Sebastopol Cittaslow: Holding onto a Way of Life

©Copyright 2013: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

I grew up in the Los Angeles area in a little town named Hermosa Beach in the late 40’s and early 50’s.  This beach town was isolated from the greater Los Angeles megalopolis because there were no freeways yet.  Hence, my childhood was spent in an idyllic small town.  We had good schools and a warm and friendly small-town lifestyle.  When we went to visit my grandmother in Orange County, we left our small town and drove through miles and miles of bean fields, dairies and, then, orange groves before we finally arrived in Santa Ana (where I was born).  My grandfather was a lawyer in Santa Ana and moved there because he loved the small town lifestyle surrounded by rural, agricultural space.

Looking back on that simple, slow life in Southern California seems like only a dream now.  It did something to me to grow up as Los Angeles grew up around me, spinning almost out of control as roads were built, freeways spiderwebbed their way into communities evaporating the simple, sweet lifestyle, forever changing small towns into areas next to other areas, making lines of demarcations noted by “Welcome to……” signs almost meaningless as one community abutted another and another and another until the cultural identity of each town succumbed to the monolithic greater Los Angeles identity.

There were enclaves of uniqueness, many of which, due to their special geography, high concentrations of famous people, or other variance from the monolithic norm, even to this day maintain a special aura about them (such as Beverly Hills, the Hollywood Hills, Hancock Park, Malibu, Laguna, South Bay beach towns like Redondo, Manhattan, Hermosa, Palos Verdes, etc.); for the most part, however LA achieved a reputation for miles and miles of concrete and asphalt sameness as developers, fueled by the paranoid Cold-War aerospace industry growth explosion in LA, the epicenter, where the biggest names in American aircraft were headquartering themselves, began on a boom-like scale to plant shopping centers and housing tracts like Johnny Appleseed all over Southern California.  It began to take longer and longer to “get through LA” by car on the nearly unnavigable web of freeways.

Far from thriving on the vibrancy emanating from the local cultural revolution, I bailed when I was 20, craving a way to re-create for myself an environment that fostered small-town-slower-way-of-life rustic simplicity.  Instead of having to drive the better part of an afternoon to get to a place where traffic thinned out and houses weren’t stacked against, above and below each other, I sought a place where rural was within walking distance of downtown, where a municipality of 20 thousand, instead of being one of hundreds and hundreds of such abutting each other, stood out as being among the larger municipalities in the area.

In other words, I set out on a quality-of-life quest and ended up in Sonoma County.  Here, shortly after arriving, I struggled to withdraw from the state of being where world-famous classical musicians, opera stars, ballet performers, photographers, movie-stars, poets, jazz greats, rock stars, folksingers, museum displays, surfing safaris, shopping boulevards were minutes away, where food, merchandise, entertainment and fashion were readily available around the clock.

 


Sonoma State College was the first name of Sonoma
State University.  This photo was taken before
any landscaping.  Students called it San Quentin North.



I enrolled in the local university, called Sonoma State College at the time, where I happened upon, among the litany of general education courses required for a liberal arts degree, a cultural geography course that surveyed the series of steps a spot on the Earth goes through in its evolution from bare land, agricultural beginnings and mercantile establishments to city center and cultural identity and, finally, to individual identity.  After that, I looked at Sonoma County differently because, unlike LA, where older sections of town were those over 20 years, I realized that I was able to look around me and see the living history of that evolution of culture in smaller towns, separated from each other by miles of agricultural stewardship, a county where Spain had sent one of its prized generals to create the new California over a hundred years before I was born.

I could see the symbiotic importance of the dairies, wineries, orchards, pastures filled with sheep and beef cattle, farms, poultry-keepers, bee-keepers and apple-processors, all sorts of agricultural enterprises, to the communities and the connectedness of the communities to the local artists and managers of the land.  The symbiosis was palpable to a student of anthropology or Zen, but, at the same time, was so natural here that it mostly went unnoticed as water does to a fish.

HOW CITTASLOW BEGAN

The post WW-2 times lured most of the Western world into super-industrialization and began to weave technology into the everyday lives of citizens around the world.  Parts of cities everywhere began to look like those counterparts in cities everywhere else as chain-store consciousness blossomed and corporate agribusiness invented itself, carrying the lessons of business learned in big cities back out the land and those in charge of its husbandry. 

The image has become commonplace of small armies of air conditioned combines marching through fields of grain at harvest time automatically doing by machine power in minutes what centuries ago took thousands of people several days.  Technology has changed the vision in all of us of what we can do with our world, how we post WW-2 citizens manage the symbiosis of rural and urban.

 

It is a stretch of consciousness beyond anything believed possible by any citizen alive in the 15^th century, for example, to envision a farmer harnessing his work animals to plow the earth and simultaneously envision the many rotations of the wheels of history that have led to tractor technology in farmers’ fields today.  Just as there have been social movements in response to such things as the clear-cutting of mahogany forests in Southeast Asia, mutilation of elephants for their tusks, alligators for purses and shoes, clear-cutting and strip-mining along the Amazon, and the many others that come to mind, a kind of movement favoring natural, local grown food and environmentally-friendly manufactured products has woven its way into our daily lives that began with students of the 60’s wanting organic, macrobiotic diets and led all the way to today’s more generally organic attitude, not restricting the adjective “organic” to foodstuffs, but extending into clothing, bedding, construction materials, personal relationships, you name it.

