If This Didn't Seem Impossible, It Probably Wouldn't be Necessary

A seed potato in a planting hole, April 2014

It’s been three years since I launched the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative as a way to generate community resilience in the face of economic and ecological shifts. The basic idea is this: display a sign at your residence with a green hand printed or painted on it to indicate your willingness to share skills. When I first put forward the idea at a strategic meeting of Transition groups from around Michigan in Feb 2010, the idea was warmly received, and subsequent conversations with knowledgeable people were very encouraging.

But so far, the simple idea – that physical signs in neighborhoods would generate conversations, skill sharing, and more resilient community, has gone nowhere. It seemed so elegant in principle, requiring no centralized organization, no expensive or hierarchical infrastructure, and no organized meetings except among interested and presumably local people as needed to meet immediate needs.

When I first started the Green Hand website and blog at the suggestion of my friend Ken and the help of my technologically astute daughter, it was intended to be a solutions-focused affair, a celebration of the possibilities of sharing and human ingenuity, promoting the Green Hand sign concept as a vehicle for community building.

Three years later, the blog might just be the most successful part of the project in terms of people I’ve reached, because as far as I know, I myself possess the only Green Hand sign in existence. I wondered about this failure for some time as I continued with my increasingly sporadic blog postings and occasional presentations at community events. Was the problem my admittedly lackluster performance as a promoter and marketer of ideas, or with the idea itself?

While I’m certain I could do more as a promoter, before I renewed my efforts I felt that it would be a good idea to vet the concept’s viability again. As it turned out, I had the good fortune to encounter a  consultant in cooperative living with 20 years’ experience in the field. After sharing my "elevator pitch" version of the concept, I asked why the idea wasn’t getting any traction. He said simply: “We’re not ready for it yet.”

Is it really that simple? But then, I thought about what I’m really asking people to do by tracing their hand in green on a sign and posting it. It’s taking a public stand within a known community at a real location. It’s showing up as “different.” It’s opening the door to interactions with strangers. It’s identifying yourself as a person who values basic skills that may not get much attention or value in the world today. It’s saying that you’re willing to do something untried, unproven and maybe even a little bit nutty because it’s a dead certainty that the stuff we’re doing that seems ‘normal’ is leading to a nasty future. It’s saying: I’m here and I’m willing to trust my neighbors enough to start making (as James Howard Kunstler would put it) “alternate arrangements,” because in my view, it seems quite likely that our leaders in government and industry are planning for a future that isn’t going to happen.

In other words, participating in the Green Hand Initiative is asking a lot of people, socially, emotionally, and psychologically. It’s terrible but often true that when people get stressed, they tend to hold more firmly to dysfunctional coping strategies that may have worked in the past, even if they are now plainly part of the problem. Trying new things can get harder as it becomes more imperative.

However, the difficulty of each of the things the Green Hand concept asks of people – publicly identifying one’s self; reaching out in trust and build community solidarity, embracing novelty, ambiguity, uncertainty, and standing up in the face of potential ridicule, taking a stand for a future that isn’t here yet but could be by virtue of my standing for it – these are the very things we will ultimately have to do anyhow.

My conclusion is that the Green Hand Initiative is “failing,” at least in part, because it is asking of people precisely those behaviors and attitudes of mind that, were they the prevailing norm, would render the signs moot. Just as with individuals stepping "out of their comfort zone," so it is also in communities: the contours of our resistance delineate our areas of potential growth. Thus came to mind the maxim: If this project weren’t so impossible, it wouldn’t be necessary.

What to do about it?  Personally, although my blog postings have been irregular at best lately, when it comes to the actual Green Hand work of skill-sharing, plant-sharing, and relationship-building, I keep at it. On that level, I have never stopped. My driveway is becoming a veritable nursery of plants destined for new homes in other gardens. And, amazingly enough considering my location on a dead-end road, my Green Hand sign actually got noticed. One day in the middle of the record-setting winter we endured here in southeast Michigan, I was startled as I drove down my driveway to meet a visitor making his way toward me on cross country skis. He identified himself as a neighbor living some distance away who had seen a presentation I’d done at a local church. He’d seen my Green Hand sign and my fenced-in garden while skiing and wanted my contact info for a friend who was asking to know how to build a fence that keeps out deer and other animals. Of course, I’ll be happy to help. I’m also directly adding labor these days to other people’s gardens, and giving seeds, seedlings, slips, and offshoots away. Last year I estimate I gave away over 100 raspberry canes just as they were leafing out in spring, with maybe 50 or more of them going to one friend alone. A couple months later I received a photo of my friend’s grandson sitting by her new long row of raspberries, messily eating the ripe fruit from his hand.

But honestly, can this kind of thing really help to stave off or mitigate suffering as our high-energy culture sputters out of gas?  My response to that question is that the Green Hand idea is more than helping people grow food or learn other basic skills, it’s also about cultivating relationships in the process. In addition to relationships with plants, animals, wind, sun, rain and soil, I encourage everyone to build human relationships because at a very basic level, “social security” may come down to a door that opens when you’re standing in the rain.

As far as the work itself goes (supposing we as a culture are capable of better than shooting one another for canned goods if food delivery systems break down), we’re going to need to take productivity into our own hands somehow. There’s no time like the present to gather the treasure of last year’s fallen leaves and layer them in place to improve the soil, no better time than now to plant a tree or vine, no better time to befriend a property owner and offer to grow and share some food on an underused piece of land.

Do I honestly believe that the millions of garden spades hanging in the garages of America can make a difference in meeting the nation’s food needs if they were put to skillful use? Absolutely. If not, they wouldn’t have been called into service in the Victory Garden campaign of WWII.

And in addition to uprooting weeds and preparing soil, those shovels can also help dig out the pernicious idea that anything that isn’t the latest electronic gizmo from China is irrelevant to the future. On the contrary, I encourage you to put down your cell phone and instead pick up a handful of really good soil—at that moment you’re holding something of vastly greater subtlety and complexity. Plus of course, I’m planting potatoes in that soil today because, come November, it’s nice to know where to dig for them, and even nicer if I can find a friend willing to dig them up together. It’s amazing to see how they glow as they come out of the dark earth. You can almost bask in the stored sunshine.

So in the end I don’t see this project as impossible after all, because personally I’ve found a place to build from, and that’s all I can do. Scope and scale can come later, and hopefully will, as changing conditions continue to prompt social transformation.  I take some comfort in the thought that this and many other worthy ideas are slowly spreading, often underground and out of sight, and that they will be ready to sprout into action when we really need them.  For now, my approach is simply to share what I know, do what I can, spend time and work with those who appeal to me, and model what can be done with a piece of land. I can, in short, “be the change,” and if those I share with further expand the web by connecting with others, then maybe one Green Hand sign in the world is enough. At least – like the handful of bee balm roots I brought to a friend yesterday to encourage pollinators in her garden – it’s a start.