A City of Villages?

Tuesday, 07. 6. 2010  –  Featured, News and Features

Matt Cavers

It seems like an unlikely setting for urban agriculture. That is, I’ve always associated backyard chickens and the people who own them with the younger, hipper neighbourhoods east of Main. But here we are, fifteen of us, on the lawn of an upscale Dunbar home, and we’re listening as Southland Farm’s Jordan Maynard introduces us to the ancient craft of raising chickens for eggs. A couple of attractive hens strut around the circle of lawn chairs, their bold plumage complementing the rainbow colours of their coop – if coop is the right term for a purpose-built chicken cabin complete with skylight, interior decoration, and stereo.

As Maynard explains the differences between varieties of chicken feed, I become distracted by the unlikely pleasantness of the scene around me. I look at my fellow students (an urbane group), at the yard (neatly landscaped), at the metal lawn furniture and the trays of healthy snacks and lemonade. This is no heated teach-in – it’s more like a garden party from an ecologically benign future. And that seems fitting. I’m here to write a story about Village Vancouver, the group that organized tonight’s workshop. Village Vancouver belongs to the Transition movement, a young and rapidly expanding network of groups dedicated to community-level sustainability. In just five years, Transition initiatives have taken form in over three hundred communities worldwide. “Transition” refers to the combined effects of peak oil and climate change - a transition from a globalized world to a slower-paced, more local one. Which might be, in other words, a world with more backyard chicken garden parties.

Writing about an environmental group didn’t strike me as a particularly difficult assignment at the last Dependent story meeting. A group usually has a cause and a structure. Read the website, read the press releases, talk to a few members, find an angle – wham – you have a story. But things get more complicated when I talk to Ross Moster, Village Vancouver’s founder. Describing Village Vancouver, he tells me that it’s “like real life, only more sustainable.” And, when pressed, he jokes: “Have you seen the movie Soylent Green? Village Vancouver is people.” He goes on in the same enigmatic vein – Village Vancouver is less an environmental group than a “bunch of neighbours that are spread out all over the place…We get together and we figure out grassroots responses to issues like climate change and peak oil.”

It might sound too vague to take seriously. But this lack of precise definition might lay behind the Transition movement’s viral success. Transition initiatives, by definition, attempt to go beyond the confines of traditional activist circles. As Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins writes in The Transition Handbook, “the scale of the challenge of peak oil and climate change cannot be addressed if we choose to stay within our comfort zones, if ‘green’ people only talk to other ‘green’ people, business people only talk to other business people, and so on.” A free-form group (a post-group group?) might be able to involve people that would otherwise shy away from joining an environmental organization.

Of course, there is one fundamental point on which Village Vancouver and other Transition groups aren’t willing to flex, which is that there’s going to be an energy crisis as fossil fuels become ever more expensive to extract, and overcoming it will require community action. But Vancouver, a city of nearly 600,000 people, is hardly a community. Moster explains to me that Village Vancouver works by forming local neighbourhood networks, or “villages.” The villages aren’t discrete physical entities, but, according to Moster, they embody the communitarian character (“the caring, the sharing, the orientation towards sustainability”) found in bounded communities such as ecovillages. Seven neighbourhood villages currently exist in Vancouver, and Moster hopes to see villages in every Vancouver neighbourhood by next year.

Building community, Moster tells me, and building resilience are so closely related that the latter follows the former. “When you ask people to envision what their ideal neighbourhood looks like,” he says, “the answers you get are not very different than if you said ‘envision that neighbourhood using ninety percent less fossil fuels.’” He says that achieving a low-energy lifestyle doesn’t require people to make sacrifices, explaining that “if you’re cooking dinner for twelve people and you’re only using one stove, and all your neighbours are walking down the block, or if you’re having a film night rather than people driving across town to a stadium to pay a hundred dollars to see a band perform…there’s dramatic drops in [energy] consumption.”

I phone Leslie Kemp, a neighbourhood convenor with the newly-formed village in the Cedar Cottage area of East Vancouver. She tells me that her village is in the early stages of its development, having begun by hosting a series of discussion group evenings on climate change. She’s optimistic about the community’s potential – there’s already a popular community garden in the neighbourhood, and there’s a waiting list for plots. The community garden boasts an outdoor stage, and Kemp glows about the potential for art and performance to engage community members. But it’s food, she feels, that has the greatest potential to reach out to people, pointing to the resurgence in popular interest in food growing and preparation. “Once you start getting people together over something like preparing food…you create other opportunities because they start talking, engaging in dialogue. And then who knows what can happen from there.”

Who knows what can happen, indeed. It could well be that coming together to garden and share meals is the first step towards a deeper connection to the local. But those words from The Transition Handbook about green people talking to other green people nag me. What about those people who, no matter what, won’t attend anything that bills itself as a “potluck”? They exist, no doubt. Or who won’t ever be, in even the slightest way, interested in gardening? Or sustainability in general? When I ask about this, Moster tells me that “the idea of Village Vancouver all along [has been] to figure out how you reach and engage that eighty-five percent of the population where if you said ‘let’s be more sustainable’ or ‘let’s build community,’ they probably would tell you to go away.” It may be a new kind of activism, but Transition still has to grapple with one of environmentalism’s oldest problems — convincing people to care about issues that, for now at least, can be ignored. How long people will be able to ignore them, of course, remains to be seen.

The chicken workshop winds down as the evening sun nears the horizon. The participants get up, shake hands with each other, and head homeward. The garden-party atmosphere begins to dissipate back into the city streets. Two of them, a pair of eager youths from East Vancouver, carry a pair of hens – their first backyard chickens, delivered to them during the workshop. They told me over lemonade that they would be among the first people in their neighbourhoods to own chickens – “hopefully,” one said, “we’ll start a trend.” Maybe they will. And maybe it’ll give them a good excuse to invite people into their backyards. That would be a trend worth starting.