In the novel Time Enough to Love, author Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long opines, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Born in a small Missouri town in 1907, Heinlein must have grown up knowing people who could do many of the things Lazarus described, average people capable of growing their own food, building their own homes, and governing their communities. America was still largely a rural nation then, a nation in which people worked both individually and together with their neighbors to feed, clothe and house their families. Quilting bees and barn raisings weren’t events held only by the Amish, and backyard gardens weren’t a fad, but rather the sensible norm.

By the time of his death in 1988, however, life had changed. Most Americans lived in cities, working specialized jobs that required special training. Though many had the skill necessary to change diapers and cook decent meals, few had a clue about building walls, setting bones, or butchering hogs. And what does “conn a ship” mean, anyway?* It was surely this shift from self-reliance to economic codependency that fed Heinlein’s creative imagination. By Lazarus Long’s definition, we have become a planet of human insects, each of us trained to perform a particular task, driving to work in long lines that stretch for miles along the highway like ants marching single file.

Though collectively humanity possesses more know-how than at any time in human history, that knowledge is spread so thinly that nearly all of us depend on the rest of society for our survival. Our skills these days are too often limited to the tasks required by our professions — writing computer code, running an x-ray machine, researching the population dynamics of the pygmy loris — and have little to do with actual living.

As a result, we’re vulnerable in ways our more broadly skilled grandparents were not. A hurricane hits coastal refineries, and high gas prices leave families thousands of miles away struggling to put food on the table. A snowstorm drops 18 inches on the Front Range, and grocery store shelves grow empty, leaving people to truly wonder what’s for dinner. In Manhattan, bankers and brokers make bad decisions that send unemployment, foreclosure and poverty trickling down to millions across the country.

What happens when humanity is hit by a bigger challenge, such as depletion of fossil fuels, global climate change or a prolonged economic crisis?

A growing number of people believe the answer lies in relocalization — transforming individuals and communities into skilled, self-reliant entities capable of meeting their own needs using locally produced resources. Not only is relocalization a way of combating global climate change, but it may be humanity’s only viable way to adapt to the consequences of climate change.

THE REAL CHANGE WE NEED

The next time you hear about a corporation outsourcing jobs to specialized workers in India, don’t criticize them. They learned this behavior from you.

You are an expert outsourcer. Don’t believe me? Make a list of all the things you don’t know how to do for yourself. It will look something like this: food production, preservation and safety; raising and butchering animals; clothing manufacture; home building and repair; education; furniture building; tool production; childrearing (daycare); health care; decision-making (self-help gurus, life coaches); fuel production and delivery; communication; water delivery; waste removal; recycling; transportation; toy making; storytelling (TV); governance; funerals; the making of medicine, cosmetics and cleaning products; music making; giving birth/ helping a partner give birth; lactation (infant formula); self-defense; dispensing justice in your community. The food you eat, the clothing you wear, the heat that keeps you warm in the winter — it’s all provided by strangers, some of whom live on the other side of the world, in exchange for that coarsest and most impersonal of commodities: money.

From a certain perspective this makes sense. Modern health care has cost lives, but it has also saved them. Having police on hand to enforce laws, and a justice system that determines the fate of those who break them, maintains a certain kind of order.

Besides, who has time these days to master midwifery, farming, sewing, canning, steel working, plumbing, carpentry, parenting, construction, animal husbandry, teaching, research, self-government and minstrelsy? Modern technology is so complex and modern life so fast-paced and complicated that it’s much easier to leave these tasks to those who are experts.

Economy is, after all, a function of time. It’s about how you choose to use your time. Human history has been a long march toward gaining mastery of time in a way that enables us to control our environment, enhance efficiency, coordinate supply with demand, decrease the amount of labor needed to stay alive, and have more time for leisure. When I was in school, success in meeting these goals was called “progress.”

But progress has come at a price. Forests have been felled. Species are extinct. Rivers and oceans, air and soil are polluted. Communities are fragmented. Elders who grew their own food and built their own homes watch their knowledge become increasingly irrelevant in a mechanized, specialized world and find themselves herded into retirement communities and nursing homes. Economies teeter while the gap between rich and poor widens. Personal and national freedom has given way to personal and international codependency. And the environment we sought to control is about to school us in what happens when you mess with Mother Nature.

Many believe that relocalization and reskilling are the best, most viable solution to this set of serious — indeed, lifethreatening — challenges. An international movement that got its start in the United Kingdom, relocalization, or the transition movement, is about regaining lost knowledge and bringing production back to the local community.

“Reskilling first of all gives us an experience of reclaiming our power and losing that sense of powerlessness and helplessness,” says Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Boulder-based Transition Colorado. “We reclaim those fundamental life skills that our grandparents and great grandparents took for granted but which we didn’t inherit. Even things like basic home repair — we call somebody up to come and fix that stuff.”

Starting with learning to grow one’s own food, reskilling is a process that people find invigorating and inspiring, Brownlee says.

