# Held rightly, a sense of place is a tool for framing those bigger- than-we-care-to-imagine problems and bringing them back down to local scale. It helps us to focus our awareness on who we are, where we are headed, and what our next steps might be. In so doing, we often discover that the best solutions are those that can be found in our own back yards. —Steven Ames What the self-reliance movement is saying is that we want our neighborhoods to be the basis of political authority, and we want the small businesses to be the basis of the economic structure of the country. Our vision is that the power flows from below, not from above; that you can only have democracy if people own a piece of the wealth. —David Morris, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Washington, D.C. Introduction This book began more than a year ago as a brief paragraph describing a possible pamphlet on "community self-reliance in Portland." As publishers of RAIN: Journal of Appropriate Technology we had long reported to our readers on a nationwide movement among growing numbers of people who were working to make their communities more livable, cohesive and self-reliant places through such strategies as setting up farmers' markets, neighborhood weatherization workshops, community gardens and co-operative businesses. We felt it would be valuable to focus in on the problems and successes being experienced by this movement in one very special community—our own home town. We soon realized we were on to something bigger and more exciting than we had anticipated. Plans for a pamphlet became plans for a book, and the book became much more than simply a guide to community self-reliance projects in Portland. In hundreds of scribbled research notes, in endless discussions among ourselves, and in fascinating conversations with dozens of Portland people who generously shared their special insights and knowledge, we explored a whole range of challenging questions relating to community values, economics, and ecology. What did we really mean, we asked, when we spoke of our sense of place—our "portlandness"? How could our community "life support" systems—food, energy, transportation, housing, etc.—be tailored to produce a more resource-conserving, ecologically-sound, self-reliant city? How much could Portlanders (or people in any community) really expect to accomplish on a local level during a time of government cutbacks and economic hardship? How much did our self-reliant vision have in common with the conservative image of rugged self-sufficiency and how would it have to differ from that image in order to address the complexities and 5
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