ABSTRACT
Worcester, Massachusetts, is a blue-collar city of 180,000 in the northeastern United States. Its economy has been in decline since the late nineteenth century. The residents, however, are well known in that region for loyalty to their city. This loyalty is expressed through an ironic sense of humor and a tradition of storytelling that reminds the current residents of Worcester that it was once a prominent regional centre of American politics and culture. Residents under 40 refer to the city as Wormtown, in bittersweet recognition that the city is no youthful American utopia. The decomposition and detritus of what is rumored to have been a grander past are the raw materials for life in the city’s present. The stories told there today are frequently about that past. They provide intimate gossip about past residents, like anarchist Emma Goldman or poet Elizabeth Bishop, or celebrate hometown inventions ranging from barbed wire to the typewriter to the birth control pill. ‘Firsts’ are a prominent part of the stories: Worcester claims America’s first public park and the printing of its first newspaper and novel. ‘Seconds’ are also on the list, like the Second National Women’s Congress, a major national suffrage event held in Worcester in the late nineteenth century. Unique events also make for some wry storytelling, like the story of the East Coast’s only buffalo hunt, an event initiated when some 50 head of buffalo escaped a Barnum and Bailey circus enclosure and had to be hunted across the entire County (Farnsworth and O'Flynn, 1934).
My family is a part of this grassroots Rumpelstiltskin-like network of local storytellers who spin trivia into pride. Raised among those stories of place, inventions, and politics, these humorists’ approach to civics has persuaded me that sustainability is not an issue of technology, planning or policy alone. First and foremost, sustainability derives from cultural resilience and adaptability. These qualities are rooted in the knowledge of place and human behavior that is encoded in stories. Stories affect our decision making to the extent that we have come to identify with the characters and situations described in these stories, and to the extent that we suspend our disbelief long enough to believe we live in the world those stories describe.
