Recently at a gathering with friends, someone commented to a friend about alternating her home between two places: working and living in Vancouver while also having a home at Christina Lake.
She promptly and adamantly replied, “No, no, I work in Vancouver, but I live here!”
That notion – being able to celebrate living here – is vital to community health. What does it mean to really be living here, in this place, and how can we do a good job of celebrating and improving what we have here?
Some of you will remember a couple winters past, when avalanches shut down some of our transportation systems for a handful of days – no trucks came to town bearing shiny Chilean tomatoes, nor steaks from prairie feedlots.
We do have the capacity to be producing these products locally (you may have to wait a tad longer for your early tomatoes and skip the feedlots, I suppose), but if we want reliable local production, we need to provide reliable local consumption.
If you want the security of a vibrant local food system filling your fridge, you need to show local producers that you care about knowing what’s in your food; that you care about having good food accessible, and that you care about local economy.
On the whole, we all need to do a better job of recognizing that the decisions about what we eat means a great deal to whomever is touched by the string of transactions between your wallet and the soil underneath those tomatoes.
And what of that string of transactions? When you pay that local contractor to refinish your roof, he or she pays her employee, who in turn pays for local child care, who then pays to go listen to the band in town that night, who maybe then takes that money out of town. Conversely, when you fill up with fuel in Kettle Falls, those dollars are lost from our local economy immediately, and furthermore, no tax dollars, gas tax or otherwise, return to our community!
This form of economic recycling within a community, where income continues to generate income, is called a local multiplier.
Some coarse research indicates that if every family in the Boundary spent just $20 more per week on local food (while not spending any more on food in total), we would have $5 million more entering our local economies that would spur about $10 million more in local economic activity. And that’s not even addressing the jobs created!
The same economics applies to other local enterprises, with slightly different numbers; whether it’s your local auto mechanic or the bike shop, it makes a big difference.
So then, what’s it worth to spend a little more of your time, energy and money in our local communities? There are myriad examples around the globe of the financial, social, and environmental value of being more present in our local communities.
Your local government is making some exciting moves in the right directions. For example, the City of Grand Forks recently adopted a local food charter, a noteworthy action solidifying their support for healthy local food and agricultural systems. So what about local procurement policies? How much is it worth to you to have a local contractor hired for regional district work, or a local florist creating our city flower baskets?
If you think it makes sense for local government to “live here,” what about yourself? What’s your personal policy to help make this community healthier and more robust?
This is all about living locally. Let’s try to ensure that we are present in our communities: through thoughtful financial transactions, compassionate social interactions, and awareness of the environment that surrounds us. I live here, and I’m proud of being a part of this.
– Roly Russell is alternate Area D director for the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary