We Will Not Go Quietly

What ever happens in the near future, one thing for certain: it will not be quiet. So perhaps we still have a chance for good (as in stubborn good) outcomes, instead of everything economic (hence political, etc.) turning out really lousy as it threatens to, now. When people come around the neighborhood with signs that say Impeach Obama and someone has put a Hitler mustache on the president's image, and no one sees a problem with that but puts it on the front page of a local paper? Yes Obama is quite clueless but he certainly wasn't the main source of many problems we are dealing with now. So, if any president is ever going to listen to the public, people need to present some unified objectives to him or her that actually relate positively to one another, instead of conflicting with one another. That's usually what people in power hear, the conflicting versions of what everyone wants.

There is a Don Henley song from 1989 which slips into my mind, still. That song seems all the more significant, when it appears people are ready to give in to a supposedly "inevitable" decline. In the past, certainly there were economic declines which were not preventable. However, I would like to think that today, the long term stagnation "knocking on our door"  is imminently preventable. In times past, people tended to think of solidarity in terms of highly specific groups and values. But today, the need for solidarity is different, because the individual solidarities of the past finally worked against the common interests of our humanity. There is tremendous need for people to pull together in a societal sense.

Turn this thing around.
I will not go quietly.
I will not lie down.
No I will not lie down.

If only I could talk about all this without my emotions getting caught up in the process. But I continue to be afraid that people are giving up. So, this post will also pick up from the last one, where I spoke of possibilities for coordination in terms of environmental reform, in which we also allow trees to turn into old growth forests we can walk under, instead of cutting them down to bring indoors and finally subjecting to termites. No, I didn't quite say that in the plastics post, but it certainly was part of the implied reasoning.

How to coordinate possibilities that actually relate to each other? Domestic summits are one approach, even it they might have to be planned to take place in another year or two from now. Just the same, here are some ideas: Strategies for communities which would be starting from scratch could look at everything from walkable solutions for living and working, to how local building and construction options could be carried out by participants in the community.

For those communities which would be interested in skills arbitrage, a summit which explores the variety of skills people want to utilize amongst one another would be quite useful. For any who are interested in follow up potential, further classes as to group arbitrage settings could also be provided. Both of these summits could also look at the kinds of public environments that participants might want to create for work and retail space, to see how many similarities participants actually share.

Also, a summit which explores building component potential would be especially important, for those who wish to get into more technical and infrastructural aspects of the environments which participants actually want. Some would want to see how these environments could be put together in flexible and changing patterns depending on season, or exploration as to work adaptations.

Of course the most important aspect regarding these ideas are the legal requirements to make lifestyle and environment reforms possible in the first place. This is true not just for new forms of zoning and regulations (in adopting areas), but also in terms of knowledge use among all the participants themselves, who would have extensive preparation ahead of such a move, were such a community to take place. Perhaps the biggest difference between these possibilities and the kind of cities Paul Romer envisions are that the participants create the desired environment through sets of agreed upon options, and the efforts to do so would generally be in a nation of which a group already belongs. So the legal activities required to make it all happen, would be in nation processes.

If any of my readers are interested in such processes please let me know. Or, if any of you have heard about things such as this already being tried, that info would be most useful! Ultimately I want to explore these options in some form, and eventually I want to be able to travel, in order to do so.