by Annie McCleary
Peak oil and the reality of global warming require that we once again find our food locally – wild food as well as cultivated. We can no longer rely on long distance transportation to supply our daily food needs, or any other needs for that matter. The end of the age of cheap oil and the resulting globalization that led us to become an import-dependent society are giving way to the age of relocalization, when we will once again be responsible for cultivating and wild foraging our food staples locally.

In a short-term survival situation, being lost in the woods for a few days, for example, finding food is fourth on the priority list after shelter, fire and water. In a long-term survival situation, however, food is everything. In Vermont, we currently import over 95% of our food, a shocking figure for a rural state with what seems like a great many farms and avid home gardeners. Vermont is at the end of the current fossil fuel driven supply line. We have a short growing season and a severe winter to survive. We have a long we to go to meet our food needs locally and become resilient.

The Transition Town Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, by Rob Hopkins, offers a positive model for empowering grassroots communities to creatively and proactively face the unprecedented challenges of our times - peak oil, climate change and economic instability – by building futures based not on cheap oil, but based on relocalized food production, local economies and an enlivened sense of community well-being.

A core aspect of the Transition Town process is the “Great Reskilling”, re-learning the skills that our grandparents took for granted, such as how to use hand tools, how to build our own structures, how to mend and make clothing, how to make our own medicine, how to forage, grow, preserve and store our food. Reskilling is not a quick fix, but rather a commitment to the long-haul process of re-creating resilient communities. Learning these skills takes time and now is a good time to start.

Reskilling around our food needs includes dramatically increasing local cultivation, seed saving, wild harvesting, hunting and fishing, and planting perennial edibles, such as fruit and nut trees and Jerusalem artichokes. Relocalization of our food needs in this part of the world requires putting food by for winter and storing root crops in the natural cold storage of root cellars

The full article is on TransitionVT.

Annie McCleary is director of the Wisdom of the Herbs School and a steering committee member of Transition Town Montpelier.

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