Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Sunday, October 8, 2006

I just returned from a remarkable three-day meeting at the Wildacres Retreat center in the North Carolina mountains near Little Switzerland. John Wear and Willa Mays of the Catawba College Center for the Environment in Salisbury, NC, officially kicked off an entity called the Sustainable Communities Leadership Institute with this first convening of its new advisory board.

What a terrific, diverse set of leaders from North and South Carolina it was who met and mingled in this lovely, remote mountain setting, where cell phones and laptops are frowned upon. (Half of the time you can’t get a signal, but quickly you realize that you don’t want to be connected to anyplace but here.) Wildacres is a place with a rich history and was established as an arts center and cultural exchange by the Blumenthal family of Charlotte back in the mid 1930s. It sits on about 1,600 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the Blue Ridge Parkway at an elevation of 3,300 feet; mostly what you see are trees, birds and squirrels. Once you arrive, you feel that you’ve checked out of modern life. It’s another, simpler world. The doors in the dormitory have no keys; this is not a place where you have to worry about roaming thieves. At night, the sky is dark and the only thing you hear is a breeze blowing through the trees and perhaps an outdoor concert.

Our group met to discuss the multitude of concerns affecting sustainability in the Carolinas. We talked about the passion of opposition to things and often the greater challenges of building new coalitions and realities. We talked about the lack of urgency to bring about change to communities as we know them and the culture of consumerism—a rather amorphous but still very real foe in the campaign for sustainability. We did very valuable work in laying the cornerstones for what we all anticipate will be an important institute that will train many leaders in the future. And, we made new friends and reinforced ties with old ones, and went back to our homes feeling renewed and refreshed.

As I put away my notes from this meeting, I begin work on my next engagement. On Tuesday, Frank and I fly to Austin, Texas where we will shoot Wednesday for the series. On Thursday, I’ll be speaking on a panel about simple living at the Texas Governor’s Conference for Women in Austin. We’re both excited about returning to the Texas capitol, where I spent a few months back in 1993. Then it was a dynamic, bustling city, home to two of my first cousins, the Kelley girls, and their spouses and their three children.

Now it’s just as dynamic, I understand, from some of the terrific urban programs we’re lined up to shoot for the show. Now, if someone could just figure out a way to make all this travel more sustainable (on the soul and our environment), I’d be an even happier camper.