| Well, for one, I recently heard a podcast from a guy named Charles Marohn, he runs this organization called Strong Towns, and wrote a book by the same title. I haven't read it yet but I think he's onto something. His thesis is we need to do a bottom up rebuild of America, not a top down one. It's all about advocacy for a return to localism as a way to solve America's problems. This is off their website: The Strong Towns approach is a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. We believe that in order to truly thrive, our cities and towns must: - Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience; - Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn; - Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation; - Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today; - Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances. Otherwise, as an individual, I think it's about maybe insulating yourself from the impacts from what you can't control. I recently thought about growing my own vegetables, building a home hydroponics system. Had me thinking too about investing in solar power. I think the idea of teaching resilience is a better way to go, because we clearly have a way too fragile system that is susceptible to forces we can't control. As individuals it's up to us to build communities of people at the more localized level to create the world we want. |