Relocalizing the Future
Every civilization since the cave painters has guided its culture according to an understanding, a Grand Story about who they were, where they came from, where they were going.
Such stories, embraced or unaware, still guide our energies, shape our beliefs and empower our passions and our hopes. Or, to the inevitable extent that they are not perfect stories, they lead us to conclusions and to ways of living that in the end are not in our best interest—or the Earth’s.
In not a few cases, those wrong turns, those errors of understanding in past civilization stories about how to treat each other and the planet’s other creatures have led to the end of those civilizations.
The story, the narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves, has shaped mankind’s past, and such a story will shape our future. So take note: in our times, the old story is broken.
How that has come to be is complex, but it has been abetted by the heady experience and resulting arrogance of the industrial revolution.
Over the span of only a half-dozen generations, we have created civilizations and fortunes on the backs of our energy slaves—the cheap labor of the geologically brief and quickly passing Carbon Energy Era.
The affluence and seeming dominion of this flawed story has carried us down a number of roads to nowhere. One of those is a misunderstanding that we are now beyond the bounds and limits of nature; that we have finally subjugated the Earth and all its matter and energy to do our bidding.
Worse, we suffer the illusion that this petro-subsidized prosperity, progress and growth can go on forever without limits.
We've fallen under the spell, fat and happy around this banquet table, that tells us wrongly that management of this establishment will never, ever come with the bill we owe for our decades-long sumptuous lunch.
But the bill is past-due. And we’re beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with the prospects of handing it to our children to pay.
It seems the time has come for a NEW STORY because we no longer live in the world where the old one was written. That map will not send us to a future worth going to.
The good news is that reconciliation and healing are possible. The good news is that real people like you and me, in ordinary places like Floyd, Virginia, can begin to rethink the future, to write the NEW STORY that our children will inherit. And we have already started writing.
An important early chapter in the New Story is what I call "relocalizing" where we live.This asks us to revisit and rekindle local connectedness lost as our attention has moved indoors, where more and more of our hours are spent in digital shopping, chatting and mindless surfing.
The better reacquainted we become with the natural and human communities we belong to, the better we can restore the kind of fellowship, creatureship, and world-aware citizenship we will need to craft the New Story.
The New Story will send us back to find our strength in real places and real community, drawing from forces at least as powerful for change as those that science and technology will offer.
Relocalizing means drilling down into our collective sense of who we are together, of what we are about and where we are going. It means knowing and caring for the local to better know and care for the whole.
So when you look at the schedule of events for this year's Earth Day event on April 20, think about it as a step towards relocalizing—the bringing down to this piece of Earth our talents, skills and energies. Plan to come, share, learn and enjoy. I’d love to have you join me after lunch that day on a short and easy walk to celebrate the diversity of outdoor nature in a nearby meadow and forest.
Together, if we chose to, we can make HERE a place that will grow and prosper in ways that bring nature, place and community back into our lives for good.
[This piece was written to promote Earth Day in Floyd, VA—home to 14 thousand souls and one traffic light. Fred First / Fragments from Floyd]
