Alex Steffen is a planetary futurist and creator of the books Worldchanging and Carbon Zero. His new project The Heroic Future launches in September. Follow Alex on Twitter or to sign up to get his free weekly newsletter.

This archival piece was first published back in 2008.

Image credit: Freakangels.

The other night Cory Doctorow and I were talking over coffee, and we got going on an idea that’s been rattling around in my head ever since.

We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the looming climate crisis, the futility of survivalism; and we began to play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people are going to need help forging new ways of life.

Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts, political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people who are left trapped in degrading places, who don’t get the green collar jobs, do?

And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or open sharing of models for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atnadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

This would not be lone stragglers wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape (ala A Canticle for Liebowitz). As we’ve said again and again, worldending is a fool’s game, and what comes after will not be an adventure. Nor would it be the fantasy of a localist retreat to 19th Century farming communities that folks like Jim Kunstler hold so dear (I mean, for Christsakes, no one really wants that life — our ancestors all had that life and they fled it as soon as they could in great teeming masses)

Rather, it’d be a network of places where people were engaged in ingenious development of elegant solutions to the problems of life where living is hard and money is short might well be a vital necessity for a certain portion of the population. It’s really not hard for me to imagine a certain kind of person eagerly embracing the role of being facilitators of that network, sort of like barefoot solar engineers for the forgotten parts of the developed world.

It sounds implausibly weird, but then much of the world we’re moving into is likely to sound that way at first. Our ideas of what’s normal, or even what’s possible, will not outlast the next decade, and it’ll be the people who think in (what are by today’s standards) abnormal, impossible ways who may just do the most good.

So, what do you think? What innovative tools or models could you see helping in hard-hit communities? And can you think of a better name that the Outquisition?

UPDATE: People across the web have been jumping into into this conversation with good ideas, which is terrific. Glad to see so much creativity out there. Clearly something about the idea of not just writing off collapsing places has touched a chord.

However, there’s also been some outrage, and it’s also interesting how much of that criticism has focused on the idea that this is a formula for clueless city-slickers to ride in and preach to the noble yeomen farmers who will be doing just fine in the wake of disaster, thank you very much.

There are three problems here.

The first is that if you read the post, we aren’t even much talking about rural areas. It’s pretty clear to me that the areas of maximum opportunity to help are probably shrinking cities and collapsed suburbs.

The second larger problem is the clamor from certain bloggers that this is yet another example of arrogant urbanites bossing around the noble country folk. No one’s proposing that urban hipsters show up and tell anyone what to do: there are a great many ways of helping a community with new tools and resources than can start from a position of respect and intelligent engagement (in fact, you can read about hundreds of good examples of such projects right here on Worldchanging). I find it telling that some commenters assume the complete opposite, as if people who were willing to commit themselves to making a difference would be complete idiots in how they went about it.

The third, largest problem is that the idea that rural communities are all doing great and can survive collapses just fine is pretty insane. We have over a century of observed history to show us that while rural people are certainly better at being rural than urban people would be, they are no better at avoiding collapse, and, in fact, in North America, they are usually heavily in debt and dependent on long supply chains of increasingly scarce inputs. The average North American country person is not much better prepared to manage in a widespead catastrophe than the average suburbanite.

Here in North America, the vast majority of people who live in rural areas are not farmers. They work in poultry processing plants. They mine coal. They work at the landfill. They stock shelves at the local supermarket. They answer customer service queries at the local call center. They ship widgets from a mail-order warehouse. They flip burgers. I’ve spent big chunks of my life in small towns and country places, and while I love these places, they’re not what most urbanites idealize them as.

Less than 1% of the U.S. population farms, according to the Census. The average age of those farmers is rising fast, with 40% now over 55, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than half of all American farms are now either hobby or retirement farms, according to the EPA. Topsoil erosion can be measured in feet in many parts of the Midwest, while the flight from small towns of an entire generation of young people means a huge number of those towns have no future as things stand now.

Rural North America is in sad shape. Rural poverty is perhaps even more startling than urban poverty these days, and the lack of jobs, education, health and financial resources is much more pronounced in rural areas. Virtually every measurement of human well-being is worse in rural counties (at least working rural counties, rather than rural suburbs) than in urban counties. Already, huge swathes of rural America are green and leafy ghettos, complete with welfare dependencies and drug addictions.

If managing in a catastrophe were just about growing your own food, many (but not all) rural people would probably be just fine. If it were about repairing your machines, maintaining your roof, keeping the well running, a good many rural people would be okay. But there’s a lot more than that involved in running the kind of society we all demand, things like public health systems, communications systems, transportation infrastructure, energy supplies, banking and finance, good governance innovations, an effective legal system, etc. Places with these systems do a heck of a lot better than places without them, and these are systems many communities are in a poor position to provide for themselves. In much of rural America, those systems aren’t even working very well today.

That’s the reality.

In the coming decades, some places are going to do just fine. Metropolitan areas that shift gears fast enough (and are outside the worst climate-impacted areas) may even see a rise in their fortunes, as the expertise they’ve developed becomes more valued elsewhere. Ideally, we’ll get smart and help everyone manage the coming transitions as well as possible, and we’ll find that for a great many people in a great many places — including rural communities — life actually improves.

But if we don’t get smart enough, fast enough, people are going to get left behind, especially in places which are already perceived to have limited value, like run-down cities, bankrupt suburbs and poor rural areas. If the past decade is any indication, neither government nor industry is going to be riding in to help restore critical systems in a timely manner. And the reality is that people who are desperate often need help, and in the future, the only people able to give that help may well be folks who get systems and give enough of a damn to show up.

I’d rather be one who gives a damn than turns away, personally.