Interview with Center for an Ecology-Based Economy’s Scott Vlaun
By Alison Znamierowski
The Sierra Club Maine Chapter has small groups of committed environmentalists across the state called Climate Action Teams. The individuals who comprise these groups are extraordinarily inspiring, action-oriented, and, above all, dedicated to creating a thriving and beautiful future for the generations who follow us. I had the absolute pleasure of meeting and chatting with Scott Vlaun, the Climate Action Team leader of Norway and co-owner of the Center for an Ecology-Based Economy (CEBE), an environmental non-profit organization tucked into Norway’s bustling Main Street. Through CEBE, Scott and his co-founders have started projects such as Edible Main Street, which showcases planter boxes of edible foods up and down Norway’s Main Street, and a bike-share program, through which locals can borrow bikes as a means of transportation, as well as myriad other seeds of change.
When we met up with Scott, he was working alongside several local kids who were participating in the Youth Leadership program at the Community Gardens down the street from CEBE. Scott frequents the gardens, helping the kids there in learning to build sustainable food forests through planting perennial agricultural systems. Scott was using a scythe, a hand-tool used in place of a lawn mower, to reduce reliance on fossil fuels at the gardens. We were lucky enough to get a tour of the gardens, from the fruit trees to the water pump system to the solar panels to the nut trees. It was truly so inspiring and incredible to see young people who were excited and energized around sustainable and responsible agriculture.
This moment perfectly encompassed some of what I had heard Scott speak of—his deep-seeded belief that we need to create community through a shared ecological experience; his sincere passion for permacultural philosophy and practice. Here is the conversation that Scott and I shared, a conversation for which I am so grateful and by which I am so inspired.
Alison Znamierowski: Can you talk about your journey to CEBE?
Scott Vlaun: I went to Unity College right out of high school to study Environmental Science, but got kind of caught up with art—I had actually originally wanted to go to art school, but my parents weren’t supportive. After taking a course at Unity College with a really great art teacher for a semester, I decided to drop out. After that, I went back home, saved up some money, and ended up at the Portland School of Art, where I studied photography. Through studying documentary photography, I got involved in a lot of social justice and environmental issues.
I went on to pursue a graduate degree in Photography, and ultimately wrote my dissertation on Documentary Photography in the early 90s, when the internet was really just coming on. I discovered that the Internet really changed the way that photography could function. I spent a lot of time studying how photography and social change were linked throughout history, and found that it was really changing fast with instant communication. Ultimately, through social documentary work, I got more interested in the actual social causes than the photography.
After graduate school, I worked for a long time in the organic seed industry as a photographer and writer. Through that work, I got really involved in food system issues and wound up traveling a lot—I was working mostly in this country and in Central America. About ten years ago, my son Jasper was born, and traveling became a little less exciting to me. I wanted to be home more with my son, so we started really looking locally, at our local community, and how we could take the lessons we had learned about sustainability and the food system, trying to apply them locally—that’s when the idea for CEBE was born. We finally launched CEBE about 4 ½ years ago.
AZ: What was your experience in establishing CEBE in a relatively conservative community?
SV: Norway is a fairly politically conservative area, but it does have pockets of progressive organization; our food co-op is the only inland food co-op that really survived the 80s, and there’s also a strong arts community here. But when we started organizing CEBE, we really tried to find as much common ground as we could and not make this about politics.
There’s a lot of ingenuity here; a lot of people in the hills here know how to make things, grow things, fix things—they’re, by nature, I would say, conservationists, as much as they are conservative. We have a lot of common ground in terms of protecting the environment and creating local jobs, especially in the food industry; working with our local economy, that kind of stuff.
So, we try to find common ground and avoid the political aspect—we’re not a lobbying organization so much, although we do some lobbying around solar, like with the recent solar legislation here in Maine. We’ve done a lot of political organizing around that, because it affects our ability to do community solar farms. And that turns out to be fairly bipartisan stuff, for the most part.
AZ: Do you have any advice for folks who are trying to implement changes in their communities?
My take-away so far has been to really try to find where there is opportunity, where there is energy, and collaborate as much as possible with other organizations without trying to duplicate what others are doing. The more locally networked we can be in our community to collaborate with other organizations, the better. And then we try to network with like-minded organizations around the state and around New England. So we work locally with Alan Day Community Garden, Western Foothills Land Trust, Healthy Oxford Hills and others, and then statewide, we’re part of a network of community food councils, the New England Resilience & Transition Network…so we see what other organizations like us are doing in their communities around New England; again, good information sharing, but trying not to duplicate efforts that are going on here already. If we put an idea out for a project, and people don’t respond, then we’re not going to try to force that on our community; we’d rather work where the need is and where the energy is, although energy can wax and wane so sometimes we need to persevere. Community engagement is critical to our work.
