University Place  Jody Clowes Vital Skills  April 14, 2013 UP857   cc >> So, let me start by saying that I'm Jody Clowes. I'm the exhibits manager for the James Watrous Gallery and I curated the Vital Skills exhibit, with some help, of course, from my collaborators Martha Glowacki and Randall Berndt, who are here today as well. So, if you've been reading the screen, you've noticed that the Wisconsin Academy is really exploring issues related to water, climate, and energy in depth this year with a number of different programs and also in our magazine. And Vital Skills really brings together my own longstanding interest in traditional skills and crafts and my concern about the energy transition that I think we are facing. Before our economy became so dependent on fossil fuels, far more of our basic needs were met locally by skilled craftspeople and small manufacturers. But today, local people with the skills to make things are mostly, I think, providing gifts and luxury items that are very vulnerable in an economic downturn. The sort of things you don't buy if you don't have a lot of extra. And I think, similarly, the support for teaching these skills is also very vulnerable when funding gets tight, as we see with funding for the arts board, the university, technical colleges, all the places where you really can learn to do these things in a more conventional way. But it's my belief that preserving these skills is really not a luxury. They are a critical part of our cultural heritage. 

Mastering them develops an invaluable kind of manual wisdom that working virtually does not teach you. And their practitioners add immeasurably to the resilience of our local communities. And I really hoped by bringing these folks together, we could shine a light on some of the ways we're already supporting the preservation of traditional skills and offer some food for thought about how we might do more. I do need to go ahead and remind you a little bit about the Academy and why we're able to be here with you today. The Academy is an independent nonprofit organization, and we rely on the support of lots of people and organizations to help support our exhibits and our talks and our quarterly magazine. Our magazine and our season schedule are available in the gallery if you're interested. And there is an article about Vital Skills as well as an article about how we are addressing climate change and fracs and mining and all kinds of great stuff in the magazine, this issue. Today's event is presented in partnership with two organizations, the Center for Upper Midwestern Cultures at UW-Madison, Ruth Olson is here representing them, and Sustain Dane has also graciously helped us promote this. And we have had financial support from the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Dane Arts, and Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee. We're very grateful to all of them. 

And we have ongoing support from the Arts Board, DoubleTree Hotel in Madison, and of course the members of the Wisconsin Academy, which I hope many of you are. So, I want to introduce these folks here. And then we're just going to each talk for about 10 minutes or so, in turn. There will be a little mini break in between as we all shift gears to get up to the podium. And then we'll have questions and answers at the end. But I'm going to introduce everybody right now so that I don't have to keep getting up and down. So, Jim Lorman will be our first speaker. He's an expert in regenerative ecological and social systems, with a focus on watersheds, community resilience, and participatory process. You can see why I wrote this down. [LAUGHTER] He teaches at Edgewood College, has for many years, and directs their Sustainability Leadership graduate program. 

And I've asked Jim here to set the stage for us. He's going to talk a little bit about the environmental and social problems and challenges, you could say, that we're facing and what this word resilience means. Ruth Olson is a folklorist and also the associate director of the Center for Upper Midwestern Cultures at UW, and she has extensive fieldwork experience in the Upper Midwest. She's also worked very closely with the Wisconsin Arts Board as a local folk arts program coordinator. And I've relied really heavily on Ruth's research and her knowledge of Wisconsin folks and craftspeople as I prepared for Vital Skills. And I also relied very heavily on the work of Anne Pryor, one of our other speakers, who's a folk and traditional arts specialist for the Wisconsin Arts Board, and she's also associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore. Anne has been really engaged in developing the Arts Board's Folklore Apprenticeship program and the Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture program. Rob Schulz and his family live in rural Hillsboro on a homestead, building their own home, developing a farm, and using all kinds of skills to do that, and they're really committed to sharing their own experience with natural building, alternative energy systems, organic gardening, and draft horsepower. And Rob has been a blacksmith for 15 years. If I'd known about him before I finished the final checklist, he'd be in the gallery across the way as well. 

And he co-founded the Driftless Folk School in Viroqua, where he also teaches. And that's one of the things I'm hoping he'll talk to us about today. And then Greg David is a founding member of Sustain Jefferson. He leads their community-supported energy project, which he'll tell us a little about. They work on biomass gasification and anaerobic digesters and all kinds of amazing things that are hard to pronounce. And he's helping to organize their new makerspace program, which is really an exciting initiative I hope he'll talk to us about. In addition to his work with renewable energy, Greg has built everything from houses to aircraft to stills and rocket stoves, three of which are in the gallery across the way. He practices permaculture and he's accomplished as a teamster working with horses as well. So, quite a diverse group, I think you'll agree, and I think it should be an interesting afternoon. So, Jim, I'd like you to start us off. 

I'm going to just escape out of this and find Jim.  There you go. >> Thank you, Jody. And thank you all for coming. As Jody said, I was asked to provide a general framework for how I see this exhibit on Vital Skills fitting into sustainability and resilience, and how do I get this up here? Okay. I'd like to start with just a couple of definitions. My favorite definition of sustainability is this one by John Ehrenfeld. Sustainability is the possibility that humans and other lives flourish on Earth forever. It's ultimately a story about flourishing and care. I want to emphasize that because so often we think about sustainability as maintaining the status quo and just kind of making do with what we've got when I think the vision should be how we can do much better than what we're doing now because obviously a lot of people aren't doing that well, and globally especially. 

