With so many crises and pending crises banging around the world, the rubber still hits the road on Main Street and all the other streets or dirt roads where people actually live. The local community may need to go back to its adaptive roots, the ones that sustained communities in past periods of uncertainty, turmoil and disaster.
Frank Rich wrote the other day about “Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.” Or as I see it, Americans’ insistence on keeping their heads up their asses. Too many of our fellow citizens simply refuse to accept bad news until it hits them in the face.
This insistence (or reluctance to absorb) is broadly and densely distributed across the national culture. And though there are pockets of acceptance and awareness, even in those well-intentioned populations and small regions, how people decide to live fails to align with their knowledge. People who may agree in fact, in principal and on moral grounds with an action that should be taken, rarely are found in the vanguard in taking that action.
These are self-destructive attitudes in that they do not respond to known risks, and to the extent that only the chronically poor – and those who recently have lost all of their money – are practicing the New Frugality, we slip closer to some hazy but highly probable abyss every day.
My pet peeve among these instances of denial, is that while most of us, through habit and addiction, live life as we usual have over the past 20 years, we steadily waste the lead time during which we must eventually, inevitably, change most of what we think of – and act on – as “usual.”
One of the most wrenching changes – related, I’m sure, to the reluctance to give up solo commuting – will be the one from the living in the private realm to the living public realm in as the context for making important decisions. To do so, we must relearn how to engage peacefully and effectively on the personal level with our neighbors and fellow stakeholders in sustainability.
Our federal and state governments have driven themselves and the taxpayers into a financial pit. Partly as a result of that and partly as a compensatory focus on avoiding additional catastrophe, we will find that more of our needs can and must be met close to home, in our own and in our neighboring communities.
The power and the responsibilities will become increasingly decentralized. Just as states in the U.S. are becoming more autonomous, so will counties and towns become more self-reliant. The costs of being centralized and of transportation will have to be mitigated by greater organization and participation in local governance.
This also means more autonomy at the hyperlocal level, in villages and townships that may be separated from larger population centers, or that have distinct cultural values. But through the Net, these hyperlocals can communicate, collaborate, make deals and get smarter.
The problem is, we have largely forgotten how to practice this more intensively cultivated local politic gardening and community organizing. We have not practiced using the Net as an inter-community collaboration tool. And even where those skills have been preserved, developed or rediscovered, we have not yet had to confront the widespread impacts of the Age of Ultimate Limits. This is the situation we find ourselves in, with our home planet maxing out on its natural resources and being destabilized by insatiable human consumption habits.
Lack of complete knowledge where there is risk of total annihilation is no excuse for inaction. We don’t know when or how climate change impacts will affect any particular community. We don’t know if or how well the economy will recover. We do know that neither of these problems have sure or quick solutions. And as situations deteriorate, communities are being forced to adapt or be lost.
Adaptation is a community-level mandate and how it happens is what I intend to follow learn from.