{"id":2857723,"date":"2015-09-24T03:16:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T02:16:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2023-02-04T01:18:46","modified_gmt":"2023-02-04T01:18:46","slug":"beliefs-matter-resilience-reflections-with-erik-lindberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2015-09-24\/beliefs-matter-resilience-reflections-with-erik-lindberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Beliefs Matter: Resilience Reflections with Erik Lindberg"},"content":{"rendered":"
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.<\/div>\n
In Resilience Reflections we ask some of our contributors what it is that inspires their work, and what keeps them going.
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Read more Resilience Reflections here including Sandra Postel and Brian Kaller.<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
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\n<\/em>Erik Lindberg received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1998, with a focus on cultural theory. After completing his degree, Lindberg began his career as a carpenter, and now owns a small, award-winning company that specializes in historical restoration. In 2008 he started Milwaukee\u2019s first rooftop farm, and was a co-founder of the Victory Garden Initiative, as well as a member of Transition Milwaukee\u2019s inaugural steering committee. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife and young twin boys.<\/em><\/div>\n
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Who\/what has been your greatest inspiration? And why?<\/b><\/p>\n

Beliefs matter. \u00a0So do stories. My inspiration often comes from the written word, and I\u2019ve long been interested in writers who revel in the complexity of beliefs, understand how adept humans are at self-deception, but nevertheless provide a useful roadmap.\u00a0 Regardless of what I am doing or thinking, I circle back through Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and a few others, with some regularity. \u00a0Among current writers, I find John Michael Greer to be one of the most interesting storytellers; he has impressive range and depth and his writing makes me laugh and rub my hands together with glee. My father, David Lindberg, was an obsessive thinker who was willing to accept truths that could disturb some sorts of self-interest; he had a huge impact on me.\u00a0 Jim Godsil, founder of the Sweetwater Foundation, has been involved, at some level, in almost every interesting thing I\u2019ve done over the past 15 years; he showed me how to combine community activism, a love of concepts, and a life in the building trades.<\/div>\n
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Knowing what you know now about sustainability and resilience building, what piece of advice would you give your younger self if you were starting out?<\/b><\/div>\n
I am who my journey has created.\u00a0 Change the journey and \u201cI\u201d would be someone else–and then so would the advice.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I would have listened anyways.<\/div>\n
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But I do think that in my first several years of involvement in the Transition Movement I (along with many around me) felt <\/i>that a great cultural moment of grand awakening was imminent.\u00a0 Getting used to the fact that there won\u2019t be any such event was difficult and makes a certain level of exuberance hard to muster.\u00a0 Greer\u2019s notion of catabolic collapse has been rough comfort (but comfort nonetheless) for this adjustment.<\/div>\n
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What keeps you awake at night?<\/b><\/div>\n
My three-year old sons.<\/div>\n
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What gets you up in the morning or keeps you going?<\/b><\/div>\n
My three-year old sons.<\/div>\n
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One of my persistent fears is that they will be conscripted someday to fight in a resource war or civil war.<\/div>\n
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What has been your biggest setback and how did you recover?<\/b><\/div>\n
I became interested in deep or real sustainability after reading Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, <\/i>which inspired me to install a roof-top garden or farm on the building that housed my shop.\u00a0 This project, which led to my involvement in Transition Milwaukee and in helping to start The Victory Garden Initiative, made for some exhilarating times.\u00a0 It seemed like we were on the cusp of some big changes and I was on fire.\u00a0 Then I lost the building and the farm in part due to the recession after the 2008 crash and in part owing to my own shortcomings.\u00a0 This experience was very difficult and brought me down to Earth, and then some.\u00a0 But it also reminded me in very important ways that social change, economic disruption, and environmental destruction will not be as fun as Transition Milwaukee steering committee meetings were. \u00a0While my unearned class status has kept me fairly well insulated from a lot of difficult things, I did experience a sort of vulnerability that my own energy and resources could do little about; this was a giant turning point<\/a>.<\/div>\n
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I haven\u2019t recovered from this.\u00a0 Rather I changed direction.\u00a0 This may also be a phase, but I became more inward and focused on ideas and concepts, at least for now.\u00a0 I\u2019m especially interested in expectations<\/i> as a key political, social, economic, and moral concept.<\/div>\n
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For you resilience is…?<\/b><\/div>\n
It has a lot to do with having flexible expectations.\u00a0 Most of the \u201chardships\u201d and setbacks that most people I know have are largely a violation of their expectations, rather than a matter of life of death, or even of their capacity to lead a good life.\u00a0 Being a little too cold or a little too hot, or losing something you worked hard for, or having to go without something you believed you would have, are only a tragedy if we believed we should never have to.<\/div>\n
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What one social\/political\/cultural\/policy change would most assist your work\/hopes\/dreams?<\/b><\/div>\n
Beliefs, alone, don\u2019t move history; but at the same time history doesn\u2019t change without beliefs changing.\u00a0 The biggest obstacle standing between our current way of life and a truly sustainable one may be the failure of people to imagine a future that does not continue along a modern industrial trajectory, in which we can expect more comfort and security, more automation, more choice, more development, and all the other things that are generally associated with progress (even though they don\u2019t make people happier).\u00a0 That we might happily \u201cmake do\u201d with less strikes even the most thoughtful or \u201cradical\u201d people as an absurd suggestion; most liberals will fight tooth and nail to maintain their privilege and are capable of committing awful acts in order to keep what they think they need and deserve.\u00a0 We need a revolution of expectations–hopefully before we dust off the guillotine or invade Canada (or elect Donald Trump).<\/div>\n
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What gives you hope?<\/b><\/div>\n
Probably just the misfiring of brain synapses.<\/div>\n
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What book\/film\/other resource has most supported your work?<\/b><\/div>\n
The Transition Movement will probably not \u201cwork\u201d as intended.\u00a0 But Rob Hopkins and his collaborators provided us with a tremendously significant act of imagination of the sort I mentioned just above.\u00a0 Wendell Berry sowed a seed for lots of my current beliefs way back in 1988 when I read The Unsettling of America<\/i>.\u00a0 It took years for the seed he planted to sprout, but that\u2019s the book.\u00a0 Anyone who hasn\u2019t read it should! I\u2019m also grateful to the Transition Milwaukee crew\u2014truly a group of big-hearted, deep- souled people from whom I learned and gained an awful lot.<\/div>\n
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More articles by Erik Lindberg<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beliefs matter. So do stories. My inspiration often comes from the written word, and I’ve long been interested in writers who revel in the complexity of beliefs, understand how adept humans are at self-deception, but nevertheless provide a useful roadmap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19171,"featured_media":3463714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,79720],"tags":[85817,91616,176181,98139],"class_list":["post-2857723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-society","tag-culturebehavior","tag-resilience","tag-resiliencereflections","tag-transitionmovement"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19171"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2857723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3463714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2857723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2857723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2857723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}