And resilience is very much tied up with this because resilience, of course, means that we can respond to disturbance in a way that maintains the integrity of our systems. And from an ecological kind of ecosystem, recently there's a whole theory of body, theory of ecosystem resilience. It also involves self-organization, ability to maintain organization and organize within a system. And then to increase capacity for learning and adaptation. And I think that those are all things that are really kind of things to keep in mind when we think about reskilling what the learning community is like for those kinds of things. And one key idea is that sustainability depends, then, on resilience systems much more than it does on isolating and optimizing isolated systems. So, when we think about the kinds of skills that are shown in the exhibit, these are things that can be done more efficiently if we measure it in other ways, or more optimally, but are not as resilient. So, resilience provides kind of a different perspective on what's important to us and how we move forward. We think about the big picture here of historical eras. This is from an organization called The Great Transition Initiative, which is looking at, on a very broad scale, historical eras that the timescale on the bottom is logarithmic, so they're powers of 10, and it's kind of interesting to think about in a very broad way. 

The Stone Age, which was dependent upon a hunter/gather economy, lasting for about 100,000 years. And then a new sort of economic system based on agriculture provided the basis for much of civilization for 10,000 years that is the city, state, and the kingdom kind of system. And then the modern era being the last thousand years, roughly, which is the industrial era and depending upon fossil fuels. And then the idea that we're moving now in transition into a much more global structure, a global system that are referred to as the planetary phase, which, if we use the same powers of 10, we can expect to last about 100 years, and we're just at the early stages. Each of these phases requires some initiation and then rapid growth and then kind of stabilization. So, if you look at this hundred-year era that we're just beginning now, which is interesting because this is the era of my life too and many of us and 1950 is when it starts, this is the era of a globalization, of the Internet, of the global economy, of the global impact of people on the planet in terms of climate change and so forth. All these things are going on. We're still at the early stage. The big unknown is where this phase is leading. And I don't think it's, in my mind it's not an exaggeration to say that we are in a crisis and an era of rapid change where we don't know what the outcome is, and it could be anything. 

It could be anything from a transition to a more sustainable flourishing society, and it could be also a collapse of civilization. And one of the driving factors is the fact that all the industrial era leading up to this and the early stages of this planetary era have been fed by cheap and inconvenient fossil fuels, and that era is going to end. Whether this peak has broadened some through shale oil and so forth, there is going to be an end to fossil fuels, and we need to be thinking about the transition. And that's part of this planetary transition we're in. So this is part of what we're facing is this small era of historical time that we've been allowed this access to cheap fossil fuels which is not going to last. So, many of you are familiar with the natural step, a framework for sustainability, which Madison has adopted, for example, and many other cities. And the natural step funnel idea is that we are in an era of two things that are going on. Declining ecosystem services. The services that ecosystems provide to us to clean our air and clean our water, provide resources for food and medicine and so forth, are declining at the same time that our demand and consumption for those things are increasing, both through increasing population size and also increased consumption per individual so that we're getting a funnel and reaching this funnel in time which we're going to have to negotiate ourselves through in some form. And I talk about it as are we going to go through there with grace, or are we going to go through there clumsily and with lost of pain? So, what's going to come out on the other side is going to depend on being resilient and having and thinking carefully about what skills it is that we want to keep and which ones we want to maintain. 

At the same time, we need to be thinking about what is it we want on the other side. What is it we want for fulfillment? What is it that makes us happy? And an increasing recognition that increasing consumption is not giving us fulfillment. That, in fact, beyond a certain level of survival, the amount of consumption needed for survival and comfort, the increasing consumption beyond that can actually make us less happy and certainly not more happy. And that dashed line is representing the idea that we can move toward a kind of culture and kind of a society and set up our systems and such that we can aim toward greater fulfillment that's more of realizing our individual potential, spiritual involvement or whatever you want to call it, that is increasing fulfillment without increasing consumption. And this same sort of idea is prevalent over and over again. If you look at, for example, indices of happiness or fulfillment or standard of life, quality of life or whatever you want to look at. In this case, this particular graph, the X axis is looking at gross domestic product per capita in different countries. I know you can't see the individual countries. The United States is the one the farthest right up at the top, the highest GDP per capita, the richest country in the world, measured as gross domestic product, but not the happiest country in the world, measured according to different kinds of indices that you might want to use for that, as well as health and a number of other more straightforward kinds of standard of living standards. After a certain point, and in this case it looks like around $10,000 per capita GDP, increasing wealth does not confer increasing happiness or fulfillment. 

So, we need to be thinking, as we're thinking about these issues of reskilling, what it is we're aiming for and what is it that motivates people to be able to want to learn skills that currently may not be valued but may be more valued in the future. I'm not going to get into this other than to say that the whole realm of ecosystem ecology has got a theory that's been developed based on studying natural ecosystems. What is it that confirms resilience in a system? So, for example, diversity, maintaining the parts and keeping the options open, again, is, I think, somethings that's related to this exhibit of, there are a lot of things going on there that we don't necessarily need, but let's keep our options open. And, so, how do we design our social systems, or economic systems, and our relationships with the natural systems in a way that maximizes resilience, to ease that transition through that funnel? So this is the last thing I want to just present as another possible framework for us to think about, and that is when we think about different activities and ways we can be living, we can think about things that are low resilience. So much of what we do today and that we're talking about in our economy and so forth are high skilled things, high technology things based a lot of reliance on fossil fuels and a lot of training that in fact have low resilience and confer low resilience for society. That is, they're based on fossil fuels are going to be gone, they're causing climate change disruption, and a number of other things that aren't an advantage for us in the long run for resilience. The thing that we do the most on a day to day basis in our society that confers low resilience, it takes very little skill, is consume. So, we buy things. It's very easy to do. It takes no skill whatsoever, and yet at the end, it requires a lot of, it confers low resilience. 

