The Outquisition

I've found myself mulling this over since I read it. It's a bit 'community development' meets environmental crisis, trying to avoid Mad Max! Here's the main scenario that's been bugging me:

"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?"

To me this chimes with a concern I've had for a few years now, playing away at the back of my mind. The apocalyptic version of which is a new Dark Ages caused by environmental unsustainability becoming catastrophic probably via peak oil's economic effects and the rising tide of global warming. The latter will probably require resettlement of large numbers of people or their re-tooling for new conditions ...

... 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.

In the Dark Ages, arguably, it was the monasteries that kept learning alive and which often enabled development. I wonder whether part of the Church's mission should be conceived of in these terms:

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

And if I'm right about that (and check out the five marks of mission for a plausibility check: it hits at least 3 of the 5) ... how do we begin to build the capacity of national and local church institutions to do that?
Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Outquisition:
Ecology, food & civilisation