Re - re - re - re - re

No, I'm not singing Aretha's anthem, though it's one of my favorites.

I'm thinking about our lengthening list of re-'s, which began with reduce, reuse, recycle, and now features repurpose, rethink, reskill...

And, of course, the biggy, relocalize.

Scanning our local post-petroleum monthly email compendium the other day, I saw a magazine, partially available free on-line, Resurgence.

And in the recent issue, an article suggesting that the new key work is "resilience".

http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/keynotes_resilience_2571.pdf

In it Rob Hopkins of Britain's Transition Network (raising consciousness and doing training in relocalization) suggests that not sustainability, but resilience, is the key property of systems which we should be emphasizing if we are to take the disruptions of climate change and post peak oil seriously.

Let's see if I understand this well enough to explain it. If we look at our local food system, sustainability has us paying attention to the fact that we are using few external inputs, that we are decreasing the number of seasonal jobs in favor of more stable year round employment, that our crops are in harmony with our local environment, and not a detriment. That sort of thing.

Now in a resilient system, we pay attention to biodiversity in our seed stock, so that we can face the coming drought (due to climate change) hopefully. We look at food storage strategies that are not energy intensive, as a hedge against crop failure. We help our workers learn a variety of skills, to enhance their chances of finding useful employment year round as weather patterns change. We look not only at sourcing agricultural inputs locally, but at marketing our product locally, too, perhaps with value added, as a hedge against escalating prices for transportation.

It occurs to me that the two things most necessary to building resilience in our systems are diversity - especially nurturing diversity locally, in eco and human systems - and community. Surely these are things good Christian people know something about. My own work with Total Ministry congregations has emphasized identifying and nurturing diversity, especially diversity of gifts, and strengthening people's capacity to work together, to achieve a more deliberate practice of community - not just for the sake of getting along, but for working and envisioning together. So I wonder why so few congregations are involved in this work or relocalization, of helping the communities in which they exist become more vibrantly resilient?

More on the Sustainable Enterprise Conference

I've been mulling over some of what I learned last weekend, and am somewhat surprised by the connections. I think it started when in the workshop on Web 2.0 our leader said there were many common values between geeks and greens, and it was time environmental activists got over their anti-technology attitude. I don't think I've ever been there, but I certainly saw what he meant. And when you add in the challenges of re-localization, which we heard about on the second day, you really have something: a renewing of the local economy and community combined with greater global communication and trans-local networking and collaboration through the wiki-world.

(Is wiki-world an amusement park?)

It also seems to me that local ministry development fits into this picture - the revitalization of the local congregation in its context, with its resources, combined with greater connectivity with the wider church no longer mediated by a professional clergy class.

What does this have to do with food?

Well, perhaps food is the place where can begin to live into relocalization and enhanced communication, and also one place where we can sign that reality.

Suppose our congregations put more of emphasis on the seasonal and the local in our feeding and food distribution programs, with gleaners, and community gardens, and the like? And suppose we could then build a network of churches doing this, to share vision and information, and maybe even to work together to get some grants - to redistribute money to local projects - not just in one locale, but in national or even international networks.

And suppose a locavore meal were not something we did once a year at church - but that every Sunday the coffee hour, the flowers, the potluck, reflected the beauty of the local season in that place?

Then there's the whole notion of sharing. Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute suggested we need to bring back sharing. Why are our congregations not sharing networks? We don't need to go to the extreme of challenging the concept of private property (though some of us might like to) to see that there are many things some own that could be shared by everyone. There might even be some things - tools or equipment or ??? - I need to do more imagining here - that we could hold in common and then "rent" from the church to members.

There was not just a rush of self-righteous frugality, but real joy, when I lived in Los Angeles and the Horstmans brought a big bag of lemons to share from their very old back yard tree. Ditto in congregations around here when excess fall persimmons find their way to church. How could we see this sharing of bounty as sign and invitation to get creative and do more?

Another message for our churches I took away from the relocalization address was that limits are good. Too often, I think, our churches have bought into the American way of Growth Is Good. Thirty-five years ago on those early Earth Days, I thought about limits, and what a theology of limits might look like. It is time to revisit this, and draw out of our bag of tricks those Christian virtues which respect the limits of nature, and the limits which justice requires.

Okay - one last heavy thought. Darley said that relocalization is inevitable. That feels like both a statement of doom and a challenge to get started now, and do it right, in ways that are creative and adventursome, not cramped and painful.