http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-5om/Berry.html
Wendell Berry
Renewing Husbandry
I REMEMBER WELL a summer morning in about 1950 when my father sent a hired man with a McCormick High Gear No. 9 mowing machine and a team of mules to the field I was mowing with our nearly new Farmall A. That memory is a landmark in my mind and my history. I had been born into the way of farming represented by the mule team, and I loved it. I knew irresistibly that the mules were good ones. They were stepping along beautifully at a rate of speed in fact only a little slower than mine. But now I saw them suddenly from the vantage point of the tractor, and I remember how fiercely I resented their slowness. I saw them as "in my way."
This is not an exceptional or a remarkably dramatic bit of history. I recite it to confirm that the industrialization of agriculture is a part of my familiar experience. I don't have the privilege of looking at it as an outsider.
We were mowing that morning, the teamster with his mules and I with the tractor, in the field behind the barn on my father's home place, where he and before him his father had been born, and where his father had died in February of 1946. The old way of farming was intact in my grandfather's mind until the day he died at eighty-two. He had worked mules all his life, understood them thoroughly, and loved the good ones passionately. He knew tractors only from a distance, he had seen only a few of them, and he rejected them out of hand because he thought, correctly, that they compacted the soil.
Even so, four years after his death his grandson's sudden resentment of the "slow" mule team foretold what history would bear out: the tractor would stay and the mules would go. Year after year, agriculture would be adapted more and more to the technology and the processes of industry and to the rule of industrial economics. This transformation occurred with astonishing speed because, by the measures it set for itself, it was wonderfully successful. It "saved labor," it conferred the prestige of modernity, and it was highly productive.
During the fourteen years after 1950 I was much away from home, though I never entirely departed from farming or at least from thoughts of farming, and my affection for my homeland remained strong. In 1964 my family and I returned to Kentucky and settled on a hillside farm in my native community, where we have continued to live. Perhaps because I was a returned traveler intending to stay, I now saw the place more clearly than before. I saw it critically, too, for it was evident at once that the human life of the place, the life of the farms and the farming community, was in decline. The old self-sufficient way of farming was passing away. The economic prosperity that had visited the farmers briefly during World War II and for a few years afterward had ended. The little towns that once had been social and economic centers, thronged with country people on Saturdays and Saturday nights, were losing out to the bigger towns and the cities. The rural neighborhoods, once held together by common memories, common work, and the sharing of help, had begun to dissolve. There were no longer local markets for chickens or eggs or cream. The spring lamb industry, once a staple of the region, was gone. The tractors and other mechanical devices certainly were saving the labor of the farmers and farmhands who had moved away, but those who had stayed were working harder and longer than ever.
THE EFFECTS OF THIS PROCESS of industrialization have become so apparent, so numerous, so favorable to the agribusiness corporations, and so unfavorable to everything else, that by now the questions troubling me and a few others in the '60s and '70s are being asked everywhere. It has become increasingly clear that the way we farm affects the local community, and that the economy of the local community affects the way we farm; that the way we farm affects the health and integrity of the local ecosystem, and that the farm is intricately dependent, even economically, upon the health of the local ecosystem. We can no longer pretend that agriculture is a sort of economic machine with interchangeable parts, the same everywhere, determined by "market forces" and independent of everything else. We are not farming in a specialist capsule or a professionalist department; we are farming in the world, in a webwork of dependences and influences probably more intricate than we will ever understand. It has become clear, in short, that we have been running our fundamental economic enterprise by the wrong rules. We were wrong to assume that agriculture could be adequately defined by reductionist science and determinist economics.
It is no longer possible to deny that context exists and is an issue. If you can keep the context narrow enough (and the accounting period short enough), then the industrial criteria of labor saving and high productivity seem to work well. But the old rules of ecological coherence and of community life have remained in effect. The costs of ignoring them have accumulated, until now the boundaries of our reductive and mechanical explanations have collapsed. Their collapse reveals, plainly enough for all to see, the ecological and social damages they were meant to conceal. It will seem paradoxical to some that the national and global corporate economies have narrowed the context for thinking about agriculture, but it is merely the truth. Those large economies, in their understanding and in their accounting, have excluded any concern for the land and the people. Now, in the midst of so much unnecessary human and ecological destruction, we are facing the necessity of a new start in agriculture.
THE TRACTOR'S ARRIVAL HAD SIGNALED, among other things, agriculture's shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel. But in 1950, like most people at that time, I was years away from the first inkling of the limits of the supply of cheap fuel.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Mechanical farming makes it easy to think mechanically about the land and its creatures. It makes it easy to think mechanically even about oneself, and the tirelessness of tractors brought a new depth of weariness into human experience, at a cost to health and family life that has not been fully accounted.
Once one's farm and one's thoughts have been sufficiently mechanized, industrial agriculture's focus on production, as opposed to maintenance or stewardship, becomes merely logical. And here the trouble completes itself. The almost exclusive emphasis on production permits the way of working to be determined not by the nature and character of the farm in its ecosystem and in its human community, but rather by the national or the global economy and the available or affordable technology. The farm and all concerns not immediately associated with production have in effect disappeared from sight. The farmer too in effect has vanished. He is no longer working as an independent and loyal agent of his place, his family, and his community, but instead as the agent of an economy that is fundamentally adverse to him and to all that he ought to stand for.
THE WORD "HUSBANDRY" is the name of a connection. In its original sense, it is the name of the work of a domestic man, a man who has accepted a bondage to the household. To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals -- obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures, in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all the practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.
Most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures appear to be the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry. The attempt to remake agriculture as a science and an industry has excluded from it the age-old husbandry which was central and essential to it.
This effort had its initial and probably its most radical success in separating farming from the economy of subsistence. Through World War II, farm life in my region (and, I think, nearly everywhere) rested solidly upon the garden, dairy, poultry flock, and meat animals that fed the farm's family. Especially in hard times farm families, and their farms, survived by means of their subsistence economy. The industrial program, on the contrary, suggested that it was "uneconomic" for a farm family to produce its own food; the effort and the land would be better applied to commercial production. The result is utterly strange in human experience: farm families that buy everything they eat at the store.
An intention to replace husbandry with science was made explicit in the renaming of disciplines in the colleges of agriculture. "Soil husbandry" became "soil science," and "animal husbandry" became "animal science." This change is worth lingering over because of what it tells us about our susceptibility to poppycock. Purporting to increase the sophistication of the humble art of farming, this change in fact brutally oversimplifies it.
"Soil science," as practiced by soil scientists, and even more as it has been handed down to farmers, has tended to treat the soil as a lifeless matrix in which "soil chemistry" takes place and "nutrients" are "made available." And this, in turn, has made farming increasingly shallow -- literally so -- in its understanding of the soil. The modern farm is understood as a surface on which various mechanical operations are performed, and to which various chemicals are applied. The undersurface reality of organisms and roots is mostly ignored.
"Soil husbandry" is a different kind of study, involving a different kind of mind. Soil husbandry leads, in the words of Sir Albert Howard, to understanding "health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject." We apply the word "health" only to living creatures, and to soil husbandry a healthy soil is a wilderness, mostly unstudied and unknown, but teemingly alive. The soil is at once a living community of creatures and their habitat. The farm's husband, its family, its crops and animals, all are members of the soil community; all belong to the character and identity of the place. To rate the farm family merely as "labor" and its domestic plants and animals merely as "production" is thus an oversimplification, both radical and destructive.
"Science" is too simple a word to name the complex of relationships and connections that compose a healthy farm -- a farm that is a full membership of the soil community. The husbandry of mere humans, of course, cannot be complex enough either. But husbandry always has understood that what is husbanded is ultimately a mystery. A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'" The mothering instinct of animals, for example, is a mystery that husbandry must use and trust mostly without understanding. The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble. Husbandry originates precautionary sayings like "Don't put all your eggs into one basket" and "Don't count your chickens before they hatch." It does not boast of technological feats that will "feed the world."
Husbandry, which is not replaceable by science, nevertheless uses science, and corrects it too. It is the more comprehensive discipline. To reduce husbandry to science, in practice, is to transform agricultural "wastes" into pollutants, and to subtract perennials and grazing animals from the rotation of crops. Without husbandry, the agriculture of science and industry has served too well the purpose of the industrial economy in reducing the number of landowners and the self-employed. It has transformed the United States from a country of many owners to a country of many employees.
Without husbandry, "soil science" too easily ignores the community of creatures that live in and from, that make and are made by, the soil. Similarly, "animal science" without husbandry forgets, almost as a requirement, the sympathy by which we recognize ourselves as fellow creatures of the animals. It forgets that animals are so called because we once believed them to be endowed with souls. Animal science has led us away from that belief or any such belief in the sanctity of animals. It has led us instead to the animal factory which, like the concentration camp, is a vision of Hell. Animal husbandry, on the contrary, comes from and again leads to the psalmist's vision of good grass, good water, and the husbandry of God.
Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small—too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community—and this is crucial. "Out of context," as Wes Jackson has said, "the best minds do the worst damage."
OUR RECENT FOCUS UPON PRODUCTIVITY, genetic and technological uniformity, and global trade -- all supported by supposedly limitless supplies of fuel, water, and soil -- has obscured the necessity for local adaptation. But our circumstances are changing rapidly now, and this requirement will be forced upon us again by terrorism and other kinds of political violence, by chemical pollution, by increasing energy costs, by depleted soils, aquifers, and streams, and by the spread of exotic weeds, pests, and diseases. We are going to have to return to the old questions about local nature, local carrying capacities, and local needs. And we are going to have to resume the breeding of plants and animals to fit the region and the farm.
The same obsessions and extravagances that have caused us to ignore the issue of local adaptation have caused us to ignore the issue of form. These two issues are so closely related that it is difficult to talk about one without talking about the other. During the half century and more of our neglect of local adaptation, we have subjected our farms to a radical oversimplification of form. The diversified and reasonably self-sufficient farms of my region and of many other regions have been conglomerated into larger farms with larger fields, increasingly specialized, and subjected increasingly to the strict, unnatural linearity of the production line.
But the first requirement of a form is that it must be comprehensive; it must not leave out something that essentially belongs within it. The form of the farm must answer to the farmer's feeling for the place, its creatures, and its work. It is a never-ending effort of fitting together many diverse things. It must incorporate the lifecycle and the fertility cycles of animals. It must bring crops and livestock into balance and mutual support. It must be a pattern on the ground and in the mind. It must be at once ecological, agricultural, economic, familial, and neighborly.
Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs. The problem of renewing husbandry, and the need to promote a general awareness of everybody's agricultural responsibilities, thus becomes urgent.
How can we restore a competent husbandry to the minds of the world's producers and consumers? This effort is already in progress on many farms and in many urban consumer groups scattered across our country and the world. But we must recognize too that this effort needs an authorizing focus and force that would grant it a new legitimacy, intellectual rigor, scientific respectability, and responsible teaching. There are many reasons to hope that this might be supplied by our colleges of agriculture.
The effort of husbandry is partly scientific but it is entirely cultural; and a cultural initiative can exist only by becoming personal. It will become increasingly clear, I believe, that agricultural scientists will need to work as indwelling members of agricultural communities or of consumer communities. It is not irrational to propose that a significant number of these scientists should be farmers, and so subject their scientific work, and that of their colleagues, to the influence of a farmer's practical circumstances. Along with the rest of us, they will need to accept all the imperatives of husbandry as the context of their work. We cannot keep things from falling apart in our society if they do not cohere in our minds and in our lives.
Full Version: Regaining economic freedom
http://energybulletin.net/3757.html
Published on 26 Dec 2004 by Permaculture Activist. Archived on 26 Dec 2004.
Urban vs. Rural Sustainability
by Toby Hemenway
Over ten years ago my wife and I moved to the country. One of our many reasons for leaving the city was to finally pursue the dream of self-reliance: to create a permaculture homestead that would trim our resource use and let us tap in more fully to nature’s abundance. And in the back of my mind was the quietly nibbling worry that someday the overconsumption party would end—the oil would run out, and things might get ugly. I wanted to be settled where we could be less dependent on the fossil fuel umbilicus when the cord finally snapped.
We went a good way toward making that dream come true. The red clay of our former clearcut turned, in places, to chocolate loam, though I noticed that even as our trees matured I still seemed to be needing more wood chips from the electric company or manure from a stable two miles away. From the garden flowed a steady procession of fruit and vegetables, but I confess I tried to ignore how much well-water we were pumping once our rain catchment ran dry partway through Southern Oregon’s four-month dry season.
We became involved in the local community: Master Gardeners, an environmental group, town meetings. Although we were busy in regional life in the beginning, eventually I found I preferred to drive the hour to see friends in progressive-minded Eugene than fight the pro-logging consciousness that permeated our county. Over the years my few local friends fell away as I became more drawn to the mind-set of those in Eugene, and as the local economics made it necessary for me to be away for weeks to teach and do design work. We were on good speaking terms with all our neighbors, but never found much common ground with them. Local parties began with watery beer and often ended in drunken fights, and neither was to our taste.
Slowly a mild paranoia set in. I started to wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was really in the right place. We had the best garden for miles around, and everyone knew it. If law broke down, wasn’t there more than a chance that my next door neighbor, a gun-selling meth dealer and felon, might just shoot me for all that food? How about the right-wing fundamentalists past him, who shot Stellar’s jays for fun and clearcut their land when they suspected spotted owls lived there? Or the two feuding families beyond them—one had fired a pistol during an argument, and neither would give way when their cars met on the road. I began to sense the outlines of a pattern that replicated one in society at large. We have the technical means to feed, clothe, and house all humanity. But legions starve because we have not learned to tolerate and support one another. People’s real problems are not technical, they are social and political. Down in Douglas County, I’d solved most of the technical problems for our own personal survival, but the social hurdles to true security were staring me in the face.
Our isolation also meant we were burning a lot of gas. A simple drive for groceries was a 40-minute round trip. Fortunately we both worked at home and had no children, so we could go for days without using the car. But the odometer was whirling to higher numbers than it ever had in the city. A couple of families had moved off our hill because they were exhausted by two to four round trips each day down our steep, potholed gravel road to work, school, soccer practice, music lessons, and shopping.
We cherished our decade-plus in the country, but eventually the realities began to pile up. There wasn’t a local market for the work we did. Community events left us saddened by the gulf between our way of life and theirs. And we were still tethered to the fossil-fuel beast, just by a much longer lifeline of wire, pipe, and pavement. That the beast looked smaller by being farther away no longer fooled us.
There was a positive side, too. We had achieved what we’d set out to do: to make sense of our lives, find the work we loved, and grow into ourselves. The portents now spoke clearly. It was time to return to where the people were, and to be in the thick of things once more.
So we have moved to Portland, and into the heart of town. We love it. The first of many good omens was the bio-diesel Mercedes across the street sporting a Kucinich sticker. And it’s a pleasure to be within walking distance of a bookstore, good coffee, and Ben and Jerry’s.
During the first few days in the city I would stand on the back porch, eyeing our yard with permaculture dreams in my head. The sole tree is a sprawling European prune plum. Other than that, the yard is a blank slate, dominated by a brick patio, a lawn, and an old dog run. And it’s small. I wondered how I would I fit all my favorite fruit trees in that tiny space.
The answer soon came. The plum tree straddles the fence we share with our neighbor Johnny, who has lived next door for 55 years. One day, on opposite sides of the fence, Johnny and I were gathering a small fraction of the branch-bending loads of plums when he called out, “Do you like figs?” I said I did, and soon a tub of black mission figs wobbled over the fence toward me.
We kept returning the basin to Johnny, but it found its way back almost immediately, full of figs. “You weren’t here in time for the apricots I’ve got,” Johnny told us, “But next year you’ll get your fill of them.”
As the buckets of plums began to fill up the yard, I tried to unload some on Theressa across the street. “Oh, no,” she said, “I’ve got my own tree. But when the Granny Smith’s come on, you’d better help me with them. And next year’s peaches will knock you out.”
When I met our neighbor Will, he begged me to take some of the pears that were plopping onto his yard. The American chestnuts up the street are bearing heavily, although the Asian community is all over them each morning before I wake up. I’ve cracked a few of the local walnuts, and they’re pretty good. And yesterday I discovered a nearby strawberry tree dotted with creamy mild fruit.
This informal assessment of local resources has revised my mental landscape design. I don’t need to grow all my favorite trees, only the ones that my neighbors lack (I’m thinking Asian pears, persimmons, and some early and storage apples). My neighbor’s yards are my Zones Two and Three. [Ed's note: a common feature of permaculture design is the zoning of a property up into areas, numbered one through to five or so, relating to proximity to the house and levels of required maintainence. -AF ] Plus, Stacey and Troy on the next block have persuaded the owner of a vacant lot to let eight families create a community garden on the site. A local tree service will soon be dumping chips there for sheet mulch, and next year we’ll be awash in food.
The Big Rural Footprint
I had always assumed that cities would be the worst place to be in bad times. I’m revising my opinion. Granted, Portland is an exceptional city. (Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone!) But I can’t help comparing this neighborhood to our old one. There, we were twelve families on two miles of road, driveways hundreds of feet long, all served by long runs of phone and electric wire, individual septic systems and wells, each commuting long distances. And with political and social views so divergent that feuds, gossip, and awkward conversations about safe topics were the norm.
In the city, an equal group of twelve families use 10% of the road, wire, and pipe needed in my old neighborhood. Many neighbors bus or bike to work, or at worst, drive single-digit mileages. And our social and political views are close enough that I am fairly confident we can work in mutual support if times get tough.
This is not the place to go deeply into the question of whether cities are more sustainable than contemporary American country life, but at each point where I delve into the issues, I find suggestions that urbanites have a smaller ecological footprint per capita.
Over the last two decades, millions of people have moved out of cities. Many of them are people of modest means, driven out by the high costs of urban life. Unfortunately, they have brought their city ways with them. Our neighbors in the country all clearcut their land and planted acres of grass. Many built enormous houses, since low interest rates made more square footage affordable. Some put up glaring streetlights in their front yards. They bought boats, ATVs, RVs, and other gas-guzzling toys. Unlike earlier self-reliant country folk, these are simply city people with really big yards. And there are millions of them.
