Localism
Been Ages since I’ve blogged, so hi again. Where am I at, what am I on …
Google tells me I’m on an island off the coast of Auckland city, New Zealand.
One of 10,000, where some live the glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine. A New York Times travel feature recently called us the Hamptons of the South.
“Hands up anyone want this assignment” … Well, fly me round the world with my rose tints, and I would wax lyrical about anything too. Cheers NYT.
On my island there are the well-to-do, then lots of us that service them. I’m mostly in the latter bunch but on a sly day can be found hanging on the shirt tails of the former. Privileged.
For now we have food and shelter, my children, and their children.
In that respect we are fully paid up first world lucky.
Lucky to enjoy this seaside largesse by virtue of birth, a cottage purchase a decade ago and a great network of community chums.
Shit’s going down overseas — as always, and there’s a few potholes on the roads closer to home. Unsavoury truths are circling and descending.
Some, like Russian paratroopers, already landed. Mother nature’s started wheel clamping us before we’ve even stopped the car. I know as do lots of my peep’s that we’ve overshot the mark in our quest for the modern world.
The whole thing showed so much promise. Plenty of narratives always on offer and tellingly we went for the aspirational one, the acquisition one, the ‘profit/growth’ one. Lots in the catalogue, so much choice …
All that time we thought it was all about us. For a while it was.
Following the fissures of the 1970’s, we popped the cork on the 80’s winner takes all.
Dancing on the tables to the free market’s runaway hit ‘I’ll Have That Thanks’.
Especially when it came to exploiting and extracting our planets resource for economic growth — a good thing apparently, depending on the economic flavour of your saviour. Me, I’ve always been a JK Galbraith economist, comb-over to the left.
And now we have to chill it the fuck out, crawl into the chai tent and dribble for a while to recalibrate. Will we? Well, the modern human engine is a hungry beast.
Pulling the brake is just not going to happen. Cop26, Greta Thunberg ? bless.
So it’s going to happen To Us, already is.
Pick your geopolitical hotspot, load your drones.
Pick your expanding desert belt wasteline of depleted soils and failed crops.
Pick your oceanic plastic small things riding on the currents.
Pick your production and supply chain maybe’s
Pick your billions on the see-saws of obedience.
These are most twisted times we inhabit.
If you’re after an angle on the Russian sit’n, the first part of this guys blog has resonated with me the most. Not the latter part. I’m a dove not a hawk.
He could be right, but I can’t go there.
I have never been more alarmed and excited in the same breath.
My wife said to me when our first covid lockdown happened here in New Zealand — 2 yrs ago now, ‘There’s no need to look so gleeful .. “
True, I was riffing on it bigtime. Even though it stopped my small business dead in it’s tracks. I’d spotted a chink in the armour, the latest rug-pull sitting on the bench of our fast times. Not so much the virus itself, more the kickers that come from the cutoff’s in business as usual. New and exciting territory for sure — terrifying but essential. Ask the Lorax.
Reflecting personally, it’s been and still is, a fascinating trajectory. 42 yrs ago I was a freshly minted macro-economics grad. I liked the rebel energy of the free market boys n’ girls rolling seamlessly into boosty promise-projections. But I found the focus lacking in dimension, the patter a bit skint.
Integrity, empathy, take-a-man-at-his-word, trust, all a bit pawned in the wake of heady times. The now infamous rollcall — Thatcher, Reagan, American foreign policy, Rogernomics here in NZ; none of it smelt or felt right to the touch. Blogged bout this before
Now in 2022, the leveraged boom-bust bubble gyro’s are spinning on max, GFC 2008 just the curtain raiser.
The Lorax might be loving the supply chain peak production neolib meltdowns, but We’re not going to like it, not one bit.
And trying to get a handle on it … smoke and mirrors, choose your tribe, commentators mewing predictable schtick.
Who to believe? Where is there robust leadership ?
So much clutter, so much to defrag …
We’re open house on information, so we think we know a lot. But really we’re Generation Sifter — big mouth whales dragging for plankton, endless spume firing out the top, least I hope there is.
We’re not only very tolerant of being misled, I think we quite like it.
