Transition Alpine looks to future

Paul Schaefer’s garden in Alpine with early spring garlic growing. Note: The inverted shiny trash can is covering the well head, which keeps the well from freezing. Photo special to the Avalanche / Paul Schaefer

Many citizens in many countries recognize that world production of oil, natural gas and coal have peaked or will soon.

There will be a good quantity of oil for a long time, but it will become more expensive as more and more people in the world seek a share of a globally diminishing resource.

There are ongoing threats of disruptions to our community’s life from known and unknown sources — drought, failure of capital resources, job losses. There is a global economic crisis.

The transition town movement — beginning in Kinsdale, Ireland, and, from there moving quickly through Great Britain and to Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, South Africa and more — is responding to the globally discerned need for creating a new way to live that requires less oil and other forms of carbon-based energy.

Transition towns plan ways to measurably reduce carbon-based energy use, primarily by localizing their economies.

In Alpine, it is easy to feel a kinship with transition towns. We live in a remote town, connected to the global market by trucks, propelled by fuel that escalated last summer to extraordinary prices, which affected the cost of everything moved by truck transport.

We are more vulnerable to changes in the oil supply than many places would be. Plus, national economic bailouts have never favored the sparse voting population of rural areas. We cannot count on the government saving us; we are not too big to fail; we need to prepare ourselves for greater self-sufficiency and resiliency.

More than 50 Alpinians came together over a period of four months last winter and spring to study the transition handbook and the ways in which other transition towns around the world have begun creating ways to diminish reliance on oil and to increase localization. We formed several teams, including:

Food production, medicinal herbs, art-music-culture-fun, community outreach, communication, futuristic thinking and transition planning, mental and physical health, local currency, local energy, recycling, reskilling (old skills to new skills), sustainable building, transportation, water storage and capture, and water usage.

This is where the transition town “needs YOU” part comes in. Each of these teams will be seeking out the traditional skills that work in Alpine as well as the new non-oil based technologies that can be integrated with those traditional skills.

We know that Alpine was much more localized, more self-sufficient, and more resilient before the Eisenhower highway system was created in the 1950s. The town produced much of its own food. It had to; there weren’t trucks bringing it in with the abundance we now enjoy and which will be too expensive to enjoy after the end of cheap oil.

Alpine had local businesses, too. More than now.

Centennial School photos of old Alpine show windmills everywhere.

Many families have lived here for 100 years or more. That is a great deal of experience with this place.

We all need to know how this community worked before cheap oil transformed it into a tourist destination and gave us chain stores and the ability to participate in the global economy. Losing cheap oil or facing major economic changes would require resilience and re-learning old skills that we haven’t had to use for several generations.

Transition Alpine teams are preparing a fall program of community programs and workshops to spread the wisdoms of our community elders.

We will be interviewing all summer to learn the skills that helped our Alpinian forebearers survive and flourish. We are also designing workshops to integrate traditional skills with new technologies that require ingenuity instead of oil.

We are collaborating with other transition towns as they pursue energy descent plans, localized economies and strengthened resilient community.

If you or a friend or relative would be willing to share your memories of Alpine and what made it work before cheap oil, in English or Spanish, or if you would like to participate in our Transition Alpine work, please call Transition Alpine today at 432-837-7150 or send an email to pcschaefer@yahoo.com.

Why are we doing this?

Editor’s note: This is the first in a four-part series about how people in Alpine are educating themselves and the community on ways to prosper during the world’s transition away from an oil-based economy. The transition is expected to take many decades, but much can be — must be — done immediately. Alpine lawyer Eve Trook prepared this series as a way to help Avalanche readers think about the issues that are already here andissues to come. As Trook points out, it is particularly vital that rural, isolated areas such as Alpine - which do not have a substantial voice on the world stage - make their own plans for the coming transition. This is not gloom-and-doom stuff; it is continuing to work for a better way of life for ourselves and future generations. This is make-a-difference stuff.