 back of the room, giant on a table. We want you to write down groups that you want other people to know about. We make sure all of that goes out in our notes. If there are any events that you want people to know about, please also write those down back there so that we can make sure those go out in the notes as well. We do take notes. We actually take lots and lots of notes. Who here is getting the notes from the series? All right and it's okay if you haven't read them but I'm just curious. Has anyone read the notes? Okay if you have not gotten the notes and you would like to leave me your name and email on the yellow piece of paper here on the table. That's the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition list. Chris Wood also has a list for bail so I recommend signing up for both. But if you want the notes, write them down on that piece of paper. The other way to get them is if you are a part of the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition list serve, I also post them more. So if you want to just get them off the list serve you can do that. On May 8th we are hosting a 7th soil series. We just can't stop. The last one is April 24th. It's in two weeks and two weeks after that we're gonna have the 7th one. There won't be any speakers. It'll be three hours long and at that event we're gonna plug everybody into action. We've learned a lot. We've learned a lot from you. We're taking really good notes including your questions, your statements, your interest, things you're already doing and we're gonna work together to plug people in and get active. Sharing information is great and meeting you all is wonderful. We need to start working together. And let's see what else did I... Oh, our sponsors have been flashing behind me on the screen here. We have 23 businesses, farms, organizations that have stepped up to support this. And what I want to share with you there is I sent out one email to about 19 people saying hey do you want to speak at this event? And I sent out another email to about 25 people saying hey do you want to sponsor this event? And almost everyone said yes to both emails. So that's really good. We've hit something that people are excited about and I'm so glad you all could be here. So I'm gonna turn it over to our panel and I feel like you guys are really far away over there. We're gonna have each of these guys are gonna speak for about seven minutes. Boom, boom, boom. You're gonna see some slides, a little bit of film, and then after they're done we're gonna get into a circle and have a discussion. So Mindy Blink is our first speaker. Do you want to stand or... Might be easier for everyone to see you. A wonderful series that Kat and Chris have put together and I'm so grateful to be part of it and I just I want to say this is the most important work that we can really be doing right now is resilience building locally and so by being here you are part of doing this incredibly important work. I want to talk to you a little bit tonight about that link between soil health and community resilience and first I want to set the context for this with a little bit of background on the organization that I'm part of called Community Resilience Organizations and this this is a nonprofit that's mainly based in Vermont but we also work a little bit throughout the rest of New England and it is a living evidence that really beautiful wonderful things can come out of terrible disasters. Community Resilience Organizations is a product of Tropical Storm Irene. The founder of the organization Peg Elmer, she was living in South Royal Tan at the time and she was teaching at Vermont Law School. She was teaching hazard mitigation planning and she was also working at the state level doing all sorts of hazard mitigation planning and helping the state prepare for climate change events and her house was decimated during Tropical Storm Irene which she was doing really hit home literally and so as she was looking around the state she was she was observing communities that bounce back faster than others and then some communities took a really long time, took years to recover from Irene and from the destruction. She was wondering what it was about these communities that bounce back faster and what she determined looking around the state when it was that it was communities that were more tight-knit and had closer relationships and people knew their neighbors and that won't come as a surprise to many of you but that is just the reality and so she built this organization based on that concept that to survive and thrive in the era of climate change that we really need stronger community relationships and deep relationships with our neighbors so what I've been seeing I came on as the executive director of community resilience organizations a little over two years ago and what I see is still that the most important thing is these community relationships but what I'm seeing more and more of now is the importance of localizing in a different way and for some for for so many different reasons and particularly looking at water energy and food the wet nexus water energy and food we need sovereignty in these areas these are our basic human needs these are the things that we cannot live without we need we all need to drink water we all need to in the northern climate stay warm and older and younger people especially need to stay cooler and we need to we need to provide food locally and not be relying on food being shipped in from California and other places we have the ability to grow here and healthy soils having healthy soils is such a huge part of this obviously but providing our basic human needs this is this is now what I'm seeing is really the most important thing and then we need sovereignty in those areas but we need connectivity connection to each other in the form of community co-creation and that's the relationship piece that is it you know that's something that we just that is what is going to carry us through and that's how we need to be localizing by building these community relationships with each other really with each other and our neighbors and that not only will help us provide our basic human needs and having some co-dependence on other people in our community but we will become happier and healthier humans as a result of that and more connection so I want to challenge you to think about resilience and that word in a much broader definition than you may have in the past when you're kind of just thinking about responding to some disaster bouncing back resilience I want you to think about it in terms of the past present and the future and I want you to think about that about resilience in terms of your individual role so ask yourself the question what do what what brings me joy what are my strengths what are my passions what are my personal gifts that I enjoy sharing with others in the community what brings you joy that you can share in your community and you can do in a way that helps your community provide their basic human needs and services and how can you joyfully contribute in that way how can you use your personal gifts and blossom and help your in a way that benefits your community and helps expand and so that can come in so many different forms you don't have to be the person in your town who's leading every initiative and doing all these big really public things like do you happen to make a killer lasagna because if you do that could be really useful and you can you can make that killer lasagna out of all local ingredients or try to grow all of them yourself and make that and share that with your neighbors and have a little community event or are you really good at social media stuff you may be volunteer with a local nonprofit and offer to do some of that for them what are the things that you're you're good at and they that you like doing that you can share and how can you be present in your community that is what I'm trying to do with community resilience organizations and this nonprofit is a way to kind of help with the cohesion around all of this and around this resilience buildings you feel like you're part of a larger movement because you are and the contributions that everybody makes are just incredibly important and two whole minutes really fast now but the way that we operate as a nonprofit is in different communities all around the state and there are 12 different communities now who are working with us yes good right yeah we started out with like two and now we just keep building and actually one in Randolph has just started it's Randolph Braintree and Brookfield but the way that the that we operate as an organization and trying to help be a you know kind of a like an incubator for this resilience work is that volunteers in communities all around the state and also in Massachusetts and New Hampshire they decide that they want to form a team a community resilience team and then they can choose how whatever they want to focus on whether that's emergency preparedness or whether that's all sorts of different really fun events like potato fest Hartford is starting potato fest a ton of different things and and then the the communities also share information with each other but it's just our organization is something that helps with the cohesion of all of us I think the main message that I want to get across is that it's really important to think about resilience in a really personalized way and finding your own individual role within that and that there is support and a question that I want to put out there to you to think about throughout the series tonight is what will it take what does it take what can it take for individuals to get involved more and in some different ways that they haven't necessarily been involved in their communities before and how can we turn all of this into a bigger movement a wider movement building a culture of Brazilian so it's not just an anomaly and something we do sometimes that this is always in our mind we live in the climate change era we live in a really scary difficult but beautiful and wonderful time also and and you know we are we're all here to support you and our communities and we're we're building this together and so that's just what to consider how can how can we do more and how can we turn this into a more cohesive movement together he's getting the technical practice in White River Junction and he's going to tell us a bit about the work that they're doing and also his reflections on resilience and the social mycelium is what I like to think about with all of us working together and mimicking our great ones under the ground that are showing us how to do it right thanks cat and thank you all for being here tonight I appreciate cat and Chris for inviting me to participate in this way as cats that I come to you from the Center for Transformational Practice where we advance inner transformation is the foundation for