i4 eJournal

File 799 i4 is about crafting creative, democratic, and sustainable economies in this century of unprecedented challenge. Climate change, environmental degradation, and the disappearance of cheap fossil fuels throw into doubt most of the assumptions on which our communities are built. i4 reports how people here in Canada and around the world are rising to that challenge: how we are Inspiring, Innovating, Inciting, and Inventing ways of life and work that permit both humanity and the planet to thrive.

Think of i4 as a collective network of experience, analysis, and critical reflection. Every 2-3 weeks, it supplies you with Feature Articles by people engaged in strengthening community resilience and transforming local and regional economies: social entrepreneurs, researchers, policy-makers, activists, municipal and regional officials, business owners, managers, planners, thinkers, organizers. Just as CCCR's magazine Making Waves did (1990-2010), they’ll give you the straight goods, in French or in English: what’s happening, what’s working, what isn’t, why – and what’s next.

In addition, i4 publishes brief news stories or Gateways to help you connect quickly with the Feature Articles and other valuable resources on the same topic. Our ebulletin, Insight, will alert you to these and other important developments in community transition and resilience.

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Another Recent Gateway:

A Convergence of Child and Salmon

May 28, 2012 | Mike Lewis

File 1007

For every author the journey starts somewhere. For me, Michael Lewis, it started with a jolt, a painful epiphany that propelled my awareness across generations. For 35 of the last 40 years my home was on a family farm about 20 km outside of Port Alberni on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Every autumn we tramped down to the Stamp River to witness to coho and giant Chinook salmon struggle up the river. Rushing currents, cascading falls, towering rocks and……

In October 2003 the tramp to the Stamp was a watershed moment for me. I had my 3-year-old granddaughter with me. Amira was utterly enthralled with what she saw. Seeing the world through the eyes of child seems to amplify the wonder somehow.

What choked me that day was the juxtaposition of wonder and the threat revealed to me the day before in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Its message was simple – if water temperature continued to go up salmon would be extinct in 40 years. Amira’s grandchild might never know the wonder of returning salmon. What I was sharing with her that day would become just another story of what once was.

That was the origin of The Resilience Imperative: Co-operative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy (New Society Publishers, 2012). Click here to purchase.

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