What Do We Know How To Do?

Great relocalization article, snips:

The next time you hear about a corporation outsourcing jobs to specialized workers in India, don’t criticize them. They learned this behavior from you.

You are an expert outsourcer. Don’t believe me? Make a list of all the things you don’t know how to do for yourself. It will look something like this: food production, preservation and safety; raising and butchering animals; clothing manufacture; home building and repair; education; furniture building; tool production; childrearing (daycare); health care; decision-making (self-help gurus, life coaches); fuel production and delivery; communication; water delivery; waste removal; recycling; transportation; toy making; storytelling (TV); governance; funerals; the making of medicine, cosmetics and cleaning products; music making; giving birth/ helping a partner give birth; lactation (infant formula); self-defense; dispensing justice in your community. The food you eat, the clothing you wear, the heat that keeps you warm in the winter — it’s all provided by strangers, some of whom live on the other side of the world, in exchange for that coarsest and most impersonal of commodities: money.

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Many believe that relocalization and reskilling are the best, most viable solution to this set of serious — indeed, lifethreatening — challenges. An international movement that got its start in the United Kingdom, relocalization, or the transition movement, is about regaining lost knowledge and bringing production back to the local community.

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Starting with learning to grow one’s own food, reskilling is a process that people find invigorating and inspiring, Brownlee says.

“It was very delightful to me to discover the favorite reskilling class in the U.K. was sock darning,” he says. “Here in the U.S. when we get a hole in our socks, we toss them. But in the future we won’t do that. We will be darning our socks. Fortunately, there are a few people left who know how to darn socks, and we’re going to have to learn.”

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When people start getting into this food thing — they go to the farmers’ markets, they meet the farmers, they join a CSA — they start rebuilding those connections that are very ancient, and it is a profound discovery. It gives people a sense of hope and positivity that’s been missing.”

Hope. Positive change. Local control. But the heart of it is true community, Brownlee says.

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red states are stuck with blue states whether they like it or not and so on. That means we either continue to bicker and shout and insult one another, or we get a grip and rediscover what it means to live together.

“I like to say that community is our most precious and most endangered resource on the planet,” Brownlee says. “It’s been strip-mined away by economic globalization. It needs to be healed and rebuilt. Underlying the work of relocalization, that’s really the goal.”

It might sound absurd to say that Americans need to come together over a mason jar of homegrown green beans or a homemade cherry pie, but such a gathering holds more promise than another round of national political conventions, no matter who’s running for office.

Imagine this for a moment: a group of local folks get together to learn the art of canning vegetables. They meet as strangers, their attention on mastering a skill that will enable them to put homegrown vegetables on the dinner table even in the depths of winter. They talk, joke, banter. They discover that one of the women is an excellent quilter, while another has been baking her own whole-grain bread for years. The bread-baker, a devout fundamentalist, doesn’t know that the quilter is a secular feminist. Politics don’t come up during the four or five hours they’re together. They’ll spend more time together in the coming months, swapping skills, and by the time their religious and political identities are “outed,” they’ll have too much respect for one another to be uncivil or to hate.

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There’s an advantage to facing these issues now as opposed to allowing catastrophe to force the issue. A community that makes the transition to local food and energy production now will have more control over how that transition unfolds than those that wait for that last drop of gasoline to vanish and summer highs to reach up to 120 degrees in Colorado, as they are predicted to do by the end of the 21st century — even if all world governments meet their goals and keep their promises with regard to reduction of greenhouse gases.

But there’s another less tangible advantage to making this transition now, and it can be summed up in a single word: freedom.

“Freedom is kind of the underlying issue here that doesn’t get talked about very much,” Brownlee admits. “In giving away our capacity to meet our own needs locally, we have become so dependent on distant sources and foreign powers that we in many ways are powerless and can be forced to pay whatever price is asked for what we need, and that’s exactly how freedom can be sacrificed in the name of survival.”

This is true on a national level and on an individual level.