from: Center for Ecoliteracy
Students participate in project-based learning over several days as they assess their community's ability to respond to crises that threaten both natural and human systems. Then they develop ideas for redesigning their community to be more resilient.
Downloadable materials for these lessons include instructions and discussion questions, a set of "Redesigning Our Community" cards for students, professional development suggestions for instructors, and links to resources about resilient communities.
Grade Levels: 9–12
Estimated Time:
Lesson One: 50 minutes
Lesson Two: five to six hours, spread over several days
Lesson Three: seven to eight hours, spread over several days
Lesson One: 50 minutes
Lesson Two: five to six hours, spread over several days
Lesson Three: seven to eight hours, spread over several days
Key Concepts:
- As we face complex and interconnected environmental and social challenges, some communities are transforming their structures, functions, and relationships to anticipate those challenges.
- By considering key local indicators, we can estimate our community's ability to endure and recover from crises that threaten the quality of life of humans and other living beings.
- Transforming a community often leads to personal and social transformations for community members.
Download Designing a Resilient Community Activity (1.3 mb pdf)
AND...
The Close-to-Home Economy: Seven Tips to Help Communities “Relocalize” Their Resources, Goods, and Services
By Ellen LaConte
Okay, let’s say we’ve all accepted the harsh truth: Our global, fossil-fueled economy is headed for collapse, and we need to “go local” to save our own lives.
Question is, what now? How can we 21st century Americans—a nation of people frighteningly dependent on the global economy to meet our basic needs—start transitioning away from the system that’s hurting us?
“First of all, don’t panic!” says Ellen LaConte, author of Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it. “While it’s true that most of us are ill-equipped to provide for ourselves on a local level, we can change that reality. There are plenty of things we as communities and also as individuals can do to bring sustainability closer to home.”
LaConte offers the following tips to help you get started:
Wrap Your Mind Around Local vs. Global
Once you (and hopefully your family, friends, and community) are convinced that practicing sustainability at the local and regional level is a priority, you’ll want to begin by practicing subtraction. Simply put, when you identify what you will no longer be able to purchase cheaply or at all from a larger economy, you’ll know what you’ll need to provide for yourselves. LaConte offers a mental exercise in deglobalization, “The ABCs of Peak Oil,” www.ellenlaconte.com/practicing-subtraction
Once you (and hopefully your family, friends, and community) are convinced that practicing sustainability at the local and regional level is a priority, you’ll want to begin by practicing subtraction. Simply put, when you identify what you will no longer be able to purchase cheaply or at all from a larger economy, you’ll know what you’ll need to provide for yourselves. LaConte offers a mental exercise in deglobalization, “The ABCs of Peak Oil,” www.ellenlaconte.com/practicing-subtraction
Create a Game Plan
Practicing subtraction can, quite honestly, be pretty depressing. Good thing there’s a cure for those low spirits: practicing replacement. The fact is, all but the most hard-scrabble locations possess a literal wealth of natural and human assets. You can get worship centers, schools, and more involved in discovering them—make the task into a competition or game!
Practicing subtraction can, quite honestly, be pretty depressing. Good thing there’s a cure for those low spirits: practicing replacement. The fact is, all but the most hard-scrabble locations possess a literal wealth of natural and human assets. You can get worship centers, schools, and more involved in discovering them—make the task into a competition or game!
On the lists of what you’d lose in a post-global, local economy, mark the things that are a) vital to physical survival, and b) vital to social, emotional, and psychological well-being (in other words, happiness). Then brainstorm which ones can be replaced regionally and sustainably. You can use SimCity game platforms or computer models of human and natural communities to test-drive your ideas and to turn global dependents into proudly “local yokels.”
Set Up a Shadow Government (Don’t worry; it’s perfectly legal!)