“It was very delightful to me to discover the favorite reskilling class in the U.K. was sock darning,” he says. “Here in the U.S. when we get a hole in our socks, we toss them. But in the future we won’t do that. We will be darning our socks. Fortunately, there are a few people left who know how to darn socks, and we’re going to have to learn.”

Transition Colorado has hosted more than 7,500 people hours of reskilling events, Brownlee says.

“There’s such demand for it,” he says. “People say, ‘I want to raise chickens in my backyard, but I have no idea how to go about it.’ So we find somebody who knows, and we organize a class. We’ve done that kind of thing over and over and over again.”

Relocalization advocates say reskilling empowers people to take control over essential aspects of their lives, saving them money and making them less dependent on the Wall Street economy. But it also rebuilds community by turning strangers into neighbors and making elders relevant again as people come together to master skills their parents couldn’t teach them.

If the resurgence of interest in backyard gardening and farmers’ markets is any indicator, people are hungry not just for food, but also the sense of safety that comes from knowing who produced your food and how. And, indeed, food growing and preservation is at the heart of reskilling, Brownlee says. But not just for the obvious reasons.

“It is in beginning to rebuild our capacity to produce our own food locally — that’s the primary way we rediscover community,” he says. “Because of the way that economic globalization has gone and how we’ve lost all our local capacities to meet our own needs, we have lost our connection to the land. We’ve lost the connection to the people who grow our food, even the people who prepare our food. Those basic connections of a community have been cut, so most of us have not grown up in a place where those connections exist. It means we really haven’t experienced community. When people start getting into this food thing — they go to the farmers’ markets, they meet the farmers, they join a CSA — they start rebuilding those connections that are very ancient, and it is a profound discovery. It gives people a sense of hope and positivity that’s been missing.”

Hope. Positive change. Local control. But the heart of it is true community, Brownlee says.

Community is certainly a word one hears often in Boulder. Do we really know what it means?

Perhaps not.

RECONCILING OUR DIFFERENCES

There was a time when people knew their neighbors, when police knew the parents of the kids they busted for skipping school, when wives traded eggs for honey or fresh-baked bread and husbands helped one another repair roofs and fences. Think of the television program The Andy Griffith Show. In that idyllic community, everyone knew everyone else and adapted to one another’s quirks. In a crisis, they could be counted on to come together.

Few places in America resemble Mayberry; perhaps such a place never existed. Regardless, it doesn’t take a social scientist to see the divisions in the United States today. We are a fragmented society in which many — both left and right — believe that the time for civility has long since passed. The stakes seem high, and everyone wants one thing: political victory. Abortion, immigration, religion, health care, gay marriage — our divisions run deep and seem at times irreconcilable.

But America can’t get a big divorce.

The last time it tried, the loss of life was catastrophic. The Civil War remains America’s most devastating conflict to date. And so red states are stuck with blue states whether they like it or not and so on. That means we either continue to bicker and shout and insult one another, or we get a grip and rediscover what it means to live together.

“I like to say that community is our most precious and most endangered resource on the planet,” Brownlee says. “It’s been strip-mined away by economic globalization. It needs to be healed and rebuilt. Underlying the work of relocalization, that’s really the goal.”

It might sound absurd to say that Americans need to come together over a mason jar of homegrown green beans or a homemade cherry pie, but such a gathering holds more promise than another round of national political conventions, no matter who’s running for office.

Imagine this for a moment: a group of local folks get together to learn the art of canning vegetables. They meet as strangers, their attention on mastering a skill that will enable them to put homegrown vegetables on the dinner table even in the depths of winter. They talk, joke, banter. They discover that one of the women is an excellent quilter, while another has been baking her own whole-grain bread for years. The bread-baker, a devout fundamentalist, doesn’t know that the quilter is a secular feminist. Politics don’t come up during the four or five hours they’re together. They’ll spend more time together in the coming months, swapping skills, and by the time their religious and political identities are “outed,” they’ll have too much respect for one another to be uncivil or to hate.

A single mom gets help from the guy next door planting a cherry tree, then returns the favor by showing him how to change his own oil. By the time they share that first cherry harvest in a luscious homemade pie, does it matter that she favors gun control and he is a certifiable gun nut? Maybe. But maybe the connection they forged instills more tolerance than they might otherwise have shown one another.

“We’ve lost these basic human connections that have existed in the past but have been obliterated these days,” Brownlee says. “Those kinds of things are going to have to be rebuilt, not to go back to the past, but to reconstruct a human unity that we’re going to need to grapple with such challenges as global warming, fossil fuel depletion and economic collapse. We can’t do that as a divided humanity.”

If people don’t believe in global climate change, there’s still the powerful motivation of saving money during this recession.

“It is so true that the focus on growing the economy has resulted in loss of community, loss of ability to work cooperatively and collectively for the good of all,” says Betty Ball of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center (RMPJC). “It’s all about me and my survival and making sure I have what I need.”

The result is the loss of people’s ability to communicate meaningfully and maintain healthy relationships, Ball says.

