Being outdoors, spiritual practice, being with animals, and creative pursuits are among four types of resilience practice. For the last 3 years, I’ve understood these practices as primarily solo activities through an individual experience. But, I’m endeavoring to craft more shared resilience practices that are cottage-scale infrastructure projects to install solar panels for photovoltaic (PV) systems along with water catchment.
I see this in sharper relief in the last month after a small brushfire, tsunami warning, and interruption to the municipal water system. And, I can imagine a different possibility, in part having read about community solar projects more than a decade ago; the first time reading, recognized how such turbulence could provide a deviant other way for local energy and electricity rather than continue to depend on the sketchy ethics of energy monopolies: Xcel, Con Edison, PG&E, they are providers of essential electricity but they are unfairly protected by state and federal laws that create unnecessarily burdensome barriers for smaller alternatives to adapt.
Rather than pine for how this local community and my surroundings could be different, I now know of a group of people capable of building the water and electricity systems that are self-contained, independent and not reliant on the functional administrative and tech systems of the utility monopolies. So, we will embark by figuring out how much we can do in the next year so that when the next blackout, storm, drought, other man-made disaster or natural calamity occurs that we may have some resiliency that doesn’t harken to what FEMA could and couldn’t do 21 years ago in the hours, days, and weeks after Hurricane Katrina.
Organizing starts with relationships, simple inquiries, and collecting stories, data, names, and addresses. Then we can imagine how we change our lives together.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 