The Cosby Co-op Plan

[Ning The Merciless]

Ok, I think everybody has got it now. The speculative economy we have all surfed for decades is a thing of the past. Jobs are drying up, credit for investment in capital ventures is disappearing, the Tourist Industry is down and will stay down into the foreseeable future. For people raised in times of an expanding economy this is an unmitigated disaster, especially those who are too rigid in their ways of doing things to understand that the rules of the game have changed.

On the other hand, members of Cosby Co-op are, by definition, fluid Warriors, capable of adapting rapidly to new conditions and even gaining an advantage from change.

For example, regionally we have become dependent on servicing tourists for our primary income. However, tourism is itself dependent on large numbers of people with surplus income and time to take a “trip to the mountains” occasionally. Mass tourism is also vitally dependent on cheap fuel. Both of those conditions, along with the easy credit required to build and insure tourist attractions, are things of the past. There will always be tourists on one level or another but it is time to understand that the reliable yearly flood of visitors with cash burning holes in their pockets is a thing of the past.

This need not be a disaster for the people that live here. We never actually kept the lion’s share of that income anyway, though we did get to pay for a lot of the damage it did in increased pollution, wear and tear on the infrastructure, as well as the slow erosion of the natural beauty that made the mountains a target of tourism in the first place.

The obvious conclusion is that we must now move our economy away from wiping tables and making beds to the actual manufacture of goods. Housing is a good place to start. The boom in floor space over the last decade has left us with millions of square feet of slapped together, poorly planned, and poorly positioned housing that will soon be mostly empty as owners discover that they can no longer afford upkeep/repairs/mortgage payments. People will still need shelter. But the demand will shift to solidly built, cheap to maintain, and repair, smaller structures, positioned to take advantage of proper drainage, sunshine, accessibility in the winter, nearer to potable water and community services. Builders who shift to these values will prosper and grow.

A second vital consideration is food production and processing. Today’s supermarket system is a mind bogglingly complex network of technological and productive links the failure of any one of which could turn the wonders of “same day delivery” into a human disaster of historic proportions. With good planning, nimble entrepreneurship, and a little luck, we can establish a regional food production and distribution system that will be resilient in the face of economic failures and agricultural disasters that occur outside the region. The opportunities for ground up business ventures by local entrepreneurs can be numbered in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

The list goes on. Building supplies, tools, auto and truck repair, clothing, medicine, fertilizer, all the requirements of civilization will need to be manufactured or assembled right here in the region. Today’s “kitchen table” or “shade tree” enterprises are tomorrow’s successful businesses. Those who get in early and stay with it will be the names that will shine regionally in the coming decades.

Of course, there are problems.

The long expected collapse of the dollar will make doing business, and getting paid for it much more difficult. Credit will be a thing of the past. We are going to discover that our current technological base, communications, transportation, electrical power, medicine, almost every system we depend on for a civilized comfortable existence, has been designed to wear out and be replaced every five years by highly trained technicians. We are going to find that a large percentage of our population has only obsolete skills and an expectation that if things go south they will be “taken care of.”

Here in the mountains we have a few things going for us though. We have a large contingent of Elders who still remember how to store potatoes, raise chickens, or slaughter a hog. We have a large number of folk who understand the value of independence, hard work, basic skills, and helping each other out. We have an amazingly high percentage of folks who saw the crash coming and have already taken steps to deal with it on a personal level. These are the people who will emerge as leaders in our community as the new game becomes clear to all.

For example, the Cosby Co-op offers itself as a means of finding like-minded folk in our region and interacting with them directly. By establishing trade relationships and trust we can find a way around the cash vapor lock and start doing business with each other again. By building a freely available body of technological information and sharing our experience and expertise in real time we can accelerate the re-training of our workforce based on “what works,” as opposed to mere theory and speculation. By talking with each other across the usual cultural boundaries and sharing our collective experience we are creating the groundwork for what will be the shape of the future.

So congratulate yourselves for being savvy and forward looking and flexible enough to be members of the Cosby Co-operative.

Now let’s get to work.