A community-based "no regrets" strategy for survival

The following is a talk I gave at the Sustainable Ballard street fair in Seattle on Sunday. I promised to post it along with links, so here it is -- for folks in Ballard or anyone interested in making their community more sustainable.

This is a good time to be having this community gathering. It is a time when we need to come together while so much is falling apart. If there is one thing we should now understand in this post-Katrina world, it is that there is no security except the security we offer to each other.

We can be sure that there will be more disasters, big and small. What we don’t know is if the suffering will fall to certain families and communities while business as usual continues, or whether there be system-wide breakdowns.

Whatever happens, there is nothing else that can take the place of community when things get really bad. Not money, which can turn worthless. Not possessions which are easily lost or stolen. Only other people, working together, can get us through. But by the time things get really bad, it is late to start building community and harder to find the resources. The time to start is now.

So how do you do that? How do you build meaningful relationships and start implementing the great innovations that could form into a sustainable community? Especially, how do you find time and resources when everyone is so busy, and so many are stretched financially?

What I’ve found as a community activist and an observer of successful community activism is that most people get involved in something because it meets a need, whether for housing, food, or child care or a sense of belonging.

A second principle is that everyone has something to offer and giving is as important to well-being as taking – perhaps more so.

A third is we should begin at a scale at which there can be some immediate successes or accomplishments.

So let me offer some examples of innovations that meet people’s needs, give everyone an opportunity to contribute, and can be accomplished immediately. Many of these examples are found in stories in YES! magazine (links are included below).

You can start pea patches or community gardens, to give people fresh, safe food, an opportunity to be outside with friends and neighbors, a cut in food expenses. This also raises awareness about the difference between fresh and corporate food, and begins building a survival infrastructure.

Canning or drying food together in a church kitchen or someone’s home. Extend the harvest season. Celebrate the harvest together.

Lots of parents with young kids struggling to make it? How about a baby sitting co-op. Maybe a clothes/toy exchange for hand-me-downs. Form a parents group to take kids into natural settings where they can learn to love nature, and support each other in taking our kids out of the over-scheduled treadmill.

A tool bank cuts expenses and encourages people to learn self-reliance skills. Lending tools naturally morphs into helping each other with household or neighborhood improvement projects, like Portland City Repair.

Are you fired up about the great projects you’ve seen here at the Sustainable Ballard street fair, but don’t have the money to install a solar panel or weatherize your home? Some communities have formed revolving loan or joint savings systems. Each person contributes a certain amount each month, and then they take turns drawing out funds for sustainability projects. It’s extra fun to install rainwater harvesting system or retrofit for passive solar when you can share your accomplishment with your friends and when you can help them finance their next innovation.

Hold a monthly pot luck so people can share information about the new innovations.

A neighborhood website can list community events, and people can post things they’d like to offer or things they need.

Those are relatively easy places to begin. What if you’re ready to take the next step?

How about a free clinic for people without health insurance – a regular time when doctors, nurses, dentists, complementary health practitioners volunteer their time.

How about local currencies or Time Dollars, a system in which your contributions to a neighbor are counted, by the hour, and you can then later “spend” those hours by calling on another neighbor. Perhaps the medical professionals who volunteer at the free clinic could be paid in time dollars. Everyone has something to offer, whether it is delivering groceries to a home-bound elder or reading to a child after school. Time dollars helps to unleash this hidden wealth.

In addition to the pea patches, you can begin urban farms, organized as community supported agriculture, so each person who joins “subscribes” to a share of the farm’s produce. Or form such a relationship with outlying farms. And start a farmers market if you don’t already have one, with art, hand-crafted soaps, foods, and gifts. Maybe you can pay part of the cost with Time Dollars.

How about a senior center that also houses a day care center, and a youth center. How about developing internships and mentoring for youth. Get donations of slightly used computers and other electronics from businesses who are upgrading, and let young people use Time Dollars to pay for them.

Begin radio programs for the community, either through a low-power FM station or by streaming on your website.

Okay, it’s getting greener! Ready for the advanced list?

Start your own bank or credit union. A bank is better. Loan money to local living economy business ventures, to help people burdened by excessive high-interest debt, and for purchasing homes.

Start a local land trust so land can be taken out of the speculative market and be permanently affordable.

Develop cohousing for families, seniors, multi-generations.

Launch an integrated food system, like the one in Burlington, Vermont, where the waste heat from a power plant warms greenhouses that produce food year-round. The food is processed by one of a number of businesses that make use of a business incubator facility – that is a facility with health-department approved kitchens where would-be business owners can try out their salsa recipe or their favorite soups.

Start a restaurant owned by local people that features great, local food, conversation cafes, music events, study trips, speakers.

Did you notice -- none of these require a change in the power structure in Washington, DC. All of these are things we have the power to do, in our own communities, to meet our needs.

We’ve allowed the cash economy – the corporate economy – to take over too much of our lives. When we are dependent on a corporate employer, a corporate chain store, the corporate media, we lose our independence. Everything is oriented around the short-term bottom line, and pretty soon, we can’t even imagine that there is anything more to life than working and consuming. We lose the creative space in which we can make a life that is sustainable, filled with joy, and meets our needs as individuals and as a community. We need to move more and more of our lives out from under the corporate banner and into liberated spaces that we create ourselves.

We need these liberated places to find out what we’re made of and what is possible. And we need community and the infrastructure of community to get us through hard times and to fully relish the good times.

Is there anything more satisfying than offering our gifts to others in our communities who appreciate them? And is there any form of security more meaningful than knowing that your friends and neighbors have your back?

In a time of unraveling, we also need to understand the big picture. Things are unraveling because they are not sustainable. We are reaching the limits of the Empire Era of human history. We can no longer base our economies on over-exploitation of the natural world, the use of military force to enforce our access to other people’s resources, the use of our society’s considerable clout to further concentrate wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. These things, and the values of materialism and selfishness that go with them, cannot continue.

The kind of transition we’re in creates tremendous stress. Those who can’t see that there is another way, fall into a nihilist trap and believe the world is ending. The enormous popularity of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels is a sign of this obsession with end times.

But a new era is being born, and all that you’ve seen today at the Sustainable Ballard Fair is part of its struggle to be born. With that, I’d like to thank you all for being here. No one is going to do this work for us. All of us are among the millions of mid-wives of a new era.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.