"Only if 20% of us do 2 hours a day will we hit the tipping point that changes local systems". Neal Gorenflo on his Year of Living Locally

Mountain View's gleaming new community center where Neal Gorenflo’s Cool Block activism started

We are great admirers of the works of Shareable - a vast American compendium of locally-oriented and community-powered solutions (profiled a few times in these pages). We’re excited to see their new publication, written by their founder Neal Gorenflo, titled A Year of Living Locally (available free when you sign up here).

That year being 2020, the book is an extremely relevant and detailed map of ambitious and evolving localisation, with Covid upending and transforming any of Neal’s careful plans. As a taster for the book, Neal did an audio forum at this page. There is a useful transcription from the recording, which we have tidied up a little below. It reads as an very honest reflection on the triumphs, and tribulations, that comes from a radical commitment to locality.

Neal Gorenflo: To start our discussion, I’ll share a few lessons learned from my one year life experiment in local living. This is something I did in 2020, and it’s the basis for Shareable’s new book, “A Year of Living Locally.”

With that, let’s get started. So first, you might be wondering why I did this one year life experiment in living local. There are three main reasons.

First, I felt like I needed to. I’m immersed in this toxic, polarizing, disorienting media environment that I felt is slowly killing me and making me a worse person along the way. More anxious, less patient, with degraded powers of reflection and somewhat poor executive functioning. Nothing dramatic, mind you - yet noticeable and worrying.

So I wanted to try a fundamental reorientation to the more tangible things around me - my place, my town. Things that I actually have some influence over, some control over in some ways that I can shape directly.

And I thought I can improve my quality of life by connecting with my neighbours and working with them on projects that would directly benefit us. Becoming a much more engaged citizen at the local level. I wanted to put the pedal to the metal in these directions and see how this felt in comparison to my more mediated life work with lots of screen time.

The second reason is because for me, life experiments are a great way to help me learn - to try some things on at a low cost before making a big commitment. And it also has helped me avoid becoming paralyzed by uncertainty, something I suffered from when I was younger. Also, getting immediate experiences is probably my best motivation to make changes. Knowledge, somehow, isn’t enough for me. 

The third reason is that I approach all this with a lot of humility. I thought my experiment might yield some useful lessons for others. Writing about my experiment turned out to be a fantastic way to process and deepen and embody what I learned this past year.

And if someone gets something from my reflections from the book that we’re putting out today, that’s a big bonus, but not one I can necessarily expect or count on.

***

So how did my year of living locally go? So let me give you a brief overview of what actually happened. I started out in January, 2020 by promising to explore living locally on three levels: personal, neighbourhood, and city level.

I created a laundry list of things to try in each category. It was slow going at first I took steps to open channels. Things started to chug along, but slowly. After I launched a Cool Block Neighborhood Climate Action Program* and the pandemic hit in March, things really sped up. My local activity exploded. Things got a whole lot more local than I expected. And it was really a pretty good time to decide ahead of time to go local.

.. My interactions with neighbours took things in unexpected yet deeply worrying directions. For instance, the Cool Block program spawned multiple parallel neighbourhood projects, including a major irrigation system overhaul, and regular neighborhood grounds maintenance workdays. All done masked and socially distanced.

There were huge exchanges of goods and ideas as an outgrowth this program I started in our neighborhood, as well as lots of pandemic related mutual aid. So multiple grocery runs for neighbours, food collections with donations of all kinds of goods. There were PPE drives for local hospitals, getting bikes to local frontline workers in need of transportation and more.

I’ve never belonged to such an active neighborhood. Most of the activity was actually led by my neighbours - once I opened the floodgates.

When things settled down a bit in the fall, I got back to that personal laundry list I made in January.

And as I had planned, I switched from a big bank to a credit union. I explored our local ecosystem and history. I got involved in local elections. I explored starting a library of things at a local library. I tried on a local identity through civic engagement at geographic scales that was made possible in November with our U.S. presidential elections. I also had some involvement I had with my Sharing Cities colleagues in Seoul, South Korea.

And I also continued struggling with reducing my screen time: I went through periods of really following my guidelines and other times where just things really fell apart and I fell off the wagon. 

And some activities resulted in measurable impacts. My Cool Block group reduced annual neighborhood carbon emissions by over 44,000lbs through 159 actions over six months. That’s what the nine households [involved in the block scheme] were able to accomplish.

Our grounds work reduced water consumption by 62 percent and saved the community around twenty five thousand dollars. We were able to actually reduce the water use on our five acres here from 1.3 million gallons a year to around 700,000 gallons a year (and there’s more improvement to be had)

The amount of interaction was incredible. Somewhere around 5000 messages were exchanged on our neighbourhood Slack channel, set up as an outgrowth of the Cool Block program.

***

So 2020 changed me, perhaps dramatically. I’m still digesting it. One feeling stands out: I’m deeply humbled. Particularly by learning how much I didn’t and should know about how to be a good citizen and how much my success depended on my awesome neighbours.

I’m also humbled by the enormity of the system change that we must undertake. And by others who know much more about local living. As well as how much I love and depend on my family - by how powerfully fate can intervene.

But, you know, one lesson did really stand out that it takes way, way, way more time, skill, knowledge, and perseverance to be an effective, engaged citizen at the local level than I expected.

Americans only spend an average of fifteen minutes per day in public life. I committed to an hour a day and it wasn’t nearly enough. And two experiences hammered this home.

I got involved in the redesign of an intersection in Mountain View - we’ve got the high speed rail coming in. So we were going to cut off traffic to the main street, Castro Street, and redesign a park there. And if it sounds complicated, it was by getting engaged in this I realized how much time and how much knowledge and thinking I had to do to be a really effective commentator on this project.

I always felt like I had to have a Masters degree in urban planning or something. I even wrestled with the question, what perspective am I taking this from? Is the question about transportation, or equity? A very telling experience. 

The second experience was just fixing our irrigation system in our neighbourhood. It was an old system from the 70s - it should have been massively upgraded and reduced in size, with re-plantings done.

I had to learn. It took me months to learn enough to manage it and fix it in a way that it was working as intended. These two experiences and others were deeply sobering.

I also realized that the kind of system change I hope for is totally out of the question and out of reach, with this absurdly low level of focus and commitment that many people have.

A huge, encompassing change in all the ways that power is expressed will be needed to channel people’s energy into this sphere. Where it’s needed to address all the big challenges that we face, climate change and wealth inequality and so forth. 

In the same way that capitalism commands our time, space, attention, resources, culture, rules, etc - we, the people must do the same for our own purposes, for our own survival.

I estimated that it would take at least 20 percent of the population spending two hours a day to reach a kind of tipping point for systems change for any local community. This is what we really need to up civic engagement, in order to get the kind of changes we all talk about.

I already knew this to an extent, but my experiment kind of seared this lesson into my consciousness, into my soul, and made me understand at a deeper level - to the bone really - that we, as a civil society, are a very long way from taking control, in this all encompassing way.

We must up our ambitions, up our civic imagination. We are not playing for all the marbles - like the Establishment is. 

Notes

* This is a Californian community organising programme, endorsed by the Governor Gavin Newsom, which promotes sustainable living values housing block by housing block in a community.