positive social change and so we do this through offering programming including workshops and retreats and also doing networking in the community in particular with directors of nonprofits you all here Simon does he need a mic? No, he's good. Great. Directors of nonprofits and clergy and some and some activists. Yeah that's the backyard where I live and so when I think of social mycelium I wanted to approach this not from the same point of the apparent connections between people the types of things we can graph on on paper our organizational affiliations and the connections between the different organizations but rather what you might call the subtle social mycelia in other words mycelia being something that happens underground is the way that one plant communicates with another in ways that we don't actually see it's kind of the so for me social mycelia triggers thoughts about collective consciousness and so what I wanted to do is just say a few things about that and and we can recognize collective consciousness anytime we're within a group by the means of the way that the group field involves over the course of the time that we're together enter into is in what is the social field is evolving and changing over the course of our time together and it's quite flexible we can adjust it with very minor things for instance I can adjust the social field in this room right now just simply by pointing out friends we are a group here together in this room we are a group and you notice that when I say that there's a little bit of a shift that takes place in the energy of the room so when you see that shift you know oh there must be something there that's shifting because we noticed a difference so we take social field quite seriously and it has a lot of implications for how we can navigate as organizers and how we can work in groups with when you build the social field you are in a position to exercise a greater kind of collective synergy in the group you bring out the collective genius in the group you also can develop friendships more easily it becomes a more hospitable environment and ultimately become more comfortable in your own body and enjoy your work together more so that investing the social field has a lot to offer us as organizers and activists building resilience in our community is a very important thing to focus on what I wanted to do is focus on an aspect of the social field which actually holds us back and that is the way in which in addition to kind of the social field also dictates everything that can be said or thought within the context of a certain group and we can notice that quite a bit by means of the way in which what we can say shifts when we move from one group to another or what we can think shifts move from one group to another so I wanted to just do a little experiment here I'm gonna ask you a question and my request is don't try to answer the question but just observe how it feels in your body for me to pose this question to you the very important question for a particular historical moment the question is are we in a emergency time if you're like me your response to hearing that question is involves some a little bit of tension because on the one hand you say yes we're in an emergency time but on the other hand you say no because a lot of your activities are sort of geared towards business as usual we're heading down this track and we forget that and only that you also have to navigate with the assumptions of the group that you're now part of what are our collective assumptions about what are about what kind of time we're in right now this particular question is important because it has it lays the foundation for a lot of what we're going to do together so for instance similar when Greta Thunberg says our house is on fire that actually you can you can get a feeling of how something is being disrupted that's a super powerful statement for her to make and and why because it disrupts our our collective assumptions about what we're what we're up to at this time so this is the flyer that was hung up yesterday on the over the bridge the past over 91 by the 350 next step next step so okay how I know that we are we have a big part of our heart and mind that's dedicated to business as usual as many as so you know I may be I'm on the select board for the town of Hartford if you ever want to join a group that has it's experiencing a lot of inertia in terms of the evolution of its thinking I recommend you join the select board it's deeply tapped into the collective social field of thinking in the whole town right so it has to average that all out not not a terribly progressive environment and so we do things like we're we're currently considering we're gonna send three million or four million dollars building a pool and sometimes I'm in this discussion I'm thinking is this what we should be doing in an emergency time or should we be investing that's getting our roads ready for the kind of severe weather events that are going to be coming down the pike or should order there are other things we need to do to prepare for the future so you know you can only spend so much political capital bringing these things up but it's definitely on my mind and we also have it's nice to follow up on on Mindy because we have a community resilience group in Hartford and that Kai is on one of the founding people and we spent a lot of our time doing things like looking at fire preparedness looking at the hazard mitigation plan collaborating around things that we would probably be doing regardless of whether or not we were in a state of emergency and very rarely does the question come up we're potentially facing human extinction or we are on the brink of massive societal collapse what do we what does that say about resilience is that in our definition of resilience and for the most part it's pretty hard to bring that forward because the social field within which we're operating is the municipal social field and it basically excludes that kind of consideration that kind of dialogue so so we talk about things like the pool and I wanted to do is share with you a story last thing I want to do is I want to share with you a story that may interest you that starts about three years ago we hired a town manager who happened to be come from a career in the Pentagon in the town of Hartford and first of all I should say he did an excellent job you're extremely fond of this man and he did it he did a fabulous job there he is standing standing at the microphone and after two and a half year after about couple of years he came to us and said my health is not good enough to do this job I have to step down so we initiated the process of hiring a new town manager and I developed kind of a working relationship with this fellow after I got to be chair we had to meet every other week and figure out about the agenda and when we got to the very end of this time at Hartford we had set the agenda the two of us were sitting in his office across from his desk and we had some time and I said Leo I want to talk to you about some ideas that are on my mind and I really want to just ground to check them to see whether or not this makes sense to you and he said yeah let's talk about let me what's up so I said well I'm thinking about severe weather events I'm thinking about this three and a half million dollars the town of Norwich is now trying to spend on repairing their roads from the damage that was done on July 1st 2017 and the projections and how that's going to affect our budget it's like yeah this is very serious as I'm thinking about the way we're dropping bombs and seven other countries right now and the global movement away from using the US dollar as the Federal Reserve currency and the effect that could have on the economy I'm thinking about resource issues and kind of the way resources could have all you know like some scarcity in that regard social unrest we kind of talk about these different things I said I just want to know do you feel like we should be talking about these things on the select word floor as part of our obligation to take care of our citizens and and he's after the thing it already said yeah I do I actually agree with you it turns out he agreed with me not only in terms of the specifics I was bringing up he agreed with me in terms of the overarching conclusion which is that our responsibility to the citizens of Hartford to take care of them includes being able to take include this notion of the potential for systemic collapse as a reality that we're in right now and here we were in the last three weeks of his career as the leader manager and I'm thinking to myself well first of all how come I never heard this from him second of all how come you never heard this from me right and third of all is there any way we can we can use this convergence a point of view and and I said would you be willing to help us in this regard could you say something to the select board you know to let them know your views on this because everyone respects you so much and if you kind of it would help us have this conversation you know who knows it might save some lives down the road right if we could do this and he said actually I'd be willing to do that I'll bring it up with the select board if I get a chance and as it unfolded it turned out that his health was not good he missed a couple of slack board meetings at the very end and it kind of just went by there was no opportunity for him to share that point of view with the select board happen anyway the point the reason I want to share this story is not so much because of the outcome but because of what it said to me about the pervasiveness of the social field within which we operate that assumption about what the other folks are thinking so the importance of building resilience and the importance of willingness to disrupt willingness to spend that social capital in order to disrupt the assumptions of the group that you're in bring forward the alternative counter narrative and and what happens if you do what happens if you don't think here's an example of that the other side of the bridge here caution climate crisis ahead you can see the walkers going across the bridge thank you all next we have Henry Harris so cat brought up that she wrote to a bunch of folks and asked them to do some stuff and hell yeah we did what she asked us to do cat boxing is amazing my seven-minute timer because cat boxing is serious business you got your own timer I want your timer too because I know I need constant supervision if that's not immediately obvious my name is Henry Harris and I work with Kat and Grace and Molly and folks here at this brand new center for grassroots organizing Marshall Vermont we just got a bunch of acres and we were crossing our fingers that's gonna have something to do with nonviolent revolutionary organizing centering for generative agriculture we think about that so