The article contains some interviews with downtown business owners, some perspective on the history of the Main Street organization there, and some talk of renewed activity from merchants and business owners (myself among them) in helping make the area thrive.  But there’s something missing from the picture the article paints.

One key angle that the article glosses over is the role that the rest of the community plays in creating and maintaining a thriving downtown.  While there’s certainly some role for business owners and merchants to play in creating a thriving downtown, it’s not entirely their burden to bear.  Retail districts live and die by the shopping choices of their customers, and so it seems important to recognize in any conversation about the health of a downtown that at least some of it is dictated by the “consumer culture” of the surrounding community.

It would be interesting to interview some “regular citizens” and ask them where they tend to shop, and how they perceive the downtown area.  “Given the choice between going downtown to support a business there and going to the mall or a big box store, how do you decide?”  Are they willing to pay a little more for products and services knowing those dollars stay in the community longer (thus supporting the long-term health of the area), or will they always prioritize convenience and the lowest available price?

It also seems worth looking at the environment of governmental and political support surrounding downtown.  Is it possible that city, county and state laws might be negatively impacting the ability of downtown business to thrive?  Is it possible that our approach to zoning, transportation, taxpayer-funded economic development and taxation are favoring non-local chain businesses over those who would choose to start and grow a small business in the place they live?  Is it possible that politics and personalities are at times standing in the way of a thriving central business district instead of nurturing it?

I’ve blogged about these ideas before:

The value we get from a strong and diverse local business community is hard to see when compared as a “bottom line deal” against the attractions of the “big box” stores. And I’m not suggesting that these larger retailers don’t have a place in a strong local economy. But my hope is that we’ll see the Target store closing as yet another indicator of an important trend. By putting so many of our eggs in baskets that lack the personal ties and community investments that our local businesses are built around, we set ourselves up for even greater disappointments and more noticeable disappearance of the business ethic, entrepreneurship, and innovative spirit around which Richmond has historically been built.

There’s no question that the economic health of our downtown is based on complex systems with lots of variables.  The business owners and downtown merchants are mostly already doing their part – they’re running their businesses and they’re engaged in the life of the business district and the wider community.  As a small business owner myself, I know that there’s probably not a whole lot of time left over for those hard-working folks to ALSO do the marketing, advocacy, legislative and policy work needed to help downtown compete against strip malls and big box stores.

So what role does the rest of the Richmond community have in creating a thriving main street area?  How do your choices make a difference in the health of downtown?

It’s at 3:30 PM at Ivy Tech Community College, 3421 Johnson Hall – I hope you can join us.

In case you won’t be able to attend, here’s a list of 12 reasons that it’s a good idea to support the production and consumption of locally grown food (adopted from a list produced by The Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association):

1. Freshness – Locally-grown organic fruits and vegetables are usually harvested within 24 hours of being purchased by the consumer. Produce from California can’t be that fresh.
2. Taste – Produce picked and eaten at the height of freshness tastes better.
3. Nutrition – Nutritional value declines, often dramatically, as time passes after harvest. Because locally-grown produce is freshest, it is more nutritionally complete.
4. Purity – Eighty percent of American adults say they are concerned about the safety of the food they eat. They worry about residues of pesticides and fungicides. These materials are not permitted in an organic production system either before or after harvest.
5. Regional Economic Health – Buying locally grown food keeps money within the community. This contributes to the health of all sectors of the local economy, increasing the local quality of life.
6. Variety – Organic farmers selling locally are not limited to the few varieties that are bred for long distance shipping, high yields, and shelf life. Often they raise and sell wonderful unusual varieties you will never find on supermarket shelves.
7. Soil Stewardship – Soil health is essential for the survival of our species. Conventional farming practices are rapidly depleting topsoil fertility. Creating and sustaining soil fertility is the major objective for organic growers.
8. Energy Conservation – Buying locally grown organic foods decreases dependence on petroleum, a non- renewable energy source. One fifth of all petroleum now used in the United States is used in Agriculture. Organic production systems do not rely upon the input of petroleum derived fertilizers and pesticides and thus save energy at the farm. Buying from local producers conserves additional energy at the distribution level.
9. Environmental Protection – Soil erosion; pesticide contamination of soil, air, and water; nitrate loading of waterways and wells; and elimination of planetary biodiversity are some of the problems associated with today’s predominate farming methods. Organic growers use practices that protect soil, air, and water resources; and that promote biodiversity.
10. Cost – Conventional food processes don’t reflect the hidden costs of the environmental, health and social consequences of predominate production practices- of, for instance, correcting a water supply polluted by agricultural runoff, or obtaining medical treatment for pesticide induced illness suffered by farmers or consumers. When these and other hidden costs are taken into account, as they should be, locally grown organic foods are seen clearly for the value they are, even if they cost a few pennies more.
11. A Step Toward Regional Food Self Reliance – Dependency on far away food sources leaves a region vulnerable to supply disruptions, and removes any real accountability of producer to consumer. It also tends to promote larger, less diversified farms that hurt both the environment and local economies/communities. Regional food production systems, on the other hand, keep the food supply in the hands of many, providing interesting job and self-employment opportunities, and enabling people to influence how their food is grown.
12. Passing on the Stewardship Ethic – When you buy locally produced organic food you cannot help but raise the consciousness of your friends and family about how food buying decisions can make a difference in your life and the life of your community; and about how this basic act is connected to planetary issues.

