On February 25 and 26 I attended the 1st annual “Sustainable Communities in the North Conference” (Thunder Bay, ON) with members of the Dryden Envirothon Team.  The main issue that the conference addressed was peak oil and resilience of communities.  Conference pre-requisite: watched the documentary – “The End of Suburbia”.

“It is necessary that all the people of this region are given a forum to celebrate our strength and character and to feel safe and comfortable enough to take the long, hard and honest look at the challenges we face in an era of great uncertainty.” – Alex Boulet, SCN Chairperson

Dr. Mirella Stroink (Lakehead University) was the initial speaker at the conference.  Her ideas were from a psychological perspective.  She identified one of our main barriers to sustainability as mental assumption.  It leads us to assume that the marketplace is a more important ecossytem in which to seek survival than the biophysical environment; an assumption that affects our environmental behaviour.  She proposed that communities will be more secure environmentally and economically if they become more adaptive and resilient.  With the community of Dryden in mind, it is not resilient to be extremely dependent on one sector.

How do we achieve resilience?

• Diversity: (people, business, energy, sources of food, land use planning, communities, connections…etc.)  Each community must examine it’s own resources to achieve resilience.
• Modularity: Become interconnected both locally and broadly.  Modular systems can self-organize in the event of shock (since they already have patterns of interactions within their communities).

Localization is our first priority.  We must build the capability to produce locally what we CAN produce locally.

Building Resilience:

• land use planning
• business development (www.livingeconomies.org)
• energy and food production
• change behaviour
• education (change content and approach since it is currently designed to prepare people for the “marketplace ecosystem”)
• teach hard skills (farming…)
• unplug (replace the TV with stimulating community events to develop a community identity)

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During the conference, solutions were discussed during the youth forum and were shared during the conference visionary session.