A Place to Grow From

Vinodh Valluri
(Originally written for The EcoCloud Platform, Sustainable Silicon Valley, CA)
There is no place like home, goes the clich. One who ventures to foreign lands, on the other
hand, recognizes that all places are home. As all travelers know firsthand, places are more than
just about the land; each place has its own people, customs, flavors, colors, music, and words.
Where a population conducts effortless observation of the flow of time and the rhythms of
nature, it is noticeable that the aforementioned traits are unique to each place, and evolve over
time. The seasons arrive at slightly different times across the world; cultural and linguistic
nuances change with place and so does the etiquette of living as a civilized society. The variety
of place is of a fractal nature planets are different from each other, nations differ from each
other and so do neighborhoods within a city.

However, our current socio-economic systems have cultivated a motto of monopoly

(monotony?), successfully painting the human landscapes with standardized colors each
group branding its presence across a swath of towns and cities and villages and metropolises. A
staggering amount of enterprise consolidation has enabled the proliferation of such gray
monotony, epitomized in the unprecedented excess of gigantic shopping malls (and their
attached parking lots), and mega farms, and CAFOs. In the absence of sensitivity for place, the
products, by-products, and wastes created in our times have significantly pervaded places that
should remain pristineso much so that one would find empty plastic bottles littering the trek
up to the peak of Mount Everest.

In his Principles of Ecological Design, Sim Van der Ryn famously asserts, Solutions grow from
place. Nothing is a problem by itself, except when it is in a wrong place; even a sharp knife is
beneficial, if in the hands of an expert surgeon. As unique are the problems of a place, so are
the solutions to them. Cultivating solutions from the place is something intuitively sensible,
especially in unpredictable timesfinancial, social, and ecological. At a personal level, local
solutions are obvious, say, in the ordinary practice of consuming raw, local wildflower honey to
prevent spring allergies.

The San Francisco bay area is home to premier educational institutions and is a cradle for
exceptional technical and business talent. There is immense potential to address issues in this
region assertively. Innovative, community-based initiatives have begun to sprout across the
spectrum from recycling gray water, and growing local food in urban farms, to refashioning ewaste into new electronics, even spinning local yarn into fashionable clothes!

Peoples Grocery, a visionary group, works for the health and wealth of West Oakland, setting
the standards for achieving regional resilience in terms of food. This group caters to nutritional
needs - both quality and affordability, fosters urban agriculture, and champions food justice
projects. Several such institutions devote themselves to building community in the bay area,
enabling the marriage of sound economic, social and environmental practices.

"The Fibershed Project is a non-profit organization that supports the collaboration of smallscale farmers with local artisans to generate a growing and thriving bioregional textile culture
that functions hand-in-hand with principles of ecological balance, local economies, and regional
organic agriculture."

The WEST Summit 2012 brings together experts from various arenas in discussing means to
address the changing environment of our planet, and ways in which we can create regional
resilience across the San Francisco bay area. Organizations now have the opportunity to
address sustainability via local resources, solutions and partnerships. Sharing of resources and
knowledge is a proactive process for success, and is the goal of this conference.

In the Regional Resilience section, we will hear about the Fibershed Project from Rebecca
Burgess, who believes that sustainability and fashion can go hand in hand. The Fibershed
project enables the sourcing of local fibers and dyes for production of trendsetting fabrics that
are good for the planet. Projects like these are pragmatic examples of sustainable economics,
and beacons of hope in the face of the challenges we face now, and in the future. To learn
more, join the conference at http://sustainablesv.org/content/west-summit