Photo: Adam Pez
Michael Lewis is the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal and is well-known internationally as a practitioner, author, educator and leader in the fields of Community Economic Development and Social Economy.
I met with Mike Lewis on November 3, 2012 to discuss The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy (co-written with Pat Conaty) at the Food Secure Canada Assembly, held in Edmonton, Alberta. The assembly gathered over 300 individuals from across Canada representing the success and challenges of food security work trying to build systems of equity that fight hunger and sustain human and ecological health. Our conversation took place in this apt surrounding, sandwiched between a viewing of
Our Changing Homeland, Our Changing Life, a food security tale of the VuntutGwitchin First Nation of Old Crow, Yukon, and the evening’s Tastes and Sounds of Alberta,
a gala farmers market. Lewis spoke passionately and extensively about the key
messages and case studies within this book and of his personal pathway to and
from this work.
Aurora: I would like you to talk a bit about your journey to the book and what took you to the book. Why did you write this book?
Lewis: For 25 years, October was marked by the ‘Tramp to the Stamp’ with my children. Witnessing giant Chinook salmon struggling against the rushing currents and cascading falls of the Stamp River had become an annual ritual. Amira, my first grandchild, was three years old on her first ‘Tramp to the Stamp’ in 2003. She was so enthralled-gasps, laughter and sparkling eyes enlarged by the wonder of one salmon after another soaring from the torrent, hitting the rocks and getting swept back downstream.
That day I experienced the spectacle as if for the first time and my tears flowed. I felt wholeness and connection, the grace of being alive. But mixed into this torrent of emotion was a rising sense of grief.
The day before I had read an article that described how if the trend of rising water temperatures continue, salmon would not exist in 40 years. As I stood with my granddaughter, sharing the wonder of such abundance, I was hit with horror. Amira’s first grandchild, should she ever visit this incredible place, would never see a salmon. The grandeur and majestic blessing of that day might be no more than a story of what used to be.
In one hour, a child, a salmon and one journal article converged to change my life. What I knew and loved was threatened. I was shaken to the very core of my being.
I had to stop, to read, listen, learn, think and feel. It was hard. There was so much to unpack and so much to let go of. It was not a quick, painless process. Thus began the journey that brought me to the work of writing this book. It now occurred to me that the implications of climate change and peak oil were such that we were going to be compelled, whether we liked it or not, to figure out how to reweave our economies on a more local and regional basis. How do we navigate these difficult waters we are now in?
Aurora: You co-wrote the book?
Lewis: Yes indeed. While my granddaughter set me out on the journey, Pat Conaty was central to making the book a reality. We could not have done it alone, either of us. It was a true collaboration.
Like me, Pat is a dyed in the wool driven practitioner. Poverty reduction and community-based action, building multi-stakeholder organizations, mobilizing coalitions and networks, introducing proven innovations in new contexts, building new tools, and lots of research; all these themes and activities have been part of both of our lives. He has also worked with the basic idea of mobilizing and organizing blended sources of finance under a multi-stakeholder government model that’s driven by trying to affect the positive well being of a particular community or territory or sub region. He brought that into the UK.
Aurora: How did the two of you come together?
Lewis: I was at a meeting in Birmingham (UK) and we met. Once the BC/Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (BALTA) came together, I brought Pat in as a collaborator. I just thought here is a man with a lot of depth and he can teach us a lot. And he has!
So that created the context and provided some money to support the two of us getting together. Given the analysis that each of us brought to the table concerning climate change and the financial crisis, we decided that we really had to find a way of connecting the dots. What we saw happening out there in our practice, even among the best practice, is that too often we were getting siloed and connections were not being made.
I went over to the UK in 2007 to do a speaking tour in Wales. Pat and I got together and went out to the West Coast, tramped around for a couple of days in a national park where the first land trusts were ever created. When I went back home, I wrote the outline for the book. It took us three and a half years of contending to connect the dots between three basic needs – shelter, food, energy – and three cross-cutting functions – finance, how land is owned, and how we can localize and democratize ownership.
Aurora: The message of this book carries from today well into the future.
Lewis: I’m concerned about the consequences of what’s going on today for all of us and our descendants. The thing is, the themes of this book are very present. This is not something in the future. This is now.
Climate change is the backdrop to this book, not its focus. But it is worth noting that the news around climate change is not getting any better. This past year, we’ve had the biggest Arctic melt on record. We have 40% of the mass of ice that used to be in the Arctic. We’ve had 322 months in a row of temperatures that are higher than the average for the last 100 years.
If Alberta were a country, it would have, by far, the highest per capita carbon footprint of any nation in the world. That is, 74 tons per person. We’ve got a problem! Canada has no policy framework that’s really operating to deal with carbon and yet we’re one of the top ten emitters in the world. So it’s a really interesting time.
