The Seed of Local Power

  • May 2, 2024
  • Reggie Rucker, Luke Gannon
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    In 1974, in Washington D.C., amidst a backdrop of economic turbulence and social unrest, the seeds of the Institute for Local Self-reliance were sown. David Morris, Neil Seldman, and Gil Friend, driven by a shared vision of community resilience, founded the Institute in a townhouse in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Their goal was to demonstrate that our economies and environments can thrive when rooted in community cooperation and mutual aid. Fifty years later, in the face of prevailing national norms promoting centralization, ILSR continues to challenge the status quo through research, advocacy, and grassroots organizing, promoting a framework of decentralized production, responsibility, and authority.

     

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    David Morris: We chose the term “local self-reliance” consciously, but perhaps a bit glibly. What we found out was that people couldn’t understand the term, so they would forever introduce me when I was giving a speech or introduce one of us who might’ve been on television, reading off the teleprompter as “The Institutes for Self-Reliance.” The word local was dropped, and it was dropped 95% of the time, so you realize that there was something going on here. I concluded, finally, that Americans understand the term self-reliance, self-reliance, individual reliance, but the concept of local self-reliance seems almost a oxymoron. It’s a contradiction in terms. For us, it’s not a contradiction in terms, because no human being is an island. What we emphasize, as much as anything, is cooperation and mutual aid and a sense of community. Local Self-Reliance is, in fact, the name, remains the name, but only in the last 10 years will I say that people almost always get it right now.
    Neil Seldman: Back in the ’70s, there were very few groups that understood that the local place was the place to be, and that’s where you could make fundamental change. That’s what we proceeded to do.
    Reggie Rucker: Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, and this is a really special episode. Of course, every episode is special. It’s like when you have children, all of your children are special, you love all of them equally, but really you have favorites, but you love them all equally. Anyways, this one is special because we are releasing it the day after celebrating our, ILSR’s, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 50th birthday. May 1, 1974 is our birthday, and there is no one I’d rather celebrate this milestone occasion with more than my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke?
    Luke Gannon: Aw, Reggie. I feel the same way. Now, everyone, it’s really a special here for a couple of reasons. Of course, ILSR’s 50th anniversary and y’all, Reggie just got engaged, so it is truly a year for celebration. Reggie, a huge congratulations to you and your fiance.
    Reggie Rucker: Thank you, Luke. Definitely a happy moment for me. There’s so much to celebrate today. And of course, I’m going to bring this back to celebrating ILSR turning 50. That’s wild. We are in the middle of the city series. We started in Detroit, spotlighting folks doing great work to build local power there. As we’ve moved to DC in this part of the series, it is beyond fitting that we’re able to take this moment to look at how our organization was born in DC and born out of everything happening in the district in the late ’60s and early ’70s. And Luke, I love those clips that you selected to open the episode, especially that last bit from David Morris, where he talks about no human being is an island and this sense of cooperation, mutual aid, and community. When you build that, you build local power. I love that DC is embedded into the fabric of our organization, as an inspiration to so much of what we do.
    Luke Gannon: Now, this episode isn’t just about ILSR’s founding. It’s a lens into how the history of DC shaped ILSR into existence, how the economy influenced the very basis of our work, and how the political landscape pushed us to keep fighting for a more sustainable and equitable present and future. Let’s dive in.
    David Morris: The history of Washington DC is a story of the local and the national. It’s a story of top down and bottom up, and it’s a story of the quest for sovereignty. In 1963, the good citizens of the United States of America gave the citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote for the President. Not the right to have a voting delegate in Congress, but the right to vote for President. 1967, they got the right to vote for school board. And 1973, they got home rule. Home rule meant that, for the first time since 1874, they got the right to elect their city council and their mayor. That is 1974. They got into office in 1975, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was born right in the middle of that, in May of 1974.
    MUSIC: Stayed on freedom.
    David Morris: The other aspect of Washington DC, which was the sea in which we swam, is that it was a Black city. 700,000 people, and it was two-thirds Black. And in 1968, so this is six years before the institute was founded, there were riots after Martin Luther King died, all around the country. But in Washington DC, there were a thousand businesses that were destroyed. Many of the commercial strips that were owned by Black businesses were destroyed. There was the equivalent of $2 billion in property damage, in current dollars. It was two decades, almost three decades, before those were rebuilt. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance was born in a city that was coming into its own, that was gaining a certain amount of authority, that was agitated, that was angry, that was organized.
