Quick Start to Keeping Kurrent

Our lives are busy. Keeping Kurrent is the place where you can listen to short, reasonably in depth interviews and presentations about a variety of issues, ideas and trends are helpful to you. You are invited to take a quick look some of the broad issues we cover by clicking on the items listed below. Or, you can also examine the details for each category by checking the statements on the right hand side of this page.

 

Portland

Quality Communities

What does it mean to you to live in a quality community? Is it safe? Can you have meaningful conversation with your neighbors? Can you purchase goods from close-by retail outlets? Does your residence have heating and cooling equipment that use sustainable energy supplies? Do you have a vehicle that uses sustainable resources? If you'd like to explore these options then turn to try out the comments recorded from professionals and from individuals who consider that they already live in a quality neighborhood.

Some of the Questions that will be asked will be:

  • What housing styles are available?
  • How can we apply sustainability values to neighborhoods?
  • What is affordable housing?
  • How can we enhance services in our neighborhood?
  • How can we effectively, quickly and easily move around our community? See how Oregon's TriMet has added innovative rail transit.
  • What does it mean to be homeless? Listen to Annie Heart talk about Family Bridge.

 

Green Mapping

There are many national and international communities that have taken the time to develop a map that illustrates the state of their green community. You can too. The Green Map System has engaged communities worldwide in mapping green living, nature and culture. Check out their web site. Get the basic tools for your neighborhood green map. The web site is at Green Map.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Page last modified on Octobr 6, 2009.

 

What is a sustainable community?

After some lengthy research (I looked for the best Google phrase.) I came up with a substantial number of web sites that talk about this topic. Consequently, I thought I would begin with one view. It is espoused by Wendell Berry. It says:

Community in 17 sensible steps

By Wendell Berry Web

Specials Archives Issue How can a sustainable local community (which is to say a sustainable local economy) function? I am going to suggest a set of rules that I think such a community would have to follow. I hasten to say that I do not understand these rules as predictions; I am not interested in foretelling the future. If these rules have any validity, it is because they apply now. Supposing that the members of a local community wanted their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, they would:

1. Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

2. Include local nature -- the land, the water, the air, the native creatures -- within the membership of the community.

3. Ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of "labor saving" if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products in order not to become merely a colony of the national or the global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm or forest economy.

8. Strive to produce as much of their own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community, and decrease expenditures outside the community.

10. Circulate money within the local economy for as long as possible before paying it out.

11. Invest in the community to maintain its properties, keep it clean (without dirtying some other place), care for its old people, and teach its children.

12. Arrange for the old and the young to take care of one another, eliminating institutionalized "child care" and "homes for the aged." The young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school; the community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs that are now conventionally hidden or "externalized." Whenever possible they must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Be aware of the economic value of neighborliness -- as help, insurance, and so on. They must realize that in our time the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, leaving people to face their calamities alone.

16. Be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. Cultivate urban consumers loyal to local products to build a sustainable rural economy, which will always be more cooperative than competitive.

From a speech delivered November 11, 1994 at the 23rd annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council and paraphrased from Wendell Berry's Another Turn of the Crank.