At the end of three and a half years, when I finally wrote and revised the end of our final chapter, I thought, is it possible that through all of this work, I can still have no idea if it’s probable that we can bend the curve of history?
Aurora: How did you feel about that?
Lewis: Well I cried for half an hour.
But my life has taught me that you’ve got to go through the pain. Denial leads to ignoring reality. If one can grieve for the reality of the world, one can be led to hope for the world. We need the courage to hold the tension between grief and life’s wonders, to get on with the work that is right in front of us and to celebrate the journey.
It is not easy though. In the last chapter of the book, “From Cultural Captivity to Focused Attention" we explore the culturally embedded assumptions – progress framed as growth, a global financial system based on return on investment, reliance on cheap fossil fuels, and the belief that technology will save us – that block us from taking in what’s going on around us. We’re not taught how to deal with this level of converging crises or to consider our assumptions.
Aurora: What’s the main message of the book?
Lewis: Our book examines some of the big trends, and how those trends compel us to reconsider the way we organize ourselves. We need to imagine diverse ways of sharing that democratize and localize ownership, that link what we do directly to the places where we live. We really need to educate ourselves so that we can begin to see the world differently. We need to draw from other people’s deep experience and the results they are achieving. People around the world have been pioneering new ways of doing things: farmers and peasants in Latin America organizing to preserve their livelihoods and culture; Japanese mothers building a local, secure and safe food system; and, community banking partnerships in the UK that provide financial services to unbanked households. These examples make real differences in real people’s lives. We need to share the wisdom of these experiences. We then have to connect the dots of local efforts, and organize broadly in ways that resist current ideas of progress, power and ownership while building new resilient pathways.
The essence of the book is hopeful. It is also instructive about how to build those pathways to localized economies in the face of global climate change and peak oil.
Aurora: Could you talk a little bit about scale and scaling up as it applies to your book?
Lewis: If the thesis is that we are reweaving economies on more local and regional bases, we don’t simply take current products and grow them to a global level. We need to scale intentionally, both out and up. Scaling out diffuses the ownership of products and ideas locally. Stakeholders can go through a process where they learn about a proven initiative, consider their own context and then decide whether or not to put the time and energy into making it happen. We can think of this as scaling out. Once an initiative and any required infrastructure is in place in a community, efforts can be put into expansion, scaling up the impacts to the broader region.
The other part of scaling is systems change. For example, local food system work often links together many proven innovations – community building, urban farming, learning new skills – to construct a more self-reliant and resilient food system that is rooted in a region. However, much of our infrastructure has been lost, hollowed out by globalization. To actually change the system means that we have to rebuild those missing pieces. The values, beliefs, and rules that are embedded in the system need to be identified. We currently have a food policy system that’s dominated by the export of food as commodities and centralized processing, packaging and distribution. We may have to join with others to build political pressure and influence stakeholders with the authority to change policy.
Scaling is both an inner journey – local ownership and capacity building through the growth of proven initiatives – and an outer journey – systems change.
Aurora: You asked the reflective question in your book: “How resilient is your community?” Responses to this question can start off pretty superficial but quickly become deep. Could you comment on this process?
Lewis: Yes, that does become a pretty deep question.
The basic idea in the example of local food system work is that we need to begin to redefine our role as consumers to become more than just users and buyers of food. If we want to build a more self-reliant food system we must begin to see ourselves as co-producers and co-investors in transforming the food system to a more local and regional system. And then we need to act in that way, not just think that the farmer or somebody else is going to build this new system.
The Seikatsu system in Japan began as local food system work, mothers trying to secure a source of safe food for their families. There are now 350,000 engaged members of this decentralized food system built on collective purchasing, the development of ecological standards, fair prices, and reduced energy consumption. Producers and consumers audit the system as it grows. It’s an efficient and an effective system. But consumers have to be engaged.
Aurora: Is a part of this re-engaging democracy or citizenry, and opening ourselves to explore what democracy entails?
Lewis: Yes. One of the major themes of this book is economic democracy. Resilience is a key framework. Economic democracy focuses on reclaiming the commons, broadening the base of worker and community ownership and building solidarity as a foundational value to the way we organize both ourselves and the economy.
I think we are getting a strong response to this book because we are putting the pieces together in a different way. What emerges is a fresh framework. The fact that greens, social justice activists, progressive economists, movement leaders in the co-op and community economic development sectors and a range of academics are endorsing and using this book demonstrates that many of us around the world are in unfamiliar terrain. It is only recently that our species has begun to seriously contemplate the very different situation we could find ourselves in even 50 years from now. This is an unprecedented human context. And when someone brings another way of looking at a predicament, it is welcomed and appreciated.