    Luke Gannon: That’s David Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. As DC was in economic turbulence, co-founders David Morris, Neil Seldman, and Gil Friend saw a need to fill. Here’s how Neil recalls the origin story.
    Neil Seldman: When Gil Friend, David Morris, and myself founded the Institute, we were all neighbors. We all lived in Adams Morgan, and we were all working on community projects. We realized that there were three areas of the community that no one was focusing on. Food production, recycling of raw materials, and energy, sunlight falling on rooftops and so forth. I don’t even know if I chose recycling or I was assigned it. I was assigned recycling because we wanted to start a business in recycling, and I had a good deal of business background. I helped run my father’s retail store, and I worked in factories all my life.
    David Morris: Neil Seldman was the most rooted, probably, of the three of us. A very tight-knit family, raised in Brooklyn. His father owned a retail mattress shop, and his aunt owned a factory. So the three of us joined together and started the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in a three-story townhouse on 18th Street in Washington DC.
    Luke Gannon: The Institute was set up in a residential neighborhood to demonstrate that our energies and our economies can blossom when rooted in community.
    David Morris: It was an expression of our thesis and a demonstration that urban areas could be producers as well as consumers, that we could produce basic wealth at the local level. In our townhouse, one thing we did was use the roof and put solar collectors. We had just started producing solar cells for terrestrial application in the United States. They were producing heat, and then we grew food on the roof, as well. We had a Clivus Multrum composting toilet, a massive thing, in the basement. Neil Seldman oversaw the growing of hundreds of thousands of worms there.
    Neil Seldman: We succeeded in putting a greenhouse on the roof. We experimented with raising worms, with raising fish. We raised sprouts. We built a business. We were the major supplier of sprouts to restaurants throughout the city.
    David Morris: The Institute was very much interested in, simply as a demonstration, simply as a symbol, but it reflected our feeling that you could extract useful work from so many overlooked things, whether it happened to be human genius or the ground or the rooftop.
    Luke Gannon: David recalls that from its inception, they wanted ILSR to accomplish two things.
    David Morris: We wanted to develop and promote a framework. We wanted a framework of local self-reliance that could be applied throughout all the sectors of the economy, broadly. But then we also wanted to get down and dirty. We wanted to get to the point where we could see what worked and what didn’t work, and that meant choosing sectors where individuals could work in depth. We decided that we would use certain criteria to choose those sectors. One of the criteria was that working there would demonstrate the concept of local self-reliance. The second was that it would be a sector where the local authority, that is local government, would have a significant ability to establish the rules. The third is that we could achieve something. That it was doable within a certain timeframe to have an impact. One of those was solid waste. And it’s sort of an obvious thing, because solid waste is one of those things that cities, at that time, had almost complete control over and still have primary control over. They set the rules not only for pickup, but what you can throw away, where it goes, who hauls it.
    Luke Gannon: The Institute was established with the capacity to promptly react and adapt to economic dynamics. As David exemplifies, one of the Institute’s primary focuses at its inception was energy, prompted by the city and national focus on oil.
    David Morris: We chose energy because when we set up in 1974, we had just gone through an oil embargo, a quadrupling in oil prices, and the country was desperately trying to move toward what they called Project Independence. We did an investigation to say, what is the possibility… The nation chose nuclear. They wanted a thousand nuclear plants by the year 2000. And we looked and we looked and we looked, and we decided that there was this technology called a solar cell, which could generate electricity when struck by sunlight and had only been used, until very recently, for space satellites. We chose that because it was clear that you had enough space and enough sunlight to generate sufficient electricity to really make yourself a producer to the point where if you couldn’t decentralize the entire electricity system, you could certainly participate in it as an active generator, as an active producer.
    In the late 1970s when there was another quadrupling of oil prices, suddenly, the concept of waste-to-energy was born. The national environmental movements embraced it. We were going to take our garbage, we were going to generate energy, and it was going to reduce our dependence on imported oil. We didn’t believe that. We believed that the embodied energy in solid waste was more important, that we should recycle, recover, reuse that waste, and not burn it simply for the BTU value. Neil Seldman, as the man in charge of that, was to oppose the incinerators and work with coalitions all around the country. Local people who didn’t want an incinerator in their backyard. They didn’t want a garbage transfer station in their backyard. They didn’t want a landfill in their backyard.