We can change the patterns to do gardening, to ride bicycles doesn't require a lot of skill. To build solar cookers, a lot of the things that are part of the permaculture and homesteading movements are things that are low skill/low resilience. What's interesting to me about this exhibit that Jody and others have put together is that we're really looking at things that are promoting resilience in many of these ways but also require more skill. What is it that motivates somebody to spend years learning a skill, like blacksmithing, that isn't called for and needed in our society, and what do we do to maintain those skills? I think that's one of the main questions that's being asked is, how can we maintain these skills in today's society where they're not valued so that we maintain the resilience over the long run? So, if we have time later on, I'd be happy to come back to any of these ideas, including what it is that motivates people that truly so that we can actually be thinking about how to get people to ease this transition through the funnel to get to the other side. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> In a nutshell, that was really great. Lots of things to think about very fast. All right. So, we're going to just get set up for Ruth here. That was excellent, Jim. 

I asked everyone to try and stick to 10 minutes. >> So, can I have what's left of Jim's time? [LAUGHTER] >> Nope, you don't get it. There you go. >> Thanks. Okay, excuse me for reading at you, but I have a tendency to wander, so this is to keep me from doing that. I wanted to say a little bit about the center. The Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures was founded by a linguist and a folklorist at the University of Wisconsin around 2001, and it was part of an initiative to support regional culture. The linguist, Joe Salmons, is one of a crew studying languages in the Upper Midwest, including our distinctive way of speaking English here. And the folklorist, Jim Leary, is well known for his work on narrative, occupational folklore and traditional music. Folklorists can help sustain traditional culture in several ways. 

By documenting it, thus creating a record through images and recordings, and by providing support to traditional artists and communities through events such as festivals or artist in residence programs or exhibits or concerts. Sometimes just through providing information and disseminating knowledge about traditional cultures. You see this reflected in the three legs of this work. Publications, preservation and access, and education and outreach. For publications, we've got a series of books and CDs that focus on the lives and cultural traditions of the region's people. One of our best is the Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders which has stories of Ojibwa elders, and then there are a number of CDs from many different ethnic groups. For our preservation and access program, folklorist Jan Gilmore has developed a number of finding aids to help people find research collections around the Upper Midwest and is working on creating virtual exhibits that take materials from older exhibits and make them more accessible to the public. Right now we're translating an exhibit on woodland Indians into a virtual exhibit that will have sound bites as well as images and wonderful text. But what I want to focus on is the third leg, education and outreach, because it's such an important part of my own work. Here is the connection I see to Vital Skills. 

If we're talking about community resilience, it makes sense to me as a folklorist that in a number of ways, the community knows best what will make it resilient. Some of those skills are going to extend beyond creating material objects to help us do our every day tasks. Communities that can integrate all types of skills, knowledge, and perspectives are resilient communities Skills in communication, collaboration, and vision, to name just a few examples, are also vital. My husband Mark Wagler, when we worked as a fourth and fifth grade teacher, wanted his students to explore communities in as many aspects as they could. So, with Anne Pryor, we organized the Dane County Cultural Tour and took his students out around Dane County to meet community leaders, artists, business owners, and farmers. We wanted the kids to see lots of different skills and types of knowledge and to practice some skills of their own. Sledding is a vital skill. [LAUGHTER] And we found that food is a great way to help people think about culture, where it comes from, how different people make it, and here they are at Snug Haven Farm where they sledded down the hill to the hoop houses and where they interviewed Judy Hagman and Bill Warner about growing spinach in hoop houses. They went to Black Earth, where they saw sausage being made. About as different from spinach as you can get. 

In Madison, they visited some chickens while there was still a chicken underground. Here, they're learning how to make Hmong egg rolls. But, as well as food, they also documented traditional artists, like Ron Post in Black Earth who's a National Heritage Award winner, a Hardanger fiddle maker, and you'll notice the kids are taking pictures and filming and recording Ron as he plays and talks to them about the fiddle. And they visited Style and Grace, an African American barber shop here in Madison, to see how gathering places help create community. We wanted to replicate our success with Mark's fourth and fifth graders with other teachers around the state and hope that they would also do this. In 2003, we had founded a network of teachers interested in incorporating resources from their local communities into their classrooms, Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture. And in 2006, we received a grant that allowed us to create our first statewide cultural tool for teachers, Here at Home. That's the name of the tour. That year we took a brave group of 22 on an eight-day trip where we visited cheese factories, the Ice Age Trail, hardware stores, art environments, junk artists, farms, businesses, shrines, other teachers. I hope you get the picture. 

