Transcription of Sustainability, #72
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, recorded at the studios of ‘Maine Magazine’ in Portland, Maine, summaries of all our past shows to be found at ‘Doctorlisa.org’. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors; ‘Maine Magazine’, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design, and the Body Architect.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 72, ‘Sustainability’, hearing for the first time on January 27th, 2013.
Good ideas become truly great when we back that with a solid foundation of practice. As part of our sustainability show, Cecily Pingree describes her experience with Maine’s own organic milk farmers while filming the documentary, ‘Betting the Farm’, and TEDxDirigo presenter, Seth Silverton explores the idea of self-reliance as espoused by ‘The Wood Chop School’.
What does it mean to be sustainable when we’re acting a sustainable way? It really means being able to do something over the long term. Sustainability has become a buzz word and really something that we’ve had difficulty embracing much less defining.
In my life, I try to do things that contribute to the healthiness of the planet, the healthiness and wellness of my children, my family, and myself as a person, things like composting or recycling.
What I’m really trying to do is understand that life is long, and I want to minimize my potential negative impact on the world, and maximize my potential positive impact. For me, that’s really sustainability. It’s really doing something that I can do for many years, hopefully until I die.
Cecily Pingree and Seth Silverton would have unique views on sustainability based on their own personal experiences and based on time that they’ve spent with other people who are trying to create sustainable lives.
We think you’ll really benefit from hearing their interviews today. Let us know what you think, and what your own ideas about sustainability are. We’re really interested to hear other people and their approaches to building sustainable lives. Thank you for listening.
Winston Churchill once said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” One thing that I spent on considerable amount of time on with my patients is their history, their health history, their family history, their social history, because I think it’s important.
None of us exists in a vacuum, and past actions that we’ve taken with regard to our health or general living can impact our present and our future circumstances. If you’re an individual who wants to move forward in your life, I’d suggest that you spend some time thinking about where you’ve actually been and understand your own past history. If you’d like somebody to help you out with understanding this history, I’m that person. Give me a call. I’m Dr. Lisa at the Body Architect, 207-774-2196 and we’ll help you learn from your history.
Cecily The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is about health in general, but we like the idea of sustainability and sustainable health from a much broader view than just individual health, and we know that our guest, the one that’s sitting in the studio with us today, Cecily Pingree is also about health and sustainability, so we thought we’d invite her in and have her talk to us about ‘Betting the Farm’, the film that she just created, and I saw at the Camden International Film Festival last fall, and also about the type of work that she’s doing out about in the State of Maine, and what she’s seeing in the area of sustainability. Thanks for coming in.
Cecily: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Cecily, you had to come down on off of the island and via ferry, and you’ve been all over the place. You must have quite a lot of energy to be able to be doing what you’re doing.
Cecily: Yes. It comes I think with the turf of living in an island, there’s always a lot of logistics involved. It’s been interesting to be on the road for the last two months with the film because there’s just a lot of logistics.
For the most part, it feels it’s very exciting which I think helps my energy level, going to different towns night after night with this film, help bring a whole new energy to sort of moving and being on the road and living out of my car and all of those kinds of things. Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Talk about sustainability. You’ve been doing filmmaking and you’re one of the founders of ‘Pull-Start Pictures’. Prior to that, you were a filmmaker for many years. This requires the ability to basically get up and go in a moment’s notice because you actually have to be where the people are.
Cecily: Yes. It definitely does. ‘Betting the Farm’ was a really interesting project that way because it was our first independent feature length film, and it really did require us to keep in touch with all of our Maine characters and go at a moment’s notice.
We are lucky that the rest of our work, we do a lot of commissioned work for organizations, non-profits, businesses so we can do it when we need to do it. Certainly, when we get a call from the farmers, you know you’ve got about six hours of travel getting on and off of ferry boat and driving to Aroostook County or Washington County. It really was crucial. I learned a lot over the two years that we shot this film as far as being ready to go at any time, because there are certain moments that we would have missed if we hadn’t have just trusted our gut and said, “You know? This is probably a pretty important moment,” and these families’ lives and these companies’ lives, everything that kind of our story revolved around.
Yes, it was a good learning lesson on all of that. Prior to that, I had worked for a company in New York City for many years and definitely learned a lot just about that idea. If you’re going to do kind of a run and gun documentary style filming particularly if it revolves around human beings’ lives such just the nature of life and you really just have to be ready to put your own life on hold and say, “I have this great plan for this weekend, but the next three days, I have to go to this place and be with this family, be with this person and shoot this,” where it may affect the story.
