Welcome to my blog!

This year I am embarking on an independent research fellowship to study how small communities in different parts of the world are experimenting with alternatives to our current paradigm of economic development. I have created this blog to share some of my learnings, thoughts, photographs, and anecdotes from this 12-month journey. Its title, Collaborative Alternatives, is meant to capture the community scale and the experimental nature of my research. It is also the name of my funded fellowship project at the Thomas J. Watson Foundation.

Even though this fellowship is a continuation of my human ecology degree which focused on post-development economics and deep ecology, it is also a topic that feels deeply personal and hopefully relatable for some of the readers of this blog. Like many people of my generation, I always felt like the world I was born into was characterized by immense problems and contradictions. From the existential threat of climate change to the growing social dysfunction of our societies, it is easy to see that humans—especially those living in industrial countries—can’t sustain living following the same trajectory. To many of us, it now appears clear that our societies need to undergo radical transformations or we might soon see the end of our civilization as we know it. This makes our need for alternatives just as dire as our current predicament.

But what are those alternatives?

That’s the question I’ve dedicated years of studies as well as this fellowship to explore. So far, this journey has led to no simple answers. Only a sense that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution to our problems, that finding alternatives is a process of questioning the unquestioned, and perhaps, that electric cars—and the system that produces them— won’t save us from a climate apocalypse. Creating change for a better world involves constant exploration and experimentation. It is a journey, not a destination.

This is why I chose to study alternatives on a localized and small community scale. In my experience, the abstract notions of environmental and social sustainability only become tangible when it is realized and lived at a local level. My study also focuses on the cracks and peripheries of industrial capitalism. Places where people are experimenting with ways to thrive despite being left out or behind from extractive economic development. They are the places commonly described as rural, remote, indigenous, underdeveloped, devitalized, wastelands, etc. They are the communities where questioning and negotiating economic development is often a means of survival while experimenting with sustainable alternatives is a way of life.

Although every community will have its own problems and solutions, I strongly believe that every local perspective and story can bring us a greater understanding of our global problems and their solutions. In turn, my hope is that such an understanding of the whole can help us imagine, experiment, and embody the local alternatives that will address our most pressing problems. Coming from a remote and devitalized region in the Canadian province of Québec, I hope one day that the fruits of this research can be realized in a tangible way in the place where I feel to belong most. At the end of the day, this fellowship and this blog are a continuation of a life-long journey of questioning How should we live in this world? If you are reading these lines, it is probably because you are also interested in finding answers to this question.

In the same way that many local stories are necessary to understand the global ones, I hope that learning about my personal journey through this blog will give you one of the many perspectives necessary to better understand the world we live in and answer this question for yourself.