Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer who has led several successful campaigns to make polluters accountable. The author of Canaries on the Rim and Hope’s Horizon, he writes from Torrey, Utah. This essay is adapted from one that was originally published in The Nation in 2009.

Excerpt:

…Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, reports that, within the deindustrialized
ruins of Detroit, a landscape she describes as “not quite postapocalyptic
but…post-American,” people are homesteading abandoned lots, growing
their own produce, raising farm animals, and planting orchards. In that
depopulated city, some have been clawing (or perhaps hoeing) their way back
to a semblance of food security. They have done so because they had to, and
their reward has been harvests that would be the envy of any organic farmer.
The catastrophe that is Detroit didn’t happen with a Hurricane Katrina–style
bang, but as a slow, grinding bust—and a possibly haunting preview of what
many American municipalities may experience postcrash. Solnit claims, however,
that the greening of Detroit under the pressure of economic adversity is
not just a strategy for survival, but a possible path to renewal. It’s also a living
guidebook to possibilities for our new Department of Homegrown Security
when it considers where it might most advantageously put some of its financial
muscle while creating a more secure—and resilient—America.

As chef and author Alice Waters has demonstrated so practically, schools
can start “edible schoolyard” gardens that cut lunch-program costs, provide
healthy foods for students, and teach the principles of ecology. The foodgrowing
skills and knowledge that many of our great-grandparents took for
granted growing up in a more rural America have long since been lost in our
migration into cities and suburbs. Relearning those lost arts could be a key
to survival if the trucks stop arriving at the Big Box down the street.

The present Department of Homeland Security has produced reams of
literature on detecting and handling chemical weapons and managing casualties
after terrorist attacks. Fine, we needed to know that. Now, how about
some instructive materials on composting soil, rotating crops to control
pests and restore soil nutrients, and canning and drying all that seasonal
bounty so it can be eaten next winter?

It’s not just about increasing the local food supply, of course. Community
gardens provide a safe place for neighbors to cooperate, socialize, bond,
share, celebrate, and learn from one another. The self-reliant networks that
are created when citizens engage in such projects can be activated in an
emergency. The capacity of a community to self-organize can be critically
important when a crisis is confronted. Such collective efforts have been
called community greening or civic ecology, but the traditional name grassroots
democracy fits no less well.

Here’s the interesting thing: without federal aid or direction, the first
glimmer of a green approach to homeland security is already appearing. It
goes by the moniker relocalization, and if that’s a bit of an awkward mouthful
for you, it really means that your most basic security is in the hands
not of distant officials in Washington but of neighbors who believe that
self-reliance is safer than dependence. In this emerging age of chaos, pooled
resources and coordinated responses will, this new movement believes, be
more effective than thousands of individuals breaking out their survival kits
alone or waiting for the helicopters to land.

Actually, relocalization is an international movement and, as usual
when it comes to the greening of modern society, the Europeans are way
ahead of us. There are now hundreds of local groups in at least a dozen
countries that are convening local meetings as part of the Relocalization
Network to “make other arrangements for the post-carbon future” of their
communities. In Great Britain, an allied Transition Towns movement has
sprung up in an effort to spark ideas about, and focus energies on, how to
wean whole communities off imported energy, food, and material goods.
With a rising sea at its front door, the Netherlands has taken a further step.
Its national security plan actually makes sustainability and environmental
recovery key priorities.

In the United States, post-carbon working groups are beginning to sprout
across the country. In my backyard, right in the heart of red-state Utah, a
diverse group of citizens calling themselves the Canyonlands Sustainable
Solutions have come together to generate practical plans for insulating the
remote town of Moab, 200 miles from the trade and transport hub of Salt
Lake City, from future food and energy price shocks and supply interruptions.
Such local groups are often loosely allied with one another, especially
regionally, through websites and blogs that report on the progress of diverse
projects, trade ideas as well as information, and offer lots of feedback.

The citizens engaged in relocalization projects have largely given up on
federal aid and are going it alone. Still, think how much farther they could
go if only a fraction of the $27 billion directed at state and local governments
to enhance “emergency preparedness” in the 2009 Department of Homeland
Security budget were given in grants to their projects. If we can afford to
hand rural Craighead County in Arkansas $600,000 for hazmat suits and
other antiterror paraphernalia to defend cotton and soybean farmers from
attack, surely we could provide grants for urban homesteaders in Detroit.

Food security, of course, is just one aspect of a green vision of homegrown
security. Other obvious elements like energy and water security
could also be reimagined, if only official Washington weren’t so stuck in
the obvious. No doubt, somewhere out there on the Titanic this planet is
becoming, the go-it-aloners, with no Department of Homegrown Security
to back them, are already doing so—and helping prepare us all as best they
can for the realization that, right now, there are not enough lifeboats to carry
us to safety.

Perhaps it’s not so unrealistic to expect that someday, as a homegrown
security movement builds and matures, it can capture a share of the federal
funds that now go to such dubious measures as closed-circuit televisions
and crash-proof barriers at sports stadiums, including $345,000 for Razorback
Stadium in Arkansas.

In the meanwhile, let’s encourage projects that are building resilience in
communities as small as Moab and as large as New York City, while revitalizing
local culture with a dose of grassroots engagement. Seed it and feed it,
and it will bloom. Along the way we will learn that when it comes to home,
or land, or security, living in an open, inclusive, and robust democracy is
not an impediment to defense but a deep advantage. Democracy, if only we
nurture it, is the very soil of our resilience.