Dr. Lisa: Why is it that farming has been so important? I know that you did work with the Maine Farmland Trust and your farmer project, and you’ve gone on to do ‘Betting the Farm’ which is about the MOOMilk and Maine Organic Milk. Why is farming become something that you’ve had an interest in?
Cecily: Yes. We sort of naturally fell into the project and the commission project for Maine Farmland Trust, which hired us to make eight short films, which we called ‘Meet your Farmer’, and which was really just profiling small farms, big farms, organic farms all over the State of Maine, and then we met one of the MOO farmers. When we met one of those MOO farmers that became profiled in the ‘Meet Your Farmer’ series, they had just got dropped by Hood and we’re sort of banding together to start their own milk company.
That too sort of all of a sudden ended up being what we thought would be really interesting story, had all these folks who didn’t even know each other, who all got the same letter, dropped at the same time and were forced to either stop dairy farming or band together and make something totally new and different and get into the marketplace fairly immediately.
I don’t know necessarily if when we were like we want to just make films about farms for the next three years, but one led to the other. Then once particularly for ‘Betting the Farm’, once you’re a couple of months into it, I’m sure it happens where people say, “You know what? I just don’t know if there’s a story here. I don’t know if we want to keep doing this,” but we felt like once we had met or main characters and really started to spend time with them and connect with them and appreciate their story, it’s like there was no turning back. We didn’t know we were going to shoot it for two years and really sort of get knee deep into dairy policy and this company and these people’s lives. It was inevitably what had to happen to make the film we wanted to make.
I will say with all that being said, I’m from a very rural area. I grew up around a lot of farmers. I appreciate farming. Before this, we were working on a long project for Penobscot East Resource Center which was all about fishing communities in down east Maine. There are two things that are crucial to the Maine economy, the Maine landscape, and they’re also in my backyard so it felt like this was a natural place for us to start out with our own independent film in a community that was pretty close to home and also one that we understood. Certainly have understood a lot more since we finished this film, but it’s just bracing the surface.
Dr. Lisa: I was struck in watching the film. This was a CIFF candidate International Film Festival, and we had had the founder of CIFF on last fall. I was struck watching you up on the stage with the farmers and the sense that there really wasn’t a particular resolution to the story that Maine’s own organic milk was still really in its infancy as far as a company was concerned. There was almost a discomfort or not quite resonance that was happening.
Cecily: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: How was that to have a film that didn’t really provide a resonant anything?
Cecily: Yes. No, it’s really interesting because of course finding your ending for a film or even knowing when you found an ending and you stop shooting for us was really difficult, because when we finally stop shooting, it was more – they weren’t feeling the turbulent times that they had felt for the last two years that we had witnessed and we had filmed. Still, it was still a rocky road for these guys. That was probably the hardest part. We shot 300 hours. That’s an 84-minute film and finding that ending amongst those hours was very difficult … an ending that … we obviously kept following them for two years because it felt like it was going to go one way or the other. The company was either going to fold up all of these farmers, would be left with plan B and it was different for every farmer, or it was going to keep inching along.
I think in the very beginning, we thought, “This is either going to fail or it’s going to be instant success.” Neither one of those happened. They were certainly at the edge of the cliff many, many times towards closing the company and bankruptcy and all these different things, but they never became very apparent to Jason and I, my co-director and brother-in-law that wasn’t like all of a sudden people were going to go in herds into the grocery store and make this company really successful. It’s all about consumers for this company and how much they can sell across the State of Maine and now all over New England.
It has been interesting because we just finished a big, mean theatrical tour and the question that I get first or second out of every Q&A that we do afterwards is, “How are these guys doing? Where are they?”, because the film couldn’t answer that question. I even wonder whether if we kept shooting today, we’d still be able to change that ending and make it feel like it was anymore resolved, because I talk to these farmers. Most of them come to the Q&As with me, so I’ve seen them a lot over the last year even though we’re not filming, but they’re getting regular paychecks and the sales are moving up, and they’re moving into new stores, so there’s all of these little things that show that their company that is growing.
I think there’s been a bunch of business classes analysts for this company that say, “You know, it really takes for a startup company, it takes at least five years to see if a company is going to make it or not.” They’ll crash and burn in the first year if they don’t have the right capital, or they don’t know the right marketing and certainly all those problems, MOO had all those problems. I think it’s just starting to become a real company which is exciting for them but as far as a filmmaker, incredibly exhausting being like, “Oh my gosh. We keep shooting. Is anything changing …?”