“Even at coffee shops, where in the ’60s and ’70s folks went to hang out and socialize, now people are glued to their laptops and cell phones, not talking at all to others right next to them in the coffee shop,” she says.

RMPJC is tackling relocalization in part from a standpoint of activism on economic issues, but also with regard to community building.

“Potlucks, making music together, fostering meaningful conversation with people — we are frequently having events such as these, just to encourage people to really connect with one another,” Ball says. “That is going to be more and more important as the economy worsens. We’ll need to come together as a [local] community to make sure we all have food, shelter, and the help we need — exchanging skills with people, re-learning the art of bartering, having a common place where we can find people who have the skills we need and who need the skills we have.”

So what does a transitioned Boulder County look like?

What it does not look like is an organization — whether the peace center or Transition Colorado — doing the work for you. You can’t outsource relocalization, after all. It’s about what you do, how you choose to use your time.

Brownlee says he doesn’t think of Transition Colorado as an organization.

“Transition is much more of a grassroots movement than an organization,” he says. “It’s a catalytic force in the community to inspire and motivate people to do exactly the kind of things that we’re talking about. You can’t do it for them, but you can provide them some access.”

Transition Colorado is trying to be the kind of “common place” that Ball mentioned, a place where people can learn from one another and connect as human beings.

So a relocalized Boulder County is a Boulder County in which citizens in the tens of thousands follow through on their impulse to learn new skills, to get out of debt, to produce much of what they eat and use.

“There will be much more farming going on,” Brownlee says. “They will be small farms. There will be thousands of farmers instead of scores like there are today, and they will be using much more labor-intensive methods because the technology of industrial agriculture will no longer be appropriate.”

The desire to not use fossil fuels — and the eventual, certain lack of fossil fuels — will impact not only agriculture but also transportation of people, of goods. It will impact everything from the clothing available in a community to the types of tools that can be manufactured.

“Most of the technology that we talk about these days are so fossil-fuel dependent,” Brownlee says. “Even if it’s alternative technology, the fossil fuel needed to create it is enormous. So I think part of what we’re going to be looking at is dramatically decreased availability of energy.

There’s going to be technology used in a lot of different ways, but we as people are going to be using far less energy than we do now. Twenty to 30 years out, we will have to be using something like 90 percent less energy than we’re using today.

“We’re going to be using all the solar we possibly can, all the wind we possibly can, all the geothermal — every alternative that we can imagine and some that we haven’t imagined yet, we’re going to need. If you run the numbers, you start to see no matter what we do in terms of alternative energy, it’s not going to continue the kind of lifestyle that we’ve grown accustomed to on the planet.”

REACHING FOR FREEDOM

There’s an advantage to facing these issues now as opposed to allowing catastrophe to force the issue. A community that makes the transition to local food and energy production now will have more control over how that transition unfolds than those that wait for that last drop of gasoline to vanish and summer highs to reach up to 120 degrees in Colorado, as they are predicted to do by the end of the 21st century — even if all world governments meet their goals and keep their promises with regard to reduction of greenhouse gases.

But there’s another less tangible advantage to making this transition now, and it can be summed up in a single word: freedom.

“Freedom is kind of the underlying issue here that doesn’t get talked about very much,” Brownlee admits. “In giving away our capacity to meet our own needs locally, we have become so dependent on distant sources and foreign powers that we in many ways are powerless and can be forced to pay whatever price is asked for what we need, and that’s exactly how freedom can be sacrificed in the name of survival.”

This is true on a national level and on an individual level.

A reskilled family in a localized community is a family with more control over the lives of its members because its economy is subject to local control. What happens on Wall Street or in Congress doesn’t matter as much to those who are out of debt, who grow much of their own food and have the skills to meet most of their own needs — and to help their neighbors.

“Freedom — it’s a principle that we need to focus on because people are pretty much blind to it,” Brownlee says.

Even if climate change is a hoax (it isn’t) and your favorite political party holds onto the White House for the next four decades (it won’t), there is true value in knowing how to do things yourself.

Carolyn Bninski, also of RMPJC, says she found growing a vegetable garden this summer to be surprisingly satisfying. She planted the seeds, went out each day to check on their progress, watering, weeding and caring for the growing plants, then eventually enjoying the results of her work on the dinner table.

“What excites us and what engages us can change,” she says. “We’re not stuck with what they taught us with the commercial culture.”

Bninski says she is gradually learning new skills and finds the process enjoyable. The idea of Boulder County having its own thriving economy and its own culture is deeply appealing to her, but also a bit overwhelming.

“It feels really big, but you do it one person at a time and one group at a time,” she says. “If we can really bring people together, maybe we can create something where more people are engaged creating our collective future together. It feels pretty daunting, but with more people involved and with each person doing a piece, everybody becomes a leader. Everybody becomes someone who can reach out to other people and help them learn, too.”

[Editor’s Note: We looked it up. To “conn a ship” means to direct the course of a ship.]

Pamela White is editor of Boulder Weekly.