The Challenge of Gaining Ground: Bringing the Resilient Cities Conversation Home

by hans peter meyer

This past October the Gaining Ground team did it again: delivered "Resilient Cities" as an amazing, sobering, and inspiring conference on how we are, in many places, "gaining ground" on the global "sustainability project" – making our communities better places to live. This shouldn't have any of us feeling smug, however. As voices from around the world keep telling us – via 350.org, #tcktcktck, hopenhagen to name a few – we're not in good shape.

Resilient Cities (GGRC09) did show how there is lots of the "right stuff" happening, much of it not particularly expensive or difficult. It just takes doing it. Now. Right now. In my town and yours. Did I say "now?" I'll say it again: Many of the things that need to be done for our communities to "get resilient" and become sustainable are doable and they need doing now. Right now.

And that's the challenge: How to take the energy and insights of 3 conference days and make it real in a place like Whistler, Kelowna, or the Comox Valley? How do we take this stuff home and apply it, when so many people are just struggling to deal with 2008's moment of financial reckoning?

The provincial government's push to have municipalities be carbon neutral by 2020 is an opportunity. Many places are scratching their heads on how they're going to get there. GGRC09 had lots of good ideas about this. We need to find ways to have the conversations in our communities about what GGRC09 was about. Conversations about sustainability can be sobering; but they are also about making our neighbourhoods and communities richer, more vibrant places.

In my community, the collection of small urban spaces and rural hamlets known as the Comox Valley, we have a golden opportunity. For a number of reasons we have... a Comox Valley Sustainability Strategy (CVSS), Regional Growth Strategy (RGS), a Regional Conservation Strategy (RGS), and a regional water planning process (don't know the name or the acronym of that one). When opportunity rains it pours here.

In this context, GGRC09 is a rich resource for any of us who attended. However, there weren't a lot of us Comox Valley folks taking advantage of the GGRC09 banquet of ideas. Jack Minard from the Comox Valley Land Trust was there (listen the CITinfoResource interview with Jack here). So was Chris Bowers (he did some very cool video interviews with participants – take a look here). Anyone else? Raise your hands all ye citizens of the Comox Valley, particularly you from local government – staff or elected folks: Did you make it to one of the richest sustainability learning events of the year? Well, please make it a priority for next year. (You might want to listen to what Kelowna Councillor Michelle Rule said about this year's GGRC09 and why she's hoping more staff and pols attend the next GG summit.)

I write about sustainability, land use, real estate, and community development topics. It's what I've been doing on and off for about 17 years. I'm also connected to some good folks here in my town, people with lots of energy and imagination. With their help I pitched a project about "stimulating the conversation about sustainability in the Comox Valley" – and we're doing it! I look at this as my opportunity to carry the GGRC09 conversation home.

It's a curious little venture, this thing we're doing. Related to the CVSS, but not part of it. Paid for by the consultant, but outside the CVSS budget. Why is it this way? Because my imaginative friends suggested that, irregardless of the outcomes of the CVSS, its legacy and that of the many, many volunteers who put many, many hours into CVSS would depend more on an extended, generalized conversations about sustainability in the community than on a strategic document that local government might or might not pay much attention to. It's a bit of what Majora Carter referred to at GGRC09: too many great strategic and planning docs sit gathering dust because there isn't the leadership to push them to happen. So we're taking the "conversation about sustainability in the Comox Valley" outside the policy process. Online. Over lunch and dinner. Outside of "official communications." As the property and responsibility of us as residents, taxpayers, and citizens of this place.

We're at an interesting time right now in terms of "leadership" and "responsibility" in our communities. We need immediate and collective action on changing behaviours and assumptions about how live in our corners of paradise. Traditional forms are slow to respond and awkward. At the same time, we have communications tools that enable rapid exchange and development of ideas, knowledge, and action: the extension of word-of-mouth that is "social media."

It's not magic. It's just a conversation. With the help of YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, etc we're able to sit around a "campfire" with our friends and acquaintances. We swap stories and anecdotes, we share pictures of family adventures, talk about our passions – and concerns. But we get to do it across huge gaps in space/time. I take part in "conversations" that span hours or days, and bridge tens or thousands of miles. It's word of mouth to the power of 10. When I hear through people I know and trust that they're taking action on climate change because they're connected to someone on the Maldives whose island is sinking... well, it means more to me than if I watch it on TV. Is word of mouth more reliable than the network news station? In my guts, yes. And it's in my guts that real change starts to take place.

Our little Comox Valley project is about building a campfire conversation about sustainability in our community. We're using video and audio interviews, posted all over the 'net. We came up with a simple, replicable process. We encourage people to pick it up and play. As they pick it up, do their own interviews, tag them (so all of us can find them and participate in them), and post them online they're making it a bigger, more inclusive campfire convo.

There is no end-point to what "sustainability" is or means to any one of us our community. We talk about it, or various aspects of it. We do some things. We learn a few things. And then we talk and do and learn some more. We move towards a better, more wholistic relationship to the ecological systems on which our lives, our families, and our communities depend. We become more resilient and responsive as we participate in the conversation. As we take into our guts what those we know, love, and trust tell us is important to them. That's how we figure out what is right to do, and what is right to do now.

Thanks Gene Miller, to you and your crew. The campfire you lit several years ago with the first Gaining Ground summit is a good fire. And with over 600 of us taking embers from this year's event, I'm imagining many campfire convos all around the province, sparked by the ideas, knowledge, and connections generated by #GGRC09. I'm imagining that these conversations will lead to myriad and diverse actions and changes, all of it helping us "gain ground" on the sustainability project we all need to be working on. 

My take-away from Resilient Cities? To extend the convo about sustainability from the GGRC09 campfire circle to the campfire circle called home, to make our fire burn brightly, inspiring many voices – and many actions, large and small!

Endnote:
To learn more about the Comox Valley conversations about sustainability project, go to www.CV2050.com or www.facebook.com/CV2050

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• Gaining Ground: in Conversation with Gene Miller (development-issues.com)
• The Resilient Cities Interviews 1: Michelle Rule on Take-aways from GGRC09 (communitytransition.blogspot.com)
• The Resilient Cities Interviews 2: Tim Pringle talks to hanspetermeyer about GGRC09 (communitytransition.blogspot.com)
• The Resilient Cities Interviews 3: Jack Minard of the Comox Valley Land Trust talks about GGRC09 (communitytransition.blogspot.com)