Dr. Lisa: As somebody who is sitting and watching the film, I found it incredibly anxiety-provoking to see people getting the bills for their utilities and think, “How can I pay for this? How can I buy a new tractor …?” There was one farmer who’s relatively young and he and his wife had children that were running around. This idea of sustainability is it’s so important and yet it’s difficult to reach.
Cecily: Yes. That’s a very good point. I think that’s what MOOMilk is all about, is finding that sustainable place where as a company that they can sit on those grocery shelves, they have enough consumers that go buy them, and they continuously grow.
Getting to that sustainable place for them as a company has been incredibly challenging. It’s interesting because I think, Jason and I set out to make this film because we felt like these farmers were very compelling, but also this idea of starting a brand new company from scratch would barely and in capital with a bunch of people you don’t know, and total outskirts of Maine, some of the most rural and poor places in New England, banning together so all of a sudden you have enough product that you can get into Hannafords and you can get into whole foods, you become a big customer of theirs right out of the gate.
We’ve done like any of these farms could have done individually. These guys could have never done that. They’ve got about 60,000 gallons of milk a week. That’s a lot of milk, but they could have only come up with that if they had banded together and said, “Okay. We’re going to try a new model of farming, or a new model of business by banding together, becoming what looks like a national company essentially,” or worse, they’re sitting next to national companies in the grocery store unless you had a small coop and it’s raw milk or it’s your local farm which is great, but these guys needed a much bigger market than that to survive in general.
The idea of that, they could be sustainable but still be small, still farm the way that they want to farm, still have their families work at those farms and not grow to a size that they just couldn’t keep up with. A lot of these big companies … they’re dairy farmers … You just don’t see dairy farms this small banded together and sort of coop. A lot of dairy milk that you buy say Organic Valley, a lot of great family farms, but most of them are pretty big at this point in time.
Again, the idea of sustainability as far as small farms and dairy farming is a really hard industry to make it in and particularly be small and have somebody that will buy your milk.
Dr. Lisa: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: A few years ago, we were working with a non-profit on sustainability. They were trying to figure out how to replace a large government check that was going away. It took some doing, but what we came up with was a ladder to help them climb back up, not just this time but every time they get knocked down by financial circumstances.
The first rung was to realize all the different ways that money flows through the system. The second rung was to align their services and product with a value exchange that made sense for everyone involved. The third rung was to communicate their good works and all the ways that people could contribute their time, talent and treasure.
By understanding the need for currency and all its forms, the loss of funds became less important than communicating the value provided.
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Dr. Lisa: As a documentary filmmaker, you’re actually a storyteller of sorts, or maybe not of sorts, you’re a storyteller and you end up telling the stories of the people that you film, and you have to create a story out of what you see. Do you see this as being an important part of an organization of sustainability is your ability to tell their story?
Cecily: Yes. We certainly hope so. I think as a company, as Pull-Start Pictures, we do a lot of trying to work with organizations that are working on really crucial issues in the State of Maine and outside of Maine too, whether it’s healthcare or landscape, or trying to save a farmland, trying to start new businesses, many of those things and we say, “Okay. Here’s your mission statement as an organization, but who does this affect? Who are these people behind this that’s either going to affect their life,” or say in the fishing it’s like who are the people that are fishing that really like are all about sustainable policies and want to be part of that conversation and helping find the stories because of course I think most people would say, “Stories are very compelling,” particularly if you’re trying to make a case of why your organization is doing great work. People behind it that are doing – other people that you’re advocating for are great spokespeople, and we certainly usually recommend that we seek those folks out and try to build an organizational story out of that.
Then of course with documentary work, it’s like with ‘Betting the Farm’, it was crucial for us to say, “Okay. Who are these people that are going to tell the story?” because there’s a lot of great films out there that have narration and do animation and our stories like ‘Food Inc’, we have a lot of really smart policy people telling you, “Why this is a crucial, critical issue,” and we all need to be aware of it. We weren’t those filmmakers, we didn’t know how to make that film nor do we want to. We really want to tell a film about, or we want to tell it through people’s lives and how it unfolded and why someone else might care about it, because at the end of the day, ‘Betting the Farm’ is a story about dairy farmers but we also felt like it’s a story that anybody can relate to as far as business, as far as running a small business or raising your family, or being really stressed out about a certain thing in your lives, and then everything around it starts to crack in relationships, get exhausted, so we felt like there was a lot of threads that are very typical in every human beings’ lives that you could empathized and also of course start to root for them and say, “Maybe dairy farming is bigger than just whether a small farm can make it.” It’s about the landscape, it’s about … and all these other important aspects of all of our lives.