    We worked with them to stop the incinerators and then worked with them to promote recycling. That was our first success in the 1980s. When I say our, it wasn’t the Institute’s first success. We always worked in coalitions, so these were coalitions usually led by… Well, not always led by locals, but usually minorities because that’s where the powers that be installed incinerators and installed garbage transfer stations. Those were the front lines in fighting them. In the 1980s, there were several plans that were canceled, and by the late ’80s, the majority of those that were planned had been canceled.
    Luke Gannon: From the beginning, ILSR recognized the potential of converting waste into energy. Neil dedicated significant attention to solid waste policy.
    Neil Seldman: When it came to solid waste management policy, I attached myself to people who had expertise. These were the recyclers in California. From there, we developed not only the expertise for the institute, but also a network of technicians to work with. That is when we started fighting incinerators, because we were promoting recycling, economic development, and recovering the materials so that cities could be productive cities. Cities could be producing things instead of importing everything that the cities needed, both energy, raw materials, food.
    Luke Gannon: In the mid-1970s, cities and federal agencies were promoting incineration. That’s when ILSR entered the anti-incineration movement, led largely by Neil.
    Neil Seldman: The move to incineration started in the mid-1970s. EPA was promoting it. The Department of Energy was promoting it. EPA gave out planning grants, and the Department of Energy gave out what they called commercialization grants. Meaning, “Here’s 50,000 to plan it from the EPA, and here’s 10 million to start construction.” There were, in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, there were about 400 incinerator planned for the country. Every major population center in the country, someone wanted to build an incinerator. Only about 90 were built. The remainder were killed. We helped directly cancel 35, then we started writing manuals on how to do it. We distributed those very widely, and other communities started knocking out incinerators left and right.
    For many years, I would say from ’76 to ’86, we were the only national organization fighting incinerators. In fact, the national environmental organizations thought incinerators were a good thing, until we were part of the effort to build this grassroots movement nationwide against incineration. We were incredibly effective. We were involved in 35 successful fights across the country to defeat incinerators. We lost two. It developed our reputation as the go-to organization, not only to stop incineration, but what to do after you stop the incinerator.
    Luke Gannon: In one instance, Neil recounts, there was a garbage incinerator under construction in Austin, Texas. Many believed it would be impossible to halt the project, but local organizers mobilized, and ILSR came in with technical support, and they successfully halted the construction.
    Neil Seldman: The orchestration was we showed that if the city were to cancel the incinerator, they would lose $22 million. But if they invested in recycling, composting, and reuse, they would save $120 million over the twenty-year life of the planned incinerator. We explained that the incinerator is going to be very costly not only to build but to operate, therefore taxes are going to have to be increased. The business community deserted the incinerator and came over to our side.
    Luke Gannon: By 1986, national environmental groups had embraced the message of local organizers and began opposing incineration, as well.
    Neil Seldman: You can times 300 canceled incinerators by their cost of maybe $500 million, $600 million each, and you could see that we’ve saved the country billions in money that would’ve been spent adding to pollution and making people’s health much worse than it is. By 1985, more incinerators were canceled than were planned. The legacy of our work has equipped people with the information they need to stop a planned incinerator. What we’re working on now is shutting down existing incinerators, which is much more difficult, as you can imagine, than stopping a planned one.
    Luke Gannon: Now here, we’re going to take a brief detour to explain how we expanded our work from our home base of DC. In the 1980s, David authored a book highlighting cities as the focal points of local economies, emphasizing their potential to foster economic sustainability through strategic empowerment. Impressed by David’s insights, the Mayor of St. Paul extended an invitation for him to visit the Twin Cities.
    David Morris: And Mayor Latimer invited me to St. Paul and sat me in a room next to the mayor’s office with three of his senior officials, and they grilled me on how local self-reliance could be applied to the city of St. Paul. They essentially contracted with the Institute to help to design and implement what they call the homegrown economy in St. Paul. I was there, on contract through the Institute, for about a year and fell in love with the city of St. Paul and fell in love with Minnesota.
    Luke Gannon: David chose to stay in St. Paul, due to the accessibility of political leaders compared to Washington DC. Here, elected officials considered the needs of local residents, including children attending nearby schools, hospital staff, and business owners, which fostered this strong sense of community. At that time, the city was deeply entrenched in its local roots, so ILSR expanded its ideas and research into the Twin Cities,
