By Tom & Carol Braford
I got some feedback on last month’s article, questioning whether calling it a Moonshot is the best metaphor for our Post Carbon Communities of Practice. Having it be as localized as possible and having St. Louis play a lead role in aligned larger global efforts, however, resonated with a lot of people.
In fact, we are discovering several regional and global efforts already underway that we are very aligned with. Perhaps if we collaborated with them, we could have all of us go further faster. Speaking of that, check out the link for an example of our Rapid Alternative Freight & Transit (RAFT) system that will connect all these communities and the St. Louis region together. Solar-Powered Automated Transportation: Feasibility and Visualization, Full Video
One that was just rolled out during Martin Luther King week by our friends in Atlanta, Georgia and Portland, Oregon is a new branding of their combined efforts as “Just Communities of Practice” that was formerly the EcoDistricts movement.
Another is the re-ruralization movement that was originally developed in Colorado and Missouri by our friend and colleague, Peter LaVaute, while he was working with the late, great actor and entrepreneur, Dennis Weaver, and his Institute of Ecolonomics.
With Dennis’s passing years ago and Peter moving to Nova Scotia for half of each year, at first it seemed unlikely that we could continue working together, but since dealing with Covid and doing so much with webinars, this no longer seems like such a barrier. We still want to do rural Just Post Carbon Communities of Practice in Missouri, and Peter has enough land on an island in Canada to build both a Post Carbon Community and a Green Business Park, another part of our model. He also shares our enthusiasm for having the businesses owned by affiliated worker-owned co-ops, modeled after Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. This has been my dream since the early 70s, living in the Soulard neighborhood at Whole Wheat House, which was incorporated as the Harbor Housing co-op and running the Whole Wheat Co-op Grocery.
A third example is the presentation we heard at the Touhill on Martin Luther King Day that linked racial justice to economic justice that we will share more about next month.
Links to our Ideas: https://stlouis.citizenlab.co/en/ideas/post-carbon-communities-of-practice
https://stlouis.citizenlab.co/en/ideas/just-post-carbon-cities-of-practice
Contact: braford@sbcglobal.net