Sociologists Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford have each noted that during the Depression and other hard times, urban residents have generally fared better than ruralites. The causes mainly boil down to market forces and simple physics. Since most of the population lives in or near cities, when goods are scarce the greater demand, density, and economic power in the cities directs resources to them. Shipping hubs are mostly in cities, so trucks are emptied before they get out of town.
In the Depression, farmers initially had the advantage of being able to feed themselves. But they soon ran out of other supplies: coal to run forges to fix machinery, fertilizer, medicine, clothing, and almost every other non-food item. Without those, they couldn’t grow food. Farmers who could still do business with cities survived. Those too remote or obstinate blew away with the Kansas dust.
Survival Skills
Today the situation for farmers has worsened. Few farmers grow their own food. Agribusiness has made them utterly dependent on chemicals and other shipped-in products. The main lack of cities compared to farms is food-growing, but farms lack nearly everything else—and most of that comes from cities. Setting aside for the moment the all-important issue of social and political cohesion, for cities to survive a peak-oil crash, the critical necessity is for them to learn to grow food. For country people to survive, inhabitants will need to provide nearly every single other essential good for themselves. And since many country people are simply transplanted urbanites lacking gardening or other land skills, but having the isolation that makes social cohesion unnecessary to learn (for now), their survival is even more doubtful. If catastrophe comes, the cities may be unpleasant, but I fear the countryside may be far worse off.
One important tenet of permaculture is to design for disaster. While giving a talk on the wildfire that destroyed his cabin at the Lama Foundation (see page 14 of this issue), Santa Fe designer Ben Haggard was asked what his biggest lesson was. “Plan for disaster,” he said. “Whatever is the likely catastrophe at your site, count on it happening. Because sooner or later, it will.”
A technique displayed in good design that also happens to be a way to deter disaster is to meet destructive forces with mechanisms or attitudes that transform them into productive, or at worst, harmless energies. When this machinery of transformation is missing, even seemingly mild events wreak havoc. A gentle rain falling on bare ground will quickly sluice away topsoil and wash downhill in gullies. If instead plants carpet that same patch of earth, the rain becomes not an erosive force, but life-giving moisture whose energy is damped and welcomed by the vegetation. Instead of gullying, the water is held by the plants, stored over a longer time for them and for the animals that feed on or live among the vegetation. This is one of nature’s secrets: knowing how to create structures and systems that convert gales to refreshing breezes, change baking sun into sugars and living tissue.
What nature doesn’t do, and humans attempt so often, is to treat large forces as enemies to be vanquished and destroyed. This summer, as hurricanes repeatedly battered the Caribbean, ridiculous proposals appeared in letters-to-the-editor columns: Let’s build giant fans on the Florida coast to blow away the storms. Pour oil over the Atlantic to smooth out the waves. And (inevitably), why can’t we toss a few nukes into those pesky hurricanes? (Whether it’s replacing the Panama canal or toppling Saddam, someone always seems to propose atomic bombs.)
Sector Acceptance
The conceptual tool offered by permaculture in these cases is to view large forces as sector energies: influences from off the site that are beyond the control of the designer. We deal with sector energies by designing systems or placing elements to deflect, absorb, or harvest these forces, or allow them to pass unhindered. This is nature’s way as well, and how she does it offers, as usual, some profound lessons.
As ecosystems mature, biomass and complexity increase. Ecologist Ramon Margalef, in his landmark 1963 paper, “On Certain Unifying Principles in Ecology” (American Naturalist 97:357-374), suggests we think of biomass as “a keeper of organization, something that is proportional to the influence that an actual ecosystem can exert on future events.” In other words, we can think of biomass, complexity, and the other indicators of maturity as measures not only of the resilience of a system, but as a form of wisdom. That’s because as ecosystems mature, the aftermath of environmental tumult such as storm or drought depends more on the richness of the ecosystem than on the nature of the disturbance. A drought that withers a weedlot doesn’t faze an old-growth forest—the forest has learned what to do with drought. It has grown structures, cycles, and patterns that convert nearly any outside influence into more forest, and that protect key cycles during bad times. It has become wise.
Nature uses two principal tools to achieve this protection from catastrophe. The first is diversity in space—in size, shape, physical pattern, and composition. If all the pieces of a system are at the same physical scale—all the same size, or the same genetic makeup, for example—a disturbance occurring at that scale will wipe out the whole system. Diversity in scale brings protection. When a hurricane hits a trailer park, the trailers blow away, but the bacteria, mice, and other elements of very different size escape damage. A plague of cats, on the other hand, strikes at the scale of the mice, leaving the trailers and bacteria unscathed. Mature ecosystems have enough diversity in space that any catastrophe may knock out the pieces living at that particular scale but will almost never destroy the whole landscape.
The second protective tool of mature ecosystems is diversity in time—in rate, frequency, and schedule. Understory shrubs often leaf out earlier in spring than canopy trees, which lets the shrubs grab enough light to build plenty of leaves. Then when the trees grow leaves, the shrubs have the photosynthetic area to gather ample light in the dappled shade. Another classic example of diversity in time is the hatching cycle of locusts. Timed to emerge at intervals of years having prime numbers such as 13 and 17, they frustrate the predators whose more regular breeding period requires their food to arrive more predictably.
Permaculture designers use similar approaches to design for disaster. Instead of using concrete embankments and other brute-force tactics to resist flood, we place fences that can lie down, reed-like as rushing waters advance and then can be easily set up afterward. Rather than gouging enormous barren firebreaks into their hillside, Lama Foundation stacks roads, swales, and plantings together in a multiply functioning firebreak. When monsoon downpours arrive in Tucson, instead of standing by as flooding street runoff pours down sewers, Brad Lancaster harvests the water with cleverly placed curb cuts that lead to mulched food-tree basins. All these examples are detailed in Permaculture Activist #54 (November, 2004).
By observing nature’s wisdom, permaculturists follow nature’s lead and use patterning, succession, edge, and cyclic opportunities to convert large pulses of energy into smooth generators of structure, harvest, and nutrient flow. Permaculture design inquires into the nature of some of these “large pulses” and shows how they can teach us to use their energy, aikido-like, to benefit ourselves and the larger ecosystem.
Published on 26 Dec 2004 by Permaculture Activist. Archived on 26 Dec 2004.
Urban vs. Rural Sustainability
by Toby Hemenway
Over ten years ago my wife and I moved to the country. One of our many reasons for leaving the city was to finally pursue the dream of self-reliance: to create a permaculture homestead that would trim our resource use and let us tap in more fully to nature’s abundance. And in the back of my mind was the quietly nibbling worry that someday the overconsumption party would end—the oil would run out, and things might get ugly. I wanted to be settled where we could be less dependent on the fossil fuel umbilicus when the cord finally snapped.
We went a good way toward making that dream come true. The red clay of our former clearcut turned, in places, to chocolate loam, though I noticed that even as our trees matured I still seemed to be needing more wood chips from the electric company or manure from a stable two miles away. From the garden flowed a steady procession of fruit and vegetables, but I confess I tried to ignore how much well-water we were pumping once our rain catchment ran dry partway through Southern Oregon’s four-month dry season.
We became involved in the local community: Master Gardeners, an environmental group, town meetings. Although we were busy in regional life in the beginning, eventually I found I preferred to drive the hour to see friends in progressive-minded Eugene than fight the pro-logging consciousness that permeated our county. Over the years my few local friends fell away as I became more drawn to the mind-set of those in Eugene, and as the local economics made it necessary for me to be away for weeks to teach and do design work. We were on good speaking terms with all our neighbors, but never found much common ground with them. Local parties began with watery beer and often ended in drunken fights, and neither was to our taste.
Slowly a mild paranoia set in. I started to wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was really in the right place. We had the best garden for miles around, and everyone knew it. If law broke down, wasn’t there more than a chance that my next door neighbor, a gun-selling meth dealer and felon, might just shoot me for all that food? How about the right-wing fundamentalists past him, who shot Stellar’s jays for fun and clearcut their land when they suspected spotted owls lived there? Or the two feuding families beyond them—one had fired a pistol during an argument, and neither would give way when their cars met on the road. I began to sense the outlines of a pattern that replicated one in society at large. We have the technical means to feed, clothe, and house all humanity. But legions starve because we have not learned to tolerate and support one another. People’s real problems are not technical, they are social and political. Down in Douglas County, I’d solved most of the technical problems for our own personal survival, but the social hurdles to true security were staring me in the face.
Our isolation also meant we were burning a lot of gas. A simple drive for groceries was a 40-minute round trip. Fortunately we both worked at home and had no children, so we could go for days without using the car. But the odometer was whirling to higher numbers than it ever had in the city. A couple of families had moved off our hill because they were exhausted by two to four round trips each day down our steep, potholed gravel road to work, school, soccer practice, music lessons, and shopping.
We cherished our decade-plus in the country, but eventually the realities began to pile up. There wasn’t a local market for the work we did. Community events left us saddened by the gulf between our way of life and theirs. And we were still tethered to the fossil-fuel beast, just by a much longer lifeline of wire, pipe, and pavement. That the beast looked smaller by being farther away no longer fooled us.
There was a positive side, too. We had achieved what we’d set out to do: to make sense of our lives, find the work we loved, and grow into ourselves. The portents now spoke clearly. It was time to return to where the people were, and to be in the thick of things once more.
So we have moved to Portland, and into the heart of town. We love it. The first of many good omens was the bio-diesel Mercedes across the street sporting a Kucinich sticker. And it’s a pleasure to be within walking distance of a bookstore, good coffee, and Ben and Jerry’s.
During the first few days in the city I would stand on the back porch, eyeing our yard with permaculture dreams in my head. The sole tree is a sprawling European prune plum. Other than that, the yard is a blank slate, dominated by a brick patio, a lawn, and an old dog run. And it’s small. I wondered how I would I fit all my favorite fruit trees in that tiny space.
The answer soon came. The plum tree straddles the fence we share with our neighbor Johnny, who has lived next door for 55 years. One day, on opposite sides of the fence, Johnny and I were gathering a small fraction of the branch-bending loads of plums when he called out, “Do you like figs?” I said I did, and soon a tub of black mission figs wobbled over the fence toward me.
We kept returning the basin to Johnny, but it found its way back almost immediately, full of figs. “You weren’t here in time for the apricots I’ve got,” Johnny told us, “But next year you’ll get your fill of them.”
As the buckets of plums began to fill up the yard, I tried to unload some on Theressa across the street. “Oh, no,” she said, “I’ve got my own tree. But when the Granny Smith’s come on, you’d better help me with them. And next year’s peaches will knock you out.”
When I met our neighbor Will, he begged me to take some of the pears that were plopping onto his yard. The American chestnuts up the street are bearing heavily, although the Asian community is all over them each morning before I wake up. I’ve cracked a few of the local walnuts, and they’re pretty good. And yesterday I discovered a nearby strawberry tree dotted with creamy mild fruit.
This informal assessment of local resources has revised my mental landscape design. I don’t need to grow all my favorite trees, only the ones that my neighbors lack (I’m thinking Asian pears, persimmons, and some early and storage apples). My neighbor’s yards are my Zones Two and Three. [Ed's note: a common feature of permaculture design is the zoning of a property up into areas, numbered one through to five or so, relating to proximity to the house and levels of required maintainence. -AF ] Plus, Stacey and Troy on the next block have persuaded the owner of a vacant lot to let eight families create a community garden on the site. A local tree service will soon be dumping chips there for sheet mulch, and next year we’ll be awash in food.
The Big Rural Footprint
I had always assumed that cities would be the worst place to be in bad times. I’m revising my opinion. Granted, Portland is an exceptional city. (Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone!) But I can’t help comparing this neighborhood to our old one. There, we were twelve families on two miles of road, driveways hundreds of feet long, all served by long runs of phone and electric wire, individual septic systems and wells, each commuting long distances. And with political and social views so divergent that feuds, gossip, and awkward conversations about safe topics were the norm.
In the city, an equal group of twelve families use 10% of the road, wire, and pipe needed in my old neighborhood. Many neighbors bus or bike to work, or at worst, drive single-digit mileages. And our social and political views are close enough that I am fairly confident we can work in mutual support if times get tough.
This is not the place to go deeply into the question of whether cities are more sustainable than contemporary American country life, but at each point where I delve into the issues, I find suggestions that urbanites have a smaller ecological footprint per capita.
Over the last two decades, millions of people have moved out of cities. Many of them are people of modest means, driven out by the high costs of urban life. Unfortunately, they have brought their city ways with them. Our neighbors in the country all clearcut their land and planted acres of grass. Many built enormous houses, since low interest rates made more square footage affordable. Some put up glaring streetlights in their front yards. They bought boats, ATVs, RVs, and other gas-guzzling toys. Unlike earlier self-reliant country folk, these are simply city people with really big yards. And there are millions of them.
Sociologists Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford have each noted that during the Depression and other hard times, urban residents have generally fared better than ruralites. The causes mainly boil down to market forces and simple physics. Since most of the population lives in or near cities, when goods are scarce the greater demand, density, and economic power in the cities directs resources to them. Shipping hubs are mostly in cities, so trucks are emptied before they get out of town.
In the Depression, farmers initially had the advantage of being able to feed themselves. But they soon ran out of other supplies: coal to run forges to fix machinery, fertilizer, medicine, clothing, and almost every other non-food item. Without those, they couldn’t grow food. Farmers who could still do business with cities survived. Those too remote or obstinate blew away with the Kansas dust.
Survival Skills
Today the situation for farmers has worsened. Few farmers grow their own food. Agribusiness has made them utterly dependent on chemicals and other shipped-in products. The main lack of cities compared to farms is food-growing, but farms lack nearly everything else—and most of that comes from cities. Setting aside for the moment the all-important issue of social and political cohesion, for cities to survive a peak-oil crash, the critical necessity is for them to learn to grow food. For country people to survive, inhabitants will need to provide nearly every single other essential good for themselves. And since many country people are simply transplanted urbanites lacking gardening or other land skills, but having the isolation that makes social cohesion unnecessary to learn (for now), their survival is even more doubtful. If catastrophe comes, the cities may be unpleasant, but I fear the countryside may be far worse off.
One important tenet of permaculture is to design for disaster. While giving a talk on the wildfire that destroyed his cabin at the Lama Foundation (see page 14 of this issue), Santa Fe designer Ben Haggard was asked what his biggest lesson was. “Plan for disaster,” he said. “Whatever is the likely catastrophe at your site, count on it happening. Because sooner or later, it will.”
A technique displayed in good design that also happens to be a way to deter disaster is to meet destructive forces with mechanisms or attitudes that transform them into productive, or at worst, harmless energies. When this machinery of transformation is missing, even seemingly mild events wreak havoc. A gentle rain falling on bare ground will quickly sluice away topsoil and wash downhill in gullies. If instead plants carpet that same patch of earth, the rain becomes not an erosive force, but life-giving moisture whose energy is damped and welcomed by the vegetation. Instead of gullying, the water is held by the plants, stored over a longer time for them and for the animals that feed on or live among the vegetation. This is one of nature’s secrets: knowing how to create structures and systems that convert gales to refreshing breezes, change baking sun into sugars and living tissue.
What nature doesn’t do, and humans attempt so often, is to treat large forces as enemies to be vanquished and destroyed. This summer, as hurricanes repeatedly battered the Caribbean, ridiculous proposals appeared in letters-to-the-editor columns: Let’s build giant fans on the Florida coast to blow away the storms. Pour oil over the Atlantic to smooth out the waves. And (inevitably), why can’t we toss a few nukes into those pesky hurricanes? (Whether it’s replacing the Panama canal or toppling Saddam, someone always seems to propose atomic bombs.)
Sector Acceptance
The conceptual tool offered by permaculture in these cases is to view large forces as sector energies: influences from off the site that are beyond the control of the designer. We deal with sector energies by designing systems or placing elements to deflect, absorb, or harvest these forces, or allow them to pass unhindered. This is nature’s way as well, and how she does it offers, as usual, some profound lessons.
As ecosystems mature, biomass and complexity increase. Ecologist Ramon Margalef, in his landmark 1963 paper, “On Certain Unifying Principles in Ecology” (American Naturalist 97:357-374), suggests we think of biomass as “a keeper of organization, something that is proportional to the influence that an actual ecosystem can exert on future events.” In other words, we can think of biomass, complexity, and the other indicators of maturity as measures not only of the resilience of a system, but as a form of wisdom. That’s because as ecosystems mature, the aftermath of environmental tumult such as storm or drought depends more on the richness of the ecosystem than on the nature of the disturbance. A drought that withers a weedlot doesn’t faze an old-growth forest—the forest has learned what to do with drought. It has grown structures, cycles, and patterns that convert nearly any outside influence into more forest, and that protect key cycles during bad times. It has become wise.
Nature uses two principal tools to achieve this protection from catastrophe. The first is diversity in space—in size, shape, physical pattern, and composition. If all the pieces of a system are at the same physical scale—all the same size, or the same genetic makeup, for example—a disturbance occurring at that scale will wipe out the whole system. Diversity in scale brings protection. When a hurricane hits a trailer park, the trailers blow away, but the bacteria, mice, and other elements of very different size escape damage. A plague of cats, on the other hand, strikes at the scale of the mice, leaving the trailers and bacteria unscathed. Mature ecosystems have enough diversity in space that any catastrophe may knock out the pieces living at that particular scale but will almost never destroy the whole landscape.
The second protective tool of mature ecosystems is diversity in time—in rate, frequency, and schedule. Understory shrubs often leaf out earlier in spring than canopy trees, which lets the shrubs grab enough light to build plenty of leaves. Then when the trees grow leaves, the shrubs have the photosynthetic area to gather ample light in the dappled shade. Another classic example of diversity in time is the hatching cycle of locusts. Timed to emerge at intervals of years having prime numbers such as 13 and 17, they frustrate the predators whose more regular breeding period requires their food to arrive more predictably.
