About Me

In June 2005, I saw The Day After Tomorrow.  The next day, I googled it, to see if any of it was true, and I stumbled onto the concept of Peak Oil.  I'm not sure if it was DieOff.org or lifeaftertheoilcrash.net that I found first, but eventually, I found both, and it scared the $&*+ out of me.  I remember freaking out, sending messages off to ask if anyone else had heard of this, and spending the next few days, months, years, reading and reading more and more about it.  Eventually, I became a regular reader of EnergyBulletin.net.

Learning about Peak Oil tends to make you fall into one of several camps - doomer, techno fix believer, community builder, or non-believer.  I have found that I fall into the community builder camp.  I learned early on about relocalization efforts, and joined up with a group in the town I grew up in.  I tried to start a relocalization group in my own town, but could not build enough interest.  But finding a group in another town, to meet with and strategize with, and commiserate with, did a lot to help me stay positive during those first few years.

Sometime during my initial research, I discovered the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. This was an online shopping cart which connects consumers to local farmers and producers.  Sounded like a great way to get local food, and I wished we had something like that in Massachusetts.  I had been trying to find local food in my own area, and spent a lot of time driving around and not finding much.  Trying to compare prices between farm stands is an exercise in futility.  And arriving after a half hour drive to find they were closed was very frustrating.

Then I heard, through the ComFood (community food security) listserv, that the Oklahoma Food Coop was giving away their software for free.  Not long after that, the relocalization groups that I was in touch with had a visioning day, Jan 1, 2007, and we all set goals for where we wanted to be in 1, 3, and 10 years.  And I made the statement, that I wanted to get a Mass Local Food Coop started, in 3 years.

So from Jan 2007 until now, I've been working to create the Mass Local Food Cooperative. This has truly been a labor of love.  In January 2009, I found my co-founders, and we launched in June 2009.   We incorporated on Jan 5, 2010, just a couple days after my 3 year goal (although I didn't realize it until we started writing up a history of the coop for our new website).  And we had our first annual meeting in Feb 2010.  The coop has been doing well.  We sort 60-90 orders a month, for over 200 members and about 30 producers.

But it is all volunteer.  I figured out last month that we put in about 80 hours a month, and 50 of those hours are between four of us.  We had hoped to be able to give volunteers credit - like $5 or $6 an hour - for their time, but we are not clearing  enough (we charge 5% per order to customers and 5% per invoice to producers) over expenses to be able to give volunteer credits.  And of course, I put lots of time and money into the project before we launched.

Ok, that's my little whining for today.  I get frustrated sometimes, you know?

I do have other projects in mind, particularly transition towns and some way to save the knowledge we have in case of a hard crash, and it is hard sometimes to keep focused on the day to day issues of the coop when I'd rather read, research, and study how to move forward with those.  But a lot of people in the coop depend on me, so I need to continue there until I'm no longer needed.  Someday I would like to start a university/college for learning the pre-industrial skills we used in the early 1800s, before coal and then oil began to be used for industry.  I'm very interested in water power.  We used to have a lot of water-powered industry here in Massachusetts, and it would be really cool to get those started again.  And I'd love to start or join an ecovillage focused on self-sufficiency.  Agraria looks really cool - would love to either go there or start one here.

I have lots and lots of links that I've saved over the years.  I'm hoping to make them available to my friends (and myself - I hate being at work when the link I need is home on my home computer!).