We kept them very busy. These were like 14- or 16-hour days for eight days. In different forms, the cultural tours have continued over the years. We want the teachers to see as many aspects of community as possible. So, here they are in La Crosse at the Hmong blacksmith shop. And the thing about this blacksmith shop is it's also a senior center. So it performs a very important social role as well. Here they are getting ready to go out, oops. More shots from the blacksmith shop where they saw the traditional way of making gardening implements and knives. And you can, of course, see some of these in the exhibit. 

Here they are getting ready to go into the field at the Ho-Chunk Nation's bison farm by Muscoda, where they learned about how bison supply meat, especially for elders in the community. So, again, this sort of reciprocity across different parts of the community. They met up with federal forest managers in the Chequamegon Forest, everyone was thrilled to wear hardhats, to see a contract logger at work. At Bad River Reservation, we were blessed, truly blessed, to go into the Kakagon Sloughs, one of the most pristine waterways in North America, to learn how Bad River tribal members were protecting this resource for their traditional food, something that continues to be in jeopardy. And their traditional food, of course, wild rice. We went to Lac du Flambeau where we met Brooks Big John. And Brooks makes fish decoys. He's got some in the exhibit here, but the other thing that Brooks talked about was his experiences spear fishing walleye during the turbulent 1980s when the Ojibwa were trying to protect their rights for hunting and gathering. He brought his sons along to meet the teachers. He thought it was important for his sons to see a group of teachers who were interested in their culture. 

At Oneida, we visited Ted Skenadore, who talked about how their farm at Oneida, Tsyunhehkwa, grows different types of heritage corn and is helping to restore a traditional diet for its nation and for other Indian nations in the United States. And in Hurley, they visited rag rug makers whose work is beautiful and functional. And the Historical Society where the rag rug makers work is also a gathering place and a source for community. One point I'd like to make is that our vital skills are vital because they're multi-dimensional. It's not just about knowing how to create an object. It's about an awareness of the value of that thing for your community. Not just to eat or keep you warm or protect you from the elements. Sometimes vital skills are also needed to keep us connected to an even wider sense of community and tradition. Here, Rosa Samora has prepared a Day of the Dead alter for her grandfather. She created this in order to demonstrate to our teachers how one celebrates and remembers loved ones by displaying the objects that best represent them. 

I hope you can see there's a shovel in front of the alter here, and his favorite foods are on the alter as well as traditional marigolds and other kinds of things. And, so, the last thing I want to say, it's vital to have a sense of tradition and a connection to people and things beyond ourselves and beyond our lifetimes. So, I'm happy to hear spirituality and fulfillment be mentioned as one of the things we want to do as we think about community resilience. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> I'm really glad that you talked about community resilience so much because I think it's kind of a two-way street. Sharing these skills within a community builds community, and, also, learning those skills together and reskilling ourselves is another way to build community, I feel. So, a nice connection to make. Let me find Anne's slides. >> Thank you, Jody. >> You got it. 

>> So, thank you, Ruth, for a really lovely lead-in. So, I'm Anne Pryor. I'm at the Wisconsin Arts Board, and for those of you who are Wisconsin residents and taxpayers, that is your state arts agency. We work in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, yes. [LAUGHTER] Small but mighty. I brought a few handouts. One, this postcard about the apprenticeship program, the grant program that I'll be talking about today. A brochure for the exhibit featuring many of these artists that is still at the Dane County Regional Airport in partnership with Tandem Press. There until May 10th. And then I thought maybe it would be warm today and there wouldn't be so many of us gathered in an inside room, so I brought only some of these slide handouts. 

If you want to know who these people are, if some of you are sitting right next to each other have extra handouts, be generous and pass them around. So, the Wisconsin Arts Board is a granting agency. We provide technical assistance as well. Most of our work is with arts organizations, but we do have one grant program for individual artists at this time, and that is the Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program. It was started nationally in the early '80s by Bess Lomax Hawes who was the folk arts specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts at that time. And yes, she is part of that famous Lomax family. Wisconsin was one of the first 10 pilot states to be a part of the program, and we started giving these apprenticeship awards in the early '80s. The first slides that you saw were from those earliest days. And then it was put on hiatus until 1998, and then we started back up again because it's so important. We started back up again in 2009. 

So these later slides are from those batch of master artists and apprentices. Overall, we have funded about 250 artists who have taken on one or more apprentice to share their skill and knowledge. So these are arts that are not done in isolation. They are community-based. They are related to identity. They are a way for a cultural community to say this is who we are, and they are saying it through this aesthetic practice. When I say cultural community, it might be an ethnic-based cultural community. It might be one based around religion or the geography of the state. It might be an occupational cultural group. It might be family. 

It might be related to a particular recreational activity. There are lots of ways that, there are lots of nuclei around which a cultural community can form. So the art itself represents shared values and ideas. But these are individual artists. They take this art within the boundaries but expressing it in their own creative way. The way that the program works is that we support the master artist or the instructing artist. That is the person who comes to us with the application. They often have identified an apprentice, someone in their community in whom they see a lot of potential, not only artistically who can do the art form, but also with a commitment to the community to carry on this cultural activity and maintain it for the sake of the community. The applicant writes a three- to four-page application, submits a work sample not only from the master artists but also from the apprentice as well, and a panel reviews that. Incidentally, the panel is meeting for this year on Wednesday. 