we think it's a great idea too right now it's just mud holes you know and then Karen and I and others also work as the Vermont climate Union trying to promote sort of a democratic united front around what the hell are we doing about this climate crisis making sure that we're experimenting with democracy I think right now there's this kind of moment that we're in where you know what the hell do we do there's this climate emergency right and when when Simon just asked that question are we in an emergency and he asked me to feel what I felt like I felt relieved because people should be asking that question way more often I think we're in an emergency and just to hear somebody talk about that makes me feel less alienated less crazy so we are in this emergency and right now there's this thing where we're hoping that these like nonprofits and scientists and folks are going to have this moral argument and are going to just shame the legislators and the capitalists and everybody into doing the right thing even though they know and we know that that's not going to happen right so this this slide that you can all see here I thought Simon was going to talk more about chinchillas this is a this slide shows kind of long it's coming I was going to just run through two hours of you tall people get out of here we don't get some taller people this time anyway so the idea is there have been these social movements we know all about them right and they have been a product of really good organizing back in the 2000s nearly 2000s me and several of y'all were part of the global justice movement the anti neoliberal anti globalization movement and we were in the United States we were mobilizers and we just all show up at once we'd make a bunch of noise and we didn't really know a lot about organizing and really creating grassroots institutions and big membership organizations so now I'm going to mess with the slides huh this thing doesn't work okay so what do I do with my cheat sheets so there's these aren't these these ideas that great these are these ideas that many I came up with about these basic tenets for the kind of movement that we need do folks feel like we need a movement now do we feel like we're scaled up enough and like our big enough movement yeah how about the degree of coordination between different geographic areas and different aspects I like that who made the fart noise that's how I feel about it too so I am I think that there are a bunch of tried and true methods to try to help us coordinate and create that movement instead of sitting around trying to you know make sure everybody read the latest cool book that makes us really sad or really inspired we need to be employing these methods right the methods that are coming from the civil rights movement right Ella Baker who none of us know enough about I do have this amazing 45 minute documentary that we should all screen screen together this time was sort of the lead strategist for 30 years of the civil rights movement before any of us ever heard of Martin and she would really hard to make sure that all of these organizations all over the South and all of the Eastern Seaboard were independent and were coordinated with each other and we're talking about nonviolent revolutionary resistance and other things that we'll see what else so there was also the populist movement the problem was amazing right the global justice movement in the early 2000s we didn't know it was an agricultural movement we thought it was about these sort of abstractions about World Trade and you know sovereignty and you know Venezuela all companies can't push this around or something but no it was led by via campus in an agrarian interest from all over the world and they were trying to stop the long-term plan coming out of World War 2 of complete agrarian dominance of especially the Global South by the Monsanto's of the world. The populist movement started in Little County in North Texas in 1889 a couple redneck cotton farmers basically shear croppers tenant lean farmers got together and they started a little newspaper and in three years by 1892 they had 40,000 trained lecturers presenting intents across the entire country about fiat currency and the gold standard and and basically teaching people to bulk their cotton refused to sell it to the market until the price went up you know big agricultural strikes that was an amazing that was an amazing economic vehicle for their ruling and three years time they had millions of people 1892 in wagon trains in Oregon to DC that's where the populist work they had a bunch of analysis that maybe we weren't so down with today but they did put JPMorgan the biggest mercantile in the world on his ear was amazing what I think incidentally I've just been kind of every thing I end up getting involved in always feels like something that I should have already been involved in for a long time I like kind of panic youth and stuff trying to work with them because they want to keep it in the ground and whatever this right here this is a movement that's going on a just transition is being promoted by the indigenous environmental network the climate justice alliance the grassroots global justice these alliances are the biggest front line people of color indigenous led alliances on the boat and they and we all hear all these other nonprofits talking about let's follow the frontline leadership and let's be awesome to people of color blah blah now come over here and donate to us and we'll pay these white people to sit at their computers blah blah meanwhile they're there these amazing movements from all over the global south and they're talking about a just transition that's amazing okay everybody please just go like this yeah and our last speaker is Chris Wood with my seven minutes change of pace from the other amazing presenters I'm going to show a clip from a film that we made it's called dancing with the cannibal giant new stories for the great transition and it's just a clip that I love Simon's presentation about the social mycelium and the and the big question that I always ask Mindy talked a little bit about okay resilience but how do how is it that we really get to change ourselves both as an individually and when we are in a collective space you know can we do it there as well so this film the intention was just a couple of stories and I wanted the one that so since this was the soil series I chose the the topic that really sort of connected with the soil and I have some discussion items for after we get going but let me get it up and running because I've only got seven minutes starting man it's an emergency everything's working so far so this is just one of the stories from this film this film that we show around the area if anybody wants to see it we show it to eight to eighteen people is a good set to sit around in a room and have a conversation after doing African drumming when I was six years old in first grade and my sister joined with me and then I believe she did it for two years something like that and I've been doing it for five years our daughter Nishima is 13 our son Emmett is 11 they've spent most of their childhood on this land before that they spent the early part of their childhood living in urban south end of Albany you know it's it's interesting because they're so immersed in the experience their ability to reflect and see how it's different from other children is still limited so my son will say for example oh I don't really know anything about farming and then I'll proceed to give a 45 minute tour to college students where he's explaining why you need all these varieties of heritage chickens and how you intercrop fava beans to capture nitrogen for your tomatoes who are heavy feeders so they have a deep knowledge and a deep belonging Nishima was overhearing me talk about supporting a sister organization with their strategic plan and she said well have you thought about encouraging them to use a appreciative inquiry model you know so I just think they're going to be very employable in fact we've started hiring them so Emmett does youth groups and Nishima does a lot of kitchen management and she also proofreads my grants for me I mean a lot of the people that come here are like really driven to change the world in what I think of as a better direction people will come from like everywhere all over the country and just to see how much they value our work and how much they want to be a part of it Soulfire Farm in some ways you know started as an idea when Jonah and I and our two infant aged children we're living in the south end of Albany New York and Albany our neighborhood was termed a food desert by the USDA meaning that even if you try really hard it's almost impossible to get good food to get fresh fruits and vegetables so Jonah and I both had a long history of farming other people's land and had a dream of having our own land and when our neighbors found out that we had those skills we were really encouraged to find that land grow food and to bring it back into the neighborhood we purchased the land in December of 2006 and we when we arrived these soils were as about degraded as they could be and we've really spent the last five to six years building our soils really seeing it as the source of the nutrition for our communities well I think in regards to to the production of our farm first of all and and why we are focusing on delivering food into food desert neighborhoods we actually prefer the term fruit apartheid which is really the food system that we have right now where certain people live in food opulence and have access to their whole foods and their Trader Joe's and there are also a large percentage of Americans mostly black Latino and indigenous Americans who don't even have enough to eat never mind high quality food and so the result of that is that even as our nation rightly so focuses attention on the rash of police killings against black and brown people and mass incarceration of black and brown bodies we're actually five times more likely to die and be sick from diet related illness than we are from all types of violence combined as black people so our farm share accepts on a sliding scale financial contribution for the foods you don't need a car because that food's going right to your doorstep folks stay with us for many years they come out to the farm we go to their houses we cook together and make sure you fill up your whole chest your whole back your whole belly and then just let that breath out we run training programs at various levels for beginners up through advanced on how to farm and how to access land and credit so that we can become independent farmers and we also work with a lot of black and brown youth so when young people come yes they learn some farming skills and some cooking skills but more important it's about that reintroduction in a really whole and healthy way to the earth so first of all