You know, tell me something I want to hear, give me hope, lie to me if you must, have a happy day. Media oldboy Marshall McLuhan would be handing out the tabasco suppositry’s by now if he were still with us. Fahrenheit 451.
These coming times seem like a new dystopia — and they will prove to be.
The last five decades ‘normal’ have expediated our arrival to this place.
From here on it’s looking more and more like localism — networking community, growing food and the purpose and connection that come from these challenges.
Will we ‘go without’, be hungry ? Quite likely.
As we’re impacted personally by contemporary change and pennies drop, there’s confusion and anxiety. We already know lockdowns and their ricochet’s have rendered having a job, or viable business, as all a bit elastic.
Though we now know a fair bit, we are largely atrophied to any meaningful shapeshifting. Cos we can’t — as first world fossilfuel feeders our relationship to product and service is electronic and hydrocarbon rich.
Now figure a future with few if any cars/trucks/flights/shipping/big box stores yada, & keep biggering the figuring as peak supply, supply chain fails and markets nursing downwards wounds, penetrate our ability to keep up our level of comfort, convenience, consumption and civilisation.
No food in the supermarket could change a lot of things. Diesel for the trucks and where I live, ferries that transport them ? One would hope, or would one ….
We cashed up a lot of booty in a few short centuries, mostly a few short decades. Easing up is the new black. Key to our survival is now getting the carbon back into the soil. Not into the sky.
My elevator pitch these days is localism, growing food sources within our physical communities, rural and urban. Compost is the new rock n’ roll.
We’re all going to become gardeners and educators. Food, shelter, community and with it, conflict resolution.
Shifting gear on personal narrative is hard work, harder than growing food. We’ll all need a counsellor.
My wife’s one of those, lucky me. She works for a budgeting foodbank service, helping peep’s down at heel keep an even keel, or get back on one or maybe just even find one. Food and shelter stuff — the cheap seats at Maslow’s show.
Various of her stable are homeless, or about to be. These guys have got a head start on us. Some live in cars, others live nowhere, others still are in unsavoury domestic situations, and none have much chance of getting a rental — not that they could afford one, thanks AirBnB. All here in the Hamptons of the South.
Break it down brethren … how far can we walk/run, paddle or sail ? I reckon we start scoping out space, water sunshine and soil in our hood’s. If you live in a town, spare no berm.
Can be done though we’ve lost a lot of valuable knowledge. Indigenous peoples had sustainable relationships with our planet for millennia.
When Cuba lost their diesel/petrol amongst other commodities just 30 yrs ago, they fended off starvation doing just this, growing food in their local communities, urban and rural. Water/sunshine and soil that’s alive with micro -organisms will become even more critical.
My chum Richard thinks the greater Auckland area, pop’n closing on 2 mill, needs 1,000 urban gardens. I’m with him, front lawns into food forests same with areas in public parks. Go full guerrilla and dig up the roads, a row of parsnips down the centreline, fuck cars. Traffic lights could make great hanging planters.
Despite a handful of people working on it in my local hood, at our local marae, not forgetting various residents going hard on their veggies and fruit tree’s at home, we are not food resilient by a long shot. We beach hippie boomer semi-retired’s and our offspring, we’ll be bleating like hungry lambs.
In my community we’re a little more anxious now, less certain that the ground we stand on will hold. That’s some nervous energy we carry. Time to sequester that energy into the soil.
I’ve been waiting for this, a significant break in transmission. Humans living within mother natures confines — who’d have thought ?
Drop the bass DJ, I can already hear the sub’s rumble, the scaffolding tremble, and there’s not a disco biscuit in sight.
There’s people overseas desperately fleeing as their lives are mashed by war — I’m lucky to have the space and safety to even muse this stuff.
If only our soldiers would put down their weapons and pick up spades. If I was Gandalf ….
The real war is our collective survival and for this we need mother nature, always Chair of the Board and CEO, to be honoured and that means an end to our modern behaviour. Localism brothers and sisters. Forget cars, trucks and all their hydrocarbon-hungry cousins.
It’ll happen to us, be ready and welcome it, it’s time :)
