The Santa Fe Independent Business-Citizen Alliance is taking an important step toward a strong local economy by encouraging people to buy from local stores. People in the Alliance are taking power into their hands, slowly building the type of community they want. Similar to Gandhi's "constructive programme" of spinning one's cotton and severing dependence on English-milled cotton, so too can we wrest our power from huge corporate transnationals!

Building local self-reliance is more than a trendy economic idea -- it's an active way of strengthening relationships -- within our community, in the geopolitical sphere, with our non-human relations, and with the soil beneath our feet. It's a practice as old as the hills, though recently the major social engineering projects first of colonialism and now of corporate globalization make it seem "idealistic" and contrary to "progress". But as the negative economic, environmental, and social consequences of globalization become more and more apparent, the necessity of and urgency for an alternative is leading people the planet over to create alternatives and to build futures that hold promise for our beloved children.

Imagine if the structures for our production and consumption facilitated harmonious and peaceful ways of interacting with one another, with our environment, and with our world. If we actively build our local capacity to provide for ourselves, our confidence and sense of security would blossom commensurate with this increasing self-reliance. Indeed, Gandhi, Emerson, and Thoreau understood the spiritual strength, power, and sovereignty that comes from not depending on others for one's basic needs and living more or less within local means.

Imagine if people in the global south could use their best lands for growing food for themselves rather than for export luxury crops for the north. Relying on local resources for our survival would mean that we would be skilled and knowledgeable stewards of our bioregion. Relying on our soil, trees, air, water, minerals and fauna, we would have practical connection with the natural processes and cycles around us. The derivative psychological and spiritual health of such a sense of place might make mental and emotional disorders less prevalent. We would become more "human" -- of the humus.

Were we to buy most of our food from our neighbor farmers, give toys to our children from the local woodworker, beautify our homes with art from local hands, and build our own houses from local soil, our relationships with our neighbors would be strong. Being interdependent with them for our daily bread, we would have a strong sense of belonging -- of being known and knowing others, of both being tolerant and accepting of our human flaws and limitations as well as appreciating one another's gifts. Imagine if most of our business interactions took place in our own bioregion. Such a "human scale" would mean we would see the effects of our consumption patterns and could take responsibility for them, honing them to be as life affirming as possible. Imagine contributing to global biodiversity by cultivating vegetable varieties and animal species particularly suited to our climate. Imagine our pride at having a unique regional character that would emerge from our particular local ecology.

Let's join together to make these possibilities real.