So there will be five people from across the state gathering in Madison to make decisions and recommendations to our board for who to fund. It's a $3,000 award for one year. Those who are awarded work closely. Ideally, they live nearby, ideally in the same community, because if you've got a work out logistics and travel, it cuts down on the power that this very intense working relationship can have. It is not only the skill, the artistic skill that is passed along, but it is the cultural context. It's the knowledge. Sometimes its language is important for conveying certain ideas and knowledge related to the art form It might the correct times and places to use this art or how to share it back with the community. So, it's an entire package. It's not just the craft or the performance itself. So, at the end of the year of working together, the apprentice and the master artist figure out a way to give back to the community. 

Here, Else Bigton, for instance, and Colby Booth, she's the master artist. She instructed Colby on making this Norwegian trunk, complete with a hidden drawer inside with the acanthus carving, and this is a presentation at the Sons of Norway Lodge in Barron. So, an appropriate place to give back to the local community related to the particular art and apprenticeship. You can see in these images some of the master artists are elder. Sometimes they're younger. They have possibly learned this art through traditional ways within the community from an elder themselves or they have revived an art form that had disappeared from their community. They are motivated and passionate and learned. It's so much difficult to maintain an art form once it's gone away. So, this program is intended to keep that gap in knowledge and practice from happening. Let's see, sometimes the apprenticeship will involve travel. 

Not very often. Most of the time the majority of the $3,000 goes to support the master artist's time. That's the valued thing. But it might be that it's important to go to a museum where there's an archival collection about this particular art form or to go to an event where it's practiced and the apprentice can see it in situ. Some other examples of how this has been used. These are daily arts that are used. Usually the master artist is not just a practicing artist. This is a person who is living this culture, and the art form is part of their deep cultural practice. And so they are inviting in the apprentice to a life way, not just to a set of knowledge about an art. So, for instance, Jose Chavez and Emiliano Lake-Herrera are creating these cartonerias for use in Day of the Dead installations in Milwaukee. 

There's a practical use for it. Roberto Franco, I'm sorry. Here we have Robert Franco from Greendale who has had apprentices in both the performative arts and also making the regalia for traditional drumming and dancing. And then, again, it's not just performative, it's not just sharing it in a setting that might be a festival setting, but it is then used in actual ceremonies, actual rituals. And so it's an ongoing practice. So, that's one thing that really is unique and special about the arts that are supported through this program. The cultural communities range from the 11 tribes and bands of Native Americans here in Wisconsin, to the descendents of the 19th century immigrants, to people whose families were part of the great migration coming up from the south to the north to the urban centers, to more recent immigrants like Mexicans coming, especially in the southern part of the state, or Hmong with the refugee resettlement in the '80s and then again in the early 21st century. We have people who are doing this art, looking ahead. They are not just making the art form for themselves but for their own children, for their own next generation. And so they're already thinking, how are we going to pass this on? How it my work here going to maintain and perpetuate the cultural community. 

What this support of these master artists and their apprentices can do is address globalization and modification of culture. So, we get these messages, mediated messages of what we should value, of who we think we should think about ourselves, of what we should want, and these people are saying no, we know who we are, we know what we want, and here we are pursuing it for the sake of ourselves but also for the sake of our community. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thanks. I didn't realize, Anne, that the exhibit was still up at the Dane County Airport. >> It was extended. >> It was extended, so I really want to make sure and mention that. There's a wonderful exhibit, curated by Anne, called Wisconsin Folks which is at the Dane County Airport now through May 10th you said, right? And I highly recommend you go see it. Many of the people in the exhibition were part of that traditional arts apprenticeship program, but I was focused on people doing more functional things, of course, and so the show at the airport encompasses people working on all kinds of different sorts of things that you don't see in Vital Skills. So, Rob, take it away. >> Okay. 

 All right, thank you. Thanks, Jody, and thanks to the Wisconsin Academy for having me welcomed here. And thanks to you all, for being involved in this discussion. And then also to you all for taking your time out to come to such an event. All right, so, my name is Robert Schulz, and I live in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, in the southwest. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, it's in Vernon County. And I'd like to talk a little bit about my family and what we've done at our homestead since 2004, but then also get into an organization that I've helped to create called the Driftless Folk School. This is a picture of my family. And we started in 2004, came to raw vacant land, and started to build our home. Our home was built of straw, clay infill for insulation. 

It's got natural plasters. We basically did the whole entire building on our own. We had help from friends and family. I needed to get my blacksmith shop going, so we built a blacksmith shop in the first year. I like to say that we got there in 2004, and, with our intent on sharing skills like we had learned as young folks, we were already teaching courses by 2006. It was quite ambitious of us. We had students coming to our place. Literally, we are living in our basement as we are building our home, and classes were with our bedroom and our kitchen. And, so, it was a very exciting process to be involved in building but then also having people welcomed to our place. There's our home. 

Natural plasters. You can maybe see a young fellow on the bottom there. That's our friend John Santiago, who worked as an intern at our farm. And they're putting on a second coat of plaster.  I believe in a very strong work ethic, and that's me in motion forging, penning bee hives, building a chicken coop. The work that we do is extremely challenging, but I feel like that challenge brings on deep fulfillment. The greatest thing that I say about our lifestyle is that, for me, it's fun and just keeps me going. Keeps me creative and I love the struggle that it takes. Constantly problem solving. It keeps my mind clear, yet brainstorming. 

