INNOVATIVE SURVIVAL 

A preceding column pointed out the change that small communities must endure to survive -- in an environment even more different than that experienced during the transition from the Agricultural Age, when most people were farmers and country dwellers, to the Industrial Age when most people became factory or office workers and city dwellers. During that interface of changing ages, people had several centuries to adapt to the disruption. This time the time frame will be much shorter -- and the change much greater.

To accommodate such wracking change and to thrive on it, demands adaptability. One way to start getting used to changes is through your palate. A rattlesnake dinner (or any radically different meal) can modify conventional thinking. It's not a class apt to be offered in an academic institution, but it works. The world is going global and non-stop at that. You may have to work around-the-clock for some periods and even start at midnight. You must learn to accept this as normal. Conquering this change makes the next one seem less violent.

What if you have to work in a different town or city three days a week? Fly, drive take a train or ferry several times a week? Operate from home but be available 24 hours a day? People with this experience can usually handle the next upset. It's a lot like skiing or tennis. After a few tries, it doesn't seem so difficult in retrospect.

Residents of single-industry communities that have been singleindustry towns for all their lives -- being raised in the relatively slow-changing Industrial Age -- thought life would continue in the same old fashion. Fooled you didn't they?

Now people must change fast or they're toast. How to do that? Set up a community task force. Fund it without government help. Applying for government assistance wastes time and that's one other thing you also haven't got. By the time government aid comes through you, the opportunity may be lost to someone faster - moving who has already snatched it up. Government assistance has so many checks and balances that it is difficult to do anything really radical, but that is exactly what is needed.

Can you imagine government agreeing to create a lake on the outskirts of town and fill it with floating homes? Yet, many people these days are looking for exactly this type of different lifestyle. You might get a boat builder or developer to build the floating homes for that location and continue then to build them for lakes everywhere. Now you have a new industry, more employment plus you're now also a tourist attraction.

Would you be willing to change the name of your town to, say Hong Kong II? Then advertise in Hong Kong for entrepreneurs that could come to your town and get free land, buildings and a five year moratorium on taxes? If your community isn't ready to make and pay for such attempts, you aren't going to succeed - because other communities will be doing things just like that. Are you willing to offer half your hamlet for free to those who would move in and start new businesses? Remember the Canadian prairies and the American West was opened by intrepid individuals with a lust for land. That's what was offered free to those willing to work hard and farm this then wild-land. These regions filled up in about 150 years and most early pioneers and their offspring soon experienced a life far better than they or their fore bearers had known in the past. But they were risk-takers. The soft life has taken our joy of risk away. Government support has left us weak, timid, afraid and, it seems, sometimes helpless. We turned our worries over to someone in a far away capital and the resulting bureaucracy and taxes have crushed initiative.

Dependance on natural resources and the fat life our country gave us for a century or so has locked our minds into thinking that our skills are limited. Not so. Change is a challenge leading to a higher level of multiple skills and larger scope thinking. Just as in the Agricultural Age when we ate better and life in general turned out to be better than life as tribal nomads; just as the Industrial Age doubled our life span and give us a healthiness and undreamed-of luxuries, so too will the new age -- whatever we finally end up calling it. But those who resist the change will see an ever-deteriorating future. Those who embrace it will thrive. It was ever thus.

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