How working for place-based solutions can change the world

Enough drops can fill an ocean

8 minute read

A place to grab hold

In a world of onrushing crises, where the level of change required to meet them boggles the mind, even as too many trends are moving in the wrong direction, questions of “What will be enough?” and “Can it come soon enough?” surge to the foreground.

There must be a place to begin grappling with the complex questions of societal transformation. A place to grab hold and gain enough leverage to begin making fundamental changes. That place is the communities and bioregions where we live. We must begin to build the future in place.

Clearly we are over the line ecologically, as the planetary boundaries study I recently covered underscores. The air is saturated with gases that alter the climate, while chemicals that threaten biological and ecosystem heath are pervasive. Lands and waters are disrupted, putting critical pressure on biodiversity. Meanwhile, we face a political crisis of unresponsive governing structures locked up by narrow interests, social and economic crises of increasing divisions and inequality, and international crises of escalating conflict.

These converging crises present us with a dual task. We must anticipate and prepare for extremes while also doing all we can to mitigate them and reduce their intensity. The more stressed systems become, the more difficult it will be for them to respond to stress. It’s a vicious cycle, the kind of feedback loop that leads to collapse. That is why we must build strong and resilient communities in our places, in our cities, towns, rural areas and bioregions. If systems break down at larger levels, we will have to fall back on our own places.

The communities where we live offer the most ready leverage points to accomplish these dual tasks. By building effective responses in places, we can create successful models. The cumulative effect multiplies when they are replicated in other places. Place-based movements can riff off each other with the power of networks. It is a common saying that enough drops of water can fill a bucket. Enough drops can also fill an ocean.  

Building strong place-based movements that network with each other accumulates power to affect matters at broader levels. When we gain a vision for the future, and begin to assemble the tools to work towards it, this can ramify to larger jurisdictions, to subnational state and provincial governments, and nations. Below I lay out some practical ideas in this regard.

How does this play out?

Let’s look at some specifics.

“Cities - home to more than half of the world’s population and responsible for about 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions – are at the heart of the climate challenge,” reports the World Bank. Urban climate action plans have now become a commonplace, as this U.S. listing and world map show. They are the source of much progress. It is clear that many place-based solutions are working to move people from cars to mass transit, biking and walking; to reduce energy use in buildings and gain energy from clean sources; to constrain resource-gobbling sprawl, and to close loops to reduce waste and improve material use overall.

Still, the overall effectiveness of these efforts is constrained by business as usual assumptions. Growth in the context of those assumptions is cancelling out progress in other areas. So buildings are still being built that run on fossil fuels and fail to capture all efficiency potentials. Roads and airports are still being expanded, and along with them travel is increasing.

To amp up action to the required scope and scale, we need to break free of business as usual assumptions by creating a set of new community institutions whose mission is driven by the common good. That is a fundamental concept of building the future in place. A keystone is public financial institutions that take the flow of money out of the hands of privately owned, profit-driven banks and put it in the hands of public banks that will invest in institutions and policies promoting the common good. Governments, businesses and individuals should have options to put their money in places where it will benefit their own communities. Today, privately owned banks can essentially create money by lending more than they have in reserves on the assumption most loans will be paid back. The public should have this power as well.

So how would that work on in an urban landscape? First, there would be a vast expansion of investment in nonprofit, community-oriented housing. Social housing owned by the public and cooperative ventures, cohousing, ecovillages, etc.  This would address the housing crisis, one of the most pressing challenges to community resilience. It would also center housing in areas well served by transit, where car use is less necessary, in mixed-use communities that allow access to goods and services through walking and biking. These investments could help create urban centers in suburban areas, beginning the long process of turning the tide against urban sprawl. Dead malls and empty office parks could be converted into vibrant communities.

This, in turn, would build the constituency for transit and better walking and biking infrastructure. As well, there would be increased support for urban greenspaces, which cool cities and have a modest carbon-storage effect. Public financing tools would make all this more feasible. Of course, housing constructed and rehabilitated through investments by public banks would conserve energy, make its use most efficient, and gain energy from clean sources. Investments would mandate that materials come from the most sustainable options, for instance requiring that wood be supplied through the best forest certification schemes or re-use from demolished structures.

Thus, the creation of public banking that dramatically escalates investments in non-market housing ramifies to the major sources of climate-altering gases, as well as building community resilience in both social and physical dimensions. This is just one example.

Public banking can also invest in the necessary transition to a truly sustainable economy. It can fund creation of cooperative enterprises and Plan B corporations guided by a broader set of goals than the bottom line. Besides housing, key investments can be made in areas such as local and regional agriculture and food processing, building and industrial energy efficiency, clean energy production, sustainable materials, and transportation alternatives.

