Most news stories fit a pattern and can quickly be filed away—news and dispatches reinforcing the status quo or accelerating its doom like a flaming stock car.
But here is a pattern to break the pattern—a counter-current that is as refreshing as an ocean breeze on a scorching summer day—Cool Petaluma.
Cool Petaluma is a non-profit effort to train neighborhood volunteers to organize disaster preparedness and climate action, block by neighborhood block. It has trained and equipped 200 “block leaders” in Petaluma. It is nothing less than a bottom-up effort to avert further climate change that reinvigorates local democracy by training local leaders and reconstituting the neighborhood social unit.
And that’s why everyone is so excited.
In this week’s column, I interview Natasha Juliana, one of Cool Petaluma’s three co-directing co-founders.
CH: Natasha, your good ecology is rooted in the ’60s counter-cultural “back to the land” movement and an upbringing in a Humboldt Redwood forest. How does that inform your contemporary work?
NJ: At Cool Petaluma, we ask how we can bring a vision of care and love, community and beauty to the center of the climate action movement.
CH: The brilliance of your shared idea is that these things give one the emotional resilience to face the problems most of us are avoiding. You have the love and the strength of your block behind you.
NJ: And they create a lens through which we can see a new world.
CH: A new world is what’s required—a complete transformation of our lifestyle. But you equip your cool block leaders with heavily researched sets of incremental changes these neighborhood teams can take. I understand a lot of what you teach is how to engage with your neighbors.
NJ: Post-pandemic, many people are anxious and lonely and longing to reconnect, to have that good old-fashioned neighborhood feel. This is an excuse to knock on your neighbor’s door.
CH: And your six-month curriculum campaign, starting with neighborhood disaster response, plays out over wine meetings, movie nights and BBQs with a spirit of can-do comradery.
Learn more. This interview is a snippet from the rich audio-recorded interview. Follow this url, linktr.ee/CoolPetalumaLINX, or scan the QR to listen to it, visit Cool Petaluma’s website hub or sign up for their next block leader training—and you don’t have to be from Petaluma!
