Transition Albany

HomeGrown: The Film

HOMEGROWN follows the Dervaes family who run a small organic farm in the heart of urban Pasadena, California. While “living off the grid”, they harvest over 6,000 pounds of produce on less than a quarter of an acre, make their own bio diesel, power their computers with the help of solar panels, and maintain a website that gets 4,000 hits a day. The film is an intimate human portrait of what it’s like to live like “Little House on the Prairie” in the 21st Century.  - Excerpt from the film’s website.

Visit the film’s website to learn more.

Discussion with Novella Carpenter

I’ve been cultivating the city for over ten years now, and my neighbors still think I’m crazy. It all started with a few chickens, then some bees, until I had a full-blown farm near downtown Oakland. - Excerpt from Novella’s log at www.novellacarpenter.com. Farm City is her account of her experiences. She will have copies of the book available for sale at the event!

Seed and Plant Exchange

Simply bring your extra seeds and plants, and some envelopes or containers to hopefully take home others in exchange. Best to label all items properly to prevent surprise crops (but would that be so bad anyway?).

The groundbreaking film The Age of Stupid will receive a special showing at the Albany Twin Theatre on Solano Avenue on Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 11:30 a.m.  Transition Albany has organized this one-time-only showing to stimulate both discussion and action to address the challenges of climate destruction and the imminent end of the age of cheap oil.

Writing in Britain’s The Guardian, George Monbiot called The Age of Stupid “a captivating and constantly surprising film: the first successful dramatization of climate change to reach the big screen.” Grounding the film is a fictional character who looks back upon our time with full knowledge of the environmental and social upheavals of the first half of the twenty-first century. This device distinguishes the film from more conventional documentaries and arguably provides a drawing card for the film.

In the film, Academy Award-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite stars as the Archivist, the lone caretaker to the collected knowledge of humanity.  In the year 2055, the Archivist looks back upon video clips of the early years of the climate crisis from within his tower in the now-melted Arctic, his refuge from a world devastated by storms, starved by droughts, and consumed by violence.  As he views the videos, he seeks answers to the question that haunts him: Why did humanity fail to save itself?

Postlethwaite, whom Steven Spielberg named “probably the best actor in the world today,” delivers a strong performance, but it is the lives of real people from our time whom he observes in videos in his archives that make the film so compelling.  Through these videos, director Franny Armstrong follows the struggles and aspirations of several intriguing people in often uncomfortable relationships to oil and global warming.  From Iraqi refugees to a British wind farm developer, from an Indian airline founder to a French mountaineer, we see the emerging possibilities of humanity’s future with all their complications and contradictions.

Amidst resistance to change in countries such as the U.S. and U.K. and growing aspirations elsewhere to “live like Americans,” can we avoid the fate that the film depicts? Or is our time destined to be remembered as the “Age of Stupid” for our failure to heed repeated warnings?

It’s been said that the best way to predict the future is to create it.  Consider this showing an invitation from Transition Albany to begin doing just that.

Age of Stupid: Trailers: Original Theatrical Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

This theatrical showing of The Age of Stupid is expected to be the only one of its kind in the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming months.  Tickets will be available for purchase at the box office of the Albany Twin both in advance and on the morning of the 11:30 a.m. showing on Sunday, March 7, 2010.

One of the things I appreciated about the Soviet Union when I spent a year as nanny to a British attaché in Moscow in 1973 was the appearance of the storefronts. While I would never have called myself a communist, the stunning lack of artifice in a store named “Produce” or “Shoes” or “Books” deeply appealed to me.

I was reminded of this as I reviewed my experience at an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium last Sunday in Oakland’s Chinatown.

Awakening the Dreamer is a masterfully compiled multimedia collection of video excerpts, music, photographs, quotations, animation, live presenters, dyads, group processes and wisdom snippets – from Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hahn, John Robbins, Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai and Vandana Shiva, among others – that, in only four hours, clearly distils the facts and elicits and presents answers to four questions:

I had just watched the climate docu-drama The Age of Stupid and was keenly aware of the precariousness of our position on the edge of collapse as cheap oil, the fuel behind our consumer society, runs out and its effects as climate change grow more severe.

A key concept of the symposium is that we have been “entranced” by years of “marketing” to believe that we need something outside ourselves to be satisfied and that ever-increasing consumption is the answer. Although it is clear that our addiction to consumerism is driving climate change, perhaps we are not so much “stupid” as hypnotized. Stores and manufacturers in our capitalistic world proclaim their wares with brand images and logos that we have been conditioned to feel we cannot live without.  What does the name “Safeway” actually have to do with food, for instance, or “The Territory Ahead” with clothes?

The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium was put together several years ago by the Pachamama Alliance in response to a heartfelt plea from the indigenous Achuar people of Peru/Ecuador, whose shamans had predicted that the world was on the verge of a terrible catastrophe, which only industrialized countries could avert. The version I experienced was a recent improvement that is taking the Bay Area (and beyond) by storm as more and more attendees are inspired to become facilitators and bring the symposium to their own groups and associations.

At the crux of the event is the revelation of one basic assumption under which we have been operating for centuries, the reversal of which will make it inevitable that we reduce our consumption, care more for the earth and each other than for profit, and rebuild our lives in resilient communities. Can you guess what it is?

I saw the Symposium as offering a beautiful, compact introduction to the Transition concept, so I was delighted to hear this morning that the Pachamama Alliance and the Transition Network are currently formalizing a partnership to do just that.