We don’t necessarily particularly, “We live anywhere,” but if we live in Portland, it’s like, “I don’t know about Aroostook County. I don’t know that much about Aroostook, and I don’t really go there.” Then you watch this film and you’re like, “Oh yes. I may want to visit there. I don’t want to live there, but this lifestyle, this life, this product is important, is more important maybe than I thought it was.”
Dr. Lisa: I understand that you are a 2013 Media and Performing Arts fellow with the Maine Arts Commission. You have that in your future. What else is in your future? What’s coming up for you?
Cecily: This year, yes, that was a great honor. It still is a great honor. I hope that we will be working on a bunch of commissioned work this year for a variety of organizations, and also hopefully start a new independent film. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like or what it will be. We’ve got a couple of ideas in the pot, but yes. We are hoping just continue to make films, make important films, films that people want to watch that are entertaining but also are useful. That’s our hope for the next year.
My brother-in-law conveniently is my business partner. My business partner is conveniently my brother-in-law. He just had his second kid, so of course there’s always shifting, we’re always bringing new people on to our team. It looks like it’s going to be a good year.
Dr. Lisa: What is it about documentary filmmaking and maybe the things in your life in particular that sustains you?
Cecily: Yes. I still am such a new filmmaker in many, many ways. I feel like I’m constantly learning and I’m constantly surprised. I think we learned a lot through this last year, or this last two years in making ‘Betting the Farm’ that certainly I think in retrospect has been really great, but it certainly has sustained me to get involved in our project where to work that intensely with the bunch of folks where you’re filming their lives and you become really part of their life and their sort of family fabric, because you are a bi-standard to everything that’s going on in their life. That was a really exciting and fun thing to be a part of, but also very humbling in a sense that I feel like I’m always surprised and we would have never made this film of these people that we decided to follow had been so open with us.
It was shocking to me that anyone would want to be followed around with a camera, but of course their lives are much bigger than just this film so they were willing to. I think as far as sustaining me, to spend a lot of time and dedicate to a film or a project that has real-life implications is a pretty exciting one and a pretty humbling one and certainly an exhausting one in a lot of ways. I’m just sort of figuring how to do that and how to do that well and be respectful and honest about someone else’s story that you’ve captured hundreds of hours of, but at the same time it certainly is really exciting to me to think about the future of the projects that we could tackle that are about really important things, and really fun things, and really great characters and really great places in Maine and outside of Maine to sort of piece me all of that together and …
Film is one of those things that if you’re really lucky to do because it’s very potable to most people, and most people, it feels like an art form that’s not so far away. It’s pretty accessible to most of us most of the time. That feels like a great medium for us to work in and be definitely challenged by. That is a sustaining factor is something that I’m sure we’ll never … as far as Pull-Start Pictures, we will always be staying up late, trying to figure out how to do it right, and doing all over again and that seems fun.
Dr. Lisa: I appreciate your coming in and spending time with me today. We’ve been speaking with Cecily Pingree of Pull-Start Pictures and co-creator and filmmaker of ‘Betting the Farm’. Thanks for coming in.
Cecily: Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Lisa: As listeners of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast may know, we’ve started out the whole show talking about TEDxDirigo about a year ago and we’ve talked about TEDxDirigo since, and we’ve had guests from TEDxDirigo on. We only picked the best-spoken, most important guest to come on. One of these is Seth Silverton who’s the director of ‘The Wood Chop School’ who came on to talk to us today about sustainability.
Seth: Wow, that is such a nice introduction. Thank you so much.
Dr. Lisa: You are welcome. I enjoyed watching … You were at TEDxDirigo up in Bates and it was the villages show. Of course we also had the director, Adam Burk of TEDxDirigo on I think it was August or September.
Seth: Fabulous interview.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. He’s a very well-spoken man. As are you.
Seth: Yes. Ninety-nine out of a hundred days, I absolutely am well-spoken.
Dr. Lisa: All right. Be well-spoken today. Tell us about ‘The Wood Chop School’.
Seth: Cool. ‘The Wood Chop School’ was founded in order to answer what I consider to be the most pressing issue of our time, and that is resource scarcity, and addressing it in a positive way by talking about what it is that people can do within themselves and within their world view and within their daily tasks, to begin to live a slightly different kind of life that will make this shift into what some people refer to as a ‘Post-Peak Oil World’ and what other people think of as dealing with climate change more effectively. These are all extremely valid concerns. Of course there’s a big market out there, and some of it is manifested … some of the responses to this reality are manifested in different ways. I think it’s very, very important for somebody to say, “Here is a place where we can go deal with this in a healthy way.” I’m going to be aware of questions like, “Where does my food come from? Where does my water come from? Literally, what are the steps that it takes to get that water coming out of my faucet and that food to my plate?”, because if you do the math and you go backwards and you realize that a lot of the food that we eat comes from an unsustainable system of delivery.
