Sustainable Tarpon Springs - Local Love!

The Tarpon Springs Patch gives so much daily insight into the cool and unique things that are happening right here in our community.  I’ve enjoyed reading about a variety of very timely little local business ventures happening in Tarpon Springs - from the Court of the Two Sisters, to the new Anclote Brew on Dodecanese, and the recently opened Urban Relics on Pinellas.  We are fortunate that in a ‘corporate world’ we can still enjoy zany, one-of-a-kind places that add color and dimension to our own lives.  

There are some corporations that take local, social responsibility into consideration - but if you have seen the film, The Corporation, you know this is more of a rarity.  David Korten’s 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World, gave a lot of insight and warnings about how our purchasing choices would drastically be reduced if more multinational corporations were to wipe out local businesses.  We witnessed this happen in the small town of Omak, Washington, when a ‘Big Box’ corporate store (to remain nameless here) came to the area, and the classic little Main Street businesses were destroyed overnight.  It was a cultural tragedy to see Bramer’s True Value Hardware crushed by this new, China-made Big Box store.  Many of us have seen or been casualties of this kind of trend.

But there is hope in recognizing that you and I have power to enrich our local communities.  We may not have the power to stop a Big Box store from entering our market, but we can certainly control how and where we spend our hard-earned dollars!  We made a decision in 1999, to try to spend most of our money locally.  We wanted to support local growers, so we shopped at Puget Consumer Co-op and donated to the PCC Farmland Trust.  On our limited income, this has always been an ‘act of faith and conscience’ - but over time it paid off in connecting us to a movement where we met wonderful local heroes, and had a shared sense of community empowerment.

Have you ever considered how much our little local community could ‘organically blossom’ with even 10% of our consumption staying right in our area?  This is truly a ‘societal shift’ as David Korten wrote about in his sequel book, The Great Turning:  From Empire to Earth Community.  Shifting our resources may not give us the satisfaction of ‘instant discounts’ but as humans, we start to realize, we are only as strong as the weakest links in our world.  

I’d highly recommend a cute and informative online video, The Story of Stuff,   www.storyofstuff.com to give perspective on what is happening on the larger scale.  To put your good intentions for making this world a better place into action - right here, right now - the Tarpon Sunday Market will be starting up again on October 14th.  It will be a place to meet and support our local, organic growers and buy locally crafted products.  As we contribute to the Market’s success, we are contributing to the success of our whole community.  Who knows what else we can achieve once we revitalize our local economy!  We all have the potential of living our very own ‘independence dream.’  It starts by putting our money where our mouth is!  So give a little Local Love!