um thank you all so much for coming i know you came we're really really far away and had to get up so early in the morning and i don't know what miss masswell told you about this farm but we're really dedicated to food justice and dedicated to ending racism in the food system so like everything you do today goes toward that mission like we're going to be in a few minutes taking care of some soil and that soil will grow food for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to eat healthy food i think of a very large goal of this farm soulfire farm is to spread the vision the mission um to other people so that they can continue this work people come from very far away to come to our programs and although that's awesome it also like really shows the need for this work in other places i think for me what roots me and keeps me hopeful in the face of the machine is um is a jewish teaching out of pierkea vote that says you are not obligated to complete the task but neither are you free to desist from it if i consider myself obligated to end climate chaos and to figure out how to feed the entire world then i'm not going to be able to get out from under my covers but i also can't desist from doing everything in my power toward those ends and if i can inspire one person or ten people or a hundred people to do the same that collective energy might be enough to shift the machine and if it's not and we lose which is possible i would rather go out knowing that i never gave up hope that i always believed in a bright future and in the process of of building that bright future i'm actually having a good life and my children are having a really good life and the people who come here are having a better life and so the present moment is enriched by that work and speakers but i think while we get our ducks in a row maybe y'all could make a circle big oval circle please be mindful of our kind cameramen outside of the room i hear you over there i love this part when everyone gets to see who else is here it's great i'm gonna ask that our four speakers get a moment to sort of summarize what they heard from each other and set the stage for this round and what we like to do at this point is when we pass the mic try and hold it you know notice that it's different here i don't really need a mic if you're like me don't worry about it but if you're quiet please do use it because we want to hear what you say and we want to know who you are we want to know where you're from so in vermoner and you're around here where you're living now and then when we get to it we'll also want to know do you have any questions do you have any statements that you want to say we're not going to do q&a not only do we not really have time for that but it's most important that in this next 45 minutes we get to know each other because we are the ones we've been waiting for this is our community and we are the ones that are going to build resilience upon the resilience that has been built before us and we're going to continue to do that we have to we don't really have a choice and we're going to do that together and we have incredible skills and when we do these circles i'm always impressed and inspired by who's here and the collective skills that we have i feel less worried every time i meet more of you the last time i used the mic no but it was all like people said oh it's garbled i couldn't hear you so i'll use my loud voice much better anyway what i want to say about the film that we that the little segment that you just saw is is an important part of the work that that compels me personally i'm i'm the director of an organization that has sort of a very wide focus in terms of programming could you would you oh beth understand um beth beth's need to to hear to hear you can do this this works because the last time you said it was garbled it's a little bit further now over the top no no it didn't work okay just a little bit further away yeah really okay is this it yes that's it okay um everything's coming back in in us in the cycle here um what i want to say is very briefly um the the focus of using this film it's for me is part of the work that i want to be personally focused on which is around the concepts of consciousness raising culture shift and um and coming being able for in small groups to be able to identify together a collective both pain and trauma that we're all feeling but to actually come in come to that in the same space together um as an opportunity to perhaps move us beyond the place where we are incapable of finding the capacity to change our routine in our daily lives because what happens is we're all conscious we say oh gosh climate change emergency the emergency absolutely the emergency but how do you really when you walk out the door after this meeting or after going to the climate march or whatever how is it and what are the things that are going to actually move inside your body inside your heart to make that shift uh and i think actually it's been a great panel because i've been inspired by the different um characteristics of each of each of the presentations um and hopefully the the inspired words of leah pennamon is is just another guy someone who's actually found and found a space and actually has sort of a conscious awareness of why she clear clarity about what what she is doing and why she's doing it in the in the full context of acknowledging the emergency used to ask my students and try to parse this out what is it that makes some people feel a sense of responsibility for other people and for the world and why is that absent in some people what is that and i think just by nature of who is here tonight just by being here i think you feel some sense of responsibility and i think that there are there has been so much good work done and there are so many bright paths forward though we are definitely in the midst of an emergency and sometimes you know i appreciated that question too and it's yes yes we're definitely in an emergency and sometimes we can let that that reality go because we're also sitting here after having a delicious warm meal calmly in the presence of neighbors it doesn't feel like an emergency in this present moment yet we we also know that it is and so how can we use both of those feelings the feeling of emergency and that calm nourished feeling of and joining together to move forward and actually address this emergency together with cohesion i just want to say that i'm uh really honored and flattered and all that to get to be sitting up here with y'all and here with all of y'all in this i love it when we come to Randolph and be the center of the state thing you know i'm saying can you tell me the whole name of this series again the soil series grassroots for the climate emergency right grassroots for the climate emergency the idea of the grassroots and the social mycelium and stuff that folks have been talking about all of these connections and you know leah talking about the the diligence of of trying to get this work done together it was so cool to see that by the way this kid sitting over here by karen those kids are the first people that i saw influencing her to like talk about pop culture and like seeing you know britney spears or whatever and it was really cool to see them up there educating college kids about soil health and uh i think that it's been really cool to see those folks who i used to know in a completely different context and they've got you know big social lives but they managed to discipline themselves and make a big offering to a movement context i think that we're just all called on to do that we've got this network we've got these resources and i think we've got this whether it's an ethical or spiritual calling to figure out how to share effectively right um you know there's this there's this lady grace boggs who's this kind of movement philosopher from detroit and she talks about this is a revolution this is the first revolution in human history where we're going to be fighting for our right to sacrifice instead of to gain right getting off this global economy and probably joining each other in some kind of managed consensual poverty in hopes that our consumption doesn't tip us over tip the t-card here um so anyway that you know it was nice to only have to speak for seven minutes before because it could be kind of inferred that it was going to all come back together if i'd had a little bit more time but i think what i was trying to what i was trying to get at is that there have been these agriculturally based movements in the past i think that our main economy is the dairy economy in this state people are getting milk checks with a with a suicide prevention hotline brochure in them from st alvin's dairy co-op and there's an opportunity for us we're sitting here talking about soil health all of us here we're talking about you know intensive grazing rotation and blah blah it'd be a hell of a thing for a bunch of northeast kingdom farmers to make that kind of transition but that would be justice if we supported them in making that transition and with all the talk about water quality and the climate and the dairy collapse i think we've got an opportunity as as grim as it is and i hope that we can all work together to make that regenerative opportunity not all these little nonprofits and little individual brave white people thinking out loud about all what everybody should be doing but us taking opportunities like what cat has set up for us here tonight and chris and the rest of y'all have set up for us here tonight to get together talk together and then work together and i hope that we're all here for uh when the rubber hits the road in a couple weeks for the the next steps conversation thanks thanks yeah if there's something that uh i would like to amplify something that was said by uh mindy mentioned earlier today about the importance of no one solution but rather the solution is is through doing what you love and um i think there's some real wisdom in that that uh i always try and keep in mind because with urgency sometimes we can have we can think oh well then we have to twist ourselves into some kind of a pretzel which is an unnatural state but um actually the our ability to impact society is a factor of depth it's a factor of depth of dwelling within ourselves it has it dictates the depth of our impact depth of dwelling dictate depth of impact and uh when are you dwelling more deeply than when you were doing what most calls to you what you most love so i think that there's an aspect of uh good news to that the fierceness of the call is also good news and so far as it's an authorization to drop those things that are not most precious to you um and similar to that is um fierceness of willingness to be in community with one another which is part of what just a mirror of what henry was just saying part of what's happening right here in this circle there is a certain