Permaculture designers use similar approaches to design for disaster. Instead of using concrete embankments and other brute-force tactics to resist flood, we place fences that can lie down, reed-like as rushing waters advance and then can be easily set up afterward. Rather than gouging enormous barren firebreaks into their hillside, Lama Foundation stacks roads, swales, and plantings together in a multiply functioning firebreak. When monsoon downpours arrive in Tucson, instead of standing by as flooding street runoff pours down sewers, Brad Lancaster harvests the water with cleverly placed curb cuts that lead to mulched food-tree basins. All these examples are detailed in Permaculture Activist #54 (November, 2004).
By observing nature’s wisdom, permaculturists follow nature’s lead and use patterning, succession, edge, and cyclic opportunities to convert large pulses of energy into smooth generators of structure, harvest, and nutrient flow. Permaculture design inquires into the nature of some of these “large pulses” and shows how they can teach us to use their energy, aikido-like, to benefit ourselves and the larger ecosystem.
E.F. Schumacher, Buddhist Economics
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics.html
BUDDHIST ECONOMICS
by E. F. Schumacher
"Right Livelihood" is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics.
Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain faithful to their heritage. So Burma: “The New Burma sees no conflict between religious values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies.” 1 Or: “We can blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology.” 2 Or: “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do.” 3
All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model their economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be called. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics.
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.
The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that "reduces the work load" is a good thing. The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called "division of labour" and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 4 Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialisation, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs.
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.
From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from the other? “The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern West as the ancient East, “can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.” 5 It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philosopher and economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as follows:
If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality. 6
If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks this nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace. A modern economist may engage in highly sophisticated calculations on whether full employment "pays" or whether it might be more "economic" to run an economy at less than full employment so as to insure a greater mobility of labour, a better stability of wages, and so forth. His fundamental criterion of success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given period of time. “If the marginal urgency of goods is low,” says Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society, “then so is the urgency of employing the last man or the last million men in the labour force.” 7And again: “If . . . we can afford some unemployment in the interest of stability—a proposition, incidentally, of impeccably conservative antecedents—then we can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that enable them to sustain their accustomed standard of living.”
From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning for full employment, and the primary purpose of this would in fact be employment for everyone who needs an "outside" job: it would not be the maximisation of employment nor the maximisation of production. Women, on the whole, do not need an "outside" job, and the large-scale employment of women in offices or factories would be considered a sign of serious economic failure. In particular, to let mothers of young children work in factories while the children run wild would be as uneconomic in the eyes of a Buddhist economist as the employment of a skilled worker as a soldier in the eyes of a modern economist.
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is "The Middle Way" and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. It would be highly uneconomic, for instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like the modern West, when a much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the skillful draping of uncut material. It would be the height of folly to make material so that it should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to make anything ugly, shabby, or mean. What has just been said about clothing applies equally to all other human requirements. The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.
Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production—and, labour, and capital—as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised, therefore, that the pressure and strain of living is very much less in say, Burma, than it is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of labour-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used in the latter.
Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: “Cease to do evil; try to do good.” As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.
From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale. Just as the modern economist would admit that a high rate of consumption of transport services between a man’s home and his place of work signifies a misfortune and not a high standard of life, so the Buddhist would hold that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success. The former tends to take statistics showing an increase in the number of ton/miles per head of the population carried by a country’s transport system as proof of economic progress, while to the latter—the Buddhist economist—the same statistics would indicate a highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern of consumption.
Another striking difference between modern economics and Buddhist economics arises over the use of natural resources. Bertrand de Jouvenel, the eminent French political philosopher, has characterised "Western man" in words which may be taken as a fair description of the modern economist:
He tends to count nothing as an expenditure, other than human effort; he does not seem to mind how much mineral matter he wastes and, far worse, how much living matter he destroys. He does not seem to realize at all that human life is a dependent part of an ecosystem of many different forms of life. As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut off from any form of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived. This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of things upon which we ultimately depend, such as water and trees. 8
The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development independent of any foreign aid. Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.
Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and "uneconomic." From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does.
Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at attractive prices, so the Buddhist economist would insist that a population basing its economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on capital instead of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and could therefore be justified only as a purely temporary expedient. As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.
This fact alone might give food for thought even to those people in Buddhist countries who care nothing for the religious and spiritual values of their heritage and ardently desire to embrace the materialism of modern economics at the fastest possible speed. Before they dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be. Towards the end of his courageous book The Challenge of Man’s Future, Professor Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology gives the following appraisal:
Thus we see that, just as industrial society is fundamentally unstable and subject to reversion to agrarian existence, so within it the conditions which offer individual freedom are unstable in their ability to avoid the conditions which impose rigid organisation and totalitarian control. Indeed, when we examine all the foreseeable difficulties which threaten the survival of industrial civilisation, it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible. 9
Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question of whether "modernisation," as currently practised without regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results. As far as the masses are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous—a collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul.
It is in the light of both immediate experience and long term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religious values. For it is not a question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation." It is a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding "Right Livelihood."
Endnotes
The essay "Buddhist Economics" was first published in Asia: A Handbook, edited by Guy Wint, published by Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1966. In 1973 it was collected with other essays by Ernest Friedrich Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The book has been translated into 27 different languages and in 1995 was named by the London Times Literary Supplement as one of the hundred most influential books written after World War II.
In December of 2001, Mrs. Vreni Schumacher and Hartley and Marks Publishers kindly extended permission to include "Buddhist Economics" in the pamphlet, An Economics of Peace, available from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org.
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics.html
BUDDHIST ECONOMICS
by E. F. Schumacher
"Right Livelihood" is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics.
Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain faithful to their heritage. So Burma: “The New Burma sees no conflict between religious values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies.” 1 Or: “We can blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology.” 2 Or: “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do.” 3
All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model their economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be called. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics.
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.
The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that "reduces the work load" is a good thing. The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called "division of labour" and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 4 Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialisation, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs.
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.
From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from the other? “The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern West as the ancient East, “can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.” 5 It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philosopher and economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as follows:
If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality. 6
If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks this nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace. A modern economist may engage in highly sophisticated calculations on whether full employment "pays" or whether it might be more "economic" to run an economy at less than full employment so as to insure a greater mobility of labour, a better stability of wages, and so forth. His fundamental criterion of success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given period of time. “If the marginal urgency of goods is low,” says Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society, “then so is the urgency of employing the last man or the last million men in the labour force.” 7And again: “If . . . we can afford some unemployment in the interest of stability—a proposition, incidentally, of impeccably conservative antecedents—then we can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that enable them to sustain their accustomed standard of living.”
From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning for full employment, and the primary purpose of this would in fact be employment for everyone who needs an "outside" job: it would not be the maximisation of employment nor the maximisation of production. Women, on the whole, do not need an "outside" job, and the large-scale employment of women in offices or factories would be considered a sign of serious economic failure. In particular, to let mothers of young children work in factories while the children run wild would be as uneconomic in the eyes of a Buddhist economist as the employment of a skilled worker as a soldier in the eyes of a modern economist.
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is "The Middle Way" and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. It would be highly uneconomic, for instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like the modern West, when a much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the skillful draping of uncut material. It would be the height of folly to make material so that it should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to make anything ugly, shabby, or mean. What has just been said about clothing applies equally to all other human requirements. The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.
Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production—and, labour, and capital—as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised, therefore, that the pressure and strain of living is very much less in say, Burma, than it is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of labour-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used in the latter.
Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: “Cease to do evil; try to do good.” As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.
From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale. Just as the modern economist would admit that a high rate of consumption of transport services between a man’s home and his place of work signifies a misfortune and not a high standard of life, so the Buddhist would hold that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success. The former tends to take statistics showing an increase in the number of ton/miles per head of the population carried by a country’s transport system as proof of economic progress, while to the latter—the Buddhist economist—the same statistics would indicate a highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern of consumption.
Another striking difference between modern economics and Buddhist economics arises over the use of natural resources. Bertrand de Jouvenel, the eminent French political philosopher, has characterised "Western man" in words which may be taken as a fair description of the modern economist:
He tends to count nothing as an expenditure, other than human effort; he does not seem to mind how much mineral matter he wastes and, far worse, how much living matter he destroys. He does not seem to realize at all that human life is a dependent part of an ecosystem of many different forms of life. As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut off from any form of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived. This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of things upon which we ultimately depend, such as water and trees. 8
The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development independent of any foreign aid. Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.
Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and "uneconomic." From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does.
Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at attractive prices, so the Buddhist economist would insist that a population basing its economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on capital instead of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and could therefore be justified only as a purely temporary expedient. As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.
This fact alone might give food for thought even to those people in Buddhist countries who care nothing for the religious and spiritual values of their heritage and ardently desire to embrace the materialism of modern economics at the fastest possible speed. Before they dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be. Towards the end of his courageous book The Challenge of Man’s Future, Professor Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology gives the following appraisal:
Thus we see that, just as industrial society is fundamentally unstable and subject to reversion to agrarian existence, so within it the conditions which offer individual freedom are unstable in their ability to avoid the conditions which impose rigid organisation and totalitarian control. Indeed, when we examine all the foreseeable difficulties which threaten the survival of industrial civilisation, it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible. 9
Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question of whether "modernisation," as currently practised without regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results. As far as the masses are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous—a collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul.
It is in the light of both immediate experience and long term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religious values. For it is not a question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation." It is a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding "Right Livelihood."
Endnotes
The essay "Buddhist Economics" was first published in Asia: A Handbook, edited by Guy Wint, published by Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1966. In 1973 it was collected with other essays by Ernest Friedrich Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The book has been translated into 27 different languages and in 1995 was named by the London Times Literary Supplement as one of the hundred most influential books written after World War II.
In December of 2001, Mrs. Vreni Schumacher and Hartley and Marks Publishers kindly extended permission to include "Buddhist Economics" in the pamphlet, An Economics of Peace, available from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org.
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-5om/Monke.html
Charlotte's Webpage
THOMAS EDISON WAS A GREAT INVENTOR but a lousy prognosticator. When he proclaimed in 1922 that the motion picture would replace textbooks in schools, he began a long string of spectacularly wrong predictions regarding the capacity of various technologies to revolutionize teaching. To date, none of them—from film to television—has lived up to the hype. Even the computer has not been able to show a consistent record of improving education.
"There have been no advances over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers," said Stanford University professor of education Larry Cuban in 2001, summarizing the existing research on educational computing. "The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested." Recent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.
Whether or not these assessments are the last word, it is clear that the computer has not fulfilled the promises made for it. Promoters of instructional technology have reverted to a much more modest claim—that the computer is just another tool: "it's what you do with it that counts." But this response ignores the ecological impact of technologies. Far from being neutral, they reconstitute all of the relationships in an environment, some for better and some for worse. Computers tend to promote and support certain kinds of learning experiences, and devalue others. As technology critic Neil Postman has observed, "What we need to consider about computers has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning."
Several years ago I participated in a panel discussion on Iowa Public Television that focused on some "best practices" for computers in the classroom. Early in the program, a video showed how a fourth grade class in rural Iowa used computers to produce hypertext book reports on Charlotte's Web, E. B. White's classic children's novel. In the video, students proudly demonstrated their work, which included a computer-generated "spider" jumping across the screen and an animated stick-figure boy swinging from a hayloft rope. Toward the end of the video, a student discussed the important lessons he had learned: always be nice to each other and help one another.
The teacher explained that her students were so enthusiastic about the project that they chose to go to the computer lab rather than outside for recess. While she seemed impressed by this dedication, it underscores the first troubling influence of computers. The medium is so compelling that it lures children away from the kind of activities through which they have always most effectively discovered themselves and their place in the world.
Ironically, students could best learn the lessons implicit in Charlotte's Web—the need to negotiate relationships, the importance of all members of a community, even the rats—by engaging in the recess they missed. For recess is not just a break from intellectual demands or a chance to let off steam, but also a break from a closely supervised social and physical environment. It is when children are most free to negotiate their own relationships, at arm's length from adult authority. Yet across the U.S., these opportunities are disappearing. By the year 2000, according to a 2001 report by University of New Orleans associate professor Judith Kieff, more than 40 percent of the elementary and middle schools in the U.S. had entirely eliminated recess. By contrast, U.S. Department of Education statistics indicate that spending on technology in schools increased by more than 300 percent from 1990 to 2000.
Structured learning certainly has its place. But if it crowds out direct, unmediated engagement with the world, it undercuts a child's education. Children learn the fragility of flowers by touching their petals. They learn to cooperate by organizing their own games. The computer cannot simulate the physical and emotional nuances of resolving a dispute during kickball, or the creativity of inventing new rhymes to the rhythm of jumping rope. These full-bodied, often deeply heartfelt experiences educate not just the intellect but also the soul of the child. When children are free to practice on their own, they can test their inner perceptions against the world around them, develop the qualities of care, self-discipline, courage, compassion, generosity, and tolerance—and gradually figure out how to be part of both social and biological communities.
If children do not dip their toes in the waters of unsupervised social activity, they likely will never be able to swim in the sea of civic responsibility. If they have no opportunities to dig in the soil, discover the spiders, bugs, birds, and plants that populate even the smallest unpaved playgrounds, they will be less likely to explore, appreciate, and protect nature as adults.
Computers not only divert students from recess and other unstructured experiences, but also replace those authentic experiences with virtual ones. According to surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation and others, school-age children spend, on average, around five hours a day in front of screens for recreational purposes. All that screen time is supplemented by the hundreds of impressive computer projects now taking place in schools. Yet these projects—the steady diet of virtual trips to the Antarctic, virtual climbs to the summit of Mount Everest, and trips into cyber-orbit that represent one technological high after another—generate only vicarious thrills. The student doesn't actually soar above the Earth, doesn't trek across icy terrain, doesn't climb a mountain. Increasingly, she isn't even allowed to climb to the top of the jungle gym.
During the decade that I spent teaching a course called Advanced Computer Technology, I repeatedly found that after engaging in Internet projects, students came back down to the Earth of their immediate surroundings with boredom and disinterest—and a desire to get back online. Having watched Discovery Channel and worked with computer simulations that severely compress both time and space, children are typically disappointed when they first approach a pond or stream: the fish aren't jumping, the frogs aren't croaking, the deer aren't drinking, the otters aren't playing, and the raccoons (not to mention bears) aren't fishing. Their electronic experiences have led them to expect to see these things happening—all at once and with no effort on their part. The result is that the child becomes less animated and less capable of appreciating what it means to be alive, what it means to belong in the world as a biological, social being.
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN RURAL IOWA, I certainly lacked for many things. I couldn't tell a bagel from a burrito. But I always and in many ways belonged. For children, belonging is the most important function a community serves. Indeed, that is the message that lies at the heart of Charlotte's Web. None of us—whether of barnyard or human society—thrives without a sense of belonging. In my case, belonging hinged most decisively on place. I knew our farm—where the snowdrifts would be the morning after a blizzard, where and when the spring runoff would create a temporary stream through the east pasture. I could tell you where I was by the smells alone. Watching a massive thunderstorm build in the west, or discovering a new litter of kittens in the barn, I would be awestruck, mesmerized by mysterious wonders I could not control. One of the few moments I remember from elementary school is watching a huge black-and-yellow garden spider climb out of Lee Anfinson's pant cuff after we came back from a field trip picking wildflowers. It set the whole class in motion with lively conversation and completely flummoxed our crusty old teacher. Somehow that spider spoke to all of us wide-eyed third graders, and we couldn't help but speak back.
Though the work of the students in the video doesn't reflect it, this kind of experience plays a major role in E. B. White's story. Charlotte's Web beautifully draws a child's attention to something that is increasingly rare in schools: the wonder of ordinary processes of nature, which grows mainly through direct contact with the real world. As Hannah Arendt and other observers have noted, we can only learn who we are as human beings by encountering what we are not. Substituting the excitement of virtual connections for the deep fulfillment of firsthand engagement is like mistaking a map of a country for the land itself
Rather than attempt to compensate for a growing disconnect from nature, schools seem more and more committed to reinforcing it, a problem that began long before the use of computers. Even relying on books too much or too early inhibits the ability of children to develop direct relationships with the subjects they are studying. But because of their power, computers drastically exacerbate this tendency, leading us to believe that vivid images, massive amounts of information, and even online conversations with experts provide an adequate substitute for conversing with the things themselves.
As the computer has amplified our youths' ability to virtually "go anywhere, at any time," it has eroded their sense of belonging anywhere, at any time, to anybody, or for any reason. How does a child growing up in Kansas gain a sense of belonging when her school encourages virtual learning about Afghanistan more than firsthand learning about her hometown? How does she relate to the world while spending most of her time engaging with computer-mediated text, images, and sounds that are oddly devoid of place, texture, depth, weight, odor, or taste—empty of life? Can she still cultivate the qualities of responsibility and reverence that are the foundation of belonging to real human or biological communities?
During the years that I worked with young people on Internet telecollaboration projects, I was constantly frustrated by individuals and even entire groups of students who would suddenly disappear from cyber-conversations related to the projects. My own students indicated that they understood the departures to be a way of controlling relationships that develop online. If they get too intense, too nasty, too boring, too demanding, just stop communicating and the relationship goes away. This avoidance of potentially difficult interaction also surfaced in a group of students in the "Talented and Gifted" class at my school. They preferred discussing cultural diversity with students on the other side of the world through the Internet rather than conversing with the school's own ESL students, many of whom came from the very same parts of the world as the online correspondents. These bright high school students feared the uncertain consequences of engaging the immigrants face-to-face. Would they want to be friends? Would they ask for favors? Would they embarrass them in front of others? Would these beginning English speakers try to engage them in frustrating conversations? Better to stay online, where they could control when and how they related to strange people—without much of the work and uncertainty involved with creating and maintaining a caring relationship with a community.
