A community bucket list
- Make a map collaboratively - show what YOU think is important, not what a geographer tells you is important
- Create a park that reflects the values of your community
- Don't take your amenities for granted - have backup plans for the necessities of life - water, energy, food, medicine. Make a peak oil plan, for example
- Do a community self-portrait
- Go on vacation to see another community
- Be pen pals with a community in another country
- Have a workshop to make a community bucket list
Preparing for the worst? Try making your world more resilient.
In the Washington Post online's opinion pages, dated Friday Feb 25, Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network, describes the measures that he is taking to prepare for an increasingly likely scenario of system disruption resulting from climate change.
I know several people who have concluded that things are likely to get much worst and are preparing with similar measures. Some have bolt holes in the mountains and a few are stockpiling weapons. Many are edging towards food self sufficiency by ramping up gardening or working out energy self-sufficiency options. Measures to prepare for the worst may be prudent, but they aren't sufficient. There's probably some correlation between personal security measures and a sense of the absence of resilience in a community. The only meaningful way to prepare for the worst when it becomes a chronic problem is to work with your neighbors to improve the resilience of your community. What can you do? Well in the first instance, it would be useful to assess your vulnerabilities - where your community is not likely to spring back easily after a shock. And although I have not yet developed such an analytical tool, I think that it is safe to say that many of us live within a system of systems that is very precise, and finely balanced - think "just in time" delivery of necessities. Last winter the Manchester Guardian, reporting on the difficulty of stocking shelves after heavy snows, warned that the region was "nine meals from anarchy". Our system is so finely tuned that a failure in one component easily leads to cascading failures, culminating in a complete breakdown in social order such as was seen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. Brothers and sisters, better locks on your doors, hidey holes in the mountains, and a generator may make you feel secure. But in the long term, will you be more secure? Will your community close ranks and help one another? Or is it every man for himself where you live? Women, do you agree? How then do we respond? That's the challenge.Amplify’d from www.washingtonpost.com
As a longtime environmental activist, I was deeply alarmed by new studies on global warming, so I went all out. I did my part.
Now I'm changing my life again. Today, underneath the solar panels, there's a new set of deadbolt locks on all my doors. There's a new Honda GX390 portable power generator in my garage, ready to provide backup electricity. And last week I bought a starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows.
Human cooperation may have emerged from punishment, not altruism.
There are some important lessons here for community-based natural resource management. In particular, it raises the possibility that the cultural frames of reference of outside observers of CBNRM may be radically different from those of the community itself. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been at this business for a while, but it does provide an interesting explanation as to the nature of the difference. It makes me want to go back and reread Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Amplify’d from jonfwilkins.blogspot.com
