Story

Urban Ecoliteracy teaches the "language" of place – nature’s language of where one lives at the interface between the natural and built environments. The content for my urban ecological literacy workshops, or urban ecolit for short, emerged from my work as a sustainable landscape professional who works with nature instead of inadvertently against it. I realized that the cumulative behaviors and attitudes towards landscapes (hence, the planet) that I was observing in clients manifested from a profound disconnect. The challenge is healing that disconnect, which is at the root of environmental degradation.

The most effective and lasting solutions in communities will be initiated on a human, local scale. Urban ecolit intends to help people reground at this level. Without this reconnection, all the gardening classes, Permaculture intensives, and community gardens in the world will not help urban dwellers/suburbanites viscerally understand their relationship to the Earth. Intellectual understanding does not suffice. While the experience of a one-day workshop will not undo a lifetime of disconnection that became the normative social standard over millennia, being firmly rooted in a sense of place is the only saving grace to the rampant social disconnection, ecological alienation, and anomie that haunts the psyches of people today. We can only dwell in one place at a time. A person can't be grounded (literally) if he or she is not willing to become vested; if one is not vested, that person is only a tourist pretending to be a citizen. To become vested, one has to be willing to cultivate relationships with one’s surroundings and neighborhood, which includes the human and nonhuman elements in toto. Visceral place specific knowledge and heart connection are keys to overcoming alienation from a sense of belonging - not just in a place - but to a place.

I collaborated with a fellow landscape professional and we developed our introductory one-day place-centered multimedia workshop. We're currently developing the material for the advanced urban/suburban ecolit workshop. I am orchestrating the dynamics of both workshops to facilitate and strengthen networking, connecting community members so that they may forge local collaborations and (re)build social capital and trust. In the introductory workshop, participants teach each other the place-specific content, reinforcing connection to place, each other, and appreciation for where they live. My colleague and I dovetail that content by teaching big picture concepts along with fundamental skills and practical insights that we routinely apply in our work, translating “earthspeak” into English. Participants begin to learn to retrofit sustainability into their gardens that then save water, energy, money, and time. The advanced workshop will integrate advanced skills and knowledge combining place-specific horticulture, ecopsychology/psychology of change, relevance of historical and sociological context, application of Permaculture principles, refinement of landscape reading skills, and advanced garden design in urban/suburban contexts.

Practically every day-to-day choice we make requires energetic and material exchanges with our environment and/or other persons. Our personal and collective challenge is that feedback required for self-regulation is often so diffuse as to be impalpable. Negative feedback asserts itself in a myriad of depersonalized news stories ranging in scale from local drinking water contamination to global warming. Despite exhortations to take action, the public is mostly at a loss to know how to respond because the problems feel too big for individuals to solve. Practical personal choices about how to steward our resources and care for this planet are better made when informed by a strong connection to place, recognition of our individual impacts, and a sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of our choices. The workshop series is not about browbeating anyone with guilt (don’t we have enough of that?); it is about authentic empowerment and feeling the cumulative strength of numerous, deceptively small choices, all while learning applicable skills and practical knowledge in supportive company.

My goal is to teach at least 11 local workshops the first year starting in Southern California and expand to interactive online teaching. My colleague and I have standing invitations from community gardens and groups around Los Angeles that want to host the workshop. We have also been invited to lead a game centered on the theme of urban forests at the 2009 California Urban Forests Council state conference in early October.

As for the Transition Town movement, I participated in the first training in Los Angeles in December 2008 in Westchester (near LAX). Since then, I have been collaborating with others on outreach and education to spur the development of other Transition Town efforts in nearby West Los Angeles communities. In September, I may have an opportunity to speak about Transition at Long Beach City College.

While my story is far from typical, it is also not an isolated effort without kindred souls working on other projects in tandem. Effective collaboration is hampered by the very spatial layout of the megalopolis and the energetic imprint of this place, which fosters a narrow provincialism that seems counterintuitive given the geographic context, unbounded urbanization, and media saturation. I hope news of what's germinating in Los Angeles gives you hope and inspiration and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
 

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