What might an improved attentiveness to local food consumption look like in your community?

Our culture likes to take the old and repackage it as the new so it’s more exciting and engaging. I don’t have any problem with that per se – there can be something creative and innovative in finding different ways to present ideas, world-views, ways of living so that they’re more accessible to more people. We all go through different kinds of personal discovery about what we’re capable of, so why not have a “new movement” that helps support and nurture that for folks who are in that place right now?

This is what I thought I was being pitched when I got an invitation to subscribe to Ready Made magazine, which presents itself as “the only do-it-yourself (DIY)/lifestyle magazine for young people. It entertains and informs through DIY projects for fast-evolving lifestyles.” It sounded like a good support resource for learning more about self-sufficient living. I showed the invite to Anna Lisa and we both agreed that it looked like it would be useful, AND that we were excited such a publication existed at all. But when the first issue arrived, it only took me a few hours before I knew we’d be canceling the subscription. Here’s why:

Despite a couple of useful articles, the issue of Ready Made that we received (Oct/Nov 2008) seemed to be a thinly veiled handbook for excelling in the consumerist, image-obsessed culture of which the DIY movement (as I understand it) is inherently critical.

The publication itself is very glossy and polished, full of flashy ads and artwork, airbrushed models, and beautiful photos that set the bar super high for even the most dedicated do-it-yourselfer. It feels like an issue of “Teen Better Homes and Gardens,” not a rag that is all about making the most of sufficiency in resources. I can see how this style would engage a younger audience used to the glitz, and I won’t begrudge them their success if indeed the approach works, but I found it to be an unfortunate mental disconnect between the message and the presentation.

The DIY projects that they cover range from the somewhat practical (various pumpkin recipes, how to give an effective presentation, building a loft bed, storing your bicycle on the ceiling) to fun and quirky (various pet furniture, bamboo drum brushes) to the outright gratuitous (designer miniaturist models?). And in the end, many articles were just an introduction to more products you can buy…a $54 cushion to hold your produce on your kitchen counter-top, a $179 work table, a $200 gadget holder. And that’s in addition to the various free-standing ads for cars, beauty products, alcohol and bottled water.

Again, I’m not saying this kind of publication won’t be interesting or useful to someone out there…it’s just about expectations. If I’d picked up a standard home improvement magazine and seen some of this stuff I would have been thrilled about it, but when I was expecting a publication to capture the DIY ethic and got Ready Made instead, I was disappointed. I have enough troubling or misleading marketing images hitting me every day that I don’t need to pay for a subscription to a magazine that unnecessarily glamorizes the otherwise moderately useful bits of information.

Ready Made magazine might be a great introduction to the concept and practice of DIY for a high-school or college-aged person who is otherwise thoroughly engrossed in the culture of “when you need something or something breaks, you go shopping.” But for someone who’s already used to doing it themselves, I’d suggest you skip the magazine subscription, use their online project archive as needed, and move on to other, more authentic DIY resources instead.

I had a moment of awakening about this a number of years ago when I was sitting in a local hair stylist’s chair having my hair cut. On my recent visits I had been observing the process more closely than prior haircuts in my life, and partly out of resentment for the $15 I was paying per 10-minute haircut, partly out of an engineer’s curiosity, I starting asking questions about where her equipment came from. Together we concluded that she was using a trimmer I could get at a local store for about $20, and therefore that the main value she brought to the process was the ability to see the whole of my head to trim it when I could not. Ah-ha.

