Randall sets sail toward sustainability via blog for Northwest Earth Institute

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Shelly Randall hopes the community will set sail on the Internet and take a year-long journey with her as she strives for a more sustainable life in Port Townsend.

The journey kicks off this week on Randall’s blog website – sustainabletogether.com – which she’s launching just as the Northwest Earth Institute (NWEI) arrives in Port Townsend for its North American Gathering at Fort Worden State Park.

Randall has been invited to be the guest blogger for the NWEI conference, which likely will push her blog front and center of the national sustainable-living conversation, a conversation that revolves around food, lifestyle, economy and environment, with concerns about health and use of world resources tossed in for good measure.

And at the core, Randall says, is community.

She is resolving to post to her blog at least twice a week as she records the progress of her own attempts to create stronger community through more sustainable living and reports on sustainability success stories from Port Townsend and beyond.

Randall, a published nonfiction writer, said she chose a blog as her outlet because she’s intrigued by the opportunities for immediate reader feedback and dialogue. The format also will help her compile content for a future book project. “I’m not planning to get paid right away,” she says.

 

Paradigm shift

A former Leader reporter who sailed into Port Townsend in 1999 after a season as an environmental educator aboard the schooner Adventuress, Randall says her current journey toward a more sustainable life really started in earnest with the arrival of her son, Soren, in 2008.

“My paradigm shift,” she says, “came with his home birth.”

Her easy and joyful birthing experience, assisted by a midwife, made her wonder “if the way humans have lived for thousands and thousands of years is perhaps a better guide than the way we have lived since the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps we, as a society, have gone too far with some technological interventions.”

Industrial farming, fishing and intensive resource extraction are potent examples, she says.

More than that, Randall says, having a child has made her think hard about the “carrying capacity of the world.” She wants to be sure Soren will have a chance to grow up and have children, and that the planet can support those children having children.

“I’m not an alarmist, but I believe we’re in an eco-crisis that is the defining issue of my generation,” she says. “And addressing it is going to take more than changing out my lightbulbs or even putting solar panels on my roof. Those individual actions are not going to be sufficient.”

Randall, whose husband, Jeff, is a solar agent for Power Trip Energy Corp. and the family breadwinner, feels that a key point often unspoken or missing in sustainability messaging is how we can achieve sustainability together and therefore go much farther than we could alone.

NWEI organizer Judith Alexander, one of Randall’s mentors, agrees.

“The connectivity piece is the main thing holding back the sustainability movement,” Alexander says. “People still resonate to the iconic rugged individuality of the Marlboro Man in making changes they feel give them personal power. While individual changes are all well and good, that approach is not potent enough for the crisis we face.

“We need to join together, in community gardens, in local investing, in neighborhood emergency preparedness, shared housing, in tool and car sharing cooperatives, in any and all ways that assist us in the recognition that we are all in this together, and that in effectively learning to be a community, we move more easily and efficiently toward a life expression that is more sustainable.”

Sustainable, frugal

So what does sustainability mean to a 35-year-old freelance writer who is the primary caretaker of an active toddler?

This summer it meant setting up a child-care spreadsheet to track the hours put in by three families, so that no one had to spend a dime on child care.

“It worked perfectly,” says Randall. “No cash was exchanged for sitting this whole summer except for some date nights.”

For Randall, sustainability goes hand in hand with frugality, household economy and bartering for services, which she believes leads to a stronger sense of community.

“If you can craft a life where your social networks are your economic networks are your food networks, then that’s a sustainable life,” says Randall.

She sees many of her peers picking up “old-fashioned” practices such as knitting, sewing, baking their own bread and growing their own food as ways to counter consumerism and to tap into the health benefits of the handmade and homegrown. They see no irony in turning to the Internet for gardening information or knitting patterns.

Randall admits she googled “canning step by step” and reviewed several detailed blog posts with pictures before attempting her first-ever canning project this summer.

She borrowed canning equipment from a neighbor, reused glass jars, and then gathered apples from her parents’ trees on Guemes Island. So she and her mom made applesauce together – for the first time in the daughter’s kitchen, not the mother’s.

Another example is the progressive dinner Randall is planning as a way of becoming better acquainted with her neighbors on Roosevelt Street in Uptown.

“It’s a small thing to have a supper with your neighbors, but it’s money in the bank when you need to borrow a tool or ask them to water your garden or call upon them in an emergency – or they need to call upon you,” she said.

 

Reaching out

Randall has pledged to get involved in Local 20/20, join the barter network Fourth Corner Exchange, and host an NWEI discussion course this fall to bond with other like-minded parents of young children.

“These are all worthwhile activities I have meant to do for years, but have not prioritized until now,” she said.

On her blog, Randall is interested in profiling institutions and organizations she sees as vital to the efforts of a critical mass of people to live more sustainably, starting with the Food Co-op and the Quimper Mercantile cause. People taking collective actions – such as sharing cars, community gardening, and cohousing – will be another topic.

As Soren grows up and attends public schools, Randall expects her blog to grow up with him and include reflections on the school system. She hopes that, in time, it also “will clarify my career direction and solidify my vocation.

“I consider it a self-directed master’s degree in sustainability studies,” she says of the blog project.

Randall acknowledges that she is in a privileged position as a work-at-home freelancer and mostly full-time mom. But she has a reality check in her sister Nora, a public health professional in Colorado, who has offered to review blog posts with an eye toward keeping it real.

“We all have to start where we are," she said. “In sharing my own journey toward a more sustainable life, I hope to make the case for sharing the journey.

“After all, there’s no such thing as a sustainable community of one.”