Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Times of turbulence usually precipitate great change, and we are certainly on the brink of great change. Which direction we go in is entirely down to us – how we spend our money, how we vote, how we engage with our community. I hope the opportunity isn’t wasted.
Coronavirus is both a symptom of the problematic globalized economy and an important signal that things need to change. Emergency short-term measures to contain the virus also have a positive impact on decimated global ecosystems.
We need to be thinking of ways to keep civic connections alive for the next while. The pandemic will not last indefinitely: the virus itself may be here for good, but one way or another it and humanity will negotiate some sort of biological accommodation… Our urgent task is to keep our communities healthy and resilient in the interim.
‘The food that you buy will all be grown locally,’ says policy director at New Consensus, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, in a Vox video. This is stated simply, as an aspect of what it will be like to live in the time of a Green New Deal (GND). Yet it represents a fundamental challenge to international trade governance in ways that must be addressed if the GND is to be successful.
The current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to stand any chance, the global economy must be redesigned. The problem is more fundamental than capitalism or the emphasis on growth: it is money itself, and how money is related to technology.
So today, various relocalization movements need to develop a cultural analog of TCP/IP to help local actors interconnect and inhabit a common space.
As the fault lines in the global economy continue to grow, and the desire for genuine human connection becomes ever more keenly felt, these existing initiatives will provide direction as well as inspiration, and stand as a compelling alternative to the faux-localist path of violence, fear, and hate.
Our current global society appears to be in the conservation phase of its adaptive cycle: it is at a peak of scale and integration. If the cyclical behavior of past societies is repeated in ours, recent trends toward globalization and urbanization will reach natural limits and be reversed.
Despite the warning signs — climate change, biodiversity loss, depleted soils and a shrinking supply of cheap energy — we continue to push along with an economy fueled by perpetual growth on a finite planet.We’ll need to reckon with this discrepancy.
Localization means getting out of the highly unstable and exploitative bubbles of speculation and debt, and back to the real economy – our interface with other people and the natural world.
The way trade works in the global economy can be insane – it wastes resources, worsens climate change, and undermines the livelihoods of millions of small-scale producers worldwide.
To relocalise effectively we need to map the productive potential of our regions and communities, including resource, material, waste and energy flows and identify threads and opportunities for relocalising production and consumption.
