I am pleased to announce that John Robb and John MacQuarrie will be attending the Boyd 2008 Conference on PEI December 6-7. Link here.
What a couple of weeks we have been through. The question that many now are asking is "What can we do?" "How can we protect ourselves from all this uncertainty?"
I think the overarching answer to our uncertainty is that we have to find ways of getting some control back. Having more control locally - in our money, in energy, food and security.
John Robb, who has been focusing on this idea of a Resilient Community has kindly agreed to become our keynote speaker. The bias of his remarks will be about what can we do to get our local power back. Here is a link to his concept of the "Resilient Community". Snip here:
It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows. In short, we've lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral system that is operating in ways that we don't fully understand (nor will we). The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won't work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I've latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community.
This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses.
John will explain this thesis and then explore the key areas where we have to take back our local power. These will include:
- Energy.
- Food.
- Security (both active and passive).
- Communications.
- Transportation.
The conference is being held on Prince Edward Island - Canada's smallest province. A place that is most exposed to having low or no control over these areas where restoration will be essential. But perversely, we have assets that might enable us to leap frog into being truly resilient again.
We have the best wind resource in North America and will soon have more than 100% of our electrical needs fulfilled with wind. We are a agricultural society that has been focused on commodities - but have the skills to have a local system. We have a wood and water resource that might enable us to further reduce our dependence on oil. We have a tight sense of community still and are very strong in a crisis.
So to add more weight to the pragmatic aspects of our discourse, John MacQuarrie, who is the Deputy Minister for Environment, Energy and Forestry will join us. John is the man who will have to make a lot of what we do on PEI work. In his earlier career, he spent 3 years working in Ukraine, Romania and Poland after the fall of the Soviet Union and has direct experience of how societies have to struggle to regain their local independence. He served for several years as the Deputy for Agriculture and knows more about the realities of the state of play for industrial agriculture than any one else I know. As DM for Energy he has operationalized a very aggressive wind regime on PEI and again has the the operational experience about how best to cope with the community and political aspects of this type of innovation.
John will be able to offer guidance in how to get the new done in the social and political context that we all face. He is also very interested in your ideas - for he and we on PEI will have to take more action and soon.
Boyd's thinking will imbue all we talk about and it is my hope that this may be a landmark beginning to a new way of seeing our place in the world.
As an historic aside. It was a conference like this in the 19th century that lead directly to the founding of the Nation State of Canada. How fitting it may be that we may be attending a meeting where the Nation State is redesigned?
Here is a link to a site where you can learn more about the conference and how to sign up
