Reason Enough

I guess Sustainable Glasgow is still at that stage where a lot of folks are still asking "what is it?" "why is it?" and "who is it?" and I guess that is understandable due to the youth of our movement, but the events of this week would seem to answer all of those questions handily.

The situation that over 500,000 of our fellow Kentuckians find themselves in, with respect to the loss of the technology they depend upon, provides the perfect example of the risk we take by counting on distant companies to provide for our needs in good times and in bad. The larger the company (take AT&T and LG&E and KU for examples), the more difficult it becomes for the stockholders to make proper investments to adequately serve a community like Glasgow. They find it much easier to pay themselves bonuses and dividends. Of course, that is the nature of the beast. Companies who do business in a community where the owners do not live are there to extract money from the community and send it back to where the owners do live.

Sustainable Glasgow is a group that recognizes this vulnerability and is going to push for solutions that guarantee the self dependence that is necessary to assure that our lives are sustainable. Another great example of why we should be producing and consuming food within the geographic region known as "the Barrens" is the story we are all experiencing which you can view using this link. The story from ABC News explains the real truth behind the current salmonella outbreak related to peanut products. Clearly, like the bankers who are taking bail out funds and then giving them to themselves in the form of bonuses, many corporate executives consider their needs vastly more important than the needs of we consumers. Sustainable Glasgow plans to help trap money, and the benefits which flow from that money, in our community.

Who are we then? We are a group of local folks who dream of a network of local businesses which deliver goods and services to local residents in such a fashion that we do not fear storms of the natural type or storms of the economic variety. We are a group who has seen too many of our friends and neighbors toiling away for too long at the whims of corporations that couldn't care less about the lives of people in and around Glasgow. To quote Howard Beale from the 1976 movie Network, we are mad as hell and not going to take this anymore!

We could use your help. Become a member, come to our meetings, volunteer to help us establish the Bounty of the Barrens Market, a local garden plot project, and any of the many other initiatives that we have planned for the reinforcement of our local economy. Let's begin with a local initiative and wind up with a robust local economy, that fears neither ice nor recession, and feeds itself from the bounty of our land instead of a box of who-knows-what from a factory located who-knows-where.