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| Gathering like pigeons in the rain. Some of my friends and I met at a cafe in the middle of our city (Perth, in Western Australia, Australia) last night. We carpooled! We've been instant messaging about the oil shock and I've been relaying articles to them from WWO. The first suggestion that was thrown forward was that we needed to do something towards banding together. We decided that we might as well call ourselves a 'democratic collective' (my suggestion, my less political friends giggled...) and we decided that we'd meet regularly to make decisions about steps we take to deal with the crisis here. We figured because we were such a small group that we had the opportunity to make all of our decisions in a consensus democratic way, so we didn't appoint a president and we've decided that we're going to share other roles around. Its a little scary to imagine what might happen if the situation we've already seen in places like Milton Keynes in the US takes root here and develops into some kind of mass lawlessness. I was hoping I wouldn't have to deal with this in my lifetime. I'm glad we have our own little 'self-government' now that we can turn to if things start to fall apart. But anyway, our little collective is trying to keep its spirits up by coming up with some 'crazy ideas' as advocated by WWO's Mpathytest. Crazy Idea #1: This was a little left field but some of the folks who were there were pretty big on riding and did most of their transport on their bikes. I threw up the question about how it is that those guys could transport larger items or large amounts of items. How did they get their flatpacks home from Ikea? So we had this pretty wacky brainwave of welding two bikes together with a large carrying basket in between the two. That way, not only could we have a way to move larger stuff around, with twice the power being applied to the vehicle, we could go a little faster too when we were unloaded. We weren't sure how the added weight would impact on the effort it would take to ride, so we haven't fired up the welder just yet. Clearly though this is gonna be a much more efficient than a normal 'tandem' bike. Crazy Idea #2: Actually, this isn't much of a crazy idea at all. We discussed the way that the soaring oil prices were going to make transportation of goods crazy expensive. Living in Australia, the one thing we have a massive amount of is space. At first we decided that this was a pretty crappy thing, because everything here has to be moved around further than in Europe or in big American cities. We realised that fresh food was going to cost a whole lot real soon. But then we though about the fact that in our suburban homes we have pretty huge backyards. So why couldn't we start growing our own food? All we needed were seeds and compost and, at least for the moment, water costs aren't spiking. We decided that we are going to separate out the food growing duties amongst us, depending on what kind of space each of us has. We're going to get together once a week and distribute the food amongst us so that everyone gets a little bit of each. We plan to grow mostly vegetables and herbs because we figure that those will be easier than fruits. Some of us already have citrus trees so those folks will provide us with our vitamin C. The fact that each of us will be bringing enough of one kind of food for each of us, it should make it possible to transport by bike. Because we'll be sharing everything out, everyone should be able to ride home with the same amount of weight we started with. We all threw some of our money into a central kitty so that we can purchase seeds. But we also realised that we could utilise geurilla gardening to expand our growing operations into other spaces. We decided we'd look into what kind of parks, bushland and vacant blocks we had around us. I've got a vacant block next to my house which hasn't has a house on it for years. I'm going to try to quietly plant some vegetables behind the masses of tall grass. We're thinking very seriously about this idea and decided that should we have any surplus we'd seek out like minded people to trade with and we'd try to make sure we have some food going to charities. Anyway, we all had a pretty excellent night in the end and set another meeting in the near future. I walked home and I looked up at the stars, and I felt good about things. Even without oil, the sun is still going to shine down on plants and no oil crisis was gonna stop photosynthesis. We will still eat, no matter what. | ||||||
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