Evidence of this new organic attitude can be found in department stores, corporate supermarkets, hotels with all natural bed linens, to name a few obvious ones.  In fact, the attitude has become assimilated into many of our governing bodies through (a) enforcement strategies such as those used to insure food labeled “organic” really is, as well as (b) endorsement of and support for organizations dedicated to perpetuating and enriching the concepts of local and organic, of the small-town symbiosis of urban and rural.

The city of Sebastopol has a working relationship with such organizations, one of which came from Italy where it was born in 1999, inspired by a movement spreading around the world for decades known as the Slow Food Movement, on whose web site “slow food” is explained this way:

“Slow Food is an idea, a way of living and a way of eating. It is part of a global, grassroots movement with thousands of members in over 150 countries, which links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.”

A group of mayors of small towns in Italy met and, whether intending to or not, began a movement that has come to our part of the world as well.  It is explained by Tasha Beauchamp this way:

“The Cittaslow movement was started in Italy in 1999 when several mayors in Tuscany decided they wanted to apply the principles of the Slow Food movement to urban planning and commercial development in their towns. They developed the 6 Slow City priorities and began to proudly brand their towns as ‘Cittaslow’. Other mayors asked to participate and eventually they had requests from around the world as many small towns struggle to preserve their local culture while growing their economies in a sustainable manner.”

The number of participating towns is approaching 200.  Here is a link to the list of all the Cittaslow towns in the world:

http://www.cittaslow.org/download/DocumentiUfficiali/CITTASLOW_LIST_4_2013.pdf

71 of the towns on the list are in Italy indicating the movement has really caught on there. What follows is taken directly from the web site of the international Cittaslow organization.  It appears to have been translated from Italian into English and is not written exactly according to our linguistic conventions, but it states well what the Italian mayors had in mind.

“The Movement of cittaslow was born in 1999 through the Paolo Saturnini’s brilliant intuition , past Mayor of Greve in Chianti, a little town of Tuscany.
The new idea of considering the town itself and thinking of a different way of development, based on the improving of life quality, moved him to spread his thoughts all over our country. Fastly his ideals were endorsed by Mayors of towns of Bra (Francesco Guida) , Orvieto ( Stefano Cimicchi) and Positano ( Domenico Marrone) as well as they met later the president of slow food Carlo Petrini’s support. The main goal of cittaslow was, and still is today, to enlarge the philosophy of Slow Food to local communities and to government of towns, applying the concepts of ecogastronomy at practice of everyday life.
Municipalities which join the association are motivated by curios people of a recovered time, where man is still protagonist of the slow and healthy succession of seasons, respectful of citizens’ health , the authenticity of products and good food, rich of fascinating craft traditions of valuable works of art, squares, theaters, shops, cafés, restaurants, places of the spirit and unspoiled landscapes, characterized by spontaneity of religious rites, respect of traditions through the joy of a slow and quiet living.”

There are 3 Cittaslow towns in the United States:  Sebastopol, Sonoma and Fairfax. I am a more recent addition to the 11 steering committee members of the Sebastopol branch of Cittaslow where we have adopted six priorities of the Cittaslow movement:

● Support locally made products and agriculture

            ● Celebrate our culture and history

            ● Welcome visitors (tourism) and embrace neighbors (community cohesion)

            ● Use technology wisely

            ● Promote the health of the environment

            ● Develop community-friendly inftrasturcture

To be designated a Cittaslow town is an honor, not something that is automatically granted to those who apply.  A Cittaslow organization is NOT independent from the city it is in.  The City Council is involved.

It is explained this way by Tasha Beauchamp of the Cittaslow steering committee:

“To receive the designation, the City Council must complete a questionnaire of 60 questions describing how the town demonstrates its commitment to the 6 Slow City priorities. It is a rigorous process. Only 30% of the towns that inquire actually start the application, and only half of those actually finish it. Representatives from the international movement review city applications and score questionnaire results based on the strength of the City's answers. To qualify as Cittaslow, a city must earn at least 50% of the total possible points and commit itself to improving in the areas in which it is weakest. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Sebastopol was very strong in all of the priorities EXCEPT community cohesion.)

“There are cities that do not meet the standards set by the international Cittaslow organization, and they are denied the designation. Once every 5 years a Cittaslow city must apply for re-certification and demonstrate improvements in their weakest areas. Cities that have not made adequate improvements have been de-certified.

“Standards are high, but the intention is to support cities to do their best to improve. This is where the national organization (Cittaslow USA in our case) comes in to assist with organizational development, strategic planning, and networking between Cittaslow cities.

