Relocalization and the Regeneration of Community

by Michael Brownlee

We use the word “sustainability” very loosely, to the point that the word almost seems to have lost its meaning. It has been co-opted by just about everyone, from big oil companies to Wal-Mart. We use the word indiscriminately, with concepts like “sustainable growth” and “sustainable profitability.”

Many of us speak of sustainability as a kind of holy grail, what we’re all trying to achieve. This is very misleading, for it obscures what it is that needs to be sustained. Isn’t it rather ironic that we try to live a sustainable lifestyle, when we know that individual life is unsustainable? The only form of life that is sustainable is community. It is only as community that the human species survives and evolves.

For most of us, “community” is a distant memory, or a longing for what we have never lived in but may have experienced in fleeting moments. It is what we all yearn for, what we all need, what we are designed for—and what is most missing for all of us.

Community is perhaps the most valuable and most essential resource on this planet. And through the process of economic globalization and the advent of a culture of profligate consumption, community has also become our scarcest and most threatened resource. Thus, the restoration or rebirth of community is now our most urgent priority.

But what is community? Clearly, it is not merely a feeling or an experience that we arrive at in a workshop or other event where people come together temporarily or occasionally. It is not just a team, an organization, nor a special-interest or affinity group. These experiences and feelings may point to community, but they are not community.

A formal definition of community is useful: “All the groups of organisms living together in the same area, usually interacting or depending on each other for existence.”

In human terms, then, a community is a living organism comprised of interdependent individuals, families and neighborhoods. Community is anchored and rooted in place. In Permaculture terms, it is Zone Zero, the place where we live and work—and the people with whom we live and work.

Very few cities or towns or villages function as communities any more. Community of the kind that we’re speaking of here has nearly vanished in our society.

Take a moment to recall a place and a time before the advent of oil, a simple village. At the very center of this village, the place where people naturally gather and converse and trade, what do we find there? A well. This well is the source of water for everyone in the village. Everyone comes here to draw this most essential resource into their bodies. You could say that this village is a community of water, for the flow of living water is what connects everyone here, what binds and bonds them to each other. The well is the hub of the village, its sacred center, its primary shared resource.

Now, think of the place where you live and work today—your community. What is the well of living water that your community draws from? What is it that binds you and bonds you together?

We’re not just talking about physical water here, but something deeper.

Recently it occurred to me that the water well at the center—the source and symbol of hope and unity in a community—has been replaced with another kind of well. In essence, we’ve attempted to replace the living water that connects us and binds us into community with something else. You could say it’s oil. Or you could say it’s a reliance on something external—like technology—rather than our deepest inner resources. In this manner, without realizing it, we’ve slowly been poisoning the well of living water.

We know what we have lost and what we must restore: it is, above all else, community—the community of water. At the heart, this is what the relocalization movement is all about. Externally, we are surely developing community self-sufficiency in energy, food and economy, and then building a network of interdependent communities in our respective bioregions. But there is far more to the story.

What’s fundamentally at stake here is human freedom. For we are discovering—a bit painfully, perhaps—that if we are dependent on distant sources and foreign powers for our essential needs, we will have no choice but to pay whatever price we must in order to survive. This is how freedom can be sacrificed for survival. Our only viable alternative is to learn how to meet our essential needs locally.

If human civilization is to survive at all in the context of freedom, we can only do so as a community of self-reliant communities who have adopted relocalization strategies as ethical and evolutionary imperatives. Only upon such a foundation can we develop a platform for sustainable life upon this planet. Only as communities—restored as communities of water—can we again be in accord with the living river that flows through the forces of nature and evolution.

Community. This is the hope and the promise of the relocalization movement. This is our greatest common need, and the greatest gift that we can bring forth. And bring it forth we can, and we will.

Coming back from the first regional localization conference, April 7-9, sponsored by Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL!), I found myself haunted by one question: In the future, in our local communities what will be the equivalent of the well of the village; what will be the spiritual center of living water that we draw from and that binds us together? I do not have the answer to this question, but I am living with it, and we are living with it in Boulder Valley Relocalization, where 120 citizens are working together to build a strategic relocalization plan for our community. I am confident that if we will persist, and if we will draw upon the deepest wisdom and compassion that resides within and among us, we will finally rediscover the well of living water that we had seemingly left behind. And in the process we may learn to be part of the great watering of our neighborhoods and communities that we intuitively know is so greatly needed.

We are regenerating or re-building community right where we already are. This is a process of transformation, not of building from scratch. We’re remodeling the house, not bulldozing it flat and starting over. We’re not moving to the country to begin again. And we’re not heading off to another planet because this one is beyond hope.

It’s a long process, which begins with understanding our strengths and our vulnerabilities. It requires strategic planning like our lives depend on it—planning for the challenges and opportunities of rapidly-converging crises, including peak oil, runaway global warming, and economic instability—planning to gracefully and ethically ride down the long curve of an energy-constrained future.

A handful of us have already begun, but the biggest challenge will be to engage the entire population of our communities in this process—along with existing infrastructures of government, economy and industry—so that the goals and plans of relocalization are actually adopted, implemented and achieved.

For some of us, this will be the most important endeavor we will ever engage in, our legacy. For others, the experience will enable us to discover how to take on even bigger challenges—and to be sure, even bigger challenges are coming.

As we engage, it’s important to remind ourselves that this has never been done before. That is, no community—that we know about—has ever relocalized itself. It’s never really been attempted. Many communities have begun or are experimenting—more than 100 to date, in eight nations—but it’s never been completed anywhere yet. (An exception of sorts is Cuba. The difference is that they were responding to a national emergency after the fact. We have a brief opportunity to respond before the storm arrives.)

This is historical work, and it’s possible that we will fail. It is a very radical undertaking, and there are very few guidelines. We are grateful to Post Carbon Institute—and the pioneering people in Willits, California, Tompkins County, New York, and Kinsale, Ireland—for laying down a trail that we could learn from. We in Boulder promise that we will share what we learn from our successes and our mistakes and our failures.

Along the way, we will be creating a culture of relocalization, one that is very different from what most of us are living in now, and we might as well be conscious about it. In Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, David Holmgren points to the need for this: “The hope, that in a sustainable future we can continue to live isolated from each other is the social side of the illusion of a sustainable future in the technosphere. The belief that human nature demands that we live segregated and uncooperative lives is arguably a greater impediment to a sustainable future than the belief that technology and human brilliance can solve environmental problems.”

Why is relocalization so important? Because we are regenerating or rebirthing community; our most precious resource is community, and this resource is rapidly diminishing. It turns out that a fossil-fuel-based culture of consumption—and the economic globalization that it inevitably spawns—destroys community. And it is only by building community self-sufficiency in energy, food and economy that we have a chance of preserving what’s most important about the human species into the future and ensuring the future of human freedom. We live on one planet, and it is becoming essential to our survival that we begin thinking and acting as one people; this can only realistically begin on the level of community.

We have the option right now to choose to prepare our communities for an energy-constrained future. We can choose to do so with humility, with compassion, with creativity—and yes, even with joy. But we must choose, or choices will be made for us.

I think of the words of Dumbledore to Harry Potter: “Dark and difficult times lay ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”

We find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first modern citizen-based movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our luxuries and our comforts be severely reduced. The first to call for a people to lead the world in sacrifice. The first to mobilize communities in the face of a crisis that has not quite arrived.

This may be the greatest challenge any movement has faced. We are rising to it, but we know it will not be easy. We are struggling to displace assumptions of entitlement, and to reverse habits of consumption that have become deeply embedded in our culture. We must transcend these assumptions and patterns—first within ourselves.