Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One centralised Parliament is much easier for the likes of Rupert Murdoch to influence than a plethora of local authorities at a scale small enough for people to actually meet up and discuss their needs in person.
Ten months since our major cities were blanketed by smoke from the Black Summer bushfires and nine months since the National Climate Emergency Summit considered the radical emergency footing that is now Melbourne’s COVID-19 reality, a quiet suburban revolution is taking place.
How could local authorities raise their game and start to shift the balance towards more local food resilience? There are a few pointers towards a more radical approach. One is the way that many have declared climate emergencies and begun to work with citizen groups to find new ways forward.
For more than two years now, the small community of Whatcom County, in Northwest Washington State in the U.S. has been working with local leaders to take bold action that would restrict growth of dirty fossil fuel projects in their community — all while safeguarding industry workers, the climate, and the economy.
The powers and resources of city governments must be protected and enhanced to provide proper oversight and governance of new food challenges.
The growing effects of climate change, including climbing global temperatures and rising sea levels, are forecast to have an increasing economic impact on state and local governments in the United States. “This will be a growing negative credit factor for issuers without sufficient adaptation and mitigation strategies,” Moody’s noted in a statement released in conjunction with the report.
If you’ve been looking to the federal government for action on big challenges such as poverty, climate change, and immigration, this has been a devastating decade…a more hopeful story is unfolding. Cities are taking action.
There has been much written about the federalist nature of the American political system. But virtually all of it focuses on the rights of states vs. the federal government. At this historical moment, where the last bastion of true democracy is at the local level, we need to extend the debate to include the rights of communities vs. the states.
The old-fashioned school districts that provided me with a convenient example in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report represent a mode of politics that nobody, but nobody, talks about in today’s America. Across the whole landscape of our contemporary political life, with remarkably few exceptions, when people talk about the relationship between the political sphere and the rest of life, the political sphere they have in mind consists of existing, centralized governmental systems.
