A Different Way of Thinking

    “Local Sustainability” is a lifestyle where every natural (or unnatural) resource you need to survive originates from nearby. For our purposes let’s define “nearby” as within a half-day’s walk from home.
• You don’t need anything you can’t at least partially control.
• What happens in the next county, state, or country has little effect on you.
• You and others who depend upon local resources are going to take care of them.
• People have a sense of “place” and function. Those who would attempt to steal or corrupt in such a situation will move on quickly (tar and feathers tend to do that).
• Most employment is local, and involved fairly directly with the local needs and comforts of life (telecommuting and distant travel would still be options).
• Transportation needs will be greatly reduced, and expensive personal transportation will no longer be essential to life. Access to global travel however, will still be convenient.

   Such enclaves of prosperity and stability could coexist among existing infrastructures – and indeed could be quite synergistic with them. The modular nature of such communities would enable widely diverse cultures to live harmoniously near each other.
For our part, we would be providing an increasingly refined alternative to economic slavery and to an ecological time bomb.
   The objective is to free ourselves of the need of the current infrastructure. We may well enjoy the privileges, but we must be very careful to maintain control of the essentials at the user level.

   A very different paradigm will be needed. Some of the necessary changes may be quite offensive to some in modern cultures, and it may take exceptionally rational minds to consider them seriously. It is obvious however, that if we don’t begin thinking differently, we aren’t going to change a thing.
   This exercise is for those moving forward into the future, rather than accepting their current paths as casualties of history. If some of these concepts seem un-American, consider that any resemblance to America is purely coincidental. We are trying to achieve something more honest, fair, and universal than Hollywood and politics.

   Historically, local sustainability was the general rule through the first half of the 19th century (the 1800’s). It is true that key centrally-manufactured goods were increasingly common, and were developing dependencies in the metropolitan areas, but with a few key exceptions, the rural areas and widely-separated towns depended little upon outside help.

   Local self-reliance faded quickly however, in areas that had access to railways. The transportation systems that have unified the globe and made all its resources available everywhere have virtually eliminated local sustainability.
   The path in this case is to first step backwards in time to consider the components of an earlier period, and then take “history” down a different path that does not include needing distant resources. We need to bring modern tools, sciences, and creativity to bear on implementing technically sophisticated answers to age-old problems.

   The Welfare challenge is to compassionately meet real needs without spawning a sense of entitlement – let alone an entitlement-oriented government.
   This would require an iron-clad wall against conflicts of interest in which those receiving community resources could not have any say in what they receive. The logical end of this is that welfare recipients would not be allowed to vote (gasp!), and public salaries could only be determined by the constituency, rather than by the politicians receiving them.
   Now obviously we want to help the less fortunate, and we want to properly reward those in public service, but we also want to protect the poor from being abused as political fodder by politicians capable of voting their own salaries.
   The concept of having the producers and contributors determine the use of public resources must be kept in balance. All qualified (i.e. non-special interest) votes must be counted as equal, regardless of the income levels. Special interest must be thwarted, but equality must be maintained.

   Transportation would have a very different face. Look around you: When you consider the streets, driveways, garages (personal and commercial), parking lots, gas stations and all the local businesses supporting the transportation infrastructure, how much or our environment is obliterated by this one component of our infrastructure? Many would say that this accounts for about half of the real estate within our cities and towns. Now consider the impact of our highways, railways, oil wells, refineries, super-tankers, wars, bad treaties, skyrocketing fuel prices, economic control, etc, etc. What does our mobility ultimately cost us?
   With all natural resources originating from within a few miles, heavy vehicles could disappear. We may still maintain links to global personal travel, but an efficient community-owned system would do the connecting. Certainly this requires an adjustment to our current habits. But consider: How much of your paycheck goes to car payments, fuel, vehicle taxes, and insurance?
   Typically people migrate for greater opportunity, so a modern self-supporting system must provide opportunities to maintain suitable personnel. Local sustainability would force a more even distribution of employment categories. A village complex of less than 100 acres would offer professional opportunities in medicine, engineering, and various categories of R&D. There would also be jobs in construction, education, and other services. Internet access would remove all barriers to educational opportunities.

   Relationships with others in your community will be among the most challenging and important changes. In our current lifestyles we generally have no need to (or interest in) knowing who lives next door in our apartments or neighborhoods. Now however, they will be significant to our daily lives. They will be directly involved in the commodities and services we use every day, and they will be depending upon us to do our part. There will be a mutual dependence among neighbors for security and quality of life.
This is a mixed blessing. Survival itself is not life, but relationships are.

 

   Money is extracted from a system by those who lend it from outside, and our nation is a prime example. Our entire monetary system depends upon loans from an international consortium of bankers. Interest is charged by this group (Federal Reserve) on every dollar in circulation, and is tuned to optimize their profit while keeping our economy alive enough to do so. Such debt continues to increase the disparity between the rich and the poor. (As a chilling side note, be aware that the both the Secret Service and National Guard are now under the Treasury Department – basically a pawn of the Federal Reserve.)

   Other schemes of unearned wealth that sap economic energy without directly producing a product include taxes, opportunistic litigation, mandatory insurance and the innumerable fees imposed by the hierarchy of governmental agencies. In addition to all this, endless regulations complicate business and blight efficiency. Until the land of a village is debt-free, it would remain just another player in global war and money.

   Debt is control, and control is the antonym of empowerment. Although initial external debt may be necessary, the debt of anything within the village is not. We must reorient our thinking to proactive preparation, rather than continuing to commit ourselves to financial slavery. Resources must be allocated ahead for the unexpected needs. This should become routine in our thinking both individually and as a group.