To develop normally, any child needs to learn to exert some control over her environment. But the control computers offer children is deceptive, and ultimately dangerous. In the first place, any control children obtain comes at a price: relinquishing the uniquely imaginative and often irrational thought processes that mark childhood. Keep in mind that a computer always has a hidden pedagogue—the programmer—who designed the software and invisibly controls the options available to students at every step of the way. If they try to think "outside the box," the box either refuses to respond or replies with an error message. The students must first surrender to the computer's hyper-rational form of "thinking" before they are awarded any control at all.
And then what exactly is awarded? The child pushes a button and the computer draws an X on the screen. The child didn't draw that X, she essentially "ordered" the computer to do it, and the computer employed an enormous amount of embedded adult skill to complete the task. Most of the time a user forgets this distinction because the machine so quickly and precisely processes commands. But the intensity of the frustration that we experience when the computer suddenly stops following orders (and our tendency to curse at, beg, or sweet talk it) confirms that the subtle difference is not lost on the psyche. This shift toward remote control is akin to taking the child out of the role of actor and turning her into the director. This is a very different way of engaging the world than hitting a ball, building a fort, setting a table, climbing a tree, sorting coins, speaking and listening to another person, acting in a play. In an important sense, the child gains control over a vast array of complex abstract activities by giving up or eroding her capacity to actually do them herself.
The computer environment attracts children exactly because it strips away the very resistance to their will that so frustrates them in their concrete existence. Yet in the real world, it is precisely an object's resistance to unlimited manipulation that forces a child (or anyone) to acknowledge the physical limitations of the natural world, the limits of one's power over it, and the need to respect the will of others living in it. To develop normally, a child needs to learn that she cannot force the family cat to sit on her lap, make a rosebud bloom, or hurt a friend and expect to just start over again with everything just as it was before.
We hand even our smallest children enormously powerful machines long before they have the moral capacities to use them properly. Then to assure that our children don't slip past the electronic fences we erect around them, we rely on yet other technologies or fear of draconian punishments. This is not the way to prepare youth for membership in a democratic society that eschews authoritarian control.
That lesson hit home with particular force when I had to handle a trio of very bright high school students in one of the last computer classes I taught. These otherwise nice young men lobbied me so hard to approve their major project proposal—breaking through the school's network security—that I finally relented to see if they intended to follow through. When I told them it was up to them, they trotted off to the lab without a second thought and went right to work—until I hauled them back and reasserted my authority. Once the external controls were lifted, these teens possessed no internal controls to take over. This is something those who want to "empower" young children by handing them computers have tended to ignore: that internal moral and ethical development must precede the acquisition of power—political, economic, or technical—if it is to be employed responsibly.
Technology can provide enormous assistance in figuring out how to do things, but it turns mute when it comes to determining what we should do. Without any such moral grounding, the dependence on computers encourages a manipulative, "whatever works" attitude toward others. It also reinforces the exploitative relationship to the environment that has plagued Western society since Descartes first expressed his desire to "seize nature by the throat." Even sophisticated "environmental" simulations, which show how ecosystems respond to changes, reinforce the mistaken idea that the natural world conforms to our abstract representations of it. Such reductionism reinforces the kind of faulty thinking that is destroying the planet: we can dam riparian systems if models show an "acceptable" level of damage, treat human beings simply as units of productivity to be discarded when inconvenient or useless, and reduce all things, even those living, to mere data. The message of the medium—abstraction, manipulation, control, and power—inevitably influences those who use it.
OUR TECHNOLOGICAL AGE REQUIRES A NEW DEFINITION OF MATURITY: coming to terms with the proper limits of one's own power in relation to nature, society, and one's own desires. Developing those limits may be the most crucial goal of twenty-first-century education. It is not necessary or sensible to teach children to reject computers (although I found that students need just one year of high school to learn enough computer skills to enter the workplace or college). What is necessary is to confront the challenges the technology poses with wisdom and great care. A number of organizations are attempting to do just that. The Alliance for Childhood, for one, has recently published a set of curriculum guidelines that promotes an ecological understanding of the relationship between humans and technology. But that's just a beginning.
In the preface to his thoughtful book, The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner writes, "I am convinced that any philosophy of technology worth its salt must eventually ask, 'How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we would like to build?'" Unfortunately, our schools too often default to the inverse of that question: "How can we limit human beings to match the best use of what our technology can do and the kind of world it will build?" As a consequence, our children are likely to sustain this process of alienation—in which they treat themselves, other people, and the Earth instrumentally—in a vain attempt to materially fill up lives crippled by internal emptiness. We should not be surprised when they "solve" personal and social problems by turning to drugs, guns, hateful Web logs, or other powerful "tools," rather than digging deep within themselves or searching out others in the community for strength and support. After all, this is what we have taught them to do.
This article was supported by Orion's Thoughts on America Fund.
Lowell Monke, who has taught young people with and about computers for seventeen years, currently gets paid by Wittenberg University to confuse aspiring teachers as to what education is all about. He lives with his family in Springfield, Ohio, and is at work on a book about children, education, and computers.
Charlotte's Webpage
THOMAS EDISON WAS A GREAT INVENTOR but a lousy prognosticator. When he proclaimed in 1922 that the motion picture would replace textbooks in schools, he began a long string of spectacularly wrong predictions regarding the capacity of various technologies to revolutionize teaching. To date, none of them—from film to television—has lived up to the hype. Even the computer has not been able to show a consistent record of improving education.
"There have been no advances over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers," said Stanford University professor of education Larry Cuban in 2001, summarizing the existing research on educational computing. "The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested." Recent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.
Whether or not these assessments are the last word, it is clear that the computer has not fulfilled the promises made for it. Promoters of instructional technology have reverted to a much more modest claim—that the computer is just another tool: "it's what you do with it that counts." But this response ignores the ecological impact of technologies. Far from being neutral, they reconstitute all of the relationships in an environment, some for better and some for worse. Computers tend to promote and support certain kinds of learning experiences, and devalue others. As technology critic Neil Postman has observed, "What we need to consider about computers has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning."
Several years ago I participated in a panel discussion on Iowa Public Television that focused on some "best practices" for computers in the classroom. Early in the program, a video showed how a fourth grade class in rural Iowa used computers to produce hypertext book reports on Charlotte's Web, E. B. White's classic children's novel. In the video, students proudly demonstrated their work, which included a computer-generated "spider" jumping across the screen and an animated stick-figure boy swinging from a hayloft rope. Toward the end of the video, a student discussed the important lessons he had learned: always be nice to each other and help one another.
The teacher explained that her students were so enthusiastic about the project that they chose to go to the computer lab rather than outside for recess. While she seemed impressed by this dedication, it underscores the first troubling influence of computers. The medium is so compelling that it lures children away from the kind of activities through which they have always most effectively discovered themselves and their place in the world.
Ironically, students could best learn the lessons implicit in Charlotte's Web—the need to negotiate relationships, the importance of all members of a community, even the rats—by engaging in the recess they missed. For recess is not just a break from intellectual demands or a chance to let off steam, but also a break from a closely supervised social and physical environment. It is when children are most free to negotiate their own relationships, at arm's length from adult authority. Yet across the U.S., these opportunities are disappearing. By the year 2000, according to a 2001 report by University of New Orleans associate professor Judith Kieff, more than 40 percent of the elementary and middle schools in the U.S. had entirely eliminated recess. By contrast, U.S. Department of Education statistics indicate that spending on technology in schools increased by more than 300 percent from 1990 to 2000.
Structured learning certainly has its place. But if it crowds out direct, unmediated engagement with the world, it undercuts a child's education. Children learn the fragility of flowers by touching their petals. They learn to cooperate by organizing their own games. The computer cannot simulate the physical and emotional nuances of resolving a dispute during kickball, or the creativity of inventing new rhymes to the rhythm of jumping rope. These full-bodied, often deeply heartfelt experiences educate not just the intellect but also the soul of the child. When children are free to practice on their own, they can test their inner perceptions against the world around them, develop the qualities of care, self-discipline, courage, compassion, generosity, and tolerance—and gradually figure out how to be part of both social and biological communities.
If children do not dip their toes in the waters of unsupervised social activity, they likely will never be able to swim in the sea of civic responsibility. If they have no opportunities to dig in the soil, discover the spiders, bugs, birds, and plants that populate even the smallest unpaved playgrounds, they will be less likely to explore, appreciate, and protect nature as adults.
Computers not only divert students from recess and other unstructured experiences, but also replace those authentic experiences with virtual ones. According to surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation and others, school-age children spend, on average, around five hours a day in front of screens for recreational purposes. All that screen time is supplemented by the hundreds of impressive computer projects now taking place in schools. Yet these projects—the steady diet of virtual trips to the Antarctic, virtual climbs to the summit of Mount Everest, and trips into cyber-orbit that represent one technological high after another—generate only vicarious thrills. The student doesn't actually soar above the Earth, doesn't trek across icy terrain, doesn't climb a mountain. Increasingly, she isn't even allowed to climb to the top of the jungle gym.
During the decade that I spent teaching a course called Advanced Computer Technology, I repeatedly found that after engaging in Internet projects, students came back down to the Earth of their immediate surroundings with boredom and disinterest—and a desire to get back online. Having watched Discovery Channel and worked with computer simulations that severely compress both time and space, children are typically disappointed when they first approach a pond or stream: the fish aren't jumping, the frogs aren't croaking, the deer aren't drinking, the otters aren't playing, and the raccoons (not to mention bears) aren't fishing. Their electronic experiences have led them to expect to see these things happening—all at once and with no effort on their part. The result is that the child becomes less animated and less capable of appreciating what it means to be alive, what it means to belong in the world as a biological, social being.
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN RURAL IOWA, I certainly lacked for many things. I couldn't tell a bagel from a burrito. But I always and in many ways belonged. For children, belonging is the most important function a community serves. Indeed, that is the message that lies at the heart of Charlotte's Web. None of us—whether of barnyard or human society—thrives without a sense of belonging. In my case, belonging hinged most decisively on place. I knew our farm—where the snowdrifts would be the morning after a blizzard, where and when the spring runoff would create a temporary stream through the east pasture. I could tell you where I was by the smells alone. Watching a massive thunderstorm build in the west, or discovering a new litter of kittens in the barn, I would be awestruck, mesmerized by mysterious wonders I could not control. One of the few moments I remember from elementary school is watching a huge black-and-yellow garden spider climb out of Lee Anfinson's pant cuff after we came back from a field trip picking wildflowers. It set the whole class in motion with lively conversation and completely flummoxed our crusty old teacher. Somehow that spider spoke to all of us wide-eyed third graders, and we couldn't help but speak back.
Though the work of the students in the video doesn't reflect it, this kind of experience plays a major role in E. B. White's story. Charlotte's Web beautifully draws a child's attention to something that is increasingly rare in schools: the wonder of ordinary processes of nature, which grows mainly through direct contact with the real world. As Hannah Arendt and other observers have noted, we can only learn who we are as human beings by encountering what we are not. Substituting the excitement of virtual connections for the deep fulfillment of firsthand engagement is like mistaking a map of a country for the land itself
Rather than attempt to compensate for a growing disconnect from nature, schools seem more and more committed to reinforcing it, a problem that began long before the use of computers. Even relying on books too much or too early inhibits the ability of children to develop direct relationships with the subjects they are studying. But because of their power, computers drastically exacerbate this tendency, leading us to believe that vivid images, massive amounts of information, and even online conversations with experts provide an adequate substitute for conversing with the things themselves.
As the computer has amplified our youths' ability to virtually "go anywhere, at any time," it has eroded their sense of belonging anywhere, at any time, to anybody, or for any reason. How does a child growing up in Kansas gain a sense of belonging when her school encourages virtual learning about Afghanistan more than firsthand learning about her hometown? How does she relate to the world while spending most of her time engaging with computer-mediated text, images, and sounds that are oddly devoid of place, texture, depth, weight, odor, or taste—empty of life? Can she still cultivate the qualities of responsibility and reverence that are the foundation of belonging to real human or biological communities?
During the years that I worked with young people on Internet telecollaboration projects, I was constantly frustrated by individuals and even entire groups of students who would suddenly disappear from cyber-conversations related to the projects. My own students indicated that they understood the departures to be a way of controlling relationships that develop online. If they get too intense, too nasty, too boring, too demanding, just stop communicating and the relationship goes away. This avoidance of potentially difficult interaction also surfaced in a group of students in the "Talented and Gifted" class at my school. They preferred discussing cultural diversity with students on the other side of the world through the Internet rather than conversing with the school's own ESL students, many of whom came from the very same parts of the world as the online correspondents. These bright high school students feared the uncertain consequences of engaging the immigrants face-to-face. Would they want to be friends? Would they ask for favors? Would they embarrass them in front of others? Would these beginning English speakers try to engage them in frustrating conversations? Better to stay online, where they could control when and how they related to strange people—without much of the work and uncertainty involved with creating and maintaining a caring relationship with a community.
To develop normally, any child needs to learn to exert some control over her environment. But the control computers offer children is deceptive, and ultimately dangerous. In the first place, any control children obtain comes at a price: relinquishing the uniquely imaginative and often irrational thought processes that mark childhood. Keep in mind that a computer always has a hidden pedagogue—the programmer—who designed the software and invisibly controls the options available to students at every step of the way. If they try to think "outside the box," the box either refuses to respond or replies with an error message. The students must first surrender to the computer's hyper-rational form of "thinking" before they are awarded any control at all.
And then what exactly is awarded? The child pushes a button and the computer draws an X on the screen. The child didn't draw that X, she essentially "ordered" the computer to do it, and the computer employed an enormous amount of embedded adult skill to complete the task. Most of the time a user forgets this distinction because the machine so quickly and precisely processes commands. But the intensity of the frustration that we experience when the computer suddenly stops following orders (and our tendency to curse at, beg, or sweet talk it) confirms that the subtle difference is not lost on the psyche. This shift toward remote control is akin to taking the child out of the role of actor and turning her into the director. This is a very different way of engaging the world than hitting a ball, building a fort, setting a table, climbing a tree, sorting coins, speaking and listening to another person, acting in a play. In an important sense, the child gains control over a vast array of complex abstract activities by giving up or eroding her capacity to actually do them herself.
The computer environment attracts children exactly because it strips away the very resistance to their will that so frustrates them in their concrete existence. Yet in the real world, it is precisely an object's resistance to unlimited manipulation that forces a child (or anyone) to acknowledge the physical limitations of the natural world, the limits of one's power over it, and the need to respect the will of others living in it. To develop normally, a child needs to learn that she cannot force the family cat to sit on her lap, make a rosebud bloom, or hurt a friend and expect to just start over again with everything just as it was before.
We hand even our smallest children enormously powerful machines long before they have the moral capacities to use them properly. Then to assure that our children don't slip past the electronic fences we erect around them, we rely on yet other technologies or fear of draconian punishments. This is not the way to prepare youth for membership in a democratic society that eschews authoritarian control.
That lesson hit home with particular force when I had to handle a trio of very bright high school students in one of the last computer classes I taught. These otherwise nice young men lobbied me so hard to approve their major project proposal—breaking through the school's network security—that I finally relented to see if they intended to follow through. When I told them it was up to them, they trotted off to the lab without a second thought and went right to work—until I hauled them back and reasserted my authority. Once the external controls were lifted, these teens possessed no internal controls to take over. This is something those who want to "empower" young children by handing them computers have tended to ignore: that internal moral and ethical development must precede the acquisition of power—political, economic, or technical—if it is to be employed responsibly.
Technology can provide enormous assistance in figuring out how to do things, but it turns mute when it comes to determining what we should do. Without any such moral grounding, the dependence on computers encourages a manipulative, "whatever works" attitude toward others. It also reinforces the exploitative relationship to the environment that has plagued Western society since Descartes first expressed his desire to "seize nature by the throat." Even sophisticated "environmental" simulations, which show how ecosystems respond to changes, reinforce the mistaken idea that the natural world conforms to our abstract representations of it. Such reductionism reinforces the kind of faulty thinking that is destroying the planet: we can dam riparian systems if models show an "acceptable" level of damage, treat human beings simply as units of productivity to be discarded when inconvenient or useless, and reduce all things, even those living, to mere data. The message of the medium—abstraction, manipulation, control, and power—inevitably influences those who use it.
OUR TECHNOLOGICAL AGE REQUIRES A NEW DEFINITION OF MATURITY: coming to terms with the proper limits of one's own power in relation to nature, society, and one's own desires. Developing those limits may be the most crucial goal of twenty-first-century education. It is not necessary or sensible to teach children to reject computers (although I found that students need just one year of high school to learn enough computer skills to enter the workplace or college). What is necessary is to confront the challenges the technology poses with wisdom and great care. A number of organizations are attempting to do just that. The Alliance for Childhood, for one, has recently published a set of curriculum guidelines that promotes an ecological understanding of the relationship between humans and technology. But that's just a beginning.
In the preface to his thoughtful book, The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner writes, "I am convinced that any philosophy of technology worth its salt must eventually ask, 'How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we would like to build?'" Unfortunately, our schools too often default to the inverse of that question: "How can we limit human beings to match the best use of what our technology can do and the kind of world it will build?" As a consequence, our children are likely to sustain this process of alienation—in which they treat themselves, other people, and the Earth instrumentally—in a vain attempt to materially fill up lives crippled by internal emptiness. We should not be surprised when they "solve" personal and social problems by turning to drugs, guns, hateful Web logs, or other powerful "tools," rather than digging deep within themselves or searching out others in the community for strength and support. After all, this is what we have taught them to do.
This article was supported by Orion's Thoughts on America Fund.
Lowell Monke, who has taught young people with and about computers for seventeen years, currently gets paid by Wittenberg University to confuse aspiring teachers as to what education is all about. He lives with his family in Springfield, Ohio, and is at work on a book about children, education, and computers.
