Monday, October 19, 2009

Relocalization Conference at RCC

What's so funny about peace love and localization? Beaucoup, according to Ms Average American. Better to commiserate over a glass of chardonnay about the obscene bonuses Wall Street continues to award itself and Global Warming rather than actively try to thwart the obscenity and warming. Someone Else will take care of those things. Ms American secretly hopes/believes that somehow/someday she'll be one of them, the blessed few who are financially rewarded no matter how badly or how much they screw up their own businesses and other people's lives. Their scales must be much different from those the rest of us use. Or they use their scales for false measurement while we just hold ours over our eyes.

Fortunately, about 200-300 people in the greater Boston area are willing to work for peace, love, and localization and these folks showed up yesterday to get the ball rolling here in Massachusetts or to join others already in motion.

In the Main Tent: Peak Oil, Environmental Havoc, Big Money in Washington, and Isolation and Alienation in Our Communities - which are all interconnected and part of the same problem that needs to be undone by all of us on a local level with the globe in mind. If that makes sense.

Chuck Turner welcomed us, Frances Moore Lappe inspired us and though Mel King and Bill McKibben spoke, I couldn't hang around to listen to them. The break-out sessions included Building Local, Sustainable and Just Food Systems and Applying Democracy in the Face of Corporate Power

The concept that most piqued my interest was Transition Towns. My neighborhood in Roxbury is in transition and I'd like that change to be in the best possible direction. Permaculture, everyone?

My gripe about the conference? We didn't need the to have the problems at hand detailed - speakers were certainly preaching to the choir - about Peak Oil, about Global Warming, about the value of supporting local agriculture. And along those lines - could we work a little on making the presentations a little more pithy and dynamic?

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