participating ecovillages, first with just our organizing team and then 6 months later at a community meeting, following the circulation of a community survey. We identified the main climate threats that were already impacting our community; and more than 80 ideas were shared about what we could do to create more resiliency, to prepare for climate related disasters and to take steps to prevent them.

In the last month or so as winter began to end we had freezing cold temperatures at night, daytime temperatures of up to 80 degrees F, and then we got 4 inches of rain one night in just a couple of hours. Most of the houses have been built at the edges of the forest, before we realized that with the changing climate the trees could come crashing down on buildings and vehicles or even people etc caused by the straight line winds that sweep 2000 miles across the US driven by what are called “atmospheric rivers” carrying an enormous amount of water that would loosen and strip the soil of organic matter. Exposing and weakening the roots and blowing down the tallest trees.

Add to that we are located at the edge of what is called “tornado alley” and when the last hurricane and tornado hit just 80 miles away we only had 20 minutes to prepare from when the tornado formed up and the notice was sent out. These tornados are strong enough to collapse or lift up cars, sheds or even a whole house. So there is potentially a serious need for emergency shelters. And then we have had wildfire threat with a drought the last two years that has lasted through the month of October when the trees are at their driest. If a wildfire were to sweep up one of the ravines to where the houses are nestled in the trees we could lose many houses, along with the forests. So, one of the topics of most interest has been what we could possibly do to better prepare and focused on fire prevention and disaster preparedness. Unfortunately, we could easily lose our power and electricity at times like this for up to a week or more, so there is a serious need for electrical back up systems as well, preferably with renewable energy.

We also grow and provide a substantial but unfortunately still small part of our own food, have and manage our own water and sewage systems, maintain and own our own roads along with the 1700 acres we own and live on with a community land trust, have our own recycling center and have built and provide pretty much all of our own infrastructure here on The Farm ourselves – except for our electricity and internet connections. And there-in lies one of the main problems and challenges in striving to become more sustainable and climate resilient. Everything takes time and costs money; and we are doing so much already just to keep the community running well and to manage everything we are doing. I think that there are probably about 10 to 15 committees already on the Farm.

Meanwhile, the roads on the Farm that are paved were done many years ago and much if not most of the asphalt is cracking and popping loose, particularly due to the repeated freezing and thawing. Plans are underway for us to develop one of the first demonstration sites in the US for biochar paving – which can sequester an enormous amount of carbon in the paving material for centuries while avoiding the use of fossil fuels in the asphalt and adding strength and durability. But in the meantime we have to get our aging roadways repaired, while the innovative biochar companies are set up, before the roads are totally destroyed and we have to start all over again. But it will be great when we are finally able to demonstrate what can be done to sequester carbon with biochar pavement. And in the meantime we are already doing a lot with biochar and with growing bamboo.

The Ecovillage Training Center (ETC) is just down the hill from the Farm School with 30 some K-12 grade students. Last year I taught english there with a focus on Caring for the Earth. Thus we studied and learned about regenerative agriculture, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, climate challenges and resiliency, and innovative solutions such as the use of green burials, eating a plant based diet, growing your own food, and biochar. We have a school garden and a garden and greenhouse at the ETC. We have made compost at both and added bunnie poop from our rabbit at the school, then the kids helped to do a biochar burn at the ETC at a pit we have dug and then mixed the compost with biochar and spread it on the garden beds. Voila, 35 pound watermelons as sweet as can be that we harvested and ate together on the day the kids came down to do the biochar burn.

We also have two large solar arrays that were financed in part through business grants or loans on the Farm. It would be good if more solar panels were installed here; particularly as many Farm residents drive electric golf carts on the Farm which could be powered by electricity produced on The Farm as well; and it would be most helpful to have a back up to grid electricity in case we loose power for days or longer at a time. Hopefully funding will become available as a part of the US’s climate legislation; but it could take years for that to become available, and we will also need more charging stations. However, President Biden has just introduced regulations that should lead to half of the vehicles that are sold by 2032 being electric, so we should begin to prepare for this now; and it could provide a major contribution to our efforts to transition to climate resiliency, particularly as quite a few people commute from the Farm to work in surrounding areas or to shop fairly regularly, etc.

Unfortunately, Republican party officials are likely to file lawsuits against these regulations in an attempt to block them; and our conservative Supreme Court is quite likely to try to undercut them if they can figure out a plausible reason for doing it. In any case if we can figure out a reasonable way to finance the installation of more solar systems in the meantime here on The Farm that would be good.

There are so many other things I could tell you about and say, but perhaps one of the most important is that it is not often easy to come to community agreement around what we want to do here on The Farm. Thankfully however there are enough of us here and we mostly all chip in to help, so there are constantly new things being done and new offerings to participate in both here on the Farm and that are offered to the wider community now and again.

