Friday 9 December 2011

Field Report from Epirus, Greece

Nina-Maria reporting from the Zagori and Ioannina
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1 comment:

  1. sibadd10 December 2011 at 01:41

    Worrying indeed. I really had hoped that there was hope for a revival of sustainable communities - clusters of villages and smaller provincial towns. I understood this to be a global trend to be observed in India, Australia, Canada and much of Europe including Greece.
    The trouble is that to survive and thrive in villages you cannot revert to the past whose poverty so many sought to escape, but nor can you bring the attitudes and values of a globally urbanised world back to smaller villages. The ideas, techniques and values essential for survival and success in these smaller linked communities have not yet been assimilated or in some cases even invented. The new ideas and practices exist but only in certain places unique to particular critical clusters of people. Every small community is different and unique and there is so simple generic set of guidelines on how to make villages or clusters of villages work for their inhabitants. The ideas are out there. There are communities dotted around the world which seem to be working (some we know, some we don't and wouldn't know what we were seeing of they were evolving in front of us because of our urban globalised preconceptions). I very much doubt if the centralised governments of large modern states are capable of helping such new ways of living too evolve, and certainly the past for all our nostalgia about it has little to teach us in this matter (notwithstanding sources of wisdom in our species that have always been present in, and at, different and unpredictable places and times. The work of Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Prize 2009) is helpful but there are many many other sources of inspiration. We cannot look to Athens. London, Berlin or Washington, not Delhi, Beijing or Rio for the answers and inspiration we need, but it may well be that those who will support and help lead these other ways of living will come from the heart of great cities - not as refugees but as pioneers
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-pool_resource

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