FOCUS AREAS
Each focus area is connected to the others with equal importance, representing an interdisciplinary approach to creating
more resilience.
FOOD
ENERGY
SHELTER
TRANSPORT
EDUCATION
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BIOREGIONING
While the climate emergency is a global issue demanding a global response, it is in communities where the impacts are felt and the hard work of addressing the climate crisis ultimately takes place. For that work to succeed, basic needs must be met and people empowered to leverage their lived experience to become part of the solution. Success will mean that community members are active participants in a robust local food system with access for all; have access to safe and healthy housing; work toward collective ownership of renewable energy generation; have reliable, carbon-free transport and safe streets; and can access education and information. In each case, the systems that engender this just transition must create replicable, adaptable models, for which successes and failures can be shared via regional, state, and global networks.
We are fed by a national, sometimes global, industrial food system that consumes vast amounts of dwindling resources, pollutes our waterways, and emits around one third of the world's carbon pollution and other greenhouse gases. Building a local, farmer-driven, organic food system with a mind towards sustainability and efficient distribution increases community health and self-reliance, as well as resilience to fluctuations in national and global food supplies. In addition to creating thousands of jobs, producing the bulk of our food locally will also help alleviate hunger for the nearly 50% of Mainers who are considered food-insecure. Increased local food production on a broad scale will also lead to a more just and fair global food system as agricultural lands in the global South, now used for export crops, become available to those who live there to feed themselves and help alleviate hunger for the nearly one billion food-insecure people on the planet.
The energy we use to heat and light our homes and businesses is tied to a global supply chain and electricity grid. As a culture, we use more energy per capita than most other nations, nearly double that of Germany, and four times that of China. Building a distributed network of local and regional renewable energy production, combined with radically increased efficiency, reduces carbon emissions and increases community resilience to energy shocks and the inevitable descent of fossil fuel production. Dramatically reducing our consumption of fossil fuel also conserves valuable resources for future generations to build a robust post-carbon infrastructure.
Where and how we build our homes, businesses, and public buildings has a great effect on community health and well-being. Our current housing stock is old, inefficient and often oversized. This results in economic hardship for occupants, as well as excess resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions that affect global and local ecologies and tax future generations. By utilizing current green building technology, building at appropriate scale, using local materials and organizing our housing with access to essential services, we can increase quality of life for residents and reduce the environmental impacts of our shelter. Extreme retrofitting of existing buildings can also contribute greatly to greening our built environment and create jobs in the process.
Tied directly to the global energy and labor markets, our transportation system relies almost entirely on automobiles and paved roads, at great expense to drivers, taxpayers and the environment. Over half of all automobile trips are between one and ten miles in length. Regional and local public transportation, coupled with bicycle and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, could dramatically reduce traffic on our ailing roads, reduce pollution, including CO2 emissions, increase community health and wellbeing, and empower those without the ability to own and operate a car.
Knowledge is one of our community's greatest assets. By offering professional development to educators to inform and empower them to teach about climate and teach outside, we have an exponentially larger impact than by teaching students ourselves. We work in coalition with other organizations to amplify our impact on policies to support students and educators. Learning and sharing the skills needed to thrive in a regenerative future is a lifelong project. We teach through skill share, convergences, workshops, film screenings, demonstrations, book lending, and mentorship.
A bioregion is a geographic territory whose limits are defined not by political boundaries, but by the needs and lifeways of its human and other-than-human inhabitants, as well as the life-supporting capacity of its ecological systems. Fully realizing the vision of a thriving, regenerative culture at the bioregional scale is not work that CEBE can, or ever will, carry on its own. Together with a network of individuals and organizations, CEBE helps coordinate the nascent Forests of the Northeast bioregioning collective. We're cultivating new opportunities for knowledge-sharing and coordinated regenerative action.
