An Infrastructure Agenda For Municipal Eco-Socialism, Part 3

Towards community, conviviality, and collective wealth

Welcome to third installment in this series! Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

How can we both adapt to and head-off climate change? How can we transition to meeting our basic needs through democratically-managed public goods, rather than the nightmarish private hellscape of capitalism? And how can we do all this using readily available, low-cost processes that are viable anywhere on Earth?

These are the questions I asked myself when formulating my Infrastructure Agenda for Municipal Eco-Socialism. The series of threads (1, 2, 3) that I wrote on this topic will now get fleshed out a bit here in the newsletter.

Today, we touch five more agenda items: tool libraries, town canteens, winter gardens, town apiaries, and regional fabrics.

Part 3

1. Tool libraries and workshops. We take it as a given that every town should have a book library: a publicly-owned and operated institution that collectively manages a pool of books for free and equal use by members of the community. But why only books? Every town government should also operate a tool library. This would make tool access free and universal, while dramatically reducing resource consumption. Rather than filling every private garage with expensive, resource-intensive tools that only get used a few times a year, tool libraries would dramatically expand the range of tools available to all while simultaneously reducing their ecological footprint. Tool libraries should be housed in municipal workshops, where residents can use communal work tables, utilities, large/immobile tools, and safety equipment. Just as volunteer-run tool libraries do today, municipal workshops can host repair clinics, DIY classes, and events, similar to the reading groups, educational courses, and author readings hosted by public libraries. Libraries of all kinds are the perfect example of how public goods make us richer AND more sustainable simultaneously.

   

   

2. Town canteens. Every town should operate a canteen offering cheap meals made from locally grown food. With a small commercial kitchen--similar to what you'd find in many church basements--and pleasant dining area, town canteens would help fight hunger and loneliness, support local agriculture, and create much needed community. With high quality meals sold at cost, a canteen would cultivate a new food economy while providing affordable meals in a universally welcoming environment. This would help foster the development of local cuisines, building real community character in a world homogenized by capitalism. Competitions for best food, interior design, festivals, and more would encourage towns to go further, with winners receiving grants and publicity, via a sort of eco-socialist Michelin guide. And the spaces themselves needn't be institutional or spartan; in fact, they should set the bar for beauty and conviviality, as befits a public good.

   

   

3. Winter gardens. Called "palm houses" in Victorian Britain, heated glass and iron greenhouses served as indoor parks where people could stroll and socialize, no matter the weather. Towns in cold climates should build these again to provide plant-filled community spaces year round. While the benefits of having a lovely, centrally-located greenhouse to stroll through in the depths of winter are obvious, there's also the potential to grow food. Hobbyists regularly grow mangos, avocados, and citrus in the chilly Northeast, so why not municipalities? If you're worried this might be an unmanageable expense, consider that London's Crystal Palace, an absolute behemoth of a glasshouse at 22 acres and tall enough to fit several mature elm trees, was built in just over 5 months for the equivalent of $14 million. That's $15/sq ft; we can afford it.

   

   

4. Town apiaries. Bees are in trouble and paradoxically one of the main culprits is commercial beekeeping. Huge concentrations of commercial non-native European beehives outcompete local bees for nectar and pollen, and their transportation over long distances spreads disease. But how can we enjoy the many great benefits of honey without undermining local pollinators? Small, stationary, non-commercial apiaries are the solution. A few well-managed hives that stay in a town's food forest--which add to the local supply of nectar and pollen--would improve plant yields, produce significant quantities of honey/beeswax/propolis, and stabilize bee populations. A municipalized system of honey production would allow for the egalitarian distribution of this marvelous resource, without the capitalist growth imperative to push it into overshoot. Creating a healthy, local source of sugar that can be stored indefinitely would be a vast improvement for our food system over the industrialized production of beet and cane sugar.

   

   

5. Regional fabric. There's no better way to kickstart the development of a regional fibershed economy than by creating a trademark local fabric. By sourcing the raw materials--fiber, dyes, and labor--entirely from within a single bioregion, a regional fabric would necessarily be one of a kind. A distinctive fabric made from local fibers and botanical dyes would not only support a healthy ecosystem and economy, it would help create an authentic sense of place, a feature sorely missing or rapidly disappearing in much of America. USDA cooperative extensions should coordinate and subsidize the formation of producer and worker co-ops to make and sell the fabrics, working with local school districts, municipalities, and businesses to incorporate the fabric into local products.

   

   

All of these proposals are well-within reach. We've been told that we can't afford public goods, like libraries and gardens, but that's a lie. In a world of barbaric inequality, what actually stands between us and the joys of shared abundance are capitalists and their politicians.

We needn't wait until the nightmare of capitalism is over to start building the future. We can organize today for local governments to enact the above proposals and more. I urge you to join with others to make it happen.

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