In-sourcing your life

Imagine a giant web that stretches around the world. Imagine that you stand on one slender filament of that web. When it begins to quiver far away, you feel those vibrations, and when it breaks, even if the destruction is far from you, you can’t escape unscathed.

The “web” metaphor is often used to describe our environment. But you can also use the web to describe our economy. Financial crises on Wall Street and in Europe have a profound impact on all of us in this world where one family’s mortgage in Boulder is owned in part by a dozen different entities around the world.
When it comes to the environment, our security depends on protecting the entire global web of life — plankton in the oceans, lemurs in Madagascar, prairie dogs on the Great Plains of North America. Lose too many keystone species, and the entire web collapses.

But the situation is different when it comes to the economy. When the strands of the web reach around the globe, we leave it to a company in China to control the safety of our food, and countries in the Middle East to control our oil. To achieve economic security, we need to shrink the size of the web by doing all we can to create a self-sustaining community.

How do we achieve this? Shopping at locally owned businesses is a good start, because the money we spend stays in our community, supporting our neighbors and friends and helping to maintain jobs here in Boulder County. But it’s more than that.

To have a sustainable community, we must have a self-sufficient community. Few of us come close to living self-sufficient lives, instead outsourcing even the most basic functions to strangers in faraway countries. From our food to our clothing to every item we own, we depend on others for our well-being.
It’s time to “in-source” our lives again, to relearn the skills that our great-grandparents knew and to transform our neighborhoods into sustainable, independent communities capable of withstanding the economic turmoil of the world.

Boulderganic hopes to be your resource for “in-sourcing” your life and reclaiming your own economic vitality in a way that’s good for you, for your community, and for that fragile web of life upon which we all depend.

You can take a look at this year’s Spring edition here.

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