Last week I wrote a bit about resilience, what it means, and why people are talking about it so much these days. If you’re anything like me, you nodded, said “I get it, I get it…” and immediately moved on to the next obvious question: “What makes a community resilient?”
According to the Transition approach, the most important step to building community resilience is relocalization.
localize: 1. To make local. 2. To confine or restrict to a locality.
re: 1. Again: rebuild. 2. Back: react. 3. Used as an intensive: refine.
Relocalization is the reverse of globalization. Rather than having goods produced across the country or even across the world and transporting them into your community, relocalization calls for increased production of local goods. Communities where goods are produced locally or regionally are more resilient to fluctuations in oil prices as well as disruptions in the wider economic system. It doesn’t matter if gas is $10/gallon if you dinner is coming from your backyard or just down the street, or at least it won’t hit you nearly so hard.
One of the primary areas addressed by Transition is food production, which is understandable. Life goes on without new video games. It doesn’t go so well without food. Food production hits us where it hurts. Proposed steps include the development of community and residential gardens, local markets, and replacing ornamental landscaping with edible foliage, or plants that can be used for textile production or construction. In addition to food, The Transition Handbook mentions other important aims of localization such as energy systems, transportation, and medication and textile production.
Why Peak Oil Solutions Aren’t Climate Change Solutions
The Transition approach to relocalization clearly demonstrates how a peak oil response is not necessarily a climate change response. For instance, they include a photo of a residential firewood pile. The caption suggests that resilience can be measured in part by how much seasoned firewood is available in a community. And yes, a good supply of firewood is a local, resilient solution for home heating in the face of an oil shock. But from a climate change perspective, billions of people heating their homes with wood is not a solution if it is not paired with carefully designed and sustainably managed forestry programs.
Similarly, in the process of relocalizing the food system, climate change requires us to preserve existing forests, and not reallocate forests, wetlands, or other natural carbon sinks to food production. Transition proposes that land currently being used for car-related infrastructure such as parking lots be repurposed to strengthen the local foodshed. However, we have to remember that relocalization by itself doesn’t automatically address climate change. If relocalization is to address climate change, it must do so through deliberate systemic design.
Local Currency
To be honest, this is where Transition kind of lost me. But it is an important step in their plan and, as such, deserves mention.
Transition proposes the creation of a local currency that can only be used in the community. This new currency has a fixed exchange rate with the national currency and can be used just like standard money at participating vendors.
I can certainly understand the goal of keeping money within the community. According to a principle called the local multiplier, a dollar spent within the community generates $5-14 for the community. Anywhere from $0.60 to $0.80 of every dollar spent at a big box store leaves the community immediately. Who cares? Schools, fire departments, and any civic services that are funded through local tax dollars care. It will also affect the local unemployment rate and general community wellbeing. Creating a local currency keeps money within the community. One of the interesting (read: geeky) parts of the local currency plan is that each bill is tracked to see how many times and where it was spent. I’m sure the results would be fascinating and informative.
One of the reasons I struggle with the currency part of the Transition plan is that I don’t buy that we need to completely disengage from the global economic system (although here’s a compelling argument that we do). Certainly moving towards completely self-sufficient local and regional economies is one solution. But I don’t think it’s the only one, and possibly not even a preferable one. There are some advantages to ‘competitive advantage.’ And this is probably a cultural bias, but local currencies seem confrontational to me; a strategy not likely to foster cooperation on a global scale. And I think we really do need cooperation (or at least international development of best practices) at a global level.
Local in a Post-Oil World
Most importantly, Transition’s concept of relocalization is based on “powering down” – designing for a post-oil world. Bringing everything closer to home means less oil consumed in transportation costs, certainly. But Transition also looks at building local solutions that do not require oil. Privately owned generators for electricity are a local solution. Residential solar would be a local, post-oil, and therefore resilient solution. To apply a “Transition lens” to localization, it can’t just be local, it also has to be post-oil.
So… that was a lot. What do you guys think? Is local a solution to resilience? Is local a solution to climate change? Does it have to be local? Is relocalization the solution or only part of the solution? Other thoughts?
Also, because Transition is so much fun, I’ll be giving away my very lightly used copy of The Transition Handbook
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Gotta love the local movement. I think that being and doing local 100% have implications for climate change. It’s not enough, of course, because it requires the most enormous overhaul of mindset ever – especially in the United States. BUT it can be part of a process. I think education can be another half. If people are educated on ways to produce for themselves, it will be lucrative, and that’s what people can respond to as well.
Looking forward to book giveaway HINT HINT 
Great post
Thanks so much for the comment! I completely agree with you that we are looking at a total paradigm shift. I think relocalization and Transition offer one set of options for what the new paradigm will look like, but I know there’s a lot of criticism of Transition for “backtracking” and being somewhat old fashioned. But I think that you are right – it has great potential to be both lucrative and regenerative, and sometimes the former sells better than the latter.
Living local is a beautiful thing. I relish that opportunity. It’s taken me a while to figure out how I can optimize my life for this situation. I had it once accidentally and realized how good it was inherently.
So, how about those carbon sequestration techniques? Any thoughts on that? Some great ideas about sequestering carbon via grassland restoration/holistic grazing strategies. Interesting paradigm shift that’d affect even more than the posh urban centers that have trendy local living cultures.
Cool post!
Thanks so much for stopping by! I am with you as far as wanting to optimize my life for locality (locavorism? hrm…). It can be a hard thing to do, especially if you have minimal control over where you end up, like we do.
And yes! Carbon sequestration. I actually have tons of thoughts on that, both for agriculture and residential development. On the new urbanism side of things, I think there is so much potential for sustainable land management and the “reclaiming” and suburban land as part of the bright green urbanism paradigm. Even on the Transition side of the discussion I think there’s a lot of potential, but I think that would require educating many more people on the subject. It’s interesting, because the more I read and chat with people, the more I think that we need to be looking to permaculture as a foundation for everything.