Not only that. That unsustainable system of delivery is responsible for poisoning us as a people. That is by definition unsustainable. It’s important to have your attention on the fact that maybe living in Maine is a great thing. Maybe living in Maine as I do on a farm is a strategic advantage.
As I said in my TED talk, my personal goal is to improve my own sustainability skills every day, and then to empower other people by helping them do the same. We taught a class called, ‘Attributes of the Sustainable Mind’ which is kind of a study guide for a book that I’m working called of the same name. These are 21 attributes in daily practices that people can start having their attention on, one a day. There are things like, “How has this life of entitlement and peak oil and the ability and the wonderful things that brings to my door and to my plate? How has that changed me as a human being? What happens in the absence of that?”
Very important for judgment to be a thing of the past in one’s psyche, in one’s daily routine. I asked the people just have their attention on word like judgment and what it does to our interpersonal relationships and our relationships with place and how we can benefit by slowing down a little bit, and not judging as much, not judging circumstances or other people and understanding that we really need to become leaders of sustainability in our own community which leads to another one of the attributes of the sustainable mind or another one of the practices, which is to become a compiler of sustainable activities in your community, becoming active builder of networks.
When you become an active builder of networks and you discover that you can help people, you can help people begin to insulate them from this very real thing called, ‘Paradigm shift’, called ‘Peek oil’, and called ‘Climate change’, as well as a number of other things that are happening right now in our culture.
Dr. Lisa: This all came about ‘The Wood Chop School’ and even your move to Maine because of a very significant even that happened not only in your life, but in the lives of Americans, and maybe even citizens of the world. Tell me about that.
Seth: It was a moment of reckoning for me. We lived in Brooklyn, New York. We lived in a neighborhood that … and the neighborhood came about at the early, early, early part of the 20th century. If you’ve seen the documentaries on New York and the development of New York, you’ll see that the subway system was build to address overcrowding in New York City.
We lived all the way at the end of Flatbush Avenue close to Brooklyn College where I did my undergraduate studies. Great school by the way. Love Brooklyn College.
When September 11 happened, I turned to my wife as the second tower came down. I said, “We’re moving to Maine.” I had two small children, A.J. and Emma. That started a process of internal discovery and exploration for myself and for my family. That has led to what I consider to be all sorts of wholesome and enjoyable and fun behaviors that we do on a daily basis. That event landed us in Maine. I said, “We’re moving to Maine.” We did exactly that. We had like the most major yard sales in history, lightened our load and just took off in a big truck and came up here. We rented a house in Camden.
I began to see the differences in our culture and the way this tremendous change was manifesting itself in this part of the world. I began to have my attention on the fact that maybe what I did, I’m not recommending that people abandon the cities and move to Maine, but I think we have a tremendous strategic advantage because part of ‘Paradigm shift’ is climate change. Part of climate change is water scarcity, and unfortunately, water-related events like ‘Sandy’.
These shifting tides if you will are tremendously advantageous for people who live in the State of Maine because Maine is one of two water rich regions in the country and it is a state with tremendously undeveloped and unexploited if you will natural resources. For the State of Maine, it’s tremendously important that we manage these resources to our advantage. They are going to give us the opportunity to be the breadbasket of New England, because of course water scarcity means that the tremendous aquifer that is in the center of the country which has an unpronounceable name which sounds like Ogallala Aquifer, but I’m just Lexicon tongue-tied.
Anyway, I won’t try it. It’s depleted and it runs into mud frequently. That’s where our country is breadbasket is than we have turned that part of the country into, some would see it as a toxic waste site of food where fertilizers which are come by unnaturally, fertilized land which is tremendously distant from us, and then you put that food, that product into a vehicle which uses petroleum which is in decline and get it to wherever it’s going to the population centers.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me how you balance the need to bring people to a place where they have to change, where you’re asking them to think about things and also change their behaviors, and have enough positive energy to make these changes, but simultaneously be reckoning with the notions of what you’ve called our ‘Poisoned food network’, and ‘Poisoned food’ and scarcity and post peak oil … How do you get them past the fear of those notions and into the positive energy required for change?