There's a bit of us. I've got me with my two-year-old on my back and my eight-year-old son harvesting syrup just this spring. I wrote an article for Mother Earth News back in 2010, and one of the statements that I said is that we were not making income off of our land yet, but three years ago we started to market produce, and that's a produce field. We're also serving the Willy Street in Madison here. I like to make a statement about food. To me, being able to grow your own food in relation to the exhibit, that is one of my greatest core vital skills. If I can feed myself, my family, my community, it's just crucial.  We got to our land in 2004, and in 2008, we had our first interns. And there's a young fella who was raised just outside of Cleveland, and the thing that he told us was he was just excited to be living outside of concrete. [LAUGHTER] And so, there it is. 

So, on our farm we work draft horses for tillage. I like to say that I was blessed with my family having horses on a small farm as a young kid, and it made it so much easier for me to get into horses. Even though I wasn't riding as a child like my sisters were, I'm able to go to my sisters for knowledge, and it's just that much easier for me. So, we teach courses at our home, and this class just happened in February. I'd like to point out here, when I start talking about the folk school, this is a prime example of intergenerational learning. Kelby, in front, is 12, and Robert, in the back, is 81. And so, we were all in class together. Equal students. And in two days we each built a knife. I do have a prop here. 

Just to point this out, even if we're not into skills, if you don't have a craft that you're involved in, through mentorship or having an instructor, you can take a raw piece of steel, this is a four-inch piece of three-eighths stock, and with my help or with an instructor's help, in 20 minutes you can be forging out your own hooks. So, it's just a beautiful transformation. Raw materials to a final product, and that's all that's in the middle, is the knowledge and the skill that you have. And, to me, the most difficult part of that is starting. Just starting a craft. Yeah. So, that's what those students did in two days. Very creative.  So then, the Driftless Folk School. I had learned a lot of my blacksmithing, pretty much all of it, from the John C Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, and also I did my draft horse work at Tillers International. 

So, I wanted to give up the logo here of our school. It was established in 2006. And we're in the driftless region, hence the name. That sparrow hawk is a symbol of resilience, I'd say, in that it used to proliferate in that area and now it's having a hard time staying around. It's always great to see one. There's a standing oak tree which symbolizes deep rootedness, rooted in tradition. And the aspiring leaves, birds of the tree, that's all about inspiration for us to learn and to share skills. There's our mission statement that you can read. Core aspects of our school are hands-on education, a non-competitive learning environment. It is very important to create a space that feels safe to learn in. 

And it's an interactive learning process. The teachers are learning from the students just as the students are from the instructor. When you're in class, it's truly sacred. And grassroots. To me, a folk school is a great attempt at taking what is the strongest parts of our local culture and it's a celebration of craft, art, lifestyle, and it's inevitable that those traits will come out into the organization. And that's how also we want to serve our community. That's the beautiful land of the driftless. Hills, clean water, and it's very important for me, but also the organization, to honor that.  And then, the breakdown of our school. We have a board. 

It's a nonprofit organization. And our instructors are willing to share their skills. They've learned over the years, and now they're ready to pass that on. I'd like to make a comment about mastery. This man is a true master. You can see his ironwork. That's Tom Latané, and he has spent 20-30 years just deep in his craft. I thought that was great. [LAUGHTER] There's our classes in session.  I really feel like right now our school is acting as a network. 

We've been established for seven years, and we do not have a campus. This is taking place at a local farm, in the city of Viroqua.  John, the brew maker there, was part of the exhibit. That's at Organic Valley headquarters. A hog butchering class. And, to be true to our area, local, organic food is a big part of Vernon County and that area. That's a cheese making course. Craft that comes out of class.  And then we also teach alternative energy courses, natural building. There's a cob oven and chicken coop. 

So, these are very common, very practical skills. Then we have an intern program. And a lot of these young folks are age 20 to 30 and are coming out of university settings. And then our classes are not only about skill sharing but the connections that we make with each other. Sharing in community.  And then the celebration of community as well. Just having a good time, really. Loving life. And I want to make a statement that this is non-competitive, and I believe that if we're going to make good strides in creating a strong community that organizations will work together, and we really do. Folk schools, nature preserves. 

Yeah. Thanks. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thanks, Rob. That's great. I think it's really exciting to see the folk school movement, which has been around, obviously, for a long time. I feel like it's really revitalizing in the last 10 years or so, and that's something maybe we could talk about a little bit more later on. So, our last speaker is Greg David. Come on up, Greg.  >> Are we all set? >> I think so. >> Okay. 

I'd like to thank Jody and her staff and all the good people here for making this wonderful event possible, and for the folks in the audience for coming and spending your time on a dreary, cold Sunday afternoon with warm people wanting to share their information. This is part of a talk that I gave as part of being honored as a Badger Bioneer, but I want to put a slightly different twist on it today. However, the information that I want to share is germane for both subjects. And this is, essentially, I was asked to talk about briefly, 10 minutes. [LAUGHTER] That was the hard part. Where and I how I learned my skills and what shaped me into doing the types of things that I'm doing, and then to describe our community-supported energy group, which should be fun, and finally to talk about Sustain Jefferson's proposal for a makerspace program. How many people know what a makerspace is? Oh, excellent. Okay, good. So, to put some context to this, for the first part I wanted to talk about the credibility that I may have, my ethos, how and where I built up to the skills and the things that I like to do and share. And then put a context on myself and also a place to myself. 

