Emergency Sustainable Infrastructure

[Derian Blandon]

Redesigning our infrastructure to address various public health emergencies can lessen the damage of the climate crisis while protecting us from the worst. Updating our infrastructure is essential as it would create a massive jobs program, introduce land reform, combat soil erosion, hydraulic cycle disruption, lower community carbon footprints and expand the role of local academic leadership conducting research in various fields... if we exercise Tactical Guerilla Gardening: sidewalks, front yards, vacant lots, swales, rooftops, storefronts, shopping centers, parks ALL available space and ALL willing bodies must be directed towards localizing agricultural production through techniques in permaculture as a shield from the coming threat of a warming world and as a means of providing resources to those in need. The formation of agriculturally independent cities will diversify trade and produce community wealth. Many residences do not need to use additional water to grow their own food if they install grey-water irrigation systems which use shower/laundry water to irrigate crops(must use plant-based soaps to protect soil from chemicals). If we redesign our environments to be resource abundant through localized redesign and clean energy we can advance our standard of living while fully adapting to the various threats of increasingly hostile ecological and economic systems.

 

[MichaelG]

Thanks for this, Derian. I'd say what you're describing are important features of the World We Want, often neglected when people talk about that world. (And in my view we don't spend enough time talking about it.)
The problem, as ecosocialists often ask each other, is how to get there. Either the measures you're talking about are (1) local, independent efforts of people outside of the political/economic system (what ecosocialists call "prefiguration", that is, building the world of the future within the world of the present), or (2) demands that are made on the political/economic system, ultimately as part of a strategy of overthrowing and replacing that system with one that includes the features you describe.
I'd go for both (1) and (2) and argue that either alone will fail.

 

[David J]

On the technical side, Derian, I live in the high plains where most agriculture is centered around (hay and pasture) beef production. A few root crops and grains can be grown at scale (still chancy) and vegetables have a short growing season. How would we "diversify trade and produce community wealth" in competition with warmer climates who have better soil? We currently trade fossil fuels and minerals for food but much of this production is ecologically destructive. Should more fertile areas subsidize us or do we live on potatoes and beets?

 

[Kamran Nayeri]

Dear Derian:

Everything you say must be part of the effort to redesign human relations as well as our relationship with the rest of nature. And, I am sure you would agree, that such infrastructural project must be part of a much bigger effort to transition to a world where local and regional economies replace the national and international economy. Moreover, to get there we must organize and mobilize working people at workplaces, neighborhood, communities of various kinds, into a self-governing force that must take power away from capitalist corporations and government. I would say this sort of movement is what we as ecological socialists like to be part of both in helping to build them as well as joining in the conversation on how to design them at the same time. Of course, such movement cannot be built in a bubble. I can only be build as part of actual struggles that break out--from the teachers' strikes to Black Live Matters, to solidarity with people in the struggle against imperialism and war, etc. In this, of course, young people such as you would take the leading role if we are to stop existential threats again humanity and much of life on Earth which include the dangers of a nuclear war, the Sixth Extinction, and climate catastrophe.