Take Back your Time website
http://www.simpleliving.net/timeday/
Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery (CLAWS)
www.whywork.org
http://www.simpleliving.net/timeday/
Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery (CLAWS)
www.whywork.org
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sc...human_face.html
Technology With A Human Face
E. F. Schumacher
German-born E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977) was a British economist and author. He was confined in Britain during World War II, after which he served for twenty years as economic adviser on Britain's National Coal Board and worked on theories for that country's welfare system. He contributed many articles to the London Times, London Observer, and Economist, and has lectured at Columbia University. One of his books, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, became a best-seller. In it, Schumacher encourages human fulfillment as the best economic booster and suggests means of obtaining that goal.
The modern world has been shaped by its metaphysics, which has shaped its education, which in turn has brought forth its science and technology. So, without going back to metaphysics and education, we can say that the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and, indeed, visible signs of breakdown.
If that which has been shaped by technology, and continues to be so shaped, looks sick, it might be wise to have a look at technology itself. If technology is felt to be becoming more and more inhuman, we might do well to consider whether it is possible to have something better-a technology with a human face.
Strange to say, technology, although of course the product of man, tends to develop by its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop. Greater even than the mystery of natural growth is the mystery of the natural cessation of growth. There is measure in all natural things -- in their size, speed, or violence. As a result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology, or perhaps I should say: not so with man dominated by technology and specialisation. Technology recognises no self-limiting principle -- in terms, for instance, of size, speed, or violence. It therefore does not possess the virtues of being self-balancing, self-adjusting, and self-cleans-mg. In the subtle system of nature, technology, and in particular the super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.
Suddenly, if not altogether surprisingly, the modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technological, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment which supports human life aches and groans and gives signs of partial breakdown; and, third, it is clear to anyone fully knowledgeable in the subject matter that the inroads being made into the world's non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead in the quite foreseeable future.
Any one of these three crises or illnesses can turn out to be deadly. I do not know which of the three is the most likely to be the direct cause of collapse. What is quite clear is that a way of life that bases itself on materialism, i.e. on permanent, limitless expansionism in a finite environment, cannot last long, and that its life expectation is the shorter the more successfully it pursues its expansionist objectives. If we ask where the tempestuous developments of world industry during the last quarter-century have taken us, the answer is somewhat discouraging. Everywhere the problems seem to be growing faster than the solutions. This seems to apply to the rich countries just as much as to the poor. There is nothing in the experience of the last twenty-five years to suggest that modern technology, as we know it, can really help us to alleviate world poverty, not to mention the problem of unemployment, which already reaches levels like thirty per cent in many so-called developing countries, and now threatens to become endemic also in many of the rich countries. In any case, the apparent yet illusory successes of the last twenty-five years cannot be repeated: the threefold crisis of which I have spoken will see to that. So we had better face the question of technology -- what does it do and what should it do? Can we develop a technology which really helps us to solve our problems-a technology with a human face?
The primary task of technology, it would seem, is to lighten the burden of work man has to carry in order to stay alive and develop his potential. It is easy enough to see that technology fulfils this purpose when we watch any particular piece of machinery at work -- a computer, for instance, can do in seconds what it would take clerks or even mathematicians a very long time, if they can do it at all. It is more difficult to convince oneself of the truth of this simple proposition when one looks at whole societies. When I first began to travel the world, visiting rich and poor countries alike, I was tempted to formulate the first law of economics as follows:
"The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs."
It might be a good idea for the professors of economics to put this proposition into their examination papers and ask their pupils to discuss it. However that may be, the evidence is very strong indeed. If you go from easy-going England to, say, Germany or the United States, you find that people there live under much more strain than here. And if you move to a country like Burma, which is very near to the bottom of the league table of industrial progress, you find that people have an enormous amount of leisure really to enjoy themselves. Of course, as there is so much less labour-saving machinery to help them, they "accomplish" much less than we do; but that is a different point. The fact remains that the burden of living rests much more lightly on their shoulders than on ours.
The question of what technology actually does for us is therefore worthy of investigation. It obviously greatly reduces some kinds of work while it increases other kinds. The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is skilful, productive work of human hands, in touch with real materials of one kind or another. In an advanced industrial society, such work has become exceedingly rare, and to make a decent living by doing such work has become virtually impossible. A great part of the modern neurosis may be due to this very fact; for the human being, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a being with brains and hands, enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains. Today, a person has to be wealthy to be able to enjoy this simple thing, this very great luxury: he has to be able to afford space and good tools; he has to be lucky enough to find a good teacher and plenty of free time to learn and practise. He really has to be rich enough not to need a job; for the number of jobs that would be satisfactory in these respects is very small indeed.
The extent to which modern technology has taken over the work of human hands may be illustrated as follows. We may ask how much of "total social time" -- that is to say, the time all of us have together, twenty-four hours a day each -- is actually engaged in real production. Rather less than one-half of the total population of this country is, as they say, gainfully occupied, and about one-third of these are actual producers in agriculture, mining, construction, and industry. I do mean actual producers, not people who tell other people what to do, or account for the past, or plan for the future, or distribute what other people have produced. In other words, rather less than one-sixth of the total population is engaged in actual production; on average, each of them supports five others beside himself; of which two are gainfully employed on things other than real production and three are not gainfully employed. Now, a fully employed person, allowing for holidays, sickness, and other absence, spends about one-fifth of his total time on his job. It follows that the proportion of total social time" spent on actual production -- in the narrow sense in which I am using the term -- is, roughly, one-fifth of one-third of one-half; i.e. 3-1/2 per cent. The other 96-1/2 per cent of "total social time" is spent in other ways, including sleeping, eating, watching television, doing jobs that are not directly productive, or just killing time more or less humanely.
Although this bit of figuring work need not be taken too literally, it quite adequately serves to show what technology has enabled us to do: namely, to reduce the amount of time actually spent on production in its most elementary sense to such a tiny percentage of total social time that it pales into insignificance, that it carries no real weight, let alone prestige. When you look at industrial society in this way, you cannot be surprised to find that prestige is carried by those who help fill the other 96-1/4 per cent of total social time, primarily the entertainers but also the executors of Parkinson's Law. In fact, one might put the following proposition to students of sociology: "The prestige carried by people in modern industrial society varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual production."
There is a further reason for this. The process of confining productive time to 3-1/2 per cent of total social time has had the inevitable effect of taking all normal human pleasure and satisfaction out of the time spent on this work. Virtually all real production has been turned into an inhuman chore which does not enrich a man but empties him. "From the factory," it has been said, "dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded."
We may say, therefore, that modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all. It has multiplied the number of people who are exceedingly busy doing kinds of work which, if it is productive at all, is so only in an indirect or "roundabout" way, and much of which would not be necessary at all if technology were rather less modern. Karl Marx appears to have foreseen much of this when he wrote: "They want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people," to which we might add: particularly when the processes of production are joyless and boring. All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.
Taking stock, we can say that we possess a vast accumulation of new knowledge, splendid scientific techniques to increase it further, and immense experience in its application. All this is truth of a kind. This truthful knowledge, as such, does not commit us to a technology of giantism, supersonic speed, violence, and the destruction of human work-enjoyment. The use we have made of our knowledge is only one of its possible uses and, as is now becoming ever more apparent, often an unwise and destructive use.
As I have shown, directly productive time in our society has already been reduced to about 3¼ per cent of total social time, and the whole drift of modern technological development is to reduce it further, asymptotically to zero. Imagine we set ourselves a goal in the opposite direction -- to increase it sixfold, to about twenty per cent, so that twenty per cent of total social time would be used for actually producing things, employing hands and brains and, naturally, excellent tools. An incredible thought! Even children would be allowed to make themselves useful, even old people. At one-sixth of present-day productivity, we should be producing as much as at present. There would be six times as much time for any piece of work we chose to undertake -- enough to make a really good job of it, to enjoy oneself, to produce real quality, even to make things beautiful. Think of the therapeutic value of real work; think of its educational value. No one would then want to raise the school-leaving age or to lower the retirement age, so as to keep people off the labour market. Everybody would be welcome to lend a hand. Everybody would be admitted to what is now the rarest privilege, the opportunity of working usefully, creatively, with his own hands and brains, in his own time, at his own pace -- and with excellent tools. Would this mean an enormous extension of working hours? No, people who work in this way do not know the difference between work and leisure. Unless they sleep or eat or occasionally choose to do nothing at all, they are always agreeably, productively engaged. Many of the "on-cost jobs" would simply disappear; I leave it to the reader's imagination to identify them. There would be little need for mindless entertainment or other drugs, and unquestionably much less illness.
Now, it might be said that this is a romantic, a utopian, vision. True enough. What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopian, as we have it right here. But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival. The threefold crisis of which I have spoken will not go away if we simply carry on as before. It will become worse and end in disaster, until or unless we develop a new life-style which is compatible with the real needs of human nature, with the health of living nature around us, and with the resource endowment of the world.
Now, this is indeed a tall order, not because a new life-style to meet 16 these critical requirements and facts is impossible to conceive, but because the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world-from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced -- are the rich societies and not the poor.
It is almost like providential blessing that we, the rich countries, have found it in our heart at least to consider the Third World and to try to mitigate its poverty. In spite of the mixture of motives and the persistence of exploitative practices, I think that this fairly recent development in the outlook of the rich is an honourable one. And it could save us; for the poverty of the poor makes it in any case impossible for them successfully to adopt our technology. Of course, they often try to do so, and then have to bear the most dire consequences in terms of mass unemployment, mass migration into cities, rural decay, and intolerable social tensions. They need, in fact, the very thing I am talking about, which we also need: a different kind of technology, a technology with a human face, which, instead of making human hands and brains redundant, helps them to become far more productive than they have ever been before.
As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses. The system of mass production, based on sophisticated, highly capital-intensive, high energy-input dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace. The system of production by the masses mobilises the priceless resources which are possessed by all human beings, their clever brains and skilful hands, and supports them with first-class tools. The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person. The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralisation, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines. I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the supertechnology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people's technology -- a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and power. …
Although we are in possession of all requisite knowledge, it still requires a systematic, creative effort to bring this technology into active existence and make it generally visible and available. It is my experience that it is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again. And this insight does not come easily to people who have allowed themselves to become alienated from real, productive work and from the self-balancing system of nature, which never fails to recognise measure and limitation. Any activity which fails to recognise a self-limiting principle is of the devil. In our work with the developing countries we are at least forced to recognise the limitations of poverty, and this work can therefore be a wholesome school for all of us in which, while genuinely trying to help others, we may also gain knowledge and experience of how to help ourselves.
I think we can already see the conflict of attitudes which will decide our future. On the one side, I see the people who think they can cope with our threefold crisis by the methods current, only more so; I call them the people of the forward stampede. On the other side, there are people in search of a new life-style, who seek to return to certain basic truths about man and his world; I call them home-comers. Let us admit that the people of the forward stampede, like the devil, have all the best tunes or at least the most popular and familiar tunes. You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down; you must go forward; there is nothing wrong with modern technology except that it is as yet incomplete; let us complete it. Dr. Sicco Mansholt, one of the most prominent chiefs of the European Economic Community, may be quoted as a typical representative of this group. "More, further, quicker, richer," he says, "are the watchwords of present-day society." And he thinks we must help people to adapt, "for there is no alternative." This is the authentic voice of the forward stampede, which talks in much the same tone as Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor: "Why have you come to hinder us?" They point to the population explosion and to the possibilities of world hunger. Surely, we must take our flight forward and not be fainthearted. If people start protesting and revolting, we shall have to have more police and have them better equipped. If there is trouble with the environment, we shall need more stringent laws against pollution, and faster economic growth to pay for antipollution measures. If there are problems about natural resources, we shall turn to synthetics; if there are problems about fossil fuels, we shall move from slow reactors to fast breeders and from fission to fusion. There are no insoluble problems. The slogans of the people of the forward stampede burst into the newspaper headlines every day with the message, "a breakthrough a day keeps the crisis at bay."
And what about the other side? This is made up of people who are deeply convinced that technological development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected. The term "home-comer" has, of course, a religious connotation. For it takes a good deal of courage to say "no" to the fashions and fascinations of the age and to question the presuppositions of a civilisation which appears destined to conquer the whole world; the requisite strength can be derived only from deep convictions. If it were derived from nothing more than fear of the future, it would be likely to disappear at the decisive moment. The genuine "home-comer" does not have the best tunes, but he has the most exalted text, nothing less than the Gospels. For him, there could not be a more concise statement of his situation, of our situation, than the parable of the prodigal son. Strange to say, the Sermon on the Mount gives pretty precise instructions on how to construct an outlook that could lead to an Economics of Survival.
How blessed are those who know that they are poor:
the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs. How blessed are the sorrowful;
they shall find consolation.
How blessed are those of a gentle spirit;
they shall have the earth for their possession.
How blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail;
they shall be satisfied;
How blessed are the peacemakers; God shall call them his sons.
It may seem daring to connect these beatitudes with matters of technology and economics. But may it not be that we are in trouble precisely because we have failed for so long to make this connection? It is not difficult to discern what these beatitudes may mean for us today:
We are poor, not demigods.
We have plenty to be sorrowful about, and are not emerging into a golden age.
We need a gentle approach, a non-violent spirit, and small is beautiful.
We must concern ourselves with justice and see right prevail.
And all this, only this, can enable us to become peacemakers.
The home-comers base themselves upon a different picture of man 24 from that which motivates the people of the forward stampede. It would be very superficial to say that the latter believe in "growth" while the former do not. In a sense, everybody believes in growth, and rightly so, because growth is an essential feature of life. The whole point, however, is to give to the idea of growth a qualitative determination; for there are always many things that ought to be growing and many things that ought to be diminishing.
Equally, it would be very superficial to say that the home-comers do not believe in progress, which also can be said to be an essential feature of all life. The whole point is to determine what constitutes progress. And the home-comers believe that the direction which modern technology has taken and is continuing to pursue --towards ever-greater size, ever-higher speeds, and ever-increased violence, in defiance of all laws of natural harmony -- is the opposite of progress. Hence the call for taking stock and finding a new orientation. The stocktaking indicates that we are destroying our very basis of existence, and the reorientation is based on remembering what human life is really about.
In one way or another everybody will have to take sides in this great conflict. To "leave it to the experts" means to side with the people of the forward stampede. It is widely accepted that politics is too important a matter to be left to experts. Today, the main content of politics is economics, and the main content of economics is technology. If politics cannot be left to the experts, neither can economics and technology.
The case for hope rests on the fact that ordinary people are often able to take a wider view, and a more "humanistic" view, than is normally being taken by experts. The power of ordinary people, who today tend to feel utterly powerless, does not lie in starting new lines of action, but in placing their sympathy and support with minority groups which have already started. I shall give two examples relevant to the subject here under discussion. One relates to agriculture, still the greatest single activity of man on earth, and the other relates to industrial technology.
Modern agriculture relies on applying to soil, plants, and animals 28 ever-Increasing quantities of chemical products, the long-term effect of which on soil fertility and health is subject to very grave doubts. People who raise such doubts are generally confronted with the assertion that the choice lies between "poison or hunger." There are highly successful farmers in many countries who obtain excellent yields without resort to such chemicals and without raising any doubts about long-term soil fertility and health. For the last twenty-five years, a private, voluntary organisation, the Soil Association, has been engaged in exploring the vital relationships between soil, plant, animal, and man; has undertaken and assisted relevant research; and has attempted to keep the public informed about developments in these fields. Neither the successful farmers nor the Soil Association have been able to attract official support or recognition. They have generally been dismissed as "the muck and mystery people," because they are obviously outside the mainstream of modern technological progress. Their methods bear the mark of non-violence and humility towards the infinitely subtle system of natural harmony, and this stands in opposition to the life-style of the modern world. But if we now realise that the modern life-style is putting us into mortal danger, we may find it in our hearts to support and even join these pioneers rather than to ignore or ridicule them.
On the industrial side, there is the Intermediate Technology Development Group. It is engaged in the systematic study on how to help people to help themselves. While its work is primarily concerned with giving technical assistance to the Third World, the results of its research are attracting increasing attention also from those who are concerned about the future of the rich societies. For they show that an intermediate technology, a technology with a human face, is in fact possible; that it is viable; and that it reintegrates the human being, with his skilful hands and creative brain, into the productive process. It serves production by the masses instead of mass production. Like the Soil Association, it is a private, voluntary organisation depending on public support.
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction. And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.
Technology With A Human Face
E. F. Schumacher
German-born E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977) was a British economist and author. He was confined in Britain during World War II, after which he served for twenty years as economic adviser on Britain's National Coal Board and worked on theories for that country's welfare system. He contributed many articles to the London Times, London Observer, and Economist, and has lectured at Columbia University. One of his books, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, became a best-seller. In it, Schumacher encourages human fulfillment as the best economic booster and suggests means of obtaining that goal.
The modern world has been shaped by its metaphysics, which has shaped its education, which in turn has brought forth its science and technology. So, without going back to metaphysics and education, we can say that the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and, indeed, visible signs of breakdown.
If that which has been shaped by technology, and continues to be so shaped, looks sick, it might be wise to have a look at technology itself. If technology is felt to be becoming more and more inhuman, we might do well to consider whether it is possible to have something better-a technology with a human face.
Strange to say, technology, although of course the product of man, tends to develop by its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop. Greater even than the mystery of natural growth is the mystery of the natural cessation of growth. There is measure in all natural things -- in their size, speed, or violence. As a result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology, or perhaps I should say: not so with man dominated by technology and specialisation. Technology recognises no self-limiting principle -- in terms, for instance, of size, speed, or violence. It therefore does not possess the virtues of being self-balancing, self-adjusting, and self-cleans-mg. In the subtle system of nature, technology, and in particular the super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.
Suddenly, if not altogether surprisingly, the modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technological, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment which supports human life aches and groans and gives signs of partial breakdown; and, third, it is clear to anyone fully knowledgeable in the subject matter that the inroads being made into the world's non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead in the quite foreseeable future.