And for the community-supported energy, we'll have to describe that, create a definition, and talk about the logistics of how it's run and some of the cool projects we work on. And then, finally, for Sustain Jefferson's proposed makerspace program, talk about what a makerspace is and how ours could differ and the identity of it, the interests and the motivation that the people have that want to make this a reality. And, finally, the status of that particular project. So, I was led into much of the action of my life in the last 20 years through the natural step. And Jim did a great job describing that. It's the funnel, declining resources, the increasing demand on those, and it was taught by this man here, Dr. Carl Heinrich Robare, who I got to meet a couple times personally and toured with him in Sweden. And what's cool about the natural step is it has a very simple framework for sustainability. There's four system conditions. The first three define ecological sustainability very scientifically compared to the laws of thermodynamics. We can measure to a nano-micron. 

The other thing they do is they talk about human needs. And this is kind of touchy-feely, and I'm on our county board to talk about human needs in these social things. People shy away from it, but we need to understand it. We need to understand that there are these nine basic human needs according to Manfred Max-Neef, the Chilean economist philosopher. And there's lots of stories to tell, but I only get 10 minutes so we're going to move on. [LAUGHTER] So, whenever we do anything, we can do things three different ways. We can do them exploitively where the capital is liquidated and the hole is diminished and we're taking from nature and we're taking from society, and when we leave it, it's a worse place than when we started. Or we could do it sustainably. And that's kind of the even keel where we're neither diminishing the social and ecological capital or restoring it or making it better, and that's a better way to go than being exploitive. But the best way to go is restoratively, where, when we leave the land, it's better. 

There's more carbon locked in the soil. There's more organic matter. The diversity, the resilience of the land is better. When we work in our societies, we create social capital, like this. This is a good example of social capital. People coming together to share skills, to build trust, to build excitement in people, to make people understand that they can do this too. So, we want to create that social and ecological capital, if you will, when we make our decisions about how we are going to do something. I like to try to meet three conditions, although I don't do it most of the time. But I keep this in the back of my mind trying to think that, as was pointed out, we're on the top of an energy plateau right now and we're going to be sliding down the slippery slope there, and we need to learn how to reduce our impact, not simply, we need to really scale things down, in my opinion. And then we need to restore capital. 

I kind of explained this just a moment ago. Instead of taking, we need to be giving. And, finally, we need to invest in human dignity. We need to create meaning and purpose in people's lives. When you're in your death bed, are you going to be thinking about your seven televisions and your cars? No. You're going to be thinking about your family, the things that really made an impact in your life, and creating meaning and purpose in people's life really helps give them dignity. This is where I'm from. The city of Watertown. You can see our little farm there. They built a freeway for us. 

We have our own roundabout. [LAUGHTER] It's a 20-acre farm. It's just a little thing, but we've crammed a lot of projects in it. A little bit of problem with conversion from PPT to keynote to PowerPoint. It has a 50-foot elevation drop. It's zoned A-1, Class two prime agricultural land. Fluvian soils by the river. Theresa soils up on top. Lamartine down in the lowlands, and Matherton silt loam there, which means we can grow practically anything. It's great soil. 

So we put in shelter belts and we put in forests and we put in prairies and we put in orchards and we put in lots of gardens and permacultural plantings. This is over the last 25 years or so. We are a DNR certified compost center. We have horses and other animals, so then we needed pasture. We put in a silviculture area where we do all sorts of experimental grafting and working with trees and woody flowers and shrubs. And then we have an energy designed research center. It used to be a greenhouse, now it's kind of the place where we build rocket stoves and gasifiers and anaerobic digesters and things of that nature. And then we also built our house on the farm. [LAUGHTER] So, we put in a bunch of swales, and swales are kind of like just little ridges, usually on a contour line, help to focus water and channel it in a certain direction where it can do more good and where it can infiltrate into the land. So there's little ponds, very temporary ponds that form. 

Right now they're all full. It's been a kind of wet, rainy season, but we need that. We put in our permacultural plantings in various places. We do mushroom cultivation. We put in hedge rows all over the place. We had about two miles of hedge row on this tiny 20 by 40, it's a 20-acre farm, an eighth of a mile by a quarter of a mile, and there's over two miles of hedge row. It's at these hedge rows where you bring plant communities together. If you have a grassland community, you have grassland birds and insects and wildlife. If you have a forest, you have those types. And if you have wetlands, you have those types. 

Where you have that edge effect, that's where you create your greatest diversity and the most richness of nature. So we wanted to do as much of that as possible. That's the background. That's one of the things that has been shaping me for many, many years. This is our CSE group. This is David Bloom. We had him out to the farm. He's explaining how to heat your greenhouse via geothermal techniques. And our group formed basically to build this thing here. That's a FEMA downdraft stratified gasifier. 

And we had read the book, The Natural Step for our Communities, and it was all about becoming more sustainable, but when we read the chapter on energy, we discovered that there were a lot of people that were interested in biomass gasification, and we formed a club. This club turned out to be the Jefferson County Community-Supported Energy Club. And this man here on the left, he was very helpful to us. That's Hank Rabuck. He's about 95 years old. Yeah? Oh, five minutes? Yikes, I've got to talk faster. Okay, well I'm a politician, I'm used to this. [LAUGHTER] >> We can give you two extra minutes. >> Hank Rabuck is like the original makerspace person. He has so many people come out and work in his workshop, and he opens it up, and when your tractor's broken, you cannot repair it, you can't find the parts, it's antique, Hank Rabuck will fix it for you or he'll help you fix it. 

