Lonny Grafman: Building community resilience with decentralized resources and systems (ep240)
Lonny Grafman (@lonnygrafman) is a professor of community-based design at Humboldt State University, the President of the Appropedia Foundation, the director of the AWEsome Business Competition, and the author of To Catch the Rain (which is free to download).
In this podcast episode, Lonny sheds light on why it's so important for charity work to be community-centered and community-driven; how we can begin to rebuild more resilient systems with distributed resources rather than centralized ones; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Lonny and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by This is Us by Girl Pow-R
“The only technology that I know that is going to save us is community. The technological interventions just become the tools with which we’re addressing a particular issue in the moment.”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes.
On technological interventions vs. community interventions:
"The only technology that I know that is going to save us is community.
The technological interventions just become the tools with which we're addressing a particular issue in the moment. But the way we choose the tool and the way we engage with the tool is way more important than the actual tool.
'Is this going to be wind power, solar power, or natural gas? Is this going to be an organic soil garden, hydroponics, aeroponics, or aquaponics? Is this going to be an open-source medical device or 3D printed? [Will we be] upcycling or recycling or downcycling?’
The way we decide those questions is way more important than what we actually decide."
On the importance of regaining sovereignty over our resources:
"The more distributed our resources are, the more community engagement there is. And the more regenerative they are, the more resilient they are, and the more capacity we have to deal with emergencies like the one we're in.
The reason I started with [teaching rainwater harvesting in my series of books] is one: We can see it; we engage with water.
And two, water is just so vital. There's the law of three's from survivalism: You can go three weeks without food pretty easily, but you can only go three days without water."
On accounting for negative externalities:
“We have to get wiser about how we use things. We have to start including externalized costs back into the cost of a product, because it's not really fair, reasonable, or sound for something like solar power to compete against natural gas when you look at all of the various externalities.
If you included those costs of what we're doing to our environment, the atmosphere, and communities, then something like solar power is obviously far superior. It already is now because the costs have come down, but it should've been ten years ago—it should've been the obvious answer.”
Final words of wisdom:
"Together, we've got this.”