there is a form of warrior ship associated with meeting people that you've never met before it's a random group and saying we're going to form community right now and we're going to form it on the basis of the fact that i'm going to tell you what's actually in my heart and i'm going to listen with an open heart to what what you have to share um is a a huge piece of the solution as well which is also good news and so far as that form of community is so much of what we've most uh permanently long for in desire my name is adam in koskis this is my first time participating in this series and i think it's been a really great hearing all of you speak and video as well as the follow up i feel that for me when i you know look at the theme of today and you know resilience being the core of it from at least my takeaway um i'd say the biggest thing is to to look inward in terms of you know the day-to-day interactions of um what you typically consume especially in the united states right now we consume much much higher rates overall than most every other country we have a lot of conveniences to us that are you can walk down the walk to the store many communities here you can drive from the local market um i asked about i asked about uh where a particular crop came from when i was at the market today and it was you know shipped in fresh from california and i you know thought about it's just like well i wanted to leak so i that's what i had no getting um but recognizing that you know that came from very very far away looking at you know local consumption of um you know crops that are seasonal is a big aspect of that and what's available and what can be you know not processed not shipped and just grown you know right at home or right at your neighbor's home and shared among the community excuse me adam i couldn't hear what town you're from oh i actually um i'm not a stator so i'm up from massachusetts this evening so i live in gardener massachusetts thanks for being here my sister gardener that's the chair city yes yes so uh can you all for um this evening and i look forward to hearing whatever else that's the side hi there um my name is dorsha mcdate i live up in wister and i'm a carpenter and i also run an airbnb out of my home which is a little homestead and um yeah i'm gardening and starting a little culture food forest and working towards getting my airbnb more into a space where i could feed people that come and stay with me and have like little micro farm and have an educational aspect to that um like airbnb experience people can come up from the city and just learn what it's like to you know live in a country you know this week yeah this is i'm just not pointing at the right way but um yeah i'm glad to be here and learning more thanks hello can you hear me yeah i'm jesse markson i'm living in white river junction right now just extremely interested to continue to immerse myself in this community starting a little farm and i guess the question that i have is just more open-ended but um just how can i uh listen more intentionally how can i be a part of each and every one of all of your lives more effectively and just be a part of this movement just like everyone else wants to hi i'm grace um is it are you hearing me we are yeah i can just hear you yes okay well you can hear me anytime then i live in in barnet which is in the northeast kingdom um and i have been involved with the roman healthy soils coalition since you know over a year and but my whole life has been devoted to um advocating for organic agriculture practicing as an organic vegetable producer for a while and teaching about and every other way that i could to promote the the general goals of this of this community and i'm thrilled that at the way people have been participating and the number and quality of participation and um and i particularly made the effort to come today because of the quality of the prisoners who i know and i think you know what what really um spurred me personally to reassess everything uh this has been a hell of a year for reassessing everything in my life um but what really forced me to confront the the climate emergency was a health emergency and uh in january i was diagnosed with breast cancer and i was an early stage and uh the with the help of an incredible supportive community i'm doing great and i'm going to end up in better shape than i was before um but you know the lessons learned and the the critical importance of the work we're doing has never never been clearer to you and i have so reaffirmed my personal commitment to doing everything in my power while i'm still able to come to work with you all and uh and make this happen so thank you all hi i'm sylvia from south strafford and i care very much about the soil and try very hard to do the right thing and i've never talked about this part of my life before but i think now is the time i've been a vegetarian for 55 years beginning in high school and it was not part of a group or a movement i just kind of figured it out and began living this way so i want to invite others to think about what relationship should we have with animals should we be killing and eating them and what relationship do we want to have with the land is this an appropriate land use and just check in with yourselves and see how you feel about these issues and if you feel as many people do that meat is a an important part of your diet perhaps you can do it less so i and i do mean invite just see where you are with with those questions hello my name is steward i live in south strafford with sylvia i'm a composer which means i farm music paper i think it would be probably a good idea for for groups uh that i heard the presentations of to check in with the pentagon the cia the nsa and the national institute of health they all have gained it out the cia i mean the the pentagon the generals they're they're highly educated folks and they gained it out years ago but the major problem um the united states is monetary and weather it's not like another country coming here and the cia analysts it's the same and the nsa sees it because they're the ones that have do the satellite spine so it probably i'm a quaker and a pacifist but i do know that those people are thinking deeply about the same things that everybody in this room is and they have for a long time so maybe it would be good to link up with some of those analysts and some night or other my name is kai cochran and i live in west parkford on the small farm uh i've come to each one of these meetings and presentations and it's been absolutely fascinating and i'm starting to get a feeling um a kind of a feeling of coming together and being somewhat of one mind as these have have come on so i'm very glad that we're going to have this meeting on May 8th because what i really like is action i'm an action person and um i really want to get together with people and see if we can't figure out things to do that each of us can do and that we can do together and and i also in my life i've been involved with many organizations mostly promoting things that i thought should happen like solar energy and wind energy and all those sorts of things in montana and then this kind of thing back here um and i found that that there are ways that you can spread the word in a way that is not difficult for people to swallow humor is good humor is really important and also uh as as we've thought of in our our community resilience group we've decided that that humans tendency to to sort of want to vie against each other on things sort of contests like like uh you know there are so many sports that people just love you know and people and uh that we decided that what we're we're doing this summer in hardford is because we have five villages and we've always felt that we were kind of a scatter town because it was five villages and not a nice main street sort of thing um we thought that that was going to be difficult for us but we decided that what we want to do is take those five villages and have them vie against each other another one of the things it feels we feel strongly about is that more people should be growing their own food and so we're having this contest that we're calling potato fest where we are having the five villages buy against each other to get each one to get as many of the residents of that village growing some potatoes as possible and then we're going to have a great big celebration in september where we're going to have all things potato including a potluck and songs and games and poems and all sorts of probably skits and everything else and and we're hoping that not only will that sort of tap people's feelings that they like like to have a contest but also bring them together as as villages come together and then as we all come together at the end um hoping that it'll be a good time a fun time but they're also we're going to learn a lot and and become another little step towards resilience my name is Keith Walsh I'm from Thetford Center yet again I'm incredibly encouraged by the connectivity that happens within this space and I'm encouraged at the future that that will bring out one thing that I've been thinking about recently in terms of my social my co-leal networks is the fact that this is off on kind of a separate idea one and two maybe one and three I can't remember the exact statistic of americans are on some kind of pharmaceutical medication and which leads to a lot of addiction issues and what they're saying to be finding now is that the root of addiction is a lack of connection yes so we so we by building this connection by our actions by building further connection with our communities with individuals we under the surface are helping to build this connection to one another in a healthy way and resolving some of the deeper issues not just in the soil but within our social fabric as well so know that although your intentions may be focused in one specific one particular field or aspect of this knowledge the the ramifications the ripples that come out from your actions through this my co-leal connection I think are going to heal a lot more of the wounds then maybe even just the physical ones that we see i'm susan mills i live in randolph center in randolph center yeah okay look right at i i've been living here in this yeah randolph center since 81 done a lot of different kinds of projects and community activism and it's just great to see this continuing in this in this form too i'm i'm concerned about the some of the people who are not here inclusion is really really important to me and some of the people who just don't even think this is a problem and and and particularly young people and it's great to see at least one representative but i would like to to see more involvement with the schools i i think that i just recently saw gretta thunberg her her ted talk this was about a week ago i i've heard about her but i hadn't actually