EDITOR – This is not a blame game anymore or just telling everyone to stand back and say, “enough”. We have to act.
There is a sustainable, viable solution available that is steeped in history and which works: small communities can be and for most of history, have been independent of the state in terms of food, energy and water harvesting.
Just picture the old farmhouse windmill, corrugated iron water tanks, colorful gardens and livestock – that's all living off-grid is, only in a suburban situation with whole communities taking part, five, ten, a hundred connected homes at a time.
To hell with ‘by-laws’, they are impediments to those connections and perhaps why the unemployed are creating ‘xenophobic’ anarchy in our streets.
It is only since the Industrial Revolution and the coming of the railroads that nation-states were set up to service national infrastructures – lights and water, roads and bridges, that whole responsibility taken on by what are now welfare states failing all around the world.
Now is the time for every suburb – Chatsworth, Umbilo, Glenwood, Overport, Umhlanga, Westville, Hillcrest – to take coherent charge of the future in their own way.
I challenge each and every ward councilor, civic and religious leader within the reach of this newspaper and its editor to meet with me and anyone else who understands the problem and the possible solution that 'off-grid living' will work. Historical economically proven community strategies will help turn us from complacent but frightened consumers into independent and responsible producers who can create jobs by hiring experienced farm workers living in shack towns to contribute to the development of community gardens – for food.
It can be done. Shosholoza!
Tom Dennen
Durban