Unfortunately, during the year and a half that we participated in this program we missed many opportunities to share what we were learning about such things as the 3 Horizons, tipping points, and the challenges we are facing with much of the rest of the community. We held community meetings every couple of months but less than a fourth of the community participated in any of the meetings and probably only about an eighth of the community participated in most of them. Thus those that have perhaps the least understanding of why we need to do much more to strive for climate resiliency are probably the same ones that chose not to participate. Similarly, while many ideas were shared for what we could do to become more climate resilient very few new projects were started or implemented that would help us to actually do it. So we still need to agree on what things we might do as a community, which are the main priorities to start with, and how we can then go about doing it.

Most of the community still does not know much of what we have been doing nor do they yet understand why or at least agree about how important it is. There are a number of things however that we have started to talk about doing. So, for example, we know that we do want to focus on implementation; showing the community what we are wanting to do, and developing projects that include community participation ie biochar pavement, community composting, solar workshops and demonstration installations, regenerative agriculture projects, and disaster prevention and preparedness, etc.

GEN has received word that our application for GEN’s Second Phase of the Climate Resilience project has been approved. We on The Farm have thus indicated that we are interested in participating again in the next phase of the project. As a first step in that we would like to develop and present summary versions of our climate resiliency vision and action plan for the Farm, to develop and set some first priorities, to establish a permanent climate resilience committee, invite and encourage more of the community to participate in the organizing process, to hold regular community meetings, to save and archive discussions that take place on our community discussion list that have to do with climate resiliency, and to organize and hold on-going training programs, workshops and/or webinars and video clips, etc.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in its most recent 6th assessment report that humanity will need to reduce our carbon emissions by half by 2030 in order to limit the growth of global heating to just 1.5 degrees C. This will require all of us to be much more proactive in regards to making the fundamental changes and transition to regenerative practices that have to be made. As a part of GEN’s Climate Resiliency CoP I have been interviewed for GEN’s Podcast series and we produced a short Video Presentation that described what will need to be done, what we are doing here on The Farm, and that will hopefully give the viewer more hope for the future. (inks to these will soon be forthcoming).

Finally after participating actively and having become even more concerned about the immediacy of the problems due to climate change and global heating that we are facing, I learned about a new initiative that is being organized through the United Nations. UNESCO has launched a Greening Education Partnership that focuses specifically on climate education. They have called for every school, education department and government to include climate education and education for sustainable development in their curricula, to teach it in the schools at all levels, include it in teacher training, and to green every school and every community.

GEN has now been registered to participate in the Partnership and I specifically went to Dubai for the Climate Summit Conference, COP28, to tell the world about what GEN has been doing with our Climate Resiliency COP and to participate in the Greening Education events there. Now GEN has applied for and received approval to carry out a second phase of the Climate Resiliency Community of Practice; and I am hopeful that this will include a focus on how GEN can integrate what we are doing with climate resiliency with the Greening Education Partnership and that many more ecovillages all over the world will embrace this effort to move towards both climate resiliency and towards carbon neutrality and drawdown.

We also learned during this climate resilience program that many other ecovillages are also facing multiple threats due to climate change and global heating. They also need our help, opportunities for acquiring financing for implementation and for making the transition. Thus it would be good if Phase 2 can focus in large part on how we can spread this project throughout the GEN network while also developing new funding opportunities that will focus specifically on implementation projects.

One of the major areas of discussion and disagreement in Dubai was whether the international community should adopt an agreement to either phase down or instead phase out the production and usage of fossil fuels. Given the IPCC findings that we will need to reduce climate emissions by 50% by 2030 just to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees C, I think it is obvious that we need to do everything that we can to completely phase out fossil fuel usage as quickly as possible. And while I think it is good that the issue was raised and supported in Dubai, I also think that the big fuss that was raised over this issue at COP28 was rather ridiculous. It has become obvious over the years that those countries that are primarily producing and using fossil fuels are not going to go along with an agreement to quickly phase them out. But so what?? What needs to happen instead is for those countries and peoples that are willing to do so, to act as fully and as rapidly as possible to indeed phase them out. And we should be developing a global campaign and strategy that will encourage and welcome all peoples, schools, businesses and governments to participate in the process.

Those that recognize the real need and the urgency of the situation and are willing to do something about it, need to think carefully about what we might best be able to do, to inform ourselves more fully and then do everything we can as quickly as we can to make the changes needed. There are hundreds of different types of things that each of us, either individually or as a community, can do. So let’s keep on doing it but even more ambitiously.