Hope: Some People Are Adapting Intelligently To Harsh Realities

I keep up with Richard Heinburg, because he's one of the far-seeing smarties in the world, and his update to his book The End of Growth that he just put out included some good news that I wanted to pass along.

From this site: www.postcarbon.org/article/987348-end-of-growth-update-blowing-in

The past few months have seen a significant upwelling of interest in resilience, as exemplified in the appearance of new websites:

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• Post Carbon Institute?s highly successful site www.energybulletin.net is about to be expanded and rebranded as resilience.org, featuring separate pages on energy, economy, environment, food & water, and society. This promises to become the most useful go-to site on the web for anyone interested in news and resources for responding to the converging crises of the 21^st century.
• John Robb, a former ?tier 1 special operator? and astronautical engineer, who has written some excellent pieces on peak oil and the global security situation, has recently developed a community resilience website.
• The Rand Corporation, one of the world?s oldest, most influential, and most secretive think tanks, now appears to be conducting research into community resilience.
• The Community and Regional Resilience Institute has developed a Community Resilience System (CRS), a practical, web-enabled process that helps communities to assess, measure, and improve their resilience to a variety of threats and disruptions of all kinds.
• Bay Localize has developed a Community Resilience Toolkit designed for groups, particularly those in the San Francisco Bay Area, to enable them to prepare their communities to weather tough times.
• The Huxley College of the Environment has created a Resilience Institute, which facilitates scholarship, education, and practice on reducing social and physical vulnerability to natural hazards through sustainable community development, particularly in Washington State.
• The Resilience Alliance has for years engaged in research on resilience in social-ecological systems (this organization is the granddaddy of resilience thinking). While this isn?t a new site, omitting it from the list would be a disservice.
• Finally, the Transition Network has increasingly been using resilience as an organizing principle in its expanding grassroots work at building post-carbon communities.

Meanwhile, there is also an upwelling of interest among economists and community activists in identifying and fostering the elements of a New Economy (co-ops, alternative currencies, no-interest banks, etc.), as Gar Alperovitz recently chronicled in this excellent article.
I know some of my readers ask for links to this type of thing, so I hope this helps. I?have to admit, its really wonderful to see so many finally getting it and preparing-- even if they don't want to call it "prepping" due to bad (and overly manipulative) publicity. Keep an eye out for the words TRANSITION and the word RESILIENCE for more information on PREPPING in your key word searches. Lots of cool stuff out there and more popping up all the time.

Heinburg also mentions some trends:

Most of our adaptation to the new economic reality of sustained contraction will be driven simply by necessity. So it?s encouraging to see, for example, that high gasoline prices are curtailing Americans? driving habits, that public transit ridership is increasing rapidly, that families are cutting back on spending and living in smaller spaces, and that ever more households are putting in food gardens.

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One sees this adaptation-by-necessity especially in young people, whose expectations for the future are being shaped by the converging specters of ballooning student-loan debt and a shrinking job market. For men and women in their 20s, car ownership is no longer an inevitable badge of adulthood, and material accumulation is no longer seen as a worthwhile or realistic goal in life. For the first time in decades, the number of young American farmers is increasing.

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There is no hope in hell that Transition initiatives, co-ops, and alternative currencies will spring up fast enough and on a sufficient scale to as to avert general economic misery. But that doesn?t mean efforts along these lines are pointless; the more we do, and the sooner we do it, the better our prospects of weathering the inevitable storm.

I have several 20-something friends, and I've noticed the trends he's mentioning as well. Many of them are choosing not to go to college, or-- if they have, dropped out or are doing it in bits and pieces to keep the student loans down (trying to pay it off as they go along, which takes 10 or more years to do.) I know young adults from both poor, middle and upper-middle class families and they are ALL?struggling. I only know 1 who lives with her parents who works that can afford trips and luxuries, and she has no interest in college at this point, even though she's very smart and scholarly.

The bits about food gardens and small farmers growing in number again for the first time in-- decades (or, actually, maybe EVER since the industrial revolution started) is very cool to see as well.

So, for those who think that if we can't go on as we have for the last century then that means the only other choice is to "lay down and die, then!" like spoiled children who will hold their breath until they pass out hoping the gods will make magical rules just to accommodate them? Pa-lease. Grow up and learn to adapt like all those who were born after you. Its not that hard, I swear.

Source: http://lucretiasheart.livejournal.com/877356.html

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