Any one of these three crises or illnesses can turn out to be deadly. I do not know which of the three is the most likely to be the direct cause of collapse. What is quite clear is that a way of life that bases itself on materialism, i.e. on permanent, limitless expansionism in a finite environment, cannot last long, and that its life expectation is the shorter the more successfully it pursues its expansionist objectives. If we ask where the tempestuous developments of world industry during the last quarter-century have taken us, the answer is somewhat discouraging. Everywhere the problems seem to be growing faster than the solutions. This seems to apply to the rich countries just as much as to the poor. There is nothing in the experience of the last twenty-five years to suggest that modern technology, as we know it, can really help us to alleviate world poverty, not to mention the problem of unemployment, which already reaches levels like thirty per cent in many so-called developing countries, and now threatens to become endemic also in many of the rich countries. In any case, the apparent yet illusory successes of the last twenty-five years cannot be repeated: the threefold crisis of which I have spoken will see to that. So we had better face the question of technology -- what does it do and what should it do? Can we develop a technology which really helps us to solve our problems-a technology with a human face?
The primary task of technology, it would seem, is to lighten the burden of work man has to carry in order to stay alive and develop his potential. It is easy enough to see that technology fulfils this purpose when we watch any particular piece of machinery at work -- a computer, for instance, can do in seconds what it would take clerks or even mathematicians a very long time, if they can do it at all. It is more difficult to convince oneself of the truth of this simple proposition when one looks at whole societies. When I first began to travel the world, visiting rich and poor countries alike, I was tempted to formulate the first law of economics as follows:
"The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs."
It might be a good idea for the professors of economics to put this proposition into their examination papers and ask their pupils to discuss it. However that may be, the evidence is very strong indeed. If you go from easy-going England to, say, Germany or the United States, you find that people there live under much more strain than here. And if you move to a country like Burma, which is very near to the bottom of the league table of industrial progress, you find that people have an enormous amount of leisure really to enjoy themselves. Of course, as there is so much less labour-saving machinery to help them, they "accomplish" much less than we do; but that is a different point. The fact remains that the burden of living rests much more lightly on their shoulders than on ours.
The question of what technology actually does for us is therefore worthy of investigation. It obviously greatly reduces some kinds of work while it increases other kinds. The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is skilful, productive work of human hands, in touch with real materials of one kind or another. In an advanced industrial society, such work has become exceedingly rare, and to make a decent living by doing such work has become virtually impossible. A great part of the modern neurosis may be due to this very fact; for the human being, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a being with brains and hands, enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains. Today, a person has to be wealthy to be able to enjoy this simple thing, this very great luxury: he has to be able to afford space and good tools; he has to be lucky enough to find a good teacher and plenty of free time to learn and practise. He really has to be rich enough not to need a job; for the number of jobs that would be satisfactory in these respects is very small indeed.
The extent to which modern technology has taken over the work of human hands may be illustrated as follows. We may ask how much of "total social time" -- that is to say, the time all of us have together, twenty-four hours a day each -- is actually engaged in real production. Rather less than one-half of the total population of this country is, as they say, gainfully occupied, and about one-third of these are actual producers in agriculture, mining, construction, and industry. I do mean actual producers, not people who tell other people what to do, or account for the past, or plan for the future, or distribute what other people have produced. In other words, rather less than one-sixth of the total population is engaged in actual production; on average, each of them supports five others beside himself; of which two are gainfully employed on things other than real production and three are not gainfully employed. Now, a fully employed person, allowing for holidays, sickness, and other absence, spends about one-fifth of his total time on his job. It follows that the proportion of total social time" spent on actual production -- in the narrow sense in which I am using the term -- is, roughly, one-fifth of one-third of one-half; i.e. 3-1/2 per cent. The other 96-1/2 per cent of "total social time" is spent in other ways, including sleeping, eating, watching television, doing jobs that are not directly productive, or just killing time more or less humanely.
Although this bit of figuring work need not be taken too literally, it quite adequately serves to show what technology has enabled us to do: namely, to reduce the amount of time actually spent on production in its most elementary sense to such a tiny percentage of total social time that it pales into insignificance, that it carries no real weight, let alone prestige. When you look at industrial society in this way, you cannot be surprised to find that prestige is carried by those who help fill the other 96-1/4 per cent of total social time, primarily the entertainers but also the executors of Parkinson's Law. In fact, one might put the following proposition to students of sociology: "The prestige carried by people in modern industrial society varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual production."
There is a further reason for this. The process of confining productive time to 3-1/2 per cent of total social time has had the inevitable effect of taking all normal human pleasure and satisfaction out of the time spent on this work. Virtually all real production has been turned into an inhuman chore which does not enrich a man but empties him. "From the factory," it has been said, "dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded."
We may say, therefore, that modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all. It has multiplied the number of people who are exceedingly busy doing kinds of work which, if it is productive at all, is so only in an indirect or "roundabout" way, and much of which would not be necessary at all if technology were rather less modern. Karl Marx appears to have foreseen much of this when he wrote: "They want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people," to which we might add: particularly when the processes of production are joyless and boring. All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.
Taking stock, we can say that we possess a vast accumulation of new knowledge, splendid scientific techniques to increase it further, and immense experience in its application. All this is truth of a kind. This truthful knowledge, as such, does not commit us to a technology of giantism, supersonic speed, violence, and the destruction of human work-enjoyment. The use we have made of our knowledge is only one of its possible uses and, as is now becoming ever more apparent, often an unwise and destructive use.
As I have shown, directly productive time in our society has already been reduced to about 3¼ per cent of total social time, and the whole drift of modern technological development is to reduce it further, asymptotically to zero. Imagine we set ourselves a goal in the opposite direction -- to increase it sixfold, to about twenty per cent, so that twenty per cent of total social time would be used for actually producing things, employing hands and brains and, naturally, excellent tools. An incredible thought! Even children would be allowed to make themselves useful, even old people. At one-sixth of present-day productivity, we should be producing as much as at present. There would be six times as much time for any piece of work we chose to undertake -- enough to make a really good job of it, to enjoy oneself, to produce real quality, even to make things beautiful. Think of the therapeutic value of real work; think of its educational value. No one would then want to raise the school-leaving age or to lower the retirement age, so as to keep people off the labour market. Everybody would be welcome to lend a hand. Everybody would be admitted to what is now the rarest privilege, the opportunity of working usefully, creatively, with his own hands and brains, in his own time, at his own pace -- and with excellent tools. Would this mean an enormous extension of working hours? No, people who work in this way do not know the difference between work and leisure. Unless they sleep or eat or occasionally choose to do nothing at all, they are always agreeably, productively engaged. Many of the "on-cost jobs" would simply disappear; I leave it to the reader's imagination to identify them. There would be little need for mindless entertainment or other drugs, and unquestionably much less illness.
Now, it might be said that this is a romantic, a utopian, vision. True enough. What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopian, as we have it right here. But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival. The threefold crisis of which I have spoken will not go away if we simply carry on as before. It will become worse and end in disaster, until or unless we develop a new life-style which is compatible with the real needs of human nature, with the health of living nature around us, and with the resource endowment of the world.
Now, this is indeed a tall order, not because a new life-style to meet 16 these critical requirements and facts is impossible to conceive, but because the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world-from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced -- are the rich societies and not the poor.
It is almost like providential blessing that we, the rich countries, have found it in our heart at least to consider the Third World and to try to mitigate its poverty. In spite of the mixture of motives and the persistence of exploitative practices, I think that this fairly recent development in the outlook of the rich is an honourable one. And it could save us; for the poverty of the poor makes it in any case impossible for them successfully to adopt our technology. Of course, they often try to do so, and then have to bear the most dire consequences in terms of mass unemployment, mass migration into cities, rural decay, and intolerable social tensions. They need, in fact, the very thing I am talking about, which we also need: a different kind of technology, a technology with a human face, which, instead of making human hands and brains redundant, helps them to become far more productive than they have ever been before.
As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses. The system of mass production, based on sophisticated, highly capital-intensive, high energy-input dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace. The system of production by the masses mobilises the priceless resources which are possessed by all human beings, their clever brains and skilful hands, and supports them with first-class tools. The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person. The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralisation, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines. I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the supertechnology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people's technology -- a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and power. …
Although we are in possession of all requisite knowledge, it still requires a systematic, creative effort to bring this technology into active existence and make it generally visible and available. It is my experience that it is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again. And this insight does not come easily to people who have allowed themselves to become alienated from real, productive work and from the self-balancing system of nature, which never fails to recognise measure and limitation. Any activity which fails to recognise a self-limiting principle is of the devil. In our work with the developing countries we are at least forced to recognise the limitations of poverty, and this work can therefore be a wholesome school for all of us in which, while genuinely trying to help others, we may also gain knowledge and experience of how to help ourselves.
I think we can already see the conflict of attitudes which will decide our future. On the one side, I see the people who think they can cope with our threefold crisis by the methods current, only more so; I call them the people of the forward stampede. On the other side, there are people in search of a new life-style, who seek to return to certain basic truths about man and his world; I call them home-comers. Let us admit that the people of the forward stampede, like the devil, have all the best tunes or at least the most popular and familiar tunes. You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down; you must go forward; there is nothing wrong with modern technology except that it is as yet incomplete; let us complete it. Dr. Sicco Mansholt, one of the most prominent chiefs of the European Economic Community, may be quoted as a typical representative of this group. "More, further, quicker, richer," he says, "are the watchwords of present-day society." And he thinks we must help people to adapt, "for there is no alternative." This is the authentic voice of the forward stampede, which talks in much the same tone as Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor: "Why have you come to hinder us?" They point to the population explosion and to the possibilities of world hunger. Surely, we must take our flight forward and not be fainthearted. If people start protesting and revolting, we shall have to have more police and have them better equipped. If there is trouble with the environment, we shall need more stringent laws against pollution, and faster economic growth to pay for antipollution measures. If there are problems about natural resources, we shall turn to synthetics; if there are problems about fossil fuels, we shall move from slow reactors to fast breeders and from fission to fusion. There are no insoluble problems. The slogans of the people of the forward stampede burst into the newspaper headlines every day with the message, "a breakthrough a day keeps the crisis at bay."
And what about the other side? This is made up of people who are deeply convinced that technological development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected. The term "home-comer" has, of course, a religious connotation. For it takes a good deal of courage to say "no" to the fashions and fascinations of the age and to question the presuppositions of a civilisation which appears destined to conquer the whole world; the requisite strength can be derived only from deep convictions. If it were derived from nothing more than fear of the future, it would be likely to disappear at the decisive moment. The genuine "home-comer" does not have the best tunes, but he has the most exalted text, nothing less than the Gospels. For him, there could not be a more concise statement of his situation, of our situation, than the parable of the prodigal son. Strange to say, the Sermon on the Mount gives pretty precise instructions on how to construct an outlook that could lead to an Economics of Survival.
How blessed are those who know that they are poor:
the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs. How blessed are the sorrowful;
they shall find consolation.
How blessed are those of a gentle spirit;
they shall have the earth for their possession.
How blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail;
they shall be satisfied;
How blessed are the peacemakers; God shall call them his sons.
It may seem daring to connect these beatitudes with matters of technology and economics. But may it not be that we are in trouble precisely because we have failed for so long to make this connection? It is not difficult to discern what these beatitudes may mean for us today:
We are poor, not demigods.
We have plenty to be sorrowful about, and are not emerging into a golden age.
We need a gentle approach, a non-violent spirit, and small is beautiful.
We must concern ourselves with justice and see right prevail.
And all this, only this, can enable us to become peacemakers.
The home-comers base themselves upon a different picture of man 24 from that which motivates the people of the forward stampede. It would be very superficial to say that the latter believe in "growth" while the former do not. In a sense, everybody believes in growth, and rightly so, because growth is an essential feature of life. The whole point, however, is to give to the idea of growth a qualitative determination; for there are always many things that ought to be growing and many things that ought to be diminishing.
Equally, it would be very superficial to say that the home-comers do not believe in progress, which also can be said to be an essential feature of all life. The whole point is to determine what constitutes progress. And the home-comers believe that the direction which modern technology has taken and is continuing to pursue --towards ever-greater size, ever-higher speeds, and ever-increased violence, in defiance of all laws of natural harmony -- is the opposite of progress. Hence the call for taking stock and finding a new orientation. The stocktaking indicates that we are destroying our very basis of existence, and the reorientation is based on remembering what human life is really about.
In one way or another everybody will have to take sides in this great conflict. To "leave it to the experts" means to side with the people of the forward stampede. It is widely accepted that politics is too important a matter to be left to experts. Today, the main content of politics is economics, and the main content of economics is technology. If politics cannot be left to the experts, neither can economics and technology.
The case for hope rests on the fact that ordinary people are often able to take a wider view, and a more "humanistic" view, than is normally being taken by experts. The power of ordinary people, who today tend to feel utterly powerless, does not lie in starting new lines of action, but in placing their sympathy and support with minority groups which have already started. I shall give two examples relevant to the subject here under discussion. One relates to agriculture, still the greatest single activity of man on earth, and the other relates to industrial technology.
Modern agriculture relies on applying to soil, plants, and animals 28 ever-Increasing quantities of chemical products, the long-term effect of which on soil fertility and health is subject to very grave doubts. People who raise such doubts are generally confronted with the assertion that the choice lies between "poison or hunger." There are highly successful farmers in many countries who obtain excellent yields without resort to such chemicals and without raising any doubts about long-term soil fertility and health. For the last twenty-five years, a private, voluntary organisation, the Soil Association, has been engaged in exploring the vital relationships between soil, plant, animal, and man; has undertaken and assisted relevant research; and has attempted to keep the public informed about developments in these fields. Neither the successful farmers nor the Soil Association have been able to attract official support or recognition. They have generally been dismissed as "the muck and mystery people," because they are obviously outside the mainstream of modern technological progress. Their methods bear the mark of non-violence and humility towards the infinitely subtle system of natural harmony, and this stands in opposition to the life-style of the modern world. But if we now realise that the modern life-style is putting us into mortal danger, we may find it in our hearts to support and even join these pioneers rather than to ignore or ridicule them.
On the industrial side, there is the Intermediate Technology Development Group. It is engaged in the systematic study on how to help people to help themselves. While its work is primarily concerned with giving technical assistance to the Third World, the results of its research are attracting increasing attention also from those who are concerned about the future of the rich societies. For they show that an intermediate technology, a technology with a human face, is in fact possible; that it is viable; and that it reintegrates the human being, with his skilful hands and creative brain, into the productive process. It serves production by the masses instead of mass production. Like the Soil Association, it is a private, voluntary organisation depending on public support.
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction. And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.
links to other websites can be found here:
http://www.smallcommunity.org/links.asp
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/self_r...nt_living/60837
Are you a wage slave?
Author: Sonia Fluke
Published on: February 19, 2001
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Wage Slavery is a pretty heavy term, but it aptly describes the majority of working Westerners. Paring down, simplifying and taking control of our lives is something I've been on about a lot here but I'd like to add a new dimension to the idea of work and leisure. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hard work, or any work that is productive and meaningful - it's good for the soul. But monotonous, boring and seemingly pointless tasks undertaken purely for money are a different thing entirely.
Work has been, from the beginning of time, something we did to live, to survive. We grew our food, built and maintained our homes and established our communities. We did what needed to be done, when it needed to be done and only then. There was no talk of overtime, double shifts, roster days off, penalty rates or time in lieu. Work was part of life, and tied right in with leisure. These days, work seems to have become and end in itself, a "good job" being something to aspire to. That good job of course pays well, giving us more money, enabling us to buy more and therefore ensuring we work longer and....STOP! It's a cycle, continuous and seductive - it's a trap.
Are we so controlled and influenced by money that we would subject ourselves on a daily basis to something we (for the most part) do not like? Think about that for a minute - it's insanity! Why would we do that to ourselves? It is destroying to our soul and detrimental to the vibrations of the entire human race.
My dream is to see communities make a comeback. Lot's of self reliant folks living in rural areas and working toward the good of the community at large. Children would grow up seeing this positive example that work is not something to resent or whinge about, or something to be controlled by. Work is a means to an end, a way of life. In my last article, the Continuum Concept, I spoke of the Yequana tribe. One very interesting point I noted from originally reading the book was that there is no Yequana word for "work". The entire concept of "work" as opposed to "leisure" is alien to them - it's all part of life. There is no separation from ones family, no traffic jams, no meetings. No overtime, no double pay; just doing what needs to be done. Sounds like my kind of heaven.
I have said before that the system cannot hurt you if you do not rely on it. Realistically, most of us do rely on the system to some degree, however small but the less we need it, the less power it has. The same applies to money - the less money we need, the more powerful we are. If we are not in desperate need of something, it cannot affect us by being taken away. While we continually depend on large amounts of money for our very comfort and entertainment, we will continue to be wage slaves.
If you like to eat strawberries, grow them. Don't go to work doing something you dislike to earn the money to buy the strawberries that have sat on a truck for a week, been sprayed with harmful chemicals by someone else doing a job they dislike on a plantation run purely by profit and the demands of mass consumerism...see what I mean? Something as simple as strawberries and with the wrong attitude we can globally ruin the human spirit.
So, look around you and decide - how much is enough? How much money do you really need? Are there changes that can be made that will enable you to escape the monotony of daily work outside the home? It's worth a thought, surely.
There is a website you may like to check out, it's called C.L.A.W.S - Creating Liveable Alternatives to Wage Slavery. You can find it here: http://www.whywork.org/ This site is all about re-thinking the work ethic, and putting in place plans and strategies for a new world. I'd love to hear your views on this line of thinking.
In my next article I will explore the philosophy behind intentional communities; their goals, objectives and outcomes. These communities pretty much tie in well with self reliance and the work myth, but for now - think about that job. Think about how much you like it compared to how much you need it. Maybe it's time for a change?
http://www.smallcommunity.org/links.asp
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/self_r...nt_living/60837
Are you a wage slave?