seen her and to see her and she is something so there's a lot of potential there i think and if we can think of how to to include more young people i think that would be great hi everyone my name is carl teetaman i'm co-founder of soil for climate and non-profit based in vermont and we're honored to be one of the sponsors of the soil series for anyone interested in following this discussion at a global scale and if you're on facebook our facebook group has almost 11 000 members in more than 100 countries so it's a great way to keep in touch with all of the latest research videos and so forth i was fortunate over the last couple weeks to attend two soil events by the living soil symposium in montreal and also the grassfit exchange conference in santa rosa california and i can report that in at both of those sites there were hundreds three to four hundred people i would say at each event who are all very much at the forefront of their mind soil restoration and healing land and in particular at the event in california um the room was about half filled with uh people wearing cowboy hats and i'm sure many of them are different in the political spectrum than i am and i was heartened to realize once again that this is an issue that crosses all political lines um and very conservative people also want to literally the definition of conservation you know to heal the land and preserve a future for their children and grandchildren and i take heart with that i'm marie and together with my wife laura we founded green mountain girls farm in northfield ten years ago um you know we uh tried to make a nod to the revolutionary green mountain boys with our name um and you know the successes include some documentation of carbon and air very deep in our soil um and in a short amount of time we've made some changes uh i can also report that we have a family that for ten years has bought food just about every week from our farm and they use the shop at shaw's so it's a really big step when a family gets 70 to 80 percent of their calories um from within half a mile of their house i can tell you they were our first customers and when they joined we thought our future was bright and um the ten years since haven't been that bright not that many people step forward and vote towards the things we were talking about caring about with each meal and each bite and um so you know i guess um when i look at vermont moving forward i think that uh a tourism that's faced that's based on regenerative agriculture and a geotourism that really takes advantage of this syndemic with obesity chronic disease under nourishment and climate change all spoken about together um that we can reach out to people who do care about wellness um and as for us we host agritourists um and we hope um that together with our neighbors these people that care about um not only food as medicine but as farms as medicine um you know come up to vermont forest bathe come out to the farms and farm soak welcome to our place come anytime hi i'm uh lynn wilde from Montpelier and i i really want to say thank you for talking about this being a crisis of and an emergency and i have to agree that when i heard you ask that question and and call it what it is the sense of relief was immense i've been recognizing this sort of by myself and pushing it out to other people uh since 1972 and trying to find uh people who could talk about it and work towards preventing it so i'm really grateful to be here this is my second time and um i feel like i'm uh at a 12 step meeting yes i i'm a i'm a consumer but um so so i'm also on the Montpelier tree board and we're getting ready to plant 200 trees in May and um we're planting them in neighborhoods and trying to get neighbors to come together and work with us to put trees of their property and explain the relationship of trees as part of our life support system with rain and with um dirt soil and i'm really pleased to tell you that in Montpelier May is becomes tree city it goes from being poem city in april to being tree city and to call people's attention to trees uh and help them understand that they there is a sentience among trees that needs to be recognized and so one of my questions is um as gay brown talks about in dirt to soil putting a massive diversity of cover crops on the land what can we put at the base of trees uh to create tree guilds to help support the mycelial grove at the base of trees and that connectivity but in an urban setting not necessarily in a forest because our trees are really really struggling in town to survive the assault from salt and snow plows and lawn mowers and you know but what can we put at the base of trees so we don't need to put lawn mowers right up to trees or weed eaters or let's quit weed eating or or let's eat weeds differently um so anyway that's my thing and i'm really grateful to be here thank you hi my name is rick goddison i live in east Bethel in a uh a tiny house that i built myself i'm currently living on a far 40 acre parcel of land and two landowners and another person and and i are in the very early stages of forming a cooperative community which is based on low income um low consumption and uh mutual aid um so i really appreciate all the proactive positive things that are happening here i but i just want to bring people's attention to one other thing and that is the the idea of resistance or civil disobedience does everybody does anybody know does anybody not know what who extinction rebellion are the the group does anybody know who they are extinction rebellion i've heard of them yeah extinction rebellion is a uh a movement started in the uk and uh they're calling they do civil disobedience and whatnot they're calling for it's coming across the pond to this side of the of the uh Atlantic now so it's just starting here in this country and they're calling for a week of action uh worldwide and so far there are 120 some odd um cities around the world that are taking it's a worldwide movement and the idea is for um civil disobedience and however whatever form that takes for you you can you know the whole gamut of civil disobedience the idea being that not only do we have to have these new ways forward in in this emergency but we also have to slow down the destruction that's happening at the same time so it's not an either or a thing it's a both and okay the uh call the worldwide call starts this the 15th which is monday and it runs through the 22nd so you can look up to see if there's any um actions in your area i don't know what's happening in Montpelier i'm going to boston that week because i have friends there um i know there's things happening there so i just wanted to bring that to your attention lost uh 50 percent of all of the uh species on numbered counting species on earth in the last 40 years or so just to put that extinction thing in context um i'm henry swayze from tonbridge and a member of the Vermont healthy soils coalition and yes unfortunately it's my first one of these i've been to because i've been out of state and have not been here to do them um for 15 or 20 years uh back in the 70s and 80s i talk people how to do sustainable farming with livestock and a lot of that was to make profitability better and uh i have uh i took a break in that business my wife had Alzheimer's for 14 years and it slowed down what i was doing uh and i've kind of gotten back in gear now and um i knew that we were sequestering carbon when uh when we were teaching that and we tried to tell people that that was happening but the world really wasn't very interested in that so it wasn't a big point uh i now have learned from Walter yena that uh that we're actually cooling the planet when we cover things up with green plants and uh and keep those plants growing all the time which is what grazing management actually does um and and that's really my focus and i'll be presenting on that in a couple of weeks when we get to that um in terms of in terms of of what i reach out to this group and to other people and to myself to try and understand i do think we're in an emergency i think we're moving like molasses in january in terms of of uh of making of combating that emergency um i do think that movements can grow exponentially so that uh a lot can happen in a very short time when people wake up to the fact that that things have to happen um and i i think quality of life comes from community and community relationships uh i think if you are a rich person living in a gated community and have two people you have dinner with once a month and that's your life and it's all about uh spending and managing your money i think it's a pretty miserable kind of life you're existing and and so how to build that that local community uh how to uh how to i participate in my community a lot but i don't feel as though it's it's changing from um people aren't getting out and doing so much together as they did before we had media before we had jobs you know that that were little narrow smokestack jobs anyway so so how to get how to to turn on that community uh and i've heard the potato and trees and and and i think that that uh i think doing things that you have a passion for is the way to to energize that but i'm i i think discussing that more figuring out how to do it better getting more skillful at it it would be very important in this whole project i want to hand this back to you if i may because i talked with my body i do i came to the first meeting last time it was here a couple weeks ago whatever i was very impressed with the turnout and that in-depth scientific knowledge presented by the speakers and i have a background in science and i understood two percent of it the part i got was in the tablespoon of topsoil are billions of creatures and if you line them up back to back it would be a mile or two long i apologized for breaking the topsoil from the john dear plow who came who invented it here and brought it to illinois for manufacture but i didn't apologize for running the honey wagon where we put the manure back on the fields i'm part of the randolph region re-energized program and we're having a wrap-up of the first phase on april 24th and susan mills told me oh my it's the same night as the next soil series so john coppins called up and he said we'll work it out we're kind of overlapping and we were working on how many people we're going to have at our meeting next on the 24th with john coppins and i'm going to put in 25 names for the meal from this group until somebody calls me up and say no put in 50 names mark kelly and susan and i were working with john coppins this morning on what our priorities were going to be for the next couple of years and i'm inviting all of you every one of you to come to that meeting on april 24th to say we have to add soil to our priorities thank you gary durr so is that meeting before or after our first one are we don't mean they're trying to line it up so that they end