The linen project is now (end of June 2012) at a sensitive point where it could become robust enough to succeed independently of any one individual, or it could fall apart, quite possibly with bitterness and recriminations.
Here’s how it could succeed: We find an organizational form that engages people’s various motives strongly and focuses their energy specifically on doing the work necessary to producing cloth. The main prize will not be the cloth itself, but the organizational form, which can be applied to a range of other urgently needed projects developing local productive capacity. “We” means, of course, a group which includes “you”. So “we” aren’t going to find this organizational form unless “you” are trying to find it.
Here’s how this project could fail: The absence of enough committed people could allow crucial tasks to remain undone. Weeds could rage over our field. Come fall we could not have all the means prepared to ripple, store, ret, and dress (dressing means braking, scutching and hackling) our huge crop. So it could rot in the field, or languish in storage (the way my 2010 crop did when Transition had it.)
A less wasteful alternative that has crossed my mind is this:
I could invite the many fiber-arts hobbyists who are excited about flax, to divide up the field at harvest time and each bring home a fraction of the crop. Then they could each store and process their own bit, each at her own pace, using whatever rustic tools and methods they can pull together. This would at least develop widespread familiarity with the material, building a cohort of people some of whom might advance to more productive mechanized methods.
I started the idea in the last paragraph with “I could…” rather than “We could…” to make a point. Legally that whole flax crop is mine, from my contract with the landowner. Several people have made major contributions to growing it, and to building our knowledge of retting and further processing. They did this in the (correct) assumption that I would prefer that everyone gets their fair share of the glory from this as an activist achievement, and of the income from this as a possible niche industry.
But it would seem that many are making a further assumption, that I will figure out how to apportion these rewards fairly, and construct the system for doing so, all by myself. Yet this is a huge intellectual challenge – the central one in our overarching task of showing the way for other projects like this to succeed. I want some help figuring this out. I have some ideas, but I want other people to develop and post ideas too.
My ideas, which I have developed over years, I have attempted to:
- Identify the forms the decline might take, and their likelihoods and timescales
- Identify skills, tools and relationships that our community will need.
- Identify the obstacles and difficulties that stand in the way.
- Identify the human motives which could be engaged in overcoming these difficulties.
- Identify effective ways of engaging those motives
These difficult questions are each open to many answers, so having many people discussing them would bring out more useful insights. But I am unaware of any groups or individuals in Victoria who have attempted what seems to me very basic groundwork in resilience activism. I don’t want to do this alone.
Billy, 386-7984