Author: Sonia Fluke
Published on: February 19, 2001
My Articles
Discussions for You
Subscribe to My Topic
Page 1
Wage Slavery is a pretty heavy term, but it aptly describes the majority of working Westerners. Paring down, simplifying and taking control of our lives is something I've been on about a lot here but I'd like to add a new dimension to the idea of work and leisure. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hard work, or any work that is productive and meaningful - it's good for the soul. But monotonous, boring and seemingly pointless tasks undertaken purely for money are a different thing entirely.
Work has been, from the beginning of time, something we did to live, to survive. We grew our food, built and maintained our homes and established our communities. We did what needed to be done, when it needed to be done and only then. There was no talk of overtime, double shifts, roster days off, penalty rates or time in lieu. Work was part of life, and tied right in with leisure. These days, work seems to have become and end in itself, a "good job" being something to aspire to. That good job of course pays well, giving us more money, enabling us to buy more and therefore ensuring we work longer and....STOP! It's a cycle, continuous and seductive - it's a trap.
Are we so controlled and influenced by money that we would subject ourselves on a daily basis to something we (for the most part) do not like? Think about that for a minute - it's insanity! Why would we do that to ourselves? It is destroying to our soul and detrimental to the vibrations of the entire human race.
My dream is to see communities make a comeback. Lot's of self reliant folks living in rural areas and working toward the good of the community at large. Children would grow up seeing this positive example that work is not something to resent or whinge about, or something to be controlled by. Work is a means to an end, a way of life. In my last article, the Continuum Concept, I spoke of the Yequana tribe. One very interesting point I noted from originally reading the book was that there is no Yequana word for "work". The entire concept of "work" as opposed to "leisure" is alien to them - it's all part of life. There is no separation from ones family, no traffic jams, no meetings. No overtime, no double pay; just doing what needs to be done. Sounds like my kind of heaven.
I have said before that the system cannot hurt you if you do not rely on it. Realistically, most of us do rely on the system to some degree, however small but the less we need it, the less power it has. The same applies to money - the less money we need, the more powerful we are. If we are not in desperate need of something, it cannot affect us by being taken away. While we continually depend on large amounts of money for our very comfort and entertainment, we will continue to be wage slaves.
If you like to eat strawberries, grow them. Don't go to work doing something you dislike to earn the money to buy the strawberries that have sat on a truck for a week, been sprayed with harmful chemicals by someone else doing a job they dislike on a plantation run purely by profit and the demands of mass consumerism...see what I mean? Something as simple as strawberries and with the wrong attitude we can globally ruin the human spirit.
So, look around you and decide - how much is enough? How much money do you really need? Are there changes that can be made that will enable you to escape the monotony of daily work outside the home? It's worth a thought, surely.
There is a website you may like to check out, it's called C.L.A.W.S - Creating Liveable Alternatives to Wage Slavery. You can find it here: http://www.whywork.org/ This site is all about re-thinking the work ethic, and putting in place plans and strategies for a new world. I'd love to hear your views on this line of thinking.
In my next article I will explore the philosophy behind intentional communities; their goals, objectives and outcomes. These communities pretty much tie in well with self reliance and the work myth, but for now - think about that job. Think about how much you like it compared to how much you need it. Maybe it's time for a change?
http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display...09/01/3aa418c39
Economics and Self-Sufficiency (LR59)
Wes Jackson
Released September 1997
Published in The Land Report, Number 59, Fall 1997, a publication of The Land Institute.
On March 13, 1997, the regional newspaper of north central Kansas, the Salina Journal, published a story from Kurilovo, Russia, entitled "Russian Workers Cope as Best They Can" by Sarah Mae Brown of the Associated Press. The story begins by describing how "each day, Nikolai and Galya Nikolinko arise in the dark and go about the business of making a living. They milk their cows, feed their pig, gather eggs from their chickens, tend their garden. They live off what they grow and sell the rest for a few rubles here and there. From milk alone, they earn perhaps $100 a month. And when the sun rises, Nikolai heads off from his simple wooden house to his long-time job as a welder in a state-run auto repair factory. For this, he earns nothing."
The article continues, "People survive on their gardens and their wits, and the official economy primarily is a distraction." After some mention of an impending trade union strike and President Boris Yeltsin's concern about doing something about it the writer says more: "Across Russia, especially in smaller towns and villages, millions of workers have gone months without wages. Both the government and private employers have been unable — or unwilling — to pay them. Even retirees have gone without their pensions. Outsiders tend to ask how this is possible: How can a nation survive when its people are unpaid? Why would a worker show up for a job that offers no wages? Like many Russians, Nikolai Nikolinko — who hasn't been paid in three months — doesn't ask these questions. Why wouldn't he show up for work? 'Where would I go?' he said. 'There aren't any other jobs in this town. I'm too old to look for work in Moscow. This is a one-factory town; we have no other choices. And besides, what if the day I decide not to show up the managers start handing out wages?"
Note that it is the outsiders who ask how these millions of people get by without money income. But an additional message that doesn't get mentioned in the article is that nature's economy in combination with traditional culture continues to feed the people and sustain the industrial economy.
Imagine nearly anyone but the Amish going with no wages in the United States for three months now that our traditional rural economies have been mostly undone. The collapse of the Soviet empire represents the first major failure of the industrial mind. We should more or less ignore the differences between capitalism and the Soviet brand of communism here, for both systems have sought to concentrate power and in so doing greatly reduce the number of people on the land and in small communities.
Two important messages come through to me, at least, messages of what we need to do here at home to prevent the eventual likelihood of widespread social upheaval. First off, we need to aggressively consider ways to keep people on the land and in the small towns who are already there, and secondly, we need to imagine and implement ways to get some people back onto the land and into more traditional relationships with sun, soil, and rural community. We don't have to junk every accouterment of the technological era, but during times of food crisis history has shown that no one is safe whether they have food, grow food, or not.
Cultural arrangements of a diverse nature will ensure our security. Industrialized pig or chicken factories will not. Whether we are talking about the huge feedlot beef facilities or a Central Valley of California-style of agribusiness to provide us our vegetables, both are brittle forms of food production. This has all been said before in many ways, and at a time of a rising stock market it is easy to deny that anything can or will go wrong with our production system, however well motivated workers may be or however reliable machinery may be.
An analogy comes to mind. Mathematicians and computer wizards at places like the Santa Fe Institute are at work these days on "sand pile dynamics." The elementary model involves a steady stream of sand being poured downward to form a cone. As grain after grain slips onto the pile, nothing dramatic happens other than the cone becomes larger. At some point, however, a grain of sand will trip a cascade. Which grain it will be is unpredictable. Which grains will be caught in the cascade is also unpredictable, but that a cascade will happen is certain.
Biologists, economists, physicists and others have explored the various biological, social, and physical problems of the modern world using the sand pile dynamics model. Whether it is the application of farm chemicals to our land and water, cutting of the tropical rain forest, or overhauling the architecture of the genomes of our major crops and livestock by introducing genes from long evolutionary distances, we are seeing everywhere that the resilience of nature is not infinite, that cultural stability is fragile, and that the small cascades of the past become predictors for the future.
Meanwhile, we tend to ignore where true resilience lies. The Siberian welder and his family with his garden, pig, and chickens have more to say about a sustainable future than anything the web has to offer. This is not an argument that we should empty our cities but rather that we do get more people back on the land in small places, the small communities, and that essentially everyone in the cities be respectful of, if not connected to, one or more farmer in the local countryside. In our educational efforts of the young it is an argument for teaching the basics about our source. By that I don't mean microeconomics but rather important processes like photosynthesis and the energetics of material recycling.
The Russian couple may not be literate on the Internet or even about the chemistry of photosynthesis, but they are connected to source. It is ironic that it was the inefficiencies of communism relative to Western capitalism which kept them from undercutting the basis of their current existence.
I have learned to mistrust the too tidy story, even my own. There is probably an important ingredient left out by the AP reporter. Perhaps there is a small subsidy that comes from the government in the form of a chit or free staples. Even if that is the case, true resilience or security is dependent upon close connection to a land and culture-based source.
Economics and Self-Sufficiency (LR59)
Wes Jackson
Released September 1997
Published in The Land Report, Number 59, Fall 1997, a publication of The Land Institute.
On March 13, 1997, the regional newspaper of north central Kansas, the Salina Journal, published a story from Kurilovo, Russia, entitled "Russian Workers Cope as Best They Can" by Sarah Mae Brown of the Associated Press. The story begins by describing how "each day, Nikolai and Galya Nikolinko arise in the dark and go about the business of making a living. They milk their cows, feed their pig, gather eggs from their chickens, tend their garden. They live off what they grow and sell the rest for a few rubles here and there. From milk alone, they earn perhaps $100 a month. And when the sun rises, Nikolai heads off from his simple wooden house to his long-time job as a welder in a state-run auto repair factory. For this, he earns nothing."
The article continues, "People survive on their gardens and their wits, and the official economy primarily is a distraction." After some mention of an impending trade union strike and President Boris Yeltsin's concern about doing something about it the writer says more: "Across Russia, especially in smaller towns and villages, millions of workers have gone months without wages. Both the government and private employers have been unable — or unwilling — to pay them. Even retirees have gone without their pensions. Outsiders tend to ask how this is possible: How can a nation survive when its people are unpaid? Why would a worker show up for a job that offers no wages? Like many Russians, Nikolai Nikolinko — who hasn't been paid in three months — doesn't ask these questions. Why wouldn't he show up for work? 'Where would I go?' he said. 'There aren't any other jobs in this town. I'm too old to look for work in Moscow. This is a one-factory town; we have no other choices. And besides, what if the day I decide not to show up the managers start handing out wages?"
Note that it is the outsiders who ask how these millions of people get by without money income. But an additional message that doesn't get mentioned in the article is that nature's economy in combination with traditional culture continues to feed the people and sustain the industrial economy.
Imagine nearly anyone but the Amish going with no wages in the United States for three months now that our traditional rural economies have been mostly undone. The collapse of the Soviet empire represents the first major failure of the industrial mind. We should more or less ignore the differences between capitalism and the Soviet brand of communism here, for both systems have sought to concentrate power and in so doing greatly reduce the number of people on the land and in small communities.
Two important messages come through to me, at least, messages of what we need to do here at home to prevent the eventual likelihood of widespread social upheaval. First off, we need to aggressively consider ways to keep people on the land and in the small towns who are already there, and secondly, we need to imagine and implement ways to get some people back onto the land and into more traditional relationships with sun, soil, and rural community. We don't have to junk every accouterment of the technological era, but during times of food crisis history has shown that no one is safe whether they have food, grow food, or not.
Cultural arrangements of a diverse nature will ensure our security. Industrialized pig or chicken factories will not. Whether we are talking about the huge feedlot beef facilities or a Central Valley of California-style of agribusiness to provide us our vegetables, both are brittle forms of food production. This has all been said before in many ways, and at a time of a rising stock market it is easy to deny that anything can or will go wrong with our production system, however well motivated workers may be or however reliable machinery may be.
An analogy comes to mind. Mathematicians and computer wizards at places like the Santa Fe Institute are at work these days on "sand pile dynamics." The elementary model involves a steady stream of sand being poured downward to form a cone. As grain after grain slips onto the pile, nothing dramatic happens other than the cone becomes larger. At some point, however, a grain of sand will trip a cascade. Which grain it will be is unpredictable. Which grains will be caught in the cascade is also unpredictable, but that a cascade will happen is certain.
Biologists, economists, physicists and others have explored the various biological, social, and physical problems of the modern world using the sand pile dynamics model. Whether it is the application of farm chemicals to our land and water, cutting of the tropical rain forest, or overhauling the architecture of the genomes of our major crops and livestock by introducing genes from long evolutionary distances, we are seeing everywhere that the resilience of nature is not infinite, that cultural stability is fragile, and that the small cascades of the past become predictors for the future.
Meanwhile, we tend to ignore where true resilience lies. The Siberian welder and his family with his garden, pig, and chickens have more to say about a sustainable future than anything the web has to offer. This is not an argument that we should empty our cities but rather that we do get more people back on the land in small places, the small communities, and that essentially everyone in the cities be respectful of, if not connected to, one or more farmer in the local countryside. In our educational efforts of the young it is an argument for teaching the basics about our source. By that I don't mean microeconomics but rather important processes like photosynthesis and the energetics of material recycling.
The Russian couple may not be literate on the Internet or even about the chemistry of photosynthesis, but they are connected to source. It is ironic that it was the inefficiencies of communism relative to Western capitalism which kept them from undercutting the basis of their current existence.
I have learned to mistrust the too tidy story, even my own. There is probably an important ingredient left out by the AP reporter. Perhaps there is a small subsidy that comes from the government in the form of a chit or free staples. Even if that is the case, true resilience or security is dependent upon close connection to a land and culture-based source.
seems like its pulled from fast food nation and my political science paper.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DFHTBCC.php
ISIS Press Release 30/01/06
Dream Farm II
How to Beat Climate Change & Post Fossil Fuel Economy
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho tables a proposal around a zero-emission, zero-waste farm after a highly successful workshop with living legend George Chan, who created dozens such farms to eradicate poverty in third world countries
“Dream Farm is exactly what we need to feed the world, mitigate climate change and let everyone thrive in good health and wealth in a post-fossil fuel economy”
A fully referenced illustrated version of this paper is posted on SIS members’ website. Membship details here
Why Dream Farm?
We featured Professor George Chan’s “zero emission” or “integrated food and waste management system” in an article entitled “Dream Farm” in a recent issue of our magazine (SiS 27). This farm could potentially solve the energy and food crisis that the world is facing (see Box 1), and contribute significantly to mitigating climate change. That is why we are proposing to set up Dream Farm II here in Britain.
Box 1
Why We Need Dream Farm
No more cheap fossil fuels
United States food sector uses 17 percent and Canada 11.2 percent energy, not including export-import, food-processing machinery and buildings, waste collection and treatment, and roads for transport
Water running out
It takes 1 000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain; aquifers are severely depleted in major breadbaskets of the world
Productivity falling
Grain yields fell for four successive years; world reserves are at lowest levels in 30 years
Loss of croplands from unsustainable practices
The world loses 20 m ha, or 1.3 percent croplands annually from soil erosion and salination; replacing lost croplands accounts for 60 percent deforestation annually, which greatly accelerates global warming
Urgent need to reduce emissions
Food sector in a European country (France) is responsible for more than 30 percent carbon emissions, not including import/export, household use and storage, processing, and imported fertilizers
Global warming threatens food production
Yields fall 10 percent for every deg. C rise in night temperature; the latest prediction is an increase in the earth’s average temperature of 1.9 to 11.5 deg. C within this century
We have an energy crisis, and cheap fuel is a thing of the past, but our current food system is very energy intensive. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that the food sector consumes about 10-15 percent of total energy in industrialised countries, though only 2-5 percent are on the farm, due to fertilisers, pesticides and machinery. Estimates for the US and Canadian food sector put the figure at 17 percent & 11.2 percent respectively, which include total energy consumed on the farm, processing, transport, packaging, and storing farm products, as well as energy used by households to purchase, store and prepare food. The figures do not include energy costs in food-processing machinery and buildings, waste collection and waste treatment, or roads for transport; nor do they include energy consumed in importing/exporting food. The globalised food trade is destroying the livelihood of family farmers all over the world as corporations consolidate control of the commodity market and the food supply chain [6], and subsidized food surpluses are dumped from the rich countries in the North on poor countries in the South. The globalised food trade also wastes huge amounts of fossil fuels and spews extra tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The depletion of water is perhaps the most serious, as industrial agriculture is extremely thirsty. It takes 1 000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain; aquifers are pumped dry in the world’s major breadbaskets in the United States, China and India.
Not only water is depleted but also soil and soil nutrients and fertility, so productivity has been falling. Grain yields fell for four successive years from 2000 to 2003, and the world reserves are still at the lowest levels in 30 odd years.
Unsustainable practices over the past decades have resulted in massive losses of croplands from salination and soil erosion, totalling 20 million ha a year, or 1.3 percent of the world’s croplands. Replacing lost croplands accounts for 60 percent of deforestation, greatly accelerating climate change. That is why catastrophes such as hurricane Katrina, flood, drought and extreme weather are increasingly frequent, impacting further on food production.
There is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change, and a lot can be done through our food system. An estimate of the French food sector put its carbon emissions at more than 30 percent national total; not including import/export, household use and storage, food processing, and imported fertilizers.
Global warming itself threatens food production through the increase in temperature alone. Yields fall by 10 percent for every deg C rise in night temperature; and the latest predicted rise in average global temperature is 1.9 to 11.5 deg. C within this century when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaches 560 ppm, double the pre-industrial level.
Veteran world watcher Lester Brown summarises the fallout of the “environmental bubble economy” built on decades of unsustainable exploitation of the earth’s resources: “..collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, expanding deserts, rising CO2 levels, eroding soils, rising temperatures, falling water tables, melting glaciers, deteriorating grasslands, rising seas, rivers that are running dry, and disappearing species.” He warns that the environmental bubble economy is due for collapse, the most vulnerable sector being food; the biggest challenge, therefore, is how to feed the world.
He also says we need to restructure the economy at “wartime speed” to one that tells the ecological truth.
What Lester Brown hasn’t quite said is that the old economic model is responsible for much human suffering and poverty. The old model not only lays waste to the earth, it lays waste to people and society, and for the same reasons. It is the mistaken fundamentalist belief in the survival of the fittest; and that competition and exploitation are the laws of the market as much as the laws of nature.
Dream Farm a new model
What we need above all is a new model, a new paradigm; and that’s what Dream Farm is about. It is a unit of self-sufficiency in energy and food based on reciprocity and synergistic relationships rather than competition, it is a nucleation centre of the sustainable food production and consumption system that we need for a post fossil fuel economy, and a microcosm of the new paradigm working in a very concrete way.
