Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We are finding that in the case of the city I live in Portland, Oregon, that the hottest areas are where people have the least formal education, limited English proficiency, high levels of racial diversity and extreme poverty.
Citizen-led retrofitting, long the poor relation of climate policy, could now be its secret weapon in accelerating rapid transition.
Plugging in to a wider network of other groups also developing grassroots climate responses can help our local ideas and projects to flourish, help us learn and share with others that have the vision of more sustainable and equal communities where we have control over our day to day lives.
So how do we hack at the root? I don’t really have an answer but I think a few useful things might include: working continuously to break through corporate control of the narrative, to educate our fellow citizens; fighting to block whatever insanity is pushing through in our own locales; and working to set up ourselves, our families and our communities to get through the coming collapse with as much integrity as possible.
Traditional/original AT, based on communal social arrangements, hand-crafted from local, natural materials that cultures have used since centuries mostly for subsistence purposes, satisfies practically all of the principles of deep sustainability.
Maybe we are just Irish monks in a new dark age emerging, copying texts for a future generation to decipher. Yet involvement in where we live is the tapestry of who we are.
I firmly believe in the virtues of laziness. I would see a return to economic un-productivity. Happily, I also doubt wage-work will survive as we are forced to focus on meeting our own needs using less transport and fewer resources.
How can dreaming up futures which might never happen help communities to build resilience and address the challenges of a changing world?
In another solo episode, our host Vicki Robin shares her recent reflections on themes emerging from the “What Could Possibly Go Right?” inquiry.
The Dallas Food Justice Coalition provides a simple but powerful model. By bringing together community advocates from different areas of food justice, they’ve begun cultivating a grassroots solution to our broken food system that focuses on empowering and educating the community rather than simply providing aid.
Where we’ve allowed cheaper-to-build, cheaper-to-maintain, quality-of-life-enhancing things to become luxuries, that is on us. That is our failure, and it’s a failure brought about to a large extent by bad policy that tells us we can’t have nice things, because nice things are for the rich.
Some thrive at the local, others the global, others at the regional, and others, still, do great bouncing from one to the other to the other. But I think there is value in considering this honestly, and better understanding at what level you want to enact change, and then focusing there.
