I know this, that life is a great gift. And a mystery. We try to understand that mystery, to uncover its secrets, through science and inner exploration, conversations in our ordinary life. Peeling away layers of unknowing, the consciousness we share wants to share, and it wants us to care for each other.
on the road in nova scotia: one person's story
In 1979 when I applied, fresh from downtown Toronto, to be a bookmobile driver in Richmond County, Cape Breton, I had no idea that I was about to take on a small role in a powerful historic tradition of community-based economic development.
I got the job, and started down a road to understanding in a practical way that communities throughout Nova Scotia are a multi-culture of mutual support and assistance, of innovation and appreciation of heritage in story, music and technologies. The region has been a cradle, in Canada, for practical application of the principle of every person's right to appropriate learning opportunities, for the purpose of community-based development to improve our common quality of life.
This civic impulse, expressed in Nova Scotia through the work of the earliest churches of all denominations, the Mik'maq councils and private philanthropy led to such efforts as the Antigonish Movement, that gave us some of our first schools, worker-owned cooperatives, adult education, and much more, all from the ground up. The provincial library system I worked for is the institutional descendent of local libraries originally organized by this movement.
I came to realize that community-based development not only works, it has been essential to our economic development, and remains a current concern because it's critical to our economic future. See communication for civil society.
So, educated and inspired by the good people of Cape Breton, I came down the road to Halifax to see what I could learn from the methods of our professional communicators as a transport worker for local and international film and television productions. Along the way, I've had the good fortune to work with a variety of urban organizations by way of getting a bigger picture of some of the issues that impact on community-based development. And I've also come in dialogue with hundreds of visitors as a tour driver / guide for small groups interested in the natural and social history of our province.
In my present work with Farmers' Markets of Nova Scotia, I'm having the privilege of working first hand with the people who sustain one of the most enduring of all the institutions of civil society: the truly free market, the natural weekly market for goods of all kinds made or produced locally. Feeling their energy and determination to see community markets and the local food movement thrive and develop throughout Nova Scotia brings me full circle to what set me on this road in the first place.
That's what's in the rear-view mirror. Looking ahead, it seems to me we still have choices about the kind of life our children and theirs will experience in Nova Scotia. Those choices will certainly be driven partly by further industrial and commercial expoitation of our countryside and the waters. But they can also be driven by the strong desire on the part of people who live here to at least maintain the quality-of-life we currently enjoy, that means so much to us. Especially if we can collectively come to acknowledge it is this very quality-of-life that is providing the foundation for our economic future. It's not a question of going backwards, it's a question of respecting what has been achieved, and working together in a more systematic way to build on that.
I've been part of the working group developing Bluedoor as a way of contributing back some what I've learned about these things, in gratitude to everyone who has been my teacher. Thanks for your interest; please feel free to get in touch.
Don Black
email me here
experience
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