Seth: The real way in which human beings in western civilization or in any civilization in any part of the world, the real way in which people, human beings will be able to conquer this tremendous challenge, and we will is by acknowledging the fact that we are interdependent species, and then it is incumbent upon us to not stuck up on rice and potatoes and things of that nature and say, “You can’t get my food, and when the end comes, I’m wearing a tin foil hat so the government is going to … they steal my brain waves,” that’s not the answer.
The answer is by reaching out to people in your community in particular in Maine, where we have all the advantages, all of the advantages, we have tremendous oil, we have tremendous rainfall still, and to manage that as a village.
The theme for the TEDx Talk was villages. If you go to see my TED Talk, if you YouTube ‘Seth Silverton’ or you go to ‘TEDxDirigo.com’, and you look at my TED Talk, I take a moment to say, “Hey, listen. The theme of today is villages and that is a great call, because a village is exactly what’s required to extract us from this situation.” I believe that to the root of my soul. Also, just as in the side, the practice of developing this village, the practice of meeting and developing community for me, and see my children, abandon video games, abandon texting and volunteer as they did on Saturday night to do a dinner for ‘Hurricane Sandy’ relief efforts. When you start announcing an intention for you and your family, to embrace those behaviors, good things happen. All of a sudden, people start calling you and sending you emails and saying things like, “Hey. How do I do this?”, or you could become an authority on sustainability in your community.
The answer to your question, Lisa in a long roundabout kind of way is that it’s necessary for people to become leaders of sustainability and resilience in their own community. A word on this. Resilience and sustainability are phrases. They’re words. None is more valid than any other. Arguing about that is counterproductive. Sustainability, communities and communities that embrace sustainability are resilient, and resilient communities by their nature engage in sustainable acts and practices.
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Dr. Lisa: Is there a place for technology in this upcoming sustainable world? You talked about abandoning video games and texting and that sort of thing. I’m totally in agreement with you that it’s important to go back towards the human to some extent. Is there a way that we can bring the technology and the advances that we’ve had due to modern civilization to bear?
Seth: Great question. I guess you’ve been doing this for a while. What I would say is without question, the answer is yes, because things like social networking and things like electronic communications and things listening to podcasts such as yours, which provide human beings with information that they can use for positive change in their lives is not only going to be a part of it, it is absolutely critical for our future sustainability. The good news is it’s not going away.
If you look at studies about the ways in which people think about things like gender, race, rape, violent behaviors from our past as human beings, you discover that when there is any pulling done with questions like, and I heard this on NPR the other day, and I’m sorry I couldn’t get the exact study for you, but it’s Googleable, which has done a wonderful thing. Everything is Googleable. People who answer questions like in 1970 it is, “I do not want a black person living next door to me.” In the 1970s, that number was in the ‘60s or the ‘70s on a percentile basis, specifically in the south. When they took that study again, two years ago it was six percent and that was the crackpot response.
We are changing as a species. We are developing new ways of compassionate communication. I’m going to download this podcast when it airs, and I’m going to put it up on ‘The Wood Chop School’ website not because I’m on your show, but because I value your show. I also share – I actively share for instance Adam’s interview that you did which I thought was brilliant, and you know what? Must listening so download it now. Like as you’re listening to me, click it and download it now. Okay. Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: I admire your passion, Seth. I think it must be passion that’s enabling you to do something that is admittedly a bit risky to move your family up to Camden and to start a farm and a sustainability school, and coming out of New York City as you did.
Seth: I’m going to push back a little bit and ask you why you think it’s risky.
Dr. Lisa: I guess the people that I have known who have come from urban centers tend to have less experience. I don’t want to assume anything about you in your life, but they tend to have a little bit less experience living in less urban places like Maine. Sometimes, they find that the reality and the manifestation of something is very different from the idealization.
Seth: I understand. Don’t think for a second that I didn’t do tons of research about people who have moved to this part of the world during that time. I really feel that there’s an energy. This energy is being broadcast from this place, and it attracts people who have positive intentions, who are open-eyed, who don’t have any delusions about what their circumstance is going to be, because everybody can investigate what is my potential income going to be.
Dr. Lisa: You’re saying it wasn’t risky because you felt like you had done a lot of background work before you came here in the first place?
Seth; You know what? I’m from Brooklyn, New York. I went to Brooklyn Friends School in the grungiest part of Brooklyn at the time. No, check that. Really not, but I travelled the subway every day to go to college. I’ve been shot at, I’ve been threatened, I have been harassed, and this is not the typical experience of people in New York, but I’m telling you that if you’ve been for long enough, it happens. It’s excruciating to go through that grind and look at the way human beings react to each other and behave, and not get all the time the beautiful reaction of what happened on September 12th, 2001 which was the most astonishingly beautiful day of my life. Horrific, terrifying, but beautiful, because I saw what happened to human beings when they strip away all of the garbage, all of the judgment. When they see another human being in need, this is the same thing that happens here. It is the ground state of human beings. It is our nature to behave this way.