If established governments don’t seem eager to work toward local self-sufficiency and sustainability, you can work around them and under their radar, unofficially. (In Recreating Democracy, LaConte’s mentor, community democracy guru Lloyd Wells, and his colleague Larry Lemmel lay out the steps and even offer sample legal boilerplates for establishing community associations that organize and empower relocalizers.)
If established governments don’t seem eager to work toward local self-sufficiency and sustainability, you can work around them and under their radar, unofficially. (In Recreating Democracy, LaConte’s mentor, community democracy guru Lloyd Wells, and his colleague Larry Lemmel lay out the steps and even offer sample legal boilerplates for establishing community associations that organize and empower relocalizers.)
“If you have a group of committed ‘local yokels,’ you can create systems that pick up the post-global economic, social, and environmental balls that existing governments are dropping,” notes LaConte. “No laws prevent communities from creating local currencies, locally owned banks, businesses, and factories, or from incentivizing local energy and production systems and job creation. Start by crafting locally generated ten-, twenty-, or even hundred-year plans for sustainability.”
Create a Local Currency
“Funny money” is LaConte’s term for immaterial currency and transactions such as credit cards, derivatives, investment vehicles, and so forth that are backed by the idea and expectation of value instead of by material goods. Since this faith-based “faux money” is inherently unstable, and since millions of un- and under-employed Americans lack legal access to enough of it anyway, communities can do what they did during the Great Depression: create their own money systems and currencies.
“Funny money” is LaConte’s term for immaterial currency and transactions such as credit cards, derivatives, investment vehicles, and so forth that are backed by the idea and expectation of value instead of by material goods. Since this faith-based “faux money” is inherently unstable, and since millions of un- and under-employed Americans lack legal access to enough of it anyway, communities can do what they did during the Great Depression: create their own money systems and currencies.
“A Google search will turn up how-tos for creating local money,” notes LaConte. “The why-to is simple: It gets a local economy moving.”
Rezone for Home-Grown
Locally grown food tops the list of “must-dos” in a post-global age. With the exception of regions with harsh climates and geography, the only thing standing between the locally minded and locally grown food is outdated suburban and urban zoning regulations. Learn what your own zoning laws do and don’t allow, and if necessary, press your government to change zoning laws and to allow residential, neighborhood, public, and non-profit food production, small-scale animal husbandry, and composting. And after your proposals are (hopefully) enacted, suggest ways to get even more widespread support for relocalization of food production.
Locally grown food tops the list of “must-dos” in a post-global age. With the exception of regions with harsh climates and geography, the only thing standing between the locally minded and locally grown food is outdated suburban and urban zoning regulations. Learn what your own zoning laws do and don’t allow, and if necessary, press your government to change zoning laws and to allow residential, neighborhood, public, and non-profit food production, small-scale animal husbandry, and composting. And after your proposals are (hopefully) enacted, suggest ways to get even more widespread support for relocalization of food production.
Here are five suggestions to get you started:
- “Make food safety regulations appropriate to the scale of production and distribution; require local institutions, businesses, and agencies to purchase a certain percentage of the food they serve within 100 miles of their location; retrofit waste management systems to use local food scraps to produce compost, biogas, and animal feed,” write Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomford in The Food & Farming Transition.
- Establish local and regional systems of inspection and accreditation for residential, neighborhood, community, and regional food producers and composting systems to be carried out by trained volunteers, including students.
- Encourage seasonal celebrations of local sustainable agro-culture: For example, hold a competition for Best Food Yard, Best Bee, Bird & Butterfly Yard, or Best Farm Practices.
- Coordinate yard- and equipment-sharing systems that connect potential gardeners with others who are willing to share yard space, garden tools, and farming equipment.
- Craft provisions allowing easements and rights-of-way in residential property deeds so that cooperatively managed food production systems can cross boundaries.