at seven so the people quick starting at seven come to you it hasn't been worked out and i should say this is primarily for people from the randolph area good evening i'm david i'm here in randolph and my word tonight uh several already expressed my word is connections i really like the a potato challenge in hardford i really like what the challenge that gary kind of just described in terms of how we're going to work out the two meetings occurring on the same night in a couple of weeks so that we all have the opportunity to attend both and i get a little different take on the swimming pool issue down in down in hardford i think that swimming pool is is really important randolph has dealt with a swimming pool issue over the last couple of years and there's one who lives just a block or two from from the town park and and i'm through there several times a day pretty much every day during the summer and just see the 100 to 200 kids that that are at that pool from all parts of the community that that that's all about connections and it's those opportunities and again the potato challenge and what gary is talking about that really moves us from we and them to us and that that's really our only not only our best way forward it's our own it's our only way forward i had a very bewildering experience this this past weekend this will sound common to anybody who leaves the state for a couple of days we did my wife and i traveled down to anapolis maryland specifically to attend a extraordinary music event that that was highlighted by an original composition written by a cathy eddy of randolph and and drew us that far afield to to attend and we were only out of you know of of course you want to get out of her mind about 24 hours and you do start feeling bewildered as we did when we got down to this you know supposedly you know quaint historic american city anapolis uh and and and we're just getting you know it's just a buzz of six lane traffic i don't care where you're going what time of day you're trying to do it just a tsunami of of individuals in the four wheel pods that they're crunching into each other and trying to avoid each other and it was bewildering in that i was wondering where where's the where's the community i'm just i'm dizzy in here in this place but there the concert was was spectacular and and and i think there were a concert itself talks about unity and and this brought together and these are all volunteers a hundred member orchestra well no a full orchestra i'm not sure the count but i know it was at least a hundred member choral group performing these compositions Saturday night and truly truly was extraordinary and so even within the labyrinth and bewilderment of what seemed to be the external part of an anapolis i realized that there are there are community connections following the concert there are quite a few people from randolph went on following the concert a former resident of randolph came up and spoke to me and and he had left randolph five years ago and and lives in baltimore now and he said jeez you know from what i follow there's a whole generation of leaders new leadership coming up in randolph and and i said yeah you know that that you know that that's really true and just the last example i i guess i'll give is part of that new leadership is someone that over the years i've always been on the other side of the political issues he's on one side i'm always on the other side and at town meeting we had the opportunity to speak he has really brought energy and an impetus to returning a rope skito to to randolph that the winter equivalent of the summer swimming pool and and as we spoke at town meeting i said you know this is something you know i really would like to work with you on and that you know it's probably the first time we've ever had that conversation uh and so as a civilization i think we can model that right now and and realize and in a special culture of our small communities have such a great opportunity not to live as kind of we and them but as us and the woman from soulfire farms and you know she said it and i'm going to say that i don't know if we're going to be successful you know long term nobody does that's the tension we live in but we can start living that higher expression of civilization like right now right together and and with with potato challenge the things we're hearing about tonight and even with swimming pools and ski toes that they bring us together i just want to remind folks of the time it is eight thirty five i think we should keep going but i just want to let you know time i'm joel permley i have a small beef farm up in randolph center i was also a plumbing and heating contractor in town just retired recently and uh i don't have much for comments tonight it's past my bedtime so do you have a do you sell product off your farm yes i'd love to be able to send that out to people all right do you have a farm name partly partly farm okay my name's nancy um i'm from down south i live outside bellows falls um and i've been trying to connect up a bunch of different thoughts that are tumbling around in my head since i started coming to these um workshops um and also i was at the NOFA conference this winter and um herdlia penman so thank you very much for the the clip of the work that she's doing at soulfire farm um she's really inspirational and i was taking what she said about um her children and raising them in that environment and um i was busy this week um creating potting soil from the wonderful resources on my farm and tending my seedlings and when i'm not doing that i work with teachers of young children and um growing seedlings is a lot like working with infants and toddlers and preschoolers and i was listening to several people um around the room talk about the importance of um young children and families and um that's kind of what i'm about and i've been thinking about ways that i can do things in the very small neighborhood that i live in outside of bellows falls we're very tight knit um neighborhood and there are two other people in my neighborhood who um do some small-scale farming and sell um products from their land and it just occurred to me sitting here they're both ex-kindergarten teachers and someone started off the conversation about how do we take responsibility and when you're a teacher or a parent you are forced to take responsibility and there are so many connections between parenting and teaching and being a farmer and i live them out in my life very consciously but i think it's probably true for all of us and so lots of what i do with someone else said something about you have to do what you're passionate about and i get to do both of the things that i'm passionate about together um one of the things i do is i have a very tiny csa with family child care providers and um so i bring them food for 13 weeks over the summer and i see their children and i see the changes in what the children eat over that 13 weeks and i see the impact of them suddenly eating beets and cabbage and kale and how that impacts their parents and so there's lots of really tiny things that we can do individually that have ripple effects like you were talking about with your family that's not eating at shawls anymore um so you know we're in a crisis but we're also in an ongoing process uh i think of supporting people to live through that crisis so that's my hope what's the name of your farm blood root blood root farm um hi i'm louise peary hold on i can't hear you louise peary um uh that's my dad right there uh i recently actually if you hold it a farm in marshfield um and hopefully that will turn into something um i was intrigued about your comment about the pool being the only way to move forward um i think three to four million dollars could be put towards a lot of things um that could possibly be more fruitful to a community um i'm really thankful to be here and hear all of your stories um and hopes for the future um hopefully i can come to another one of these yeah i'm karen pixler i live in east bethle uh i'm a retired farmer and cheesemaker and when i quit raising animals because i didn't have enough energy left anymore to deal with that i did have some extra energy so i put it all into flower gardens and then a couple of years ago i was out in my flower gardens and i had this aha thing of being at war with weeds and i thought that's not what i want to do on the land i do do not want to feel like i'm at war in on my land and so i've been looking for ways since then to shift that narrative and this series has been just phenomenal for me i've got all kinds of new ideas i'm tim o'dell i live in carinth and i'd like to uh especially thank chris wood for showing the the bit on a soulfire farm because it's a very concrete example of what food sovereignty might look like at least one manifestation of it i would be interested to know how it and it emerged from its social field and what its organization beginnings were and uh and uh did that necessarily start with a business plan or to grow more organically hi i'm tim mccosker and i live at deppard and i work with community groups to set up and run zero waste community deaths my name is erin soles i live here in randolph i'm currently a software engineer added organic farmer and called post enthusiast um i just came out to see what the series was all about and i'm flattened that i've come out and starting to feel a better sense of community about other people that care about the health of the planet and you know what we can do to make progress and to healing everything that ails our current existence yeah cool thanks for coming hi um i'm lauren i live in jericho right now but i'm uh very excited to announce that because of in part this program um i just quit my job and i'm moving up to montgomery i live in an organic farm in a year for six months super pumped that's further away for the best transportation public transportation um but one thing that kind of is in resonating with me today um there's this idea of community and how i feel like there's this inherent like spatial component of community but at least for myself maybe for like my own generation i don't feel tied to a place i've moved seven times since i graduated in college four years ago and so i think community and what community looks like is shifting and i think a lot of what my community is is online in an unfortunate way um but it's also like who i see on a regular basis that doesn't live next to me but maybe lives 45 minutes or 12 hours away but those are the people that i keep in contact with and so try and figure out how that community can be strengthened through a physical process of regenerating soil is very interesting i'm cap taylor i live in wingsham um and i just want to say that this series has really kind of rocked my world um i always understood the idea of feeding the soil but i always kind of thought that the soil is an