I can more easily manifest that here. There’s less PIB involved in my life, pain in the butt. That fee doesn’t exist as a line item on my charts anymore. I’m blessed I have a relatively stable situation; my car has 148,000 on it, but it still runs. I have land outback, I’ve got 10 chickens, I’ve got like 20 bunnies, I get eggs … It’s fantastic.
Dr. Lisa: Considering what you have already dealt within your life, you didn’t consider … This move seems not that risky to you.
Seth: I couldn’t wait to get up here. The reason is because I summered up here as a kid.
Dr. Lisa: Okay.
Seth: It wasn’t zero to 60 or zero to 100. I had a feeling of the camaraderie, I had life-long friends that were up here who I’m still friends with and I was tremendously blessed. Very good.
Dr. Lisa: Let’s say it wasn’t risky at all, you did your research, you knew people up here, but you still did something that was very different and there wasn’t really a blueprint for you.
Seth: Right.
Dr. Lisa: Maybe at the very least, you did something that was unique. Let’s just say that. Have there been challenges associated with that?
Seth: Without question, there have been tremendous challenges. When you come to a community as an outsider, and certainly anybody who is in my situation, anybody who’s in my position and my family’s position knows that they all know the phrase, “Just because the kittens were born in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits.” That’s a real and living and breathing thing.
My kids were born in Methodist Hospital in Seventh Avenue. They’re bad, that’s a challenge. You’re not one of us. You’ll never be one of us. It’s okay. I understand where it comes from. I just want to help people understand this paradigm shift, and prepare for it. What I discovered is, the people of the state are the best prepared to conquer that not only in the United States, but probably in western civilization.
Dr. Lisa: The other thing that I know about your area, Lincolnville, Camden, the mid-coast region of Maine is that you’re not the only one who is a biscuit.
Seth: No I’m not.
Dr. Lisa: Lots of people have come from other places. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there are maybe the majority in this area right now. Have you found any camaraderie with those individuals?
Seth: The visionary leader of Sustainability and Entrepreneurships, Steve Koltai who also gave a TEDx Talk at TEDxDirigo, a very compelling TEDx Talk right after you get done downloading all of Lisa’s shows to iTunes, absolutely must go and watch Steve Koltai, also Don Gooding who heads Maine Angels.
Steve Koltai is a neighbor of mine as it turns out in Lincolnville Center, Maine. He lives on [Lakeman 00:48:32] [inaudible 00:48:32]. He is from California. He was in the movie business and he is now, works with the State Department for Hillary Clinton, and he travels the globe from entrepreneurship.
If you are listening to this right now, and you have the ability to watch his talk, I highly recommend it. It really addresses the need for entrepreneurship as does Don Gooding’s by the way.
Steve lives in Lincolnville. There is a tremendous, tremendous Brooklyn, New York ironically enough to Lincolnville tangent. There’s a thread that connects those two communities together. Weird, I don’t know why. I’m sure it’s not me. I didn’t do it. I’m not dancing up to it. I noticed that people who run culinary schools here for instance on the coast, it’s all water farm, often partner with butchers from Brooklyn, New York. I run into people from Brooklyn all the time, so I’m not alone and I’m supported.
As soon as I moved to Maine, everybody in my family moved to Maine – my dad, my mom, my sister. It’s a blessing. It’s fun. People love it here. You can’t get rid of us.
Dr. Lisa: That’s all part of this building of villages and this building of a sustainable network, is that you do create connections of people, whether they’re people who were living here before, whether they come here after to join you, but that’s what you’re saying is sustainability really is primarily about connections.
Seth: Sustainability is not only primarily about connections, but it is about your world view. If you look around of the scary things that you mentioned earlier in our conversation, and you start doing the math on what those scary things are, and if you don’t think it’s time to take positive action in your life for you to have a relationship with place, for you to have a relationship with water, for you to understand what composting is, for you to understand what foods grow here, and for you to understand that things like ‘Hurricane Sandy’ are the new normal. It’s on you. It’s incumbent upon you to become a leader of sustainability. That is on the individual.
