The New Resilient

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally. – Wendell Berry, the Way of Ignorance

The world economic order—that of the centralized, the multinational and the corporate—is quickly coming to a close. The Emperor of Globalization has no clothes — revealed naked by the emptiness of monetarism and the collapse of “universal truths”. Meanwhile, people are left to wonder: where to from here?

Left to pick up the pieces we can begin to influence the world that follows. Will it be a world of “disaster capitalism,” where conventional wisdom reasserts itself despite its acknowledged failures? Or, alternatively, will it be a world full of opportunities, something completely new to correct the social, economic and environmental mistakes of the past age?

This blog exists to examine and explore those opportunities, especially in the realm of food policy and the public economy. As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger so eloquently put it, “Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people.” Our food system and energy supply are currently dominated by a small group of multinationals, so who controls the nations and who controls the people? How can we change that in the new future of uncertainty?

What we need is a “resilient economy” that is no longer a “boom and bust” economy beholden to the interests of a few, or dependent on large centralized production and distribution. We need to know how our system works. We need to know how we can do it differently. We need to shift from macro economics to home economics and thinking globally to locally.

Without food security there can be no security of any kind. So too with energy and the economic ecologies within our communities. Politicians and multinationals continue to exploit group fear without addressing the authentic threats to our well-being and survival. Yet, individuals and groups are increasingly taking action to secure positive and preferable futures built on abundance, reciprocity and sustainability.

The economy of scale is over, and the decentralized, self-sufficient local economy has a real chance to change things for the better. The New Resilient is meant to spark dialogue and bring resources on food policy and the public economy together so we can do such things. So please, join us in this conversation to create a sustainable, just and equitable future in our communities.

Photo courtesy of Zyphichore.