So, I went out and bought my trimming set, and then went home to design a mirror rigging system that would allow me to see all of my hair at once, and a guide system that would prevent me from making my rear neck hairline too short or uneven. I started cutting my hair at home after that, and apart from a few special cases, haven’t paid for a haircut since. This has been a good thing, but for some reason, it was a difficult leap to decide that I could do it myself. After all, I’d always had my hair cut by someone else – why would it work any other way?

I think we are pretty heavily conditioned to avoid such leaps. Our consumerist-driven world loves that we’ve outsourced so many basic functions of day-to-day life to its storefronts, and it doesn’t want us to go back to the “do it yourself” mentality that drove so much innovation and self-sufficiency in past versions of humanity. In fact, the modern world requires that things break frequently, and that we pick up the phone and the credit card at the first sign that they might be breaking. It requires that we know little to nothing about where our food comes from, and that we pay outrageous prices for produce that can be grown for significantly less on our own. This culture requires that we forget how to make or repair or even operate the basic tools we use every day, because then we are dependent on the people and power structures that do have control over that knowledge, and we pay them to make the world right again. It doesn’t mind reinforcing our fears, either: what if we try to do it ourselves and it doesn’t work? What if we get lost? What if we can’t defend ourselves or our family against a terrorist? Surely we’re not qualified? Surely we don’t have the right tools? What if we don’t have the right standard of living? What if…?

The haircut example is perhaps a pretty benign one. (For those patrons who required more than the uniform trimming, the stylist did provide a needed sense of style and, because that took longer than 10 minutes, a kind of relationship that is probably pretty far from exploitative.) But with that milestone of self-cutting independence under my belt, I was set on a course toward some other kinds of self-sufficiency that I perhaps hadn’t imagined possible before.

For a time shortly thereafter, I lived on a small organic farm and had a daily participation in planting, growing and harvesting much more of the food that I ate. I made contact with the land that helped to feed me, and listened to what it had to say, and tried to do what it asked. I learned to cook, and to cook with the harvest that was available, instead of just what was convenient or cheap. I learned to store food, to make it last. In time, I felt much less clueless about how to sustain myself, less dependent on a grocery store for this basic daily need of food.

Every time I’ve had to hire someone to do some repair work for me, I’ve watched closely, asked them about what they were doing, and then gone out to read about it and learn more. The result has been that I’m much more bold about taking on home improvement projects that I would have previously been too intimidated to even think about. I’ve now installed light fixtures, replaced kitchen faucets, repaired walls, hung shelves, painted entire rooms, installed a trailer hitch on my car, flown a small plane, wired up telephone and Internet networks, run coaxial cable, and so many other things that I wish I’d learned about a long time ago.

Of course, doing it yourself doesn’t always mean doing it alone. All of my above adventures were accelerated greatly (and sometimes enabled entirely) by the knowledge of others, not to mention by some social and economic privilege. None of us can be specialists or knowledgeable in every area needed for survival or comfort, so there are great benefits that come from living in community where we distribute those responsibilities, and from being able to learn from others. If Alice is the community metal-smith, then maybe she doesn’t have to worry about being a good cook because Jake has dinner taken care of (as long as Alice sharpens his good kitchen knife when it dulls).

Recently a friend began teaching me a bit about forging metal, and while it may not be a calling for me to be the community metal-smith, it was one of those experiences that showed me what was possible for the first time, and I went home and looked at my kitchen knives with a whole new sense of awe. Running coax cable is great to know, but it’s these more base skills that interest me now; forging tools, learning more about four-season gardening, finding out how not just to survive in the “elements,” but to thrive in them. These skills feel real, globally applicable, like they’ll be useful no matter what.

There are still plenty of things that I don’t take on myself. I don’t change the oil in my car. I don’t perform surgery on myself, even with my mirror rigging system. I don’t make soy milk (though I do have a tofu-maker raring to go in the basement). This week alone, I’ve paid a substantial amount of money to have someone else tell me how much I still owe the IRS for the Iraq war effort, and I’m about to pay an only slightly less substantial amount to someone who knows how to repair a refrigerator that’s got all sorts of problems. I hope it doesn’t sound too strange that I have zero interest in being able to do my taxes (made immensely complex by my ownership of businesses, “thanks!” says the global economy), but I was watching that appliance repairman like a hawk as he put on the bullet piercing valves so he could attach his pressure gauge, wondering where I could get one of those myself for next time.

What are the things you want to better learn to do for yourself? What are the things you can’t imagine doing yourself? What parts of your life depend on complexity that is beyond your reach? What parts of your life would benefit from a community that fills in the gaps?