The Oil Drum: Local

In looking at what is going on around the country with the livable streets movement, I came across this excellent video of something called "Intersection Repair"

"City Repair" in Portland, Oregon hosts an annual Village Building Convergence where hundreds of people come together to build diverse projects for the benefit of their communites and to take back their streets via a process known as Intersection Repair.

This is a guest post from Hans Noeldner, a trustee in the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, a rapidly growing bedroom community of about 8,300 near Madison, Wisconsin. Hans' first piece on the rules of downtown revitalization can be found here and his "Declaration of Dependence" can be found here.

By now many millions of gourmands are familiar with “The Slow Food Movement,” and the notion of a “100 Mile Diet” is spreading quickly among the sustainability-minded.

Today was a good day for local produce and community development. The new greenmarket at St. Stephen's church brought together all the local elected officials in including Councilmember Jessica Lappin and Borough President Scott Stringer as well as the Father Angelo of St. Stephen (pictured above) and many folks from the local community board.

The Upper Green Side has a quick post about it up. It was great to see so many people talking, sharing recipes, bringing their dogs and children with them to shop.

And the crowds were bigger than expected because of the big outreach effort we did over the past two weeks.

It was about a year ago that Prof. Goose put up this post about Peak Oil and Social Capital (click on the comment thread ("No Oil Here Either") from that old post which is still available). I thought we might renew this conversation. How would you evaluate your own social capital? How would you rate your community in general in terms of social capital? Are you doing anything to help improve the situation or do you think that's a waste of time?

I am in the beginning steps of putting together a local urban environmental action group for my neighborhood to start putting words into actions. I'm going to start applying for some grants to get this off the ground. Eventually, we will try to go for full non-profit status, but in the meantime, just getting a solid group of people together will be good.

Anyone who lives in the general area of the Upper East Side is invited to sign-up. I already have 22 registered members and I am hoping to get up to 100 over the next couple of months. Please send this to anyone you know in the area.

I'm still working on the mission statement, but here's my first attempt:

"Helping make the Upper East Side more environmental sustainable by bringing together a community of neighbors interested in: Community Supported Agriculture, Pedestrian-Biking-Mass Transit improvements, Energy efficiency / Renewable energy, Recycling/Waste reduction, and other ways of reducing our community's negative impact on the environment."