Community Corner
Local Group Tackles Global Issues
Transition Ferndale will host monthly meetings and films.
A small but impassioned group met in a cinder block room last week at in Ferndale to discuss the beginnings of a plan to change the world. Transition Ferndale is a new group dedicated to using solutions such as car sharing and locally grown food to tackle global issues such as peak oil, climate change and economic turmoil.
“By the end of this century, all the fossil fuels will be gone,” said the group’s interim leader, Art Myatt, 66, of Pleasant Ridge. “Our goal is to help the local community become a lot more resistant in the face of what’s coming.”
Myatt said he became interested in the subject when he worked for 30 years as a process engineer for a solar cell company. He said he hopes to learn more about local food production and is interested in building a solar oven in his backyard.
Find out what's happening in Ferndalewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“I’m an energy guy, I really don’t know much about gardening," he said. "I’m hoping to learn something about gardens and growing food in your backyard.”
Myatt said the group will meet the first Thursday of every month at different locations around Ferndale. He said he hopes people from throughout Metro Detroit will join so the group can grow to a few hundred people.
Find out what's happening in Ferndalewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Todd Blankenship, 37, of Ferndale organized the group’s documentary video and discussion series, to be held the third Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. at the . The first film, Fresh, about alternatives to industrial farming, will be shown this Thursday. Other films will tackle issues such as peak oil, opposition to globalization and the technique of “fracking” for natural gas.
“I chose topics a lot of people in the area are concerned about or at least are interested in learning about,” he said.
Blankenship is an industrial engineer and became interested in the local food movement after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, a cookbook-memoir hybrid about a family that moves to rural Virginia to live off food that is almost exclusively locally produced.
“It kind of opened my eyes to the insanity of the agriculture system,” he said. “As an industrial engineer, I understand how we got where we are, but as an environmentalist, I’m disgusted by what we’ve allowed to happen.”
More information on the series can be found at transitionferndale.wordpress.com.
