In the early '00s, I spent a great deal of time concerned about peak oil. At that time, energy supply shortages seemed like a major threat to societal order. There was a moment where society could have chosen to use these impending shortages as motivation to reorganize around more sustainable ways of doing things. Instead of choosing sustainability, society chose fracking, tar sands exploitation, and deep ocean drilling. This temporarily mitigated the threat of peak oil while wrecking ecosystems and adding to climate instability.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, I became involved in various grassroots efforts attempting to make communities more resilient. In New York, I went to meetings about local economics and raising social consciousness. In Minneapolis, I helped organize events to educate people about sustainability and participated in several resilience-focused groups. The most popular of these groups was Transition Towns.
Originating in the UK, Transition Towns promoted a set of tools and practices designed to make local areas more resilient in the face of peak oil, climate change, and economic trouble. The movement's big idea was to pair direct action with policy-level interventions in local governments. Here in Minneapolis, some people with yards began regenerating their environmental systems directly, albeit on a micro-scale. But the policy piece never materialized, because our city government simply wasn't having it.
My involvement in Transition Towns ended when I began to understand that the organization's real structure was hierarchical and reliant on paid trainings. It started looking like yet another ineffectual group run by insiders, and I couldn't see it ever making any kind of substantive difference. On reflection, the whole model seemed flawed from the start, since local governments like mine were never going to genuinely prioritize the environment.
Activism Beyond Government
Before 2020, my city government was a pit of vipers beholden to developers and other corporate interests. These days, it's much worse. The mayor and city manager have way too much power. The Council is stacked with wet noodles. Recently, community activists disrupted a meeting about demolishing an abandoned building and Council members freaked out. That's the level of nonsense we're dealing with here. My guess is that other local governments around the country are comparably broken.
Although policy-level change is clearly impossible, the need to build resilient communities continues to become more and more pressing. One new movement designed to build resilience is The Freedom Cell Network. According to the website:
Freedom Cells are local, peer to peer groups typically consisting of 8 people. Cell members organize themselves in a decentralized manner with the goal of empowering group members through education, peaceful non-compliance, and the creation of parallel institutions. Think of it as your activist support network.
On its face, this all sounds great. So far, I haven't dug too deep into these Freedom Cells, but I do know someone who is deeply involved with one. I get along with this person okay but we disagree on some pretty basic things. This has me wondering if I'd be ideologically aligned with other Cell members.
Signing up on the website and going to a meeting is probably the only way to find out. I may do that, just to see what happens.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
I hope there are better city governments somewhere than Minneapolis. They are truly the worst that I have seen in the places I have lived.
I feel like Minneapolis government is average compared with other cities across the country. None of them are great.
Ha! I remember that we have had this conversation before :D
Freedom Cells sounds super interesting!
I loved learning more about your involvement in making communities more resilient. It reminds me of your bioneers talk :) The more diverse a city is, the harder it is to create policy change. I love learning about the amazing things happening in Sweden and Denmark. Yet it's hard to replicate what they're doing in the US, especially urban centers. Those places are way less diverse and have less health/socio-economic disparities to tackle.
For sure. The power shift from city councils to mayors/city managers over the last few decades has also made US cities much less democratic than their Scandinavian counterparts.
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