He's a great sharer of information and skills, where people come to have therapy because so many of our friends and people that want to participate, they don't have a place to go. They don't have the skills. They don't have someone to show them how grinders work. They don't have a project to work on. Well, they can come out to gasifier therapy and be part of the team. And some days we do nothing but talk thermodynamics and politics, and other days we're cutting and welding and torching and doing all sorts of fun things. And it's a great sharing, and one of the really interesting things about this, there is such a brain collective here, a brain trust if you will, there are so many people with so many skills, if you bring your project and you say, I'm stuck on this project, I simply cannot figure out how to do this, you'll have a dozen people giving you really, really good ideas. And sometimes it's hard to accept other people's ideas, but it's really been helpful for both myself and many of the people that come to gasifier therapy. The V1 rocket stove. [LAUGHTER] So, all these different projects, it's a team collective, and people come together. 

We enter a welding contest once a year, and that's the tuki tuki bird rocket stove, I think. We built this cob oven with a rocket stove under it at a person's house for Earth Day. 10/10/10, the 350 event on 10/10/10. That was a huge success. We had about 250 people show up just to see what we were doing, and they got to get their hands dirty and they got to plaster or they got to sit there and watch. Food was served and things of that nature. This is a house we built, a straw bale house. We built stills and complicated little critters, but a lot of fun. The tube boilers have been really, really a fascinating thing for us. These wound copper coils that insert into these chimneys that can extract the heat from the flue gases, and it will actually take the temperature of the flue gases down from 1500 degrees to about 100 degrees so that you can capture the latent heat of vaporization out of the flue gases. 

And this is our latest, greatest project. This is the bountiful bowel. It's an anaerobic digester of flexible design. Most anaerobic digesters start at about $100,000. This one cost me about $1,000 to put together, and it worked great. Now we're looking and working to scale it up to something that could produce about $30,000 worth of energy per year at today's conventional prices. These are some of the things we consider as we begin to make these things. All these different inputs have come together and how can we cycle one thing to the next, coming to terms, total ecological resource management? How do we understand matter and energy flow through the system so that we can take the wastes and recycle them and feed them to algae and take the gases... [LAUGHTER] That was the bountiful bowel one. [LAUGHTER] But it's a way to help the team come together so that we can brainstorm around all those different ideas and concepts and eliminate waste and recycle it. 

For instance, with our anaerobic digester, when the biogas gets burned, the end products of that are carbon dioxide and water vapor. We're planning on bubbling the water vapor through our algae tanks and then flushing it into the greenhouse so that we can double or triple the amount of production because at some point carbon dioxide is the limiting factor for growth of a plant if all the other needs are met. Now we're going to talk a little bit about our group Sustain Jefferson. It's looking to create a makerspace in Jefferson County. A makerspace, these are, we did strategic planning, and makerspace rose right to the top. This is what everybody wanted to work on, so there's a lot of enthusiasm and expertise out there waited to be shaped into a makerspace. And our makerspace, I'm going to talk about what a makerspace is in just a minute, but these are some of the ideas that were placed. This was our first brainstorming session, and our makerspace really seemed geared toward nature and growing as opposed to computers. And there's room for that in a makerspace. The makerspace is about the people that create it. 

You can make it about anything that you want. You can make it about 3D printers and computers or you can make it about rocket stoves or you can make it about growing. We want ours to be as open and collective as possible so that we actually do have a physical makerspace where people can come. There's a stupid little thing in the middle that I forgot to remove. But a makerspace or a hacker space is this location where people can come together with common interests, often in computers, technology, science, digital art, electronic form, and work on their project. So it's a safe place for people to come, and it's a place where people will have a space to work. They're given a certain amount of space to store all their junk, and then they can use the floor space and they can use the tools, once they're qualified. And we want our makerspace to be a little bit more like Bucketworks. Anybody heard of Bucketworks in Madison? >> Milwaukee. >> Milwaukee, thank you. 

Sector 67 is in Madison. >> Right. >> The Milwaukee Bucketworks, that's more of a community center, sort of an entrepreneurial center. Sort of a place where people can come to do theater, to do skills fairs, to do all these different community events, and our group, Sustain Jefferson, wants to have its own clubhouse like that where we can invite people and where we can set up our shop and where we can do all these fun different things that are a part of a makerspace. And it's kind of left up to the group of individuals, but if anybody's interested in creating a makerspace, the Space Federation has a template, worksheets. It will help you figure out exactly what your makerspace is going to be. Just go through the 17-page work form, and by the time you're done, you know how many square feet you need, what it's going to focused on, who's going to be participating, and things of that nature. So there's a road map. You do not have to create that yourself. So, again, I bring it back to what our makerspace is going to be. 

And what are the results? Well, we're hoping it will be centered around but not limited to the skills and enterprises listed below. The purposes could be staged. Many of these things need to be done first things first. The easy things, the things that, like one of the guy says I think we should have a maker space with a wood shop and a machine shop so that we can actually build the rest of our buildings What a great idea. I think we should do that. But you can see the things that we wanted to do. The list has grown. It's about four times bigger. So, I think I've gone over my time. I'd better stop. 

Thank you so very much. [APPLAUSE]