inert thing um and i thought about life in the soil is pretty much being earthworms essentially and now i understand that there's this incredible diverse dynamic symbiotic culture of all sorts of bugs in the soil and so now when i think about feeding the soil i think about feeding those bugs and how that really is going to really affect productivity and the health of the soil and now i'm finding out that this you know having healthy soil could really be the answer to a whole lot of big problems and i'm really excited about that and so i've been thinking about well so what do i do now that i have this information and so i've decided well i'm just going to start talking about that so for instance i was talking about at work today and um one of my co-workers was mentioning having a meal with wendell berry and he was talking about the big picture and what we can all do and he said if everybody took care of their backyards then we could really have an impact and so that is that's a huge goal of mine as well and i'm really grateful for the insights that this series has brought i'm beth champagne i once lived in randolph that was ending about 20 years ago and i've been living up in the northeast kingdom since then uh so as far as i'm concerned my community extends from here to there um that said i just want to get to one thing that came up really early in this round the circle um it's got to do with with seeing with different eyes um when jack laser hosted a whole bunch of us for some gathering of which i've forgotten the name about a year ago um i heard peter donovan speak now i had heard about peter donovan and his school bus that he lives in traveling back and forth across the country to visit about 300 farms that are trying to build the carbon organic matter level in their soil i had heard that he had a wood stove in his old school bus and a piano okay but i have not anytime anywhere in years and years heard someone who spoke with such depth with such presence oh my gosh so that's just to say that this is what his kind of key message was and i'm not going to succeed in quoting it precisely but it's if you want to make small changes do things differently if you want to make big changes you need to see things differently and for me and this is still just starting for me it's to have a practice of pausing when i'm having my first drink of water or bite of breakfast and allow myself to be aware that i have a lot to give thanks for have gratitude i mean a long time ago i understood that if i'm not happy clean the lenses it's nothing wrong out there but there's something wrong with the reception so that that pause to take in the wonder of all that makes my life possible and keeping going on that's that's a good place for me to start from to pull together a community thanks thank you yes three cheers for uh gratitude i came from just over the hill there in albuquerque new mexico and i did live here up until a couple years ago for about two years what's your name my name is pan vera like the goat foot had got from greece pan not frying pan i am aware that we're now worldwide experiencing a crisis of loneliness because we're really not connected with each other very much in the ways that we used to be where we grew up knowing people for our whole life so i'm really excited to see how the combination of response to crisis climate is community i'm very touched by joanna macy's advice a number of years ago when she said okay we've gone over the 350 point it's not looking good so just get into community i can't over recommend that and i'm also an avid gardener since i met gene kahn you started this little company called cascadian farms he thought maybe organic farming would become important and so my job was to haul chicken manure onto his fields and i'm very proud of him and very proud of the organic movement and i'm also an avid gardener and i have a new home that has quite a large space and i'm going to be turning it into a community garden one of the things gene kahn said was he was tired of growing garden greens everyone should just grow them in their closet and we can do that we can do that now let me introduce to you a real farmer i i'm i'm mark kelly and i'm from the far east i i live in east randall and uh where yes we do have an organic farm i'm i'm very clear on the fact that that community building is the is the key to resilience and i'm clear on the fact that we definitely need to build resilience and i'm clear on the fact that that soil building is one of the keys to the the environmental crisis however i like many people i think um i would like to get clarity about the nature of the crisis and the gentleman from south strafford mentioned the the military the cia every five years the cia does a a scenario planning exercise where they look at what they just imagine what might happen in the next few years and try to think well what should our response be to that idea and the european union has done the same thing i have to admit that the european unions scenarios are are a lot more pleasant to think about than the cias but they both have a lot in common because starting from now there are are any number of ideas that may play out into the future and and we can think about them and start to think well what's the most important thing for us to do right now um in the face of all these potential futures so my my feelings i'd love to have a group like this um do that kind of scenario thinking and planning and and try to try to figure out okay well where should we be putting our our best efforts and so that's that's my idea for now here i am the last of the group i'm joseph i wasn't going to forget the farm yeah farming rising mist farm in in east randolph and um so east randolph east randolph is um is like an underdog village of the area um and um we have a goodly portion of poverty and probably a touch of depravity and a lot of beauty and um we uh some of us decided a couple of years ago that we were we are on the um middle branch of the white river and um we decided that we would form a community group that we called the east valley community group it being the far east as mark said and um uh and so what we're up to and there was a guy named john pimentel who was here earlier who's working with us deeply on this um is that we're building resilience by building a community group um we are promoting neighbor versus meeting neighbor um and um we're sponsoring social events and we're working to get our historic old beat up community hall reopened it's been shuttered by the town reopened and renovated so that we can uh do something that people some people are calling the social infrastructure um in order to promote democracy uh and um work against inequality work against the the uh the paranoia the silos the gated mentality um we need to promote something that some people call positive proximity the being around people is a great thing instead of i want to do that for example tonight of course is a prime example in this whole fantastic series has been an example of that um and so um in that this is so that the social infrastructure actually means that you have physical places to go a good example although not always acceptable is a bar you get a drink and you're a participant you're in the club and we need to have that feeling of belonging for people that there's a place where people can go where you you yourself can go and feel that you are actually physically welcomed there and so that's that's our contribution to resilience and um and we have we have a lot of potential a lot of hope i guess that's it my my final comment is i'm eagerly looking forward to this uh the seventh session on number seven on mystical on may 8th um because uh as this woman in the pink shirt said i to him an action person and i i would feel grief at the end of this series and to walk away when we hadn't knit something so thank you it was actually it was actually your comments that made the seventh program happen that's true um so thank you all so much for yet another really great soil series night um i always learn more than i think i'm going to learn uh and different things than i thought i was going to learn and i meet new people and i'm so grateful for that so thank you so much um i i do want i do have a comment though about resilience that i just want to share with you um i am very interested in promoting the understanding of the soil health principles um i have them up on the wall but they're really small and i'm just going to read them to you they're in all of our notes um these principles are i think the best thing we can do in our yards on our porches on our farms and our communities living roots in the ground no bare soil maximize diversity minimize disturbance and animals in contact with soil when people say to me well what can i do in my yard to do this and i'll often say well where where do you sit on these soil health principles right now and is what you are thinking about doing moving you one tiny bit toward meeting those principles and if the answer is yes i say go for it so i think the same is true with resilience i love mandy that you started us off with you got to do what you love that's why we're here right now is because i'm doing what i love which is talk about soil a whole lot i got a really dirty mind yes very soiled i spent my morning working with six graders looking at a year's worth of compost data and as we get ready for our soil science unit and and separate so do what you love and and moving resilience i think one step is great but in an emergency situation in everything we do can we move it one step more toward the world that we know we need and the world that we want to see can we support marie and all the other farmers in the room and it's not supporting like i'm going to support you because you're doing cool stuff it's like you're growing important food that i need and so it's not about like charity i see that a lot and especially in the farming world we're like oh we're going to subsidize farmers it's like farmers work so hard let's just buy their food we don't have to you know we don't have to support so again thank you so much for being here the next one is in two weeks april 24th it's a wednesday uh two of our speakers are here now carl teetaman and henry swayzee we'll also have jan Lambert and june schwarz who are two of our featured authors in the series and their books are also in the raffle and then again two weeks after that will be our may 8th if you want to get the notes and you haven't been getting them please leave me your email and i also want to ask you to please consider filling out a survey because we keep forgetting to ask you and it's really actually important for us to be able to show our funders what we've done and ask for more money in the future so that we can continue to bring you things like this and do things together um so please fill out a survey thanks so much