Surviving Y2K Will Mean Reinventing Society
by Cynthia Beal

Just as we should be preparing ourselves for physical interruptions in goods and services with respect to the Year 2000 Problem, we must also prepare ourselves for the fanning of social and psychological flames that now simmer like coals throughout much of our society.

As Margaret Wheatley, et. al, writes in “The Year 2000 Problem - Social Chaos or Social Transformation?”:

“Systems issues cannot be resolved by hiding behind traditional boundaries or by clinging to competitive strategies.... Our only hope for healthy responses to Y2K-induced failures is to participate together in new collaborative relationships.”

The temptation to exploit this issue for anything other than the broadest social good can easily spell disaster for preparedness and can utterly doom self-reliance and community harmony.

If the Y2K glitch is globally rough, the current competition for resources will intensify, driving communities, corporations and nations into riskier behavior in the name of corporate or civic survival (rarely the same thing).

One place where that painful discourse will soon begin rearing its head is along the battlelines already drawn between environmentalists and corporations that engage in potentially lethal technologically-run resource extraction, production or storage.

Will the industrialists and workers who have been loyal to potentially dangerous technologies find the will to join the environmentalists and insist on pulling-the-plug in the last few months of 1999 to prevent soiling their communities and the world around them? Or will they miss the opportunity by saying, “I don’t care what happens to Those People?”

Will the environmentalists who have been single-mindedly devoted to pulling-the-plug on risky technologies (no matter what the cost to their neighbors or their families) find the will to admit their own dependence upon technical and economic infrastructures? Or will they miss the opportunity by saying, “I don’t care what happens to Those People?”

Will we be able to drop the term “Those People” from our vocabulary?

Real community preparedness must, in a very short time, make the jump from physical and short-term survival to longer-term participatory community process and the mending of conflict arising from differences. This can be done temporarily in a crisis when the common ground of all sides is uncovered. But we have an opportunity to make it deep and lasting.

I’d like to suggest we each take a few infrastructures we value and are preparing for interruptions in - water, power, food - and look around our communities to see how those failures also could impact the natural infrastructures we depend on for survival.

A quick scan up and down your community’s waterways may reveal a factory upstream that has the potential to contaminate your water supply if its embedded systems or emissions monitoring systems fail. No matter what the value of the factory to your economy, if you lose your water supply, all your community and family preparedness is worthless, and you may find yourself a refugee, forced to leave your garden and your careful preparations behind.

The same is true of those who live near any of a number of chemical- intensive manufacturing operations. Look upland and upwind, as well as upstream. Class I soil, the best for agriculture, is already rare enough. The land shed is just as precious as the water shed. If a chemical or waste spill contaminates the farm land you’re counting on for a local food supply, all your preparations may be for naught.

Environmentalists know how to look upstream, upland and upwind. Think of them as Contamination Trackers. Technologists know how to look at the machinery and find the things that might pop and must be shut off and re- started mindfully – if at all.

And so, as this issue heats up (and it will), please try to hold that voice of reason that says we all need to work together: The folk we have the biggest rubs with may turn out to be our best partners.