Old friends from the WELL – Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe – assembled the writings of some of the smartest people around who have used, observed, studied and taught about the Internet as a social catalyst and political tool kit.

You can buy it in print from lulu.com or you can read it online.

It’s not like this is a new idea. Local communities have had government for a long, long time. There have been local social institutions, too – schools, chambers of commerce, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, church parishes…

But many and probably most localities have lost much of their collaborative community spirit due to many factors in modern American culture, communications and commerce. The neighborhood that works together on projects year after year is rare indeed. So how do you revive and instill a spirit that has died? Or one that never existed?

Tom Wolff now headlines his Tom Wolff Associates website with “Coalition Building for Healthy Communities.” They’re literally about that: they help communities become more healthy. That’s a big factor in building resilience, of course, and this may be a good focus for beginning to build the collaborative skills of extreme community. Everybody can agree on better local health, right?  (Maybe not so on a national level.)

Tom Wolfe

There’s a quarterly newsletter, and a book I’m going to get and review:  The Power of Collaborative Solutions: Six Principles and Effective Tools for Building Healthy Communities.

These are Tom’s basic truths, as posted on his Philosophy page:

Collaborative processes are the key to addressing the critical challenges that confront our communities, our states and our nation in the new millennium. Through collaboration, individuals, organizations and communities become empowered to impact the world around them. Our work exemplifies the power of these processes.

And also this:

We are proud to offer the specialized tools and services that can help individual organizations and systems of coalitions work though the challenges of building and maintaining multi-sector collaborations. We aspire to bring greater joy and a deeper sense of spirit and purpose to those seeking to create healthy communities – places where we all want to live and raise our children.

Online, one must learn to balance your openness against your skepticism. Friends of friends may have a high reliability factor, but until you’ve had a certain level of verification through action with a person, you’re gambling to some degree. Doing stuff together speeds up the familiarity and trust building.

Frank Rich’s column today in the NYT put it squarely and irrefutably before us that we’ve been total suckers through this entire decade. We, as in the number of who care to a great enough degree about how large corporations pull so many strings to put incompetent and amoral clowns in high and influential places. Not just in America but around the world.

Rich think’s Time Magazine’s Person of the Year should have been Tiger Woods, almost as the typical intentional myth that defined the past decade.

As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.

Local

Wired

Friendly

Intentional

Integrated

Self organizing

Resilience oriented

Yes, any long journey begins with a first step, but so much more could have should have been accomplished. Maybe the perfect is the enemy of the good, but this doesn’t qualify as “good” given the accelerating changes the climate is going through.

I guess it will make some countries feel good enough, but many will leave Copenhagen discouraged and – soon – desperate to defend their people from impacts that can fairly be blamed on the carbon emissions of the rich nations.

So now, as WorldChanging’s Alex Steffen tweeted from the scene last earlier this week, “Lack of action is a de facto decision to pursue lifeboat regionalism.” If the collective world leadership can’t make any definitive moves for saving all of their citizens, then individual countries, provinces and towns are going need to build resilience for themselves.

Here’s the justification for switching.

After five years of development, my county’s efforts to establish a locally-owned and controlled electricity utility has reached its 90-day evaluation period, at the end of which the local municipal governments will decide if they are going to join or not.

Marin Energy Authority has found a power generation provider who will guarantee do deliver electricity that is at least 25% green, with a slightly more expensive option of 100% green energy. The incumbent provider, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has been campaigning to discourage customers from switching providers and is poised to launch a huge campaign once the February 4 decision date has arrived.

Marin could become the role model for many other green energy initiatives in other counties or localities. PG&E is even planning to put up a ballot issue in the next election to outlaw such independent local development. They’ve got a lot of money for marketing that MEA cannot match. But their idea of preventing local control should be a non-starter.

Of course, MEA has to learn how to develop and manage these new sources. Many legal and technical experts are being consulted.

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”

From the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, “The study team analyzed several million daily high and low temperature readings taken over the span of six decades at about 1,800 weather stations across the country, thereby ensuring ample data for statistically significant results.”

U.S. National Debt Clock

This will make your head spin while dramatically demonstrating that conditions are in constant flux even as you sit there. What situations must we become resilient to? The changing value and availability of money is one. And note that none of the displayed counters are going in our favor.

New ABC / WaPo Poll Shows 65% of Americans Support Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

They agree in principle, but will they agree if it cramps their lifestyle? That’s the real question.