Local Elders Wisdom Project

I'm involved with a local Transition Town initiative in my community (Sebastopol, California) and as we are figuring out how to build more community resilience and re-localize our economy in response to the coming challenges of Peak Oil, climate change, and continued global economic instability, I've become interested in learning about how life was like here during a previous time of economic downsizing. So I just recently started a project to find and interview local elders who were young adults during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's. I haven't done any interviews yet, but I have contacted a few elders (they must be in their late 80's and older to have been old enough at the time) who are willing to be interviewed.

These cultural "indigenous" elders among us lived in a time prior to the dominance of the globalized economy and our hyper-consumerized lifestyles that characterize our society during the entire existence of the baby boom generation. My grandparents were of this generation, but they have been gone for over 25 years. A few of these elders who lived in those simpler and more self-reliant times are still around, and I'd like to capture some of their experiences and wisdom before it is too late.

I want to ask them:
How were people more self-reliant?
Where did the local community get most of its food?
How much food did people grow themselves?
How did people repair things?
What kinds of skills did people have?
What did people do for entertainment?

But most importantly...
What was community life like back then?
How did people look out for one another?

I'd like more ideas of what to ask these elders.

As a kid I remember my grandmother harvesting fruit, nuts and vegetables every summer and spending many days canning and filling her basement with food she grew for the winter and spring. She also sewed much of her own clothes. Back in her day, it seemed that everyone knew how to repair things (things were repairable back then) and nobody lived in McMansions with over-sized closets filled with "stuff." Back then the storage locker industry did not exist.

Despite the hardships and suffering of the Great Depression, people made it through. Many people from that time talk fondly about how people helped one another. Is there some wisdom here for us to learn from?

Perhaps the last fifty or so years in Western culture have been an abnormal "blip" of excess resource depletion and waste in human history, and we are about to return to a more normal and sustainable level of consumption. And maybe like addicts getting off a binge, it will be hard at first, but in the long run we will all be better for it. Maybe we will collectively come to realize that happiness is more about relationships than it is about stuff. And maybe these few remaining elders among us can give us some keys.

Cheers,

Scott McKeown
scott@transitionsebastopol.org