Things are left behind when economies and communities change. Prisons in North Carolina. Harbours in the Netherlands. Golf courses in California. All of them, no longer used for their original purposes, are being repurposed and adapted for our times, rather than torn down. 

I was pondering these stories when I read about how sugar kelp is becoming Maine’s new cash crop as the state copes with how climate change threatens Maine’s billion-dollar lobster fishery. And somehow, that story seemed to summarize so many of the ideas I’d been reflecting on.

Our communities exist within much larger systems, and in turn, those systems are affected by even larger currents that we don’t control at an individual level. We tend to think the solutions to such huge issues must be equally large. 

But adaptations that are local, place-based, interconnected, and even ‘outside the box’, can be effective at a local level when they genuinely grow from the experience of that local place. And that takes local people who can see beyond the obvious.