Editor, The Times:
The word “sustainable” keeps coming up in a lot of conversations around town; sustainable forestry, sustainable food supply, sustainable health care and education. Another word that is buzzing around is “security” – food security, a secure timber supply, and secure water sources.
There seems to be a growing consensus around here that looking after of ourselves in a sustainable way is what the majority us seem to want to do.
So what does it mean? To me, it’s about living, shopping, and working locally as much as possible. It’s about buying local food or growing your own food as often as possible – finding your meat, fish and poultry within the valley, instead of from some giant processing plant that ships it God knows where and does God knows what with it before it gets to you.
It’s about hiring the local guy, even if he isn’t the cheapest or most experienced guy. It’s about making things work through creative solutions and pooling of resources.
It’s about taking the time to teach others, especially your kids, our skills and the things we’ve learned how to do, instead of just pushing through and just doing it ourselves. We need to be passing on skills like hunting and fishing, preserving and canning, planting and harvesting, woodcutting and house fixing. We need to teach people to build and make things, instead of just buying them from a store that sourced them from an economically indentured community on the other side of the world, or from a country that doesn’t care about its environment.
It’s about ensuring that Wells Gray Country and Clearwater are a great place to live, a life destination, and not just a place for teachers, doctors, and other professionals to “do time” so they can build their resumes before moving on to a “real community”. It may be the need to grow our own professionals, to invest in training people who love this place, instead of getting skilled people to move here.
Since the will is seemingly here, how do we find the way? There are some solid examples of where to start, like the farmers market, our local small scale mills, some of our local ranchers. These folks try, but I can see sometimes that it is a struggle to get enough local people on board to make any idea a sustainable reality. We may buy some local produce, but few of us buy local meat because we can’t make the connection from the cow to the frying pan. We can see the fir lumber but can’t see the new kitchen table from it.
The hard truth is that it really comes down to us as individual consumers to get this started. We need to make the choice to do more where we live. We need to escape the traps of perfection and instant gratification – of perfectly shaped produce, of two kilo boxes of chicken breasts, and of pressboard furniture made on the other side of the globe for less than we can make it ourselves locally.
We need to realize that we may have to pay more up front to get something done or to buy something, but if the dollar stays in our town, it will eventually find its way back into our pocket, not the pocket of some faceless multinational company.
I think the harsher reality is that doing this is going to more of our time and effort, and like dieting or quitting smoking, it may take many attempts before we get it right. And as much as we wish, we still can’t do it all here, so the goal has to be to do more here, not all here.
It’s going to take people to step up and lead by example, and it will require trust in cooperative efforts to move forward. Step up on the local web forums and share how you have successfully done things locally and sustainably. The knowledge is already here, we just need to start sharing it again.
Merlin Blackwell
Clearwater, B.C.
