We Need Solutions: Sustainability

Acting to Sustain

About a week ago the United States had an election, and to the rest of the world I want to say: I'm so, so sorry. I don't know what happened. But I'm starting to see through the fog of despair. Make no mistake, there will be LOTS of horrible things around the world for years to come because of American politics. But although many trajectories are probably going in a bad direction, focusing on that is a recipe for one's own personal mental health crisis.

Therefore, I want to have a series of posts that look at different ways where action and a positive trajectory come together. I have a quote over my desk from Benjamin Disraeli: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action." There will need to be a lot of action by a lot of people. And I don't mean the personal-choice kind of thing like being sure to recycle or preferring organic produce. I mean, that's fine, but it's not going to really help that much.

Today, I want to look quickly at sustainability as a concept, because it's kind of an uber-solution. As individuals we need to sustain ourselves. The promised upcoming tariffs are likely to send prices of lots of things surging upward, so financial sustainability is something to work on if you're not particularly secure. That means trying to save more, or add another revenue stream via a side hustle or whatever. (I have helped hundreds of people start businesses of various sizes, so if you want some advice or coaching, get in touch.)

Same with mental/emotional health. Physical health. Safety and security. Basic needs. We all need to be assessing where the vulnerable parts are in our own lives, our loved ones, our neighbors and communites are, and start shoring them up.

Eco-Seattle TL;DR and Small Projects on a Large Scale

But for those with fewer vulnerabilities, there's a larger scale sustainability you can advocate for, invest in, learn about, or teach. This was the level that I was talking about in my recent Eco-Seattle series. You can start at the first in the series if you want, but here's the TL;DR.

A person named Kev Polk, land use analyst, eco-strategist, and permaculture enthusiast, designed a way of making cities both healthier and more ecologically sound. More sustainable for the environment and for people. I wanted to see if it was possible to apply those ideas using relatively low-level policy changes like zoning and community councils to transform an existing city like Seattle. And in large part, it seemed plausible.

If there's a single small thing that made the large scale plan work, it's shifting away from the default ideal of having privately-owned green space. Instead, people would get more indoor living space, but outdoor space is largely shared, as in public parkland and community gardens. To live in a spacious low-rise condo or apartment surrounded by expanses of greenery rather than a single-family home surrounded by lawn that needs to be mowed. This single attitude change--granted, over the course of probably 20 years--could transform a city into a place where most daily needs are within a couple of blocks of most people.

Now that we know who the next president of the United States will be, having a plan like this for your community, one that doesn't require federal dollars or national laws, seems like a scale of improvement that people can act on. Different places have different needs and different local laws, so solutions will need to arise from local experiments all over the country. And it'd be good to have those experiments networking with each other to share what worked and support each other.

I'll offer just one to try to illustrate how something small might grow into a bigger project.

One Idea Among Hopefully Many

For this idea, you'd need one block of relatively like-minded people with a little bit of extra money. Not rich, necessarily, but reasonably comfortable and secure. Maybe it's a group that develops out of a block-watch program, or the planners of the annual block party. What they decide to do is create a small and simple organization. File the paperwork to make it a legal entity, like a no-frills LLC or something.

Once that's set up, the like-minded neighbors use it like an investment club. (If you've not heard of these, they're typically where people get together, pool their money, share responsibilities of researching companies, and buy stock as a collective unit. Eventually, if they decide to sell, the profits are distributed based on the percentage each person contributed to the club.) This, however, is a real estate investment club--and specifically for properties on their own block. House goes up for sale on the block? They try to buy it.

They might use it as a rental for a while to accumulate some more money for the next purchase. Perhaps they offer to rent it at cost to more vulnerable or marginalized people. Or perhaps they tear it down and turn it into their own community garden for the members. Let me riff off this last idea.

Maybe there's someone who was a doubter on the block. "It's never going to work." Okay, but after the club buys the house, things shift a little. Now he says, "I recognize you didn't fail, but I'm still not joining your club." But the club might know he's a great cook, so have a patch specifically for growing herbs or fresh veggies that they'll sell to him. Or if he's a carpenter, hire him to build some raised garden beds. The space becomes a way of engaging and involving people that aren't necessarily "part" of the plan.

Over several years, more of this happens--another house gets added to the portfolio. It gets turned into a pocket park, or a community meeting area. Or whatever addresses needs of the people there in that neighborhood. Invite the next block over to be part of it. Year over year, aiming at more sustainability, more involvement, engaging more people, solving more problems.

Refugium: A Place to Run Back To

The word 'refuge' comes from the Latin word refugium which literally is a place to run back to. I learned about its use in science in a quote from Kathleen Dean Moore's book, Great Tide Rising that has been circulating on Mastodon recently. To paraphrase, when Mt. Saint Helens erupted, scientists were sure it would take more than their lifetimes for the devastation to return to a healthy ecosystem. However, they were surprised at how quickly things rebounded because of refugia.