Some twenty years ago a friend of mine, a journalist, went to Peru to write a story on Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path.
My friend, sometime later, told me she had been terrified the entire time she was in Peru putting together the story. It was a country gripped in darkness and paranoia.
Sendero was a Maoist organization, especially brutal and killed without any particular remorse. A few people have likened it to the Pol Pot regime that once brutalized the inhabitants of Cambodia. Sendero’s goal was to establish a communist peasant revolutionary regime of some sort.
The leader of the Shining Path was eventually captured in the early 90s and the organization faded from public view. But it now appears to have morphed into narcotrafficking and kidnapping for ransom and is staging a comeback, its ideology not totally clear at the moment.
Our neighbor to the south, Mexico, seems to be falling further and further behind in combating the drug traffickers, who are becoming a state within a state. See Mexico’s Unsuccessful Drug War, Painfully Preserved and Hidden.
The next step is for the drug cartel to provide on-going services that the government normally provides but with more far more speed, efficiency and yes, even honesty.
These examples are being increasingly replicated across the globe. They are not going to stop anytime soon, and the “developed” world is not immune.
Now that we Americans seemingly will have a “real” president, who will—ideally—attract some intelligent people to his administration, possessing (hopefully) a fair amount of integrity, we might wisely devote a lot more time looking at cities and the development of resilient communities.
Regardless of how effective our national government may turn out to be, we are going to have to do more than pay lip service to the local and continue to tolerate truly mediocre leadership.
Growing resource scarcity, increasing disruptions of all sorts, and a dysfunctional international system badly in need of repair will, it seems to me, force us to function more effectively and independently on a smaller, albeit interconnected scale.
We know that 50% of the world’s population now lives in cities. How many of the cities where we live in the United States are run by visionary leaders, who know how to motivate people and get things done? Do we even know? It’s the first step.
A good article about incorporating some old ideas with clean-energy development at the local level is Retrofits for All.
And from the U.K, Forum for the Future, a site that examines a sustainable future. Go to Forum.
So who are the people making things happen at the local and the regional level across America? Who are these people in the cities where we live? What are they actually implementing? What is applicable for our community?