We have to come to terms with this unknown. Obviously we need to do our best to adapt. But we need to be conscious about how we go about doing that and consider what critical components we need to give priority to. At the same time, we must also mitigate to reduce carbon. There is this tension between adaptation and mitigation. This struggle will not be easy for any of us. We need a community that can support each other. We need to build ties to those who are already working in the process. And we need to act, because if we don’t act, we become immobilized.
Aurora: We know that this book came out of one of the SSHRC-sponsored BALTA projects. We also know that BALTA is in the process of creating another SSHRC proposal. Can you talk about this transition for BALTA?
Lewis: The first BALTA efforts focused on a social economy and it was within that six-year project that some of the research central to this book was advanced. Other BALTA researchers and students also started exploring the relationship between sustainability and the social economy. After that research project ended, a collective decision was made to put forward a SSHRC partnership development grant. This is a grant to help people plan an integrated, long-term research program and ensure that they have the partners aligned. This second grant application is called Scaling Innovation for Sustainability. We’re about seven months into it. Most of our collaborators and partners are from Canada and the U.K., including the New Economic Foundation. Presently there is a cluster of people exploring the contexts, innovations and enabling factors at the micro, mezzo, macro levels of transition to a more sustainable society. There is also a cluster looking at financing transition and how to address the whole question of growth.
We would like to engage communities or regions that actually take on one or more innovations and work at scaling within a particular locale. What would we track? How would we be able to track that? How would we engage the community so that this was a community-driven innovation, one that would generate data that would be important not only be from a research point of view, but could also feed back into the community or region?
Aurora: How long is that partnership development process?
Lewis: There’s a little leadership group and we’re just starting the clusters (November 2012). We’ll have a symposium in early October 2013 and then we have to have it out the door to SSHRC by end of January 2014.
Aurora: Mike, what’s next for you?
Lewis: What’s clear to me at the most personal level is that I won’t be happy unless I’m trying to take the gifts I’ve been given, the knowledge I’ve been able to glean from the many people that I’ve had in my life, and the experiences I’ve been able to be part of, and put that all to use in a way that’s relevant to addressing the epiphany that I had when I was with my granddaughter watching the salmon run on the Stamp River.
Our organization, Canadian Center for Community Renewal (CCCR) started 35 years ago. I was doing full time human rights work related to Latin America and we needed to make money in order to support that work. Now we’re in a similar situation where all of the innovations we have talked about are ahead of the market. This has been very difficult for our organization. It has been a very rich time in terms of learning and advancing our framing of these themes, but difficult organizationally because essentially most of my time devoted to this is unpaid.
At the CCCR, we have an initiative we call the Big Project. The focus of this project is the selection of between 10 and 15 communities across the country to work with on transition to resilience and scaling up proven innovations that have an impact on carbon, by way of at least one basic need or key function embedded in the book - food, energy, shelter, land tenure, finance, or the commons. The selected communities are going to need some coaching, technical assistance, and financial support.
It’s very exciting. Whether or not we can move that into reality, only time will tell. But if by happenchance the Big Project works out and if by happenstance BALTA II goes ahead, you can see how those two could be synergistic with each other. The journey continues.
Publications
The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy, Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty, 2012
Aboriginal Mining Guide: How to Negotiate Lasting Benefits for your Community, Mike Lewis, SJ Brocklehurst, 2009
Building Community Wealth: A Resource for Social Enterprise Development, Mike Lewis, 2006, Canadian Centre for Community Renewal, available on line at http://www.sparc.bc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/building-community-wealth.pdf.
CED in the High Arctic, Mike Lewis & Dr. Sandy Lockhart, 2000, Nunavut CEDO & Government of the NWT
Reinventing the Local Economy: What 10 Canadian Initiatives can Teach us about Building Creative, Inclusive, & Sustainable Communities, Mike Lewis & Dr. Stewart Perry, 1994, Center for Community Enterprise
Revitalizing Canada’s Neighbourhoods, Dr. Stewart Perry, Mike Lewis & Jean‐Marc Fontan, 1993, Center for Community Enterprise & the Community Economic Development Training Institute
Aboriginal Joint Ventures: Negotiating Successful Partnerships 1992, Center for Community Enterprise
Interview conducted November, 2012, Edmonton, Alberta
Deb Schrader is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta. Her studies focus on a broadened understanding of a sustainability worldview, as viewed through the work of people in alternative food systems.
Updated March 2020
Aurora Online
Citation Format
Deb Schrader (2013) The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy, Aurora Online