It's not coming back. The party's over. This isn't some temporary blip in the economy that a little belt-tightening will fix. One less latte and a smaller, "fuel efficient" SUV will not make this problem go away.
It would be nice to have all that money back from our Iraq misadventure. It would have been nice to have had eight years of competent federal leadership. But even so, the party had to end some time. It just came sooner than we expected. This is what the CEOs used to call a paradigm shift. Or, to borrow another corporate buzz-phrase, this is a perfect storm — too many people, too few finite resources (oil, water, coal), too little meaningful work, etc.
James Howard Kunstler, though he angers some with his dystopian forecasts, hammers this point home on his blog (www.kunstler.com). Because he has been right far more often than wrong in the past two decades, Kunstler is worth a listen (and his books, The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere, should be required reading). In a recent entry, he wrote, "Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. 'Consumerism' is dead. Revolving credit is dead — at least at the scale that became normal the last thirty years. The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance."
Drunks are told the first step to recovery is to admit a problem. We collectively had a problem. We were drunk on consumption. But now we are at one of those rare moments in history where we can redirect its energies toward different goals, driven by different ideologies besides the broken-down dichotomy of right and left, Commies and Yankees, white and black, etc. The key is to admit this is not a temporary downturn. Such delusions only keep people from fomenting real solutions.
Where I live, this effort — no matter how nascent or small — can be seen in the revival of what was once the largest working farm in town. It's more than a desire to return to New England quaintness. It may be the path to the future. The farm was acquired about 10 years ago as open space, soon after which the environment commission (on which I sat at that time) wrote a management plan for the property that included a farming component. But then it died, paralyzed by town hall's petty bickering.
Out of frustration, a group of active citizens came together to pitch the idea of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) project on the farm. After much wrangling (and the loss of a season's planting), they finally got the approval. The first crops are going in this year and shares are being sold even as we speak. It is a small step (two acres will eventually be cultivated), but it is a step, and the whole town is jazzed. As a "subscriber" in the past to a CSA in another town, I was astonished by how much food could be grown on half an acre of carefully tended land.
On the Web site of the state's organic farms (ctnofa.org/CSAs), there are 38 CSAs listed. Chances are, in a state this small, there is one near you. If not, maybe you should start one? Rep. Terry Backer (D-Stratford) has proposed a bill (HB 5800) that is itself a small step — to simply amend the statutes "to promote localized production of food through community gardening and backyard food production."
If my town is any guide, don't wait for even well-meaning government officials to take the first step. Better yet, put some crops in the ground this year in your own backyard. It's the first step toward breaking the chain of dependency and helplessness.
