The re-named Canadian Centre for Community Renewal has a new e-journal (i4) about Inspiring, Innovating, Inciting, and Inventing ways of life and work that permit humanity and the planet to thrive in this century of unprecedented challenges.
Both the Centre and its magazine are committed to working with communities to increase their resilience especially their capacity to equitably meet their needs for food, energy, finance, and shelter. Here is the rationale for their renewed focus:
Communities have always had to respond creatively to forces and conditions beyond their control. But this age of peak oil and climate change is disturbing assumptions that for generations have been fundamental to the way communities function socially and economically: their profound dependence on cheap fossil fuels for transport, heat, and innumerable products; and their expectations with regard to precipitation, temperature, seasons, as well as vegetation and animal life.
The rules of the game of community are changing. To thrive, communities have to become more resilient. We have to develop a capacity to assess, learn, adapt, and innovate all the time, especially in terms of the ways in which we meet our most basic needs: food, energy, housing, asset ownership, and the means by which we pay for all this creativity, finance.
Topics covered in the first issue of i4 include
Re-imagining the Food Chain – achieving scale for food locally produced
A Future to Celebrate – about the burgeoning Transition Town movement.
A feature I appreciated on the new website/journal is Innovations to watch, covering the topics of food, energy, housing, ownership, finance and community resilience.
It's free – simply click here to subscribe and available in French and English.
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