AZ: What are the projects that you are involved in right now?
SV: Most of our early projects at CEBE were what we call demonstration scale projects. We put a small solar array over at the community garden so they wouldn’t have to run a generator to use power tools or the PA system when they had events. We also put in a solar panel to pump water, because their roof catchment couldn’t keep up as the garden expanded. So it did reduce their fossil fuel use, for sure, but it also was a demonstration project because a lot of people go there and they get to see the solar power working—but small scale. Similarly, our Edible Main Street is not producing a viable percentage of food for the community, but it does get people, especially kids, excited about seeing food growing, provides the occasional snack on the street, and inspires folks to grow food themselves.
As we’ve moved along, we’ve been starting to scale up to what we call “high impact projects.” We have installed a couple of electric vehicle chargers in our town; they’re kind of hidden away and they only service the small amount of people who have electric vehicles. We’re about to put a highly visible installation at the high school, with a large solar tracker, and three EV chargers—probably 100x more people will see that installation; it will attract a lot more attention, and raise a lot more awareness, and actually, in this case, produce a fair amount of energy. We’re planning to do some educational programming with the students around how that technology works and why it’s important.
We are also working on a community solar farm for non-profits, small businesses and low- and moderate-income households. This has been in the planning for a long time and we’re hoping to get traction as soon as the state has a stable solar policy that determines how many “offtakers” we can have which will dictate the size of the installation. Ideally we’d like to place it on an existing brownfield or other land that is not suitable for agriculture or development. We have a community food forest in its third year, a perennial agriculture project, over at the community garden with a lot of fruit and nut trees and perennial vegetables and other functional plants. This project had a lot of energy in the design and installation phase, but less so in the maintenance work. (laughs). These are some of the more long-term projects taking shape as we get bigger and more connected in the community
AZ: What are your dreams and your next steps with CEBE?
SV: We are a permaculture-based organization. Permaculture is about making connections, connection between different elements, and providing for local needs with local resources, thinking in terms of “whole systems.” So we work in Food, Shelter, Energy, and Transport. Our long-term vision is to transition our community away from fossil fuels, to build a local economy based more on renewable resources. We spend a lot of time thinking about the Eco-Village concept, where people could live and work in the same place, multi-generational communities around the greater downtown area. It’s a big nut to crack! We’ll need to develop a regional transportation system that would run on renewable energy, but also make our community safer for pedestrians and cyclists. It’s going to be important to support young people to start sustainable agriculture projects, or what we’re calling now ‘regenerative agriculture projects’ as we realize that we need to rebuild a lot of the environmental damage that has been done through conventional agriculture.
We have a lot of farmland out here that can be brought back into more intensive production, along with woodlands, which could be transitioned into food production without completely losing the forest ecosystem. The challenge is to increase local farming exponentially while regenerating our natural capital; building soil and restoring biodiversity while sequestering climate damaging carbon from the atmosphere. If we can accomplish that here we can become a model for other communities. So if lots of communities around the planet start to localize their economies that way, and start to build soil, and draw down carbon out of the air and into the soil and maintain healthy forests, we might have a chance to turn things around for our kids. So at the same time we are adapting to climate change and resource depletion, we are also doing our part to mitigate the problem. Localized regenerative agriculture can really help to solve the climate problem, and provide better quality of life to a lot of people, because everybody knows that local, fresh food is way better than what we get at the supermarket that’s shipped from 2,000 miles away.
So that’s kind of our vision—putting people to work solving our problems; building renewable energy infrastructure, growing food, community and human powered transportation… In terms of the shelter aspect, we need to reskill our community so people have more control over building their own shelter or working together towards that end. We recently helped a young woman design and plan her own tiny house which she built with her grandfather. That was really rewarding. Owning land and a conventional home is so out of reach for so many these days—young and old. It can also be isolating. We need to find alternatives.
At the end of the day, I think our biggest challenge is to work on creating community. We’ve been kind of conditioned in our culture, to be “every person for themselves”—we all have our own car and our own house with our own yard and our own garden and lawnmower, etc. It’s really not a very tenable future for humanity, for everyone to be fending for themselves. A lot of what we’ve been doing here is relationship building, and we spend a lot of time thinking about ways of organizing so everyone’s special gifts are brought to the surface and all voices are heard. I think that’s our biggest challenge in the end. It’s not a technological challenge as much as it is a cultural challenge. So we’re working on two fronts; one, to introduce sustainable technology and agriculture to people, and at the same time, try to change our culture to be more cooperative and community-based.