    David Morris: Among the things that we were doing were studies that tracked dollars as they flowed through neighborhoods. The District of Columbia had had an announcement, when a new McDonald’s opened, that it was a job generator. We put out a little booklet and said, no, you lose jobs every time a McDonald’s opened up. Which is not intuitive, because, after all, there weren’t jobs there yesterday and there are today. But what we said is, if people were going to eat anyway, and if they weren’t going to go to McDonald’s to eat, then they were going to go to the grocery store and buy it, or they were going to go to a sit-down restaurant. However else they spent their food dollar, more of it was going to remain in the local community. That had a very large impact.
    Luke Gannon: In the late-1980s, the Institute, led by Neil’s work in waste, published Salvaging the Future, a seminal work that synthesized ILSR’s perspectives on economy and sustainability.
    Neil Seldman: We published Salvaging the Future to show that a city of 1 million people can create 1,000 jobs and create economic value of $2 billion a year if you go from wasting to recycling and composting. That’s the state of the art. That’s what circularity, sustainability, and environmental justice… All of those three concepts were all tied into our initial work
    Luke Gannon: After half a century, the Institute remains steadfast in its foundational principles, advocating for the strength of community, the significance of local economies, and the decentralization of production, responsibility, and authority. This embodies the very essence of local self-reliance.
    Neil Seldman: People are predisposed to do the right thing. They just need the encouragement and the public policy. If we want to live better, we have to change the rules to reflect the way we want to live our values and our pocketbooks. We feel that decentralizing decision-making is perhaps the only way to save the world. We wanted to change the way people thought about resources, about energy. We wanted the Institute to become a household word, and we’re pretty close to that right now.
    Local self-reliance is the ability of a community to produce its basic needs without having to rely on outside sources. Not to become completely independent, but to be able to produce enough that a city has leverage on the outside world. If you don’t like a certain product, you can design and build what you want in your city with the resources of the city, the financial resources, the material resources, like sunlight and newspaper, and of course, the labor power to be productive, and use your capital efficiently and your labor power efficiently. There’s an expression. We want an environmental policy as if every molecule mattered. To use a molecule as efficiently as you can to eliminate waste and enhance the way you live. While you’re doing it, make friends and neighbors.
    David Morris: We work on national policymaking more than we did. We focused, the first 30 years, almost entirely on local and state. We went from local to state to national, but at the same time, we’re forever grounded. Whatever you do at the international level, the rubber meets the road at the local level. We’re always focused on the decentralization of production, the decentralization of authority, and the decentralization of responsibility. Those three things, we sometimes call it the arc of community. Authority, responsibility, and capacity. That’s what local self-reliance means.
    Luke Gannon: To David, Neil, and Gil, your contributions have led me to host this podcast today, a role for which I am deeply, deeply grateful. But beyond that, I’m thankful for the opportunity to broaden my understanding of and perspectives on what an economy ought to resemble to make it equitable and inspiring for everyone participating in it. Your lifelong dedication to enhancing our world is truly commendable. Thank you, and of course, a special thanks to my star co-host for making this show what it is. Reggie, over to you.
    Reggie Rucker: Thank you. Thank you, Luke. Thank you for that episode and really for grounding our work and community and in DC. David and Neil and Gil, thank you for your work in founding this institution we are grateful to be a part of. To you, our listeners, thank you for being on this journey with us. Whatever part of the last 50 years you’ve been with us, thank you for your partnership, your allyship on this journey. You are part of our community now, and we thank you.
    We’re going to continue this celebration, but we will be back again in two weeks with another story out of DC. In the meantime, check out the very special show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into ILSR’s history and our relationship with DC. As always, you can visit ILSR.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. And we love getting your emails, so keep sending those to BuildingLocalPower@ILSR.org to let us know what’s on your mind. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Taya Noel. The music for the season is also composed by Taya Noel. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.

     

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    Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet

    Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager

    Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon

    Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet

    Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

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