Save and Collect Water
For obvious reasons, economies of any size need water for things ranging from local manufacturing and food production to the maintenance of sanitary conditions. And since no region can guarantee consistent, year-round precipitation, optimization of what water is available will be key to the success of sustainable local economies. Individuals, businesses, and institutions can install water-saving devices and greywater recycling systems (greywater is water that has been used for purposes other than flushing toilets) in order to get the most bang for their public water utility buck and most use out of regional fresh water supplies.
For obvious reasons, economies of any size need water for things ranging from local manufacturing and food production to the maintenance of sanitary conditions. And since no region can guarantee consistent, year-round precipitation, optimization of what water is available will be key to the success of sustainable local economies. Individuals, businesses, and institutions can install water-saving devices and greywater recycling systems (greywater is water that has been used for purposes other than flushing toilets) in order to get the most bang for their public water utility buck and most use out of regional fresh water supplies.
Households and businesses can also install downspout collection systems and on-site cisterns with pumps to store water against dry spells, as well as composting toilets. These commodes get around the problem of wasted “brown water” (water that can’t be recycled and reused at the household, business, or institutional level).
Relocate and Relocalize (It’s something to think about, anyway.)
It’s something we all hope won’t happen, but it’s possible that the failing global economy will leave many Americans stranded someplace that’s ill-suited to providing even the basics—food, water, shelter, survivable weather, and clothing—let alone any of the niceties.
“The fact is, fossil fuels allow us to live in places humans never could before, or at least not very many humans, but those fossil fuels won’t be readily available forever,” LaConte points out. “In anticipation of downsizing to a more local economy through sheer necessity, some are choosing to relocate where weather, soils, water, jobs, and other resources are supportive.”
Before you make any hard-and-fast decisions yourself, consider the following:
- Go where family, friends, or colleagues who share your concern for economic relocalization and sustainability form the core of a functional community. Economic localization is a team sport.
- Go rural if rugged self-reliance and the agrarian version of the American dream suit you. In fact, many states and towns in the middle of the country have lost populations due to increased urbanization and low employment. When we are producing jobs and provisions for ourselves, employment in a global economy will no longer be an issue, and many rural areas can be restored to their historic self-reliant status.
- Go urban if you’re a people person and want to work with a variety of relocalization groups. If possible, choose a city where existing laws and leadership favor sustainability, green, local, and post-carbon initiatives. See, for example, the book Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
“As we move toward more regional and local economies, we will learn that we really don’t need a lot of what we think we do to be happy,” concludes LaConte. “Enough is enough, and more may be fatal to us and other living things. Our most important needs are for things of the spirit, mind, and heart that we never could purchase, anyway. And those things are eminently localizable. They are the highest reward we receive when we meet our material needs up close and personal—sustainably and together.”
Ellen LaConte is a memoirist, magazine and book editor, freelance writer, and editor of the bi-monthly online newsletter Starting Point. She has been published in numerous magazines and trade journals on subjects ranging from organic gardening, the environment, and alternative technologies to the evolution of consciousness, democracy theory, and complex living systems. After three decades of homesteading in Connecticut and Maine, she gardens now on a half-acre in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina.
Ellen’s book Life Rules: Why So Much Is Going Wrong Everywhere at Once and How Life Teaches Us to Fix It is available at local bookstores and online. For more information, visit www.ellenlaconte.com
Replies
Anticipation is mentioned twice in this text. What is anticipation and how it works? Robert Rosen was a scientist who has written in his scientific works that anticipation requires (in order to anticipation be physically possible) time to have two directions. Whether or not this is true, a real anticipation demands from individuals to behave like this is really the case: to react to the future. I've had my share of anticipating and failing to properly adjust to future events. I learned in the process that one needs to learn to accept a failure when one reaches out a hand into the void and touches nothing. That's life.
I've heard that we should reconnect with the source and nature and relearn how to use our instincts and intuition. No, this is the first time ever (at least in the part of the universe known to us) that an animal species needs a lot of self-awareness and long-term thinking to fix the mess. It's an experiment. Who wants to be more involved in the experiment also needs to be prepared for the failure and agony.