Building A Sustainable Optimism
While the cable news junket has our national attention glued to jittering economic woes and temperamentally lopsided presidential politics, we’ve been seeing enough signs of positive change coming down the pike in our greater Catskills region to give us hope for the long term ahead… albeit with a handful, and not just a few grains, of salt.
We’ve also been thinking a great deal about the ways in which times of apparently cataclysmic changes can also turn out for the good, eventually, and spur on great achievement. Think of all that was created via the Works Progress Administration programs FDR inaugurated as part of his massive New Deal to get us all out of the Depression (forgetting the added role of World War II in such efforts), or the manner in which Europe has reformed itself so completely, and successfully, since those same times.
A few years back, following the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina (and the ineptitudes of the Bush Administration), noted Upstate writer/thinker James Howard Kunstler wrote in these pages about how the long-awaited depletion of oil will force much more than a search for alternative energies. In his view, the good to come from the changes he then foresaw by predicting $3 a gallon gas prices (oh, we now wish…) all had to do with a shifting away from bankrupt living conditions back to small town values, and efficiencies.
Since then — with major hits taken by the mortgage industry, housing investments, gas-guzzling lifestyles reliant on big vehicles and long commutes, and now the failures of an increasing number of banks and other financial institutions – what Kunstler was preaching seems increasingly prescient. And a number of local initiatives and opportunities are seeming particularly helpful.
Charlie Blumstein’s Relocalization efforts, which came to a head in a well-attended and highly informative informal gathering at the Ashokan Campus in Olive last weekend, is looking back at longstanding community patterns as a means of sharing, and alleviating, the short term pains many are expecting from rising fuel costs over the coming winter. It’s a prescription that’ll work in our towns and elsewhere in the region… with folks stockpiling for the worst, as well as the eventual need to share resources; as well as working to build up lines of communication, even with the area’s newcomers, so no one ends up wanting when the worst hits.
The Delaware County Rural Electrical Cooperative’s current push to harness the overflow from New York City’s reservoir system, with backing from all our congressional representatives, holds out the possibility for future electrical sustainability, especially given the new research being worked on to utilize clean aqueduct hydro power in the coming years. Research into joint systems for communities of homes, entire hamlets and villages, and between towns and counties – from heating furnaces to shared maintenance and other services – is starting to gain local favor after years of go-it-alone sentiments. Even the worrisome discovery of gas deposits in the shale below us all is getting many to start thinking about small-scale energy uses. And new efforts to start up small communal gardens up and down the Esopus and other local valleys.
All of this points to a great and resourceful energy being released by the impending troubles, as well as a localized future more optimistic than much we get used to seeing and hearing from the cable junket that occupies so many of our evening hours. But in addition to needing greater local support, it’s a movement that will also need a strong push to get it to full effect. After all, what good are new energy sources if they all get swallowed whole by an unchanged, still-wasteful grid? Where do our local efforts leave us if larger entities fight our best work?
Kunstler, told us recently, said the big battles ahead have to do with the breaking of giant national and regional monopolies that have thwarted the sorts of efforts we now see starting up as a true alternative to what is failing.
And we believe him… urging everyone here in our towns, our region, to not only do all we can to prepare for what’s happening, by bettering ourselves locally, but getting ready to push our successful example onto the larger national and international stage.
It may be our best hope for sustainable optimism, in the long run.
PS