by Alex Steffen
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008208.html

The other night Cory Doctorow and I were talking over coffee, and we
got going on an idea that's been rattling around in my head ever since.

We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the
looming climate crisis,the futility of survivalism; and we began to
play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some
good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and
if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental
transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their
familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose
from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people
are going to need help forging new ways of life.

Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright
green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in
many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts,
political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all
three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last
Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people
who are left trapped in degrading places, who don't get the green
collar jobs, do?

And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the
moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who
most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models
are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people
to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least
know how to find them.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and
innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead
mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm
communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed.
We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something
like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a
crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running
holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management
systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and
complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate
foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality
housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or
an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down
suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart
grids, communication systems, water treatment systems -- and getting
really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other
words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

This would not be lone stragglers wandering through a post-apocalyptic
landscape (ala A Canticle for Liebowitz). As we've said again and
again, worldending is a fool's game, and what comes after will not be
an adventure. Nor would it be the fantasy of a localist retreat to
19th Century farming communities that folks like Jim Kunstler hold so
dear (I mean, for Christsakes, no one really wants that life -- our
ancestors all had that life and they fled it as soon as they could in
great teeming masses)

Rather, it'd be a network of places where people were engaged in
ingenious development of elegant solutions to the problems of life
where living is hard and money is short might well be a vital
necessity for a certain portion of the population. It's really not
hard for me to imagine a certain kind of person eagerly embracing the
role of being facilitators of that network, sort of like barefoot
solar engineers for the forgotten parts of the developed world.

It sounds implausibly weird, but then much of the world we're moving
into is likely to sound that way at first. Our ideas of what's normal,
or even what's possible, will not outlast the next decade, and it'll
be the people who think in (what are by today's standards) abnormal,
impossible ways who may just do the most good.