“Every city has its own model for leveraging the designation. Many of the cities in Europe, for instance, have a Department of Cittaslow in the mayor's office. In Korea, Cittaslow is an active part of the university and urban planning system. Cittaslow is brand new in the United States (the first U.S. city to become Cittaslow was in 2009). Given the economic times and a vastly different city government structure, U.S. Cittaslow cities need to rely more on a grass roots effort. This is the model Sebastopol has adopted: the public/­private partnership.”

Two of the members of the Sebastopol Cittaslow steering committee are members of the Sebastopol City Council.  It was one of these two, Sarah Gurney, former mayor of Sebastopol who learned about Cittaslow from the Sonoma contingent and felt Sebastopol was a perfect fit for the concept and started the ball rolling.  About a decade after its inception as a movement in Italy, Sarah brought Cittaslow here

Sonoma City Council Member Laurie Gallian, Cittaslow USA Director Virginia Hubbell, and Sebastopol Mayor Sarah Glade Gurney with the Certificate designating Sebastopol as a member of Cittaslow, July 20, 2010

EXEMPLARY CITTASLOW PROJECT—The banner

When I came on board, the steering committee wanted to expand.  They had spent a couple of years (after the above photo) organizing and had made many contacts in the community of downtown business owners, as well as the community at large, and were ready to take steps to become more visible, to become a non-profit corporation, and raise funds needed to put into motion what viable non-profit corporations typically do as they metamorphose from theoretical beginnings into a local institution.

At the web site that Marty Roberts created for us,

http://www.cittaslowsebastopol.org/aboutus.html

you can read about us and see how we are an all-volunteer bridge organization in the community.  The “bridge” I mention refers to our role in connecting one person or organization to another in order to help make it easier for an important community project to come to fruition.

As of this writing, one such project serves well as an example: the hanging of large banners highlighting community pride in the legendary Gravenstein apple.  In this case the “bridge” is between Cittaslow and Slow Food.  The local Slow Food group has organized an effort to “Save the Gravenstein”, the details of which are here:

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/slow_food/blog_post/saving_the_gravensteins/

As a result of the collaboration of the two organizations, two very large banners were raised prominently so as to be visible to drivers going either direction along Sebastopol’s central thoroughfare.  

When I first came to Sonoma County in the 1960’s, Gravenstein apple farmers were busy as were local canners and distributors.  At harvest time it smelled like applesauce everywhere around Sebastopol.  Driving around the hills and valleys between Sebastopol and Forestville took you through tens of thousands of acres of apple orchards.  In spring the perfume released by the millions of apple blossoms added a pleasant sensory experience to the uplift you took in from the pink and white sight of that sea of blossoms.

Anybody with apples for sale who could get them to the local dryer, canner, juicer or baby-food maker in small amounts or large truck loads could exchange their pickings for money on the spot during the harvest season.  I rode in a truck with a Sonoma restauranteur from his back yard, where he had filled two large crates of apples and loaded them into the back of the truck.  With no appointment we drove to a baby-food company’s apple buying facility in Sebastopol, waited in line until it was our turn, and were finally inspected by a buyer who gave the truck, its contents – including driver and passenger – the “once over”, scrutinizing carefully, then raised one eyebrow, removed all semblances of friendliness from his countenance, replacing them with suspicion and said: “No worms, right?”  After a round of assurances from my restauranteur friend, a billfold opened, a few hundred dollars changed hands and we drove off.  The same scenario repeated itself thousands of times over the course of the few days of harvest as the centuries-old practice of commerce infused the local growers with the cash they sought and the processors with the stuff of profitability.

Those days are gone.  The apple farmers moved out, first to Washington state, then, over the years, to China where apples are now grown by the megaton along with everything else.  What Cittaslow and those whose motto is “Save the Gravenstein” want is not the impossible dream of magically turning back clocks and calendars, but, as apple orchards continue to be ripped up and replaced with wine-grape vineyards, as the great kaleidoscope of life reshapes, it is natural to want to preserve some human connection to our common past, to “Save the Gravenstein”, the apple that is a perfect symbol for Sebastopol, tart and sweet at the same time, refreshing, alive with taste.

We are the kind of community that was ripe for the opportunity to become Cittaslow and, even with the mysterious way this is put: “Municipalities which join the association are motivated by curios people of a recovered time, where man is still protagonist of the slow and healthy succession of seasons, respectful of citizens’ health , the authenticity of products and good food………” we qualify.  In Sebastopol we are people who are intrigued by our history and we want to live in such a way that we heroize the slowing down of life and display great regard for the symbiosis of our local population with the artists, farmers and merchants who dot our landscape.  With the blessing of our Sebastopol City Council and the International Cittaslow Organization, Sebastopol is now officially designated Cittaslow.

Here is a list of all those currently serving as volunteers to Cittaslow Sebastopol:

Tasha Beauchamp - Co-chair

Clare Najarian - Co-chair

Carol Capria - Treasurer

Sarah Glade Gurney - City liaison

Robert Jacob - City liaison

Deborah Morris

Marty Roberts

Annie Dobbs-Kramer

Meg Mizutani

Angie Monette

Richard von Sternberg