My message is listen up. Things are changing. You see it all the time when you tune in to the news, but experientially as well. When you have an experience of climate change or paradigm shift in regard to peek oil, if you don’t pay attention, it’s on you. If you drive a Hummer and it’s taking all of your money to fill that thing up and insure it, and you know that things are changing and that we are past peek oil which we are, that conversation is over too, if you know these things and you still act in a way which is contrary to you on sustainability or your own resilience, that is on you. It’s about your personal life and your personal decisions. The only healthy way to start making change in your own life is to develop your own skills and then to help other people.
When you help other people become resilient and sustainable, it creates a vacuum and that vacuum is filled tenfold, and it’s filled tenfold with what it is that you really need, not what it is that you really want at that moment.
Dr. Lisa: Is there a way to engage in sustainable behavior short of raising chickens and having your own farm and for people who might not have access to that situation?
Seth: Absolutely. We’re scattered. As a people, we find ourselves in different situations. We find ourselves challenged by this reality. Take solace in the creating of an intention. The very first step is to come to the reckoning of this paradigm shift and what it means for you as a leader, and what it means for your family, and you must announce an intention as crazy as it sounds as long as it’s based on healthy things, it’s up to you. My intention is to help other people through developing their sustainability skills. That’s mine.
I’ve heard Deepak Chopra say, “My intention is to heal, to be a healer.” Whatever it is that floats your boat, you better start, you better start developing those skills and sharing those skills, and compiling a database on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your Android, on your P.C., or on your Mac, on your MacBook … whatever product I can plug right now, develop a database called, ‘My Sustainable Village’, and start listing names and making your business to call these people and say, “Hey, listen. I’m interested in helping. I like goat cheese. I hear you make goat cheese. That must mean you have goat poop. Can I have some if I buy your cheese? Fantastic. I need fertilizer.
Start making these relationships. I like bees. I like honey. Christy Hemmingway knows everything about honey. She gave a great TED Talk. We need bees. These are little things. Announce your intention. If you announce your intention, all of a sudden things will start to happen. If you’re interested in our curriculum, you can go to ‘Woodchopschool.com’ to read up on us. Also, incidentally to donate to The Wood Chop School. You can’t leave this interview without plugging the donation button on the bottom of the page. You can also see my TED Talk there. I didn’t mean to artificially wrap this.
Dr. Lisa: I think that’s a perfect way to end. You’ve done a great job explaining sustainability and what you’re doing with sustainability with The Wood Chop School up in the mid-coast region of Maine. I do encourage people to go to your website and to listen to your TED Talk which of course I have done so I can attest to its inspirational nature,
Seth: Thank you. I need the hits. I need to break a thousand by this afternoon. No pressure.
Dr. Lisa: Okay. Everybody please help Seth with that and we hope that people have been inspired to work towards their own intentions in sustainability. Thank you for spending time with me. We have been speaking with Seth Silverton of ‘The Wood Chop School’.
Seth: Thank you for doing this. Thank you for your work and thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: We’re fortunate at the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to have many interesting and insightful guests join us in our studio. One of these individuals after joining us was elected to the U.S. Senate as a representative from Maine.
Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Angus King as part of our ‘Green Streets’ show last year. We hope you enjoy this.
Angus: As I looked out over the landscape in the late ‘90s, what I saw coming was an economy that was much more dependent upon education and technology and hard work and strong back. My theory was pretty straight forward. If we had the best educated and the most digitally literate society in the world, we’d win.
The legislature never sleeps in a sense. There’s always a change and nothing has ever finally settled. In fact, that’s one of the problems with term limits. I voted for term limits back at 1993, and I think it was a mistake frankly, because one of the things that happens is the legislature now turns over so fast that there’s a loss of institutional memory, that there could be a major issue, a lot of argument, a lot of debate, a lot of research, a lot of data, and then for years later, two thirds of the people that went through all that are gone.
In my eight years as governor, I had four speakers of the house. We have perfectly good people now, but it’s just this turnover, and what’s happened is a lot of the power of the legislature migrated to the governor’s office or to the lobbyist, or just evaporated. Yes, you think an issue is settled, and two or three years later, you’re right back at it.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 72, ‘Sustainability’. Our guests have included filmmaker, Cecily Pingree and Seth Silverton of ‘The Wood Chop School’.
For more information on these guests, visit ‘Doctorlisa.org’. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes for a preview of each week’s shows. Sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. You can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest under ‘Doctorlisa’ and read my take on health and well-being on the bountiful blog, ‘bountiful-blog.org’.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, hoping that our show will contribute to sustainable wellness in your world. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Pocast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors; ‘Maine Magazine’, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at RE/MAX Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design, and The Body Architect.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of ‘Maine Magazine’ at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Courtney Thebarge. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at ‘doctorlisa.org’.
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