The road trip stories...
"Nearly all our villages today... are communities in the process of dissolution." -Henri Lefebvre
Last week I was at the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation annual conference in Corner Brook and so had an opportunity to hear a keynote from David Douglas, one of the most thoughtful and kindest people you'll ever meet. David was talking about the future of the rural and the four crisis it was facing with little or no ability to address any of them. The four are: the climate crisis, technological flux, advanced market capitalism, and populism, autocracy and geo-political change. I think we can add demographic changes here as well – at least that's what I am hearing and seeing when I talk to folks in rural regions here in Newfoundland.
It's hard to argue with David. Rural communities and entire rural regions have little power over any of those big four (five). I write this in Baie Verte, the largest community on the Baie Verte Peninsula with some 1,300 people. The community I made the photo above in, Fleur de Lys, has just over 200 people. Baie Verte Peninsula, where both of these and 17 other communities are located, is larger than Malta and you could fit three cities of Paris into its area. Half the communities are fishing communities and the other half mining. It used to be asbestos, then copper, lead, zinc and gold. There is also logging. This is a resource rich place that struggles to pave its roads and provide drinking water to all its residents. There are hundreds of such places around the world in the rural regions that are exploited for their resources and left to their own devices for everything else. You are lucky if you ever see your elected member of provincial or federal parliament in your community once the elections are over.
But, the other thing I hear is that these communities are looking for ways to organize and tackle their problems together. And they are willing to put everything on the table. Who says the economy has to be organized the way it is? What if they experimented with a community ownership structure? A home can be a single family house, but it can also be a co-op housing or a communal housing that allows the aging residents to have both, their independence and vibrant social lives. What if we built a couple of greenhouses on town land and provided fresh produce for our residents year round? What if we shared resources regionally instead of competing with each other for the crumbs provincial and federal governments and mining companies throw our way? Can we figure out our own fire protection strategy? How do we learn about the climate change impacts on our fishery resources? Sit down with any small town mayor and yes they will give you a list of barriers and complaints, but once they make their way through that list and find out that you are still listening, they will give you the other list – the one they pin their hopes and their community futures on. That's the important one and the one that can prove Henri Lefebvre wrong - the dissolution of the rural is not inevitable.
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