Along the sidewalk in front of John Gear’s house in Salem, spinach, tomatoes, strawberries, squash, peas, cauliflower, and other various food-producing plants extend themselves toward the sun and absorb the water Gear dispenses from a watering can.

To Gear, his garden is more than a summer hobby or ritual; it is preparation for the future - a future Gear believes holds the promise of relying on local food sources and self-sufficiency.

Gear is a recent addition to Salem, having moved from Michigan in 2007, but he is not new to the Pacific Northwest, having lived in eastern Washington and in the Vancouver area for a number of years after spending five years on a submarine while serving in the U.S. Navy.

According to Gear, this confined underwater experience inevitably shaped his awareness of the earth’s limited resources.

“On a submarine, there is no getting away from your wastes and there is a fixed resource base,” Gear explained. “Everything you want to have has to be managed.”

Before his submarine venture, Gear says he was oblivious to the earth's limited resources. “I bought a car before I was even 16,” he reflected, “I don’t think I was particularly sensible.”

Gear relied on his engineering background while working at Hanford, a decommissioned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River, as a policy and procedures technical writer.

“It was a good environmental consciousness-raising place,” Gear said. “Hanford is a good example that it is expensive to make waste and then try to clean it up, but it is sort of the American way; we’ll get what we want now and clean it up later.”

Since moving to Salem, Gear worked for a time with the Department of Energy and currently volunteers with Marion-Polk Legal Aid Service but mostly he is readying himself for what he expects to be a very different future.

“I am more worried about preparing for getting more localized and resilient,” Gear said. His small but abundant garden attests to his efforts as does the now grassless yard that surrounds his home; it will soon be an “edible landscape” with fruit trees, berry bushes, potatoes and other ground cover. “I am working on preparing for a world different from the one I grew up with,” he noted. “The number one thing I would say to kids today is to learn how to grow food or be useful to someone who does know how.”

While learning more about how to grow and store food, Gear is also working to raise awareness in the Salem community. He started a group called STIR (Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization) to alert the community to issues related to climate change, energy scarcity, and the economic consequences of these.

“We don’t have a problem that can be solved,” Gear said. “We are in a predicament. We have to stop living like China is in our backyard.” Acknowledging that times are changing, Gear points out that there can be positive aspects to a life lived more locally. He also recognizes the benefits of living in the Willamette Valley.

“We can live well here if we are smart,” he explained. “The Willamette Valley is as a good a place to be in the new direction we are facing.” Ultimately, Gears says that STIR is about trying to make change from the bottom up.

“We are blessed with the abundance to allow us to live good and decent lives without destroying the planet. That’s what I want to work on,” he said.

For more information about STIR, visit http://groups.google.com/group/Salem-Transition.

Note: Gear also writes for a blog called LOVESalem (Live Our Values Environmentally Salem) and recommends that those interested watch the video HOME, available at http://lovesalem.blogspot.com/2009/06/amazing-video-93-min.html.