The military elephant in the room

But the elephant in the room is a bloated military budget that drains needed resources from every locality to serve the war economy. In a U.S. that can never seem to extricate itself from forever wars, the military-industrial-congressional complex is a powerful driver promoting conflict.

“Defense spending touches every Member of Congress’s district through pay and benefits for military servicemembers and retirees, economic and environmental impact of installations, and procurement of weapons systems and parts from local industry, among other activities,” the Congressional Research Service reports. “From major defense contractors (e.g., Lockheed Martin and Boeing) to smaller suppliers, more than 200,000 companies make up the defense industrial base that manufactures and supplies (Department of Defense) weapons systems.”

That provides a potent impetus to ballooning military budgets. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the total for fiscal year 2023 is $883 billion, one of the highest in history. Real spending when accounting for expenses such as debt service and veterans’ benefits is much higher. One estimate puts spending as of fiscal year 2022 at $1,537 trillion. Interest payments tied to military spending alone were $381 billion.

We can find answers to this in a place-based politics that convenes community assemblies and congresses to develop comprehensive visions and agendas for place-based change. While this necessarily focuses attention on local areas, it is not strictly localist. As detailed above, places and regions can network with each other laterally to build models for change, and together build power for change at broader national and international levels.

Here, a concept developed by Ralph Nader is useful. Long a practitioner of people-based politics, Nader understands that small groups of active citizens with a clear sense of what they want can have disproportionate effects. He recommends creation of congressional watchdog groups in every district. The legislative branch, Nader believes, is the most powerful, but it is bought. Only people power can provide the balance.

Says Nader, “An organized citizenry of less than one percent of the voters in Congressional Districts, giving voice to the voiceless majority, can free Congress from its captivity imposed by the forces of greed, power and violent Empire, draining resources from our dire domestic needs . . . Congress has become a weapon of mass destruction with multiple warheads. Only the people can recover their sovereign power, under the Constitution, now delegated to a Congress that sells out to the highest corporatist bidders.”

It is obvious the biggest drain is the military budget, and that to make the level of changes required to deal with our convergent social, political and environmental crises, we need resources invested in creating different infrastructures. People powered movements centering on places, with visions and agenda for transformation in their places, are the natural base to develop watchdog groups. These groups will be positioned to make informed demands on elected leaders backed by broad consensus in their districts and states. The creation of community-based financial institutions sets up channels to bring back resources to the local and regional levels, and invest them in ways that reflect community visions.

A revolution with no master plan

Some time back, I wrote a series detailing Fabian Scheidler’s spanning work on the civilizational crisis now reaching peak intensity, from its ancient origins down to the present day, The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization. His thoughts on how we pull ourselves out of this crisis are worth recalling here. I quote from the concluding piece in the series. (Those who want to read the whole series can start here.)

“In one of the critical insights of his book, Scheidler writes that while alternatives are emerging in all fields, there is no ‘master plan for a single global system that will replace the old one. Not only is there no such plan, but most people do not believe that it is even a good idea to have one . . . it is rather a mosaic; a patchwork of varying approaches that are adapted to local and cultural conditions.’ This is a departure from the universalism of Western Civilization, the ‘one valid truth’ that spans western philosophies from Christianity to Communism. ‘Therefore, the lack of a master plan is not a shortcoming, but an example of learning from the disasters of past centuries.’  

“Resistance struggles are decentralized. Scheidler calls out the ‘thousands of battles’ being waged against ecological and social destruction, ranging from struggles against fossil fuel infrastructure to fights against water privatization. These resistance actions build solidarity among people ‘who organize and dare to oppose power,’ from those who gathered at Standing Rock in opposition to an oil pipeline, to the self-governing structures created by the Zapatistas in Mexico. 

“‘As long as the system functions fairly smoothly, many of the resistance activities may seem like tilting at windmills. However, as soon as the system enters chaotic phases, which is precisely what seems to be happening at the moment, the learning experiences  . . . become decisive  . . . politically alert and well-organized citizens have a real chance to use systemic crises as a starting point for social reconstruction . . .’”

This is what I mean by enough drops filling the ocean, how a people-driven place-based politics can change the world. It is a pretty fair bet that the systemic crises now confronting us will intensify, opening up opportunities for rapid, transformative change when tipping points are reached. That is the importance of building working models through a place-based politics today.

The world we want to build is one of vital communities and bioregions crafting their own futures, a mosaic based on their own sense of what they most need and desire. This revolution with no master plan can, and indeed must, grow from the grassroots up. It can and will affect politics and government at all levels. But to begin filling the ocean, we must start filling buckets where we live. It is a matter of summoning our collective will to build a future based on the common good, and the people with whom we can best do it are our neighbors in our communities and bioregions. We can change the world by beginning the work in our own places.

An ask of my readers

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