How quickly can Vermont create enough community resilience that we can weather economic turbulence, interruptions in energy supplies and other shocks, while maintaining what we value?   

Part of the answer lies in how fast the great re-skilling occurs. The great re-skilling is Transition Town-speak for widespread learning of the practical skills needed to thrive where one lives, with significantly less economic exchange with the outside world.

Carl Etnier: RELOCALIZING VERMONT blogger: Since 2006, Carl has served as director of Peak Oil Awareness, an educational organization spreading knowledge about the timing and likely consequences of peak oil and policy alternatives. His career has been focused on various sustainability issues, mostly in water and wastewater. "Relocalizing Vermont" is about strengthening local production of food, energy, fiber, and materials, so we'll be better prepared for sharp reductions in global trade. It is also the name and theme of his weekly radio show on WGDR, Plainfield. Carl also writes a column, Energy Matters, that appears every other week in the Times Argus and Rutland Herald. He lives in East Montpelier with his wife, where they raise much of their food.   Practical skills include those of the 19th century, like spinning and weaving, and those of the 21st century, like installing solar panels. The skills are more complicated and difficult to learn than driving a car or riding a bicycle. They are more like learning to maintain a car – at least the old kind, that could be maintained by a shade-tree mechanic without a computer – or at least maintaining a bicycle.    

At a recent re-skilling gathering in Montpelier, called “Feeding Our Communities,” groups were asked to find ways to speed the spread of specific, food-related skills. As a once-and-future backyard chickener, I joined the group on backyard chickening. Most of the other participants were novices and primarily interested in learning the basics of backyard chickening from the skilled chickener in the group, John Hall, who has a flock of 30 layers at his home in East Montpelier. It was hard to turn the discussion to helping others learn backyard chickening.   

I suppose that reluctance to organize is natural enough. You don’t need to know how to do something to organize ways to help yourself and others learn it, but it sure helps. If you’ve never had a flock of chickens before, it’s hard to know whether the novice course should include raising chicks from eggs (probably not), or even whether the birds need a special ration or can just be raised on kitchen scraps (not a good idea unless you really know what you’re doing and you have just a few birds and/or a large kitchen).   

One rooster can service about 10 hens, ensuring that their eggs are fertile. How many novice backyard chickeners can one experienced chickener teach?    

It probably helps if the novice chickeners are teaching each other as they go along. In Four Season Harvest, Eliot Coleman describes seeing an abundance of winter gardens, including greenhouse operations, in the French village of Les Bastides des Jourdans. Why there and not elsewhere in France? He concludes that it’s for the same reason that many of his neighbors in Maine have started growing year-round gardens in plastic-covered hoop houses: they’ve seen their neighbors do it, and the idea has spread.   

What is the best way to accelerate that neighbor-to-neighbor spread of skills? In a city or region, should a Transition Town re-skilling group seek to scatter new backyard chickeners or greenhouse growers widely, hoping that each becomes the nucleus for inspiring neighbors? Or are resources better used inspiring a large number of people in a single neighborhood to learn the skill, with the hope that the neighborhood as a whole will inspire others in the town?   

With Rooseveltian national leadership, or similar leadership on the state level, re-skilling could become the obvious thing to do. Motivational questions like these would then be replaced by logistical questions of how to organize training workshops quickly enough. Until then, Transition Towns are working to both organize skill sharing and to elevate awareness about why new skills are needed in a changing world.

Carl Etnier is director of Peak Oil Awareness in Montpelier. He hosts two radio shows and blogs on the subjects of Peak Oil and relocalizing.