Localism as a Guiding Framework for Schools
By Sheila Giesbrecht M
Y MOTHER TELLS THE STORY of life in her idyllic early childhood. They lived on a peach farm and her family life was filled with local
pursuits; picking fruit, tending garden and selling produce at the local farmers market. On warm summer evenings, her grandmother and her cousins would come from the next farm over to play in their hayloft. Evening hymn sings, family picnics and community events were all part of my mother’s “local” life. Today, my family’s life is radically different than that of
my mother. Each morning our family separates. I commute to an office while my children travel to school. We return in the evening with bags of food purchased at the local super- market. In the evening we sit down to television and watch the lives of others, funnier, more interesting and more glamorous than ourselves. Our lives are framed by the modern values of mobility, consumption, entertainment and choice. Our societal orientation to the modern values of mobility,
consumption, entertainment and choice pose grave environ- mental and societal challenges, which call us to move towards more sustainable ways of living as a society. Localism is a philosophical idea that may provide a framework to move us in this direction. In this essay, I will attempt to create a picture
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of what localism is and how a reorienting of education to these ideas can help return us to more sustainable and humane ways of living. Localism is an idea where individuals and communities
prioritize the local over the global. Local food, issues, arts, businesses and projects become important. Individuals ori- ented towards localism are more likely to choose to buy an apple from the farmer’s market, than a bag of apples shipped to a supermarket from a distant source. Individuals oriented towards localism are more likely to attend a community art show than watch the latest Hollywood movie. In a local orientation, ideas, issues, people and communities become important. The source of creativity, life and nourishment for families and communities moves from external places to local places. Gruenwald (2003) calls localism a form of re-inhabita-
tion. He suggests that localism can be seen as a conceptual framework to guide our understanding of what it means to dwell in our world. Engaging in actions that demand interaction, negotiation and cooperation with those in our local environment call for more complex human capacities than those needed in our modern, technological world. Com- munities that are engaged with each other – through business enterprise, through discussions of local issues, through col- laborative projects – must move from a theoretic to a concrete
GREEN TEACHER 89
Julie Tracy
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