That is why ISIS is proposing to set up a Dream Farm II for demonstration, education and research purposes; combining the best and most appropriate technologies to showcase the new paradigm and at the same time, to act as an incubator and resource centre for knowledge and technologies that really serve people and planet.
If you wish to support this or get involved in any way, please contact us.
Mobilising human ingenuity
Figure 1 is a very schematic diagram of George Chan’s system, which I shall call Dream Farm I. As is clear from George’s excellent presentation, the farms are very diverse, depending on local resources, ingenuity and imagination.
Figure 1. Dream Farm I according to George Chan
The anaerobic digester takes in livestock manure plus wastewater and generates biogas, which provides all the energy needs for heating, cooking and electricity. The partially cleansed wastewater goes into the algal basin where the algae produce by photosynthesis all the oxygen needed to detoxify the water, making it safe for the fish. The algae are harvested to feed chickens, ducks, geese and other livestock. The fishpond supports a compatible mixture of 5-6 fish species. Water from the fishpond is used to ‘fertigate’ crops growing in the fields or on the raised dykes. Aquaculture of rice, fruits and vegetables can be done in floats on the surface of the fishpond. Water from the fishpond can also be pumped into greenhouses to support aquaculture of fruits and vegetables. The anaerobic digester yields a residue rich in nutrients that is an excellent fertiliser for crops. It could also be mixed with algae and crop residues for culturing mushrooms after steam sterilisation. The residue from mushroom culture can be fed to livestock or composted. Crop residues are fed back to livestock. Crop and food residues are used to grow earthworms to feed fish and fowl. Compost and worm castings go to condition the soil. Livestock manure goes back into the anaerobic digester, thus closing the grand cycle. The result is a highly productive farm that’s more than self-sufficient in food and energy.
What I love most about George’s farms is how happy the animals look. They are organically fed and toilet-trained (!) to deposit their manure directly into a shunt that goes to the digester, so the animals and their living quarter are spotlessly clean, which makes for healthy and contented animals.
I have described Dream Farm as an “abundantly productive farm with zero input and zero emission powered by waste-gobbling bugs and human ingenuity.”
There’s a lot of human ingenuity among scientists and engineers and other professionals who would like nothing better than to use their ingenuity for the good of people and planet and to create a sustainable world for all its inhabitants. But they have so little opportunity under the dominant regime.
Dream Farm II
I was truly inspired by George’s work, and the idea of setting up Dream Farm II soon occurred to me. Fortunately, the first person I spoke to about Dream Farm II, after making contact with George Chan, was Kenneth Spelman; that was in August 2005. I needed a good engineer, George said, and there were two possibilities. I rang Kenneth first and tried the idea on him, and he got very excited right away.
And so over the next months, we assembled a team of potential partners for a proposal to the UK Carbon Trust, which seemed like the ideal funding agency for the project. The Carbon Trust required 50 percent of the funding to come from industry. The companies we approached mostly liked the idea; it was a heady time. We managed to submit the proposal just before the November deadline.
Unfortunately, the proposal failed to get through even the first round. We have since learned that the Blair government’s idea of reducing carbon emissions is to build more nuclear power plants, which are widely known to be ecologically disastrous simply in terms of the radioactive wastes generated, also highly uneconomical; and provides little, if any savings on greenhouse gas emissions compared to a gas-fired electricity generating plant (SiS 27). The Blair government’s “energy from waste” programme is limited to burning wastes in incinerators that spew toxic fumes for miles around.
But we are not giving up, and I hope you will see why. I take this opportunity to thank George Chan for his encouragement and answering numerous questions over the e-mail, Kenneth Spelman, likewise, and undertaking to donate practically all the building works involved for the Carbon Trust proposal. Thanks are also due to our intended partners, Biogas Technology Limited, CHP Services Ltd., and ElmFarm Research Centre; and to David McGrath of SiGen, James Bakos of SHEC, Peter Saunders, Peter Rae, and others who gave valuable comments and suggestions. The Carbon Trust proposal was put together with great enthusiasm from everyone concerned and at “wartime speed”.
Integrated Reduced Emissions Food and Energy Farm
For the Carbon Trust proposal, we had to call Dream Farm something boring: Integrated Reduced Emissions Food and Energy Farm, IREFE, for short. Kenneth’s advice was never mention waste, or else the waste bureaucracy will descend on us like a tonne of bricks.
The aims of IREFE are: to maximize productivity and balanced growth; to minimise environmental impact, hence “zero emission”, “zero waste”, and even “zero input” are the ideals; and most important of all, to achieve self-sufficiency in food and energy.
These aims are also the basis of the new economic model (see “Sustainable food systems for sustainable development SiS 27), described in the complete version of the present proposal.
What really excites me about George’s dream farm is that it demonstrates concretely a theory of the organism I first presented in the second edition of my book The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms, published in 1998.
At around the same time, I proposed that we could look at sustainable systems as organisms. This idea has been developed more completely in a paper published with theoretical ecologist Robert Ulanowicz at the University or Maryland.
The important features of zero-emission systems are the same as those of the zero-waste or ‘zero-entropy’ model of organisms and sustainable systems. Entropy is made of dissipated energy, or waste energy that is useless for doing work, and simply clogs up the system, like ordinary waste.
The zero-entropy model predicts balanced development and growth as opposed to the dominant economic model of infinite, unsustainable growth. This disposes of the myth that the alternative to the dominant model is to have no development or growth at all.
Back to the practicalities: how are the aims of Dream Farm achieved?
First, we harvest greenhouse gas (biogas methane) not just from livestock manure and used water, but also crop residues and certain food wastes, which constitute feedstock for the anaerobic digester to produce fuel for on-farm energy needs and mobile uses for transport and farm machinery, substituting for fossil fuels. Notice how this reduces carbon emissions twice over, first by preventing methane and nitrous oxide from the farm wastes going into the atmosphere, and second from the fossil fuels saved by burning methane instead. But that’s not the only benefit of our approach, as distinct from the UK government’s approach of burning the wastes.
As a result of confining the farm ‘wastes’ in the anaerobic digester, nutrients, especially nitrogen, are conserved, instead of being lost as ammonia and nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas; or else leached into ground and surface waters as pollutants. These nutrients can now support the growth of algae, fish, livestock etc. for maximum farm productivity.
Harvesting sunlight is what crops do naturally, as do the algae in the aerobic digestion basin that produce all the oxygen needed to purify the partially cleansed water coming out of the anaerobic digester, and the phytoplankton in the fishpond that feed one or more of the several species of fish co-existing happily in poly-culture. Solar panels are incorporated, especially as the new generations of solar panels are much more affordable, durable and easy to install.
Conserving and regenerating potable water free of pollutants is a very important aspect of this farm, as water shortage and deprivation are affecting many parts of the world. After being cleansed by the algae, the water goes into the fishpond. From there it can be further polished by various species of aquatic plants before it is returned to the aquifers. Water from the fishpond also returns to the aquifers by being used to ‘fertigate’ the crops, and filtered through the layers of soil and subsoil.
Dream Farm is run strictly on organic principles, because pesticides and other chemicals will kill the bacteria in the biogas digester. There is now substantial evidence that organic foods are healthier; not only free from harmful pesticide residues, but also enriched in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals.
Energy is used at the point of generation. This micro-generation is gaining favour all over the world. It doesn’t depend on a grid and is therefore most suitable for developing countries. In developed countries, local micro-generation protects against power failures and black outs, not to mention terrorist attacks on the grid. A study in the UK estimated that up to 69 percent of the energy is lost through generating electricity at power stations and piping it over the grid.
What better way to reduce food miles and all the associated environmental impacts of food import/export than consuming locally produced food fresh and full of goodness, instead of goodness knows what?
A recently released report on Food Miles commissioned by UK’s DEFRA (Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs) put the direct social, environmental and economic costs of food transport at more than £9 billion each year; with congestion accounting for £5 billion, accidents for £2 billion, and the remaining £2 billion due to greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, noise and infrastructure damage. The gross value of the agricultural section was £6.4 billion and the food and drink manufacturing sector £19.8 billion. In other words, the £26.2 billion worth of agriculture and the food and drink industry involves externalising £9 billion, or 34 percent of the costs to the taxpayer.
Appropriate technologies a matter of design
The anaerobic biogas digester is the key technology in Dream Farm.
Digesters can be any size, ranging from small ones made of plastic material, disused petrol drum, moulded fibre-glass to big ones made of reinforced concrete as George has shown us. I have seen small ones buried in the ground serving a single family, which are simple and easy to maintain and mammoth constructions serving the manufacturing or waste-treatment industry.
I found one that treated wastes from a school toilet in Addis Ababa, also buried underground with two covered potholes. Animal manure could be added through one of the holes, and stirred with a wooden stick. The second pothole revealed a pipe and valve, presumably for controlling the flow of biogas.
Another I spotted recently in Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre near Lusaka, Zambia, was no longer in use; it was built next to a pig house, now empty.
Two big ones – 2 500 m3 each – were installed on a 1 000 acre farm in Wisconsin with more than 1 000 dairy cows. They are fully automated, heated, monitored, with alarm fitted, valves, whistles, what have you. The farmer is reported to be happy with his investment.
But as George has warned, the more automated, the more parts there are to go wrong. So the challenge is to design something affordable, easy to use and maintain, on a more human scale.
Pierre Labyrie, who works for Eden (énergié, dévelopment, environment) Toulouse, France, an organisation helping farmers install biogas digesters, tells me that the typical digester installed is 2 000 m3, even for small farmers with only 100 cows. The reason seems absurd. Farmers in Europe are by law required to store four-months worth of manure in slurry lagoons, which have to be that big. Rather than getting the law changed now that fresh manure is being treated and there is no need to store the slurry, they find it simpler to construct big digesters. But that means extra capital and maintenance expenses for the farmer. I have posed this question to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, and am awaiting a reply.
These digesters are not very good to look at. We need landscape architects and engineers to work together to design a beautiful and perfectly functional farm. What can be done besides the main crops and livestock, with trellised fishponds, algae shallows, grazing fields, woodlands, orchards, vegetable, herb and flower gardens, some floating on water….
The company that made the big digesters also provided a combined heat and power generation unit based on an internal combustion engine, which burns the biogas and generates electricity and heat. These heat and power generation units can now produce electricity at about 30 percent efficiency, with 50 percent recovery of power as heat, giving an overall power conversion efficiency as high as 85 percent.
Savings on carbon emissions
At an initial stocking rate of 0.8 cow/acre on a 1 000 acre Minnesota farm, 2 063 kWh/cow was produced per year from biogas. I did a little calculation on the energy yield and carbon emissions saved per cow per year. The amount of methane required to generate that amount of electricity is 620 m3 or 0.4464 tonnes, assuming 30 percent efficiency in converting to electricity. This is equivalent to 9.828 tonnes CO2 equivalent, using global warming potential of 22 for methane. The amount of oil saved per cow by using the methane as fuel is 0.553 tonne, which represents an additional 1.715 t CO2 equivalent saved (1 tonne oil = 3.1 tonne CO2). Hence the total savings by processing manure produced from a single cow per year, counting only methane is 11.543 t CO2 equivalent.
A 100-acre farm with 80 cows - a nice size for a demonstration farm, with plenty of room for woodlands, an on-site gourmet restaurant to take advantage of all that lovely fresh organic food plus an analytical research laboratory - would yield more than 160 000 kWh per year in energy and save 923.4 t CO2 equivalent in emissions.
If all the farm manure produced in the UK – estimated at 200 m tonnes - were to be treated in biogas digesters and the biogas harvested for fuel use, the carbon emissions saved would be more than 14 percent of the national emissions.
But we can do much better than that. When other farm and food residues are included, the yield of biogas can be far higher (see later). A 1 000 t CO2 equivalent saving a year is quite realistic. The market price (16 Jan 2006) was €23.35 per tonne CO2 equivalent. So 1 000 tonnes is worth more than 23 000 euros in carbon credits.
(I was informed by UK’s Department of Trade and Industry that one would be unable to gain carbon credits in Britain through the Kyoto route, i.e., Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or Joint Implementation (JL). CDM projects are in developing countries only, and while JL projects are eligible in developed countries, the UK has not yet signed up to it. One option may be voluntary emission reduction (VERs) credits, which are sold to the retail market for offsetting companies and individual emissions on a voluntary basis. Watch this space)
Livestock manure is in fact rather low down in the league of biogas yield. Fats and grease are way up there with 961 m3 per tonne. Bakery waste not far behind at 714 m3 (see Fig. 2). Waste paper, not included in this chart, is also a good substrate for generating biogas.
Figure 2. Yield of biogas with different feedstock
As you can see, it is possible to produce an excess of biogas, if that is needed.
The incentive for producing more biogas is that methane can be used directly as fuel for cars and farm machinery after being cleaned up and compressed.
Biogas digestion is certainly a far better way of getting energy from wastes than just burning wastes. It also makes nonsense of the ‘biofuels’ that the UK and other governments are supporting, which involves burning biomass or making ethanol out of maize and soybean, especially the glut of GM maize and GM soybean that Monsanto can’t sell. Even ethanol from agricultural wastes is not sustainable, because you lose irreplaceable soil nutrients and generates pollutants. Similarly, burning crops will involve mining irreplaceable nutrients from the soil.
Highly productive self-sufficient farm, research centre & incubator for new technologies, new ideas
A schematic diagram of Dream Farm II (Integrated Reduced Emissions Food and Energy Farm, IREFE) is presented in Fig. 3. This is an improved version of the one submitted to the Carbon Trust, mainly in the addition of solar power.
Figure 3. Dream Farm II
As mentioned, new generations of solar panels are cheaper and easier to install and maintain, and there is no reason not to include them as a core technology for generating energy alongside the biogas digester. (We shall definitely need extra energy for the on-site gourmet restaurant and the analytical lab.)
Our approach is to get the farm up and running on core technologies while newer technologies are integrated or substituted at the periphery as time goes on. As said, we want the farm to serve research/education purposes and as an incubator and resource centre for new technologies, new designs, new ideas.
For example, combined heat and power generation is currently done using an internal combustion engine, which is noisy, and produces some noxious fumes. The ideal is to have heat and power generation with a fuel cell.
Fuel cells are theoretically highly efficient and emission-free. A fuel cell generates electricity, operating on pure hydrogen, and produces nothing but water as by-product.
In a proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) most suitable for on-farm use, a proton-conducting polymer membrane separates the two electrodes, typically made of carbon paper coated with platinum catalyst.
On the anode (negative electrode) side, hydrogen splits into protons and electrons. The protons are conducted through the membrane to the cathode (positive electrode), but the electrons travel to an external circuit to supply electrical power before returning to the fuel cell via the cathode.
At the cathode catalyst, oxygen reacts with the electrons and combines with the protons to form water. A fuel cell typically converts the chemical energy of its fuel into electricity with an efficiency of about 50 percent. (The rest of the energy is converted into heat.)
New generations of fuel cells are under development that can take methane and reform it into hydrogen inside. The farm in Wisconsin tried out a prototype, but it did not perform as well as the internal combustion engine. A major problem was that the biogas had to be substantially cleaned up before it could be fed to the fuel cell, leading to great losses of methane [40].
Methane can be purified to less stringency and compressed as fuel for mobile use: to run cars and farm machinery. Cars run on biogas methane are available in some countries and gaining in popularity, especially in Sweden, which already has biogas methane refuelling stations dotted around the country.
Another route to go is to convert the methane to hydrogen at high efficiency using a new solar-assisted thermocatalytic process, and then use the hydrogen to run vehicles. Yet another route is to have a two-staged anaerobic digestion, the first stage at slightly acidic conditions, which optimises the production of hydrogen, with a second stage under neutral pH for methane production.
Hydrogen storage is still a problem, though it is a very active area of research at the moment. Tanked hydrogen is now used to run buses on an experimental basis all over the world including the UK; but for smaller vehicles in particular, the ideal is to store hydrogen in a lightweight solid absorbent and use that with a fuel cell. There are promising developments in those areas also.
Benefits of Dream Farm II
It is clear that as far as energy is concerned, IREFE is not only self-sufficient, but can also export electricity to the grid. Some of the energy can be used to heat the biogas digester, to make it work more efficiently. Surplus electricity can also be used to recharge hybrid gas-electric cars.
As far as food is concerned, there is a complete menu, limited only by the imagination and industry, rich enough to supply an on-site organic gourmet restaurant, all for free. I am thinking of the fishpond possibilities: fresh water oysters and other bivalves, crayfish, prawns, silver carp, grass carp, what else? Specialty mushrooms, rocket, mange tous peas, salad greens, orange beetroot, blue potatoes… plenty of room for research and innovation there.
There’s certainly enough food to spill over to local villages, schools, old people’s homes, nearby cities, delivered fresh everyday.
In short,
Dream Farm is exactly what we need to feed the world, mitigate climate change to let everyone thrive in good health and wealth in all senses of the word in a post-fossil fuel economy.
Unfortunately, our government prefers other solutions to the energy crisis. It doesn’t realise there is a food crisis yet, and is emphatically against UK being self-sufficient in food.
When asked about UK’s food policy, a DEFRA spokesperson wrote on behalf of the Minister for the Environment Elliot Morley:
“Supporting greater UK self-sufficiency in food is incompatible with the concept of the European single market, in which different countries specialise according to comparative advantage. In an increasingly globalised world the pursuit of self-sufficiency for its own sake is no longer necessary nor desirable.”
We need something like Dream Farm not only to feed the world, or to mitigate climate change, or to avert the energy crisis. Yes, it is all of those and more. Most important of all, we need to mobilise human ingenuity and creativity, to make us go on dreaming and working for a better world.
ISIS Press Release 30/01/06
Dream Farm II
How to Beat Climate Change & Post Fossil Fuel Economy
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho tables a proposal around a zero-emission, zero-waste farm after a highly successful workshop with living legend George Chan, who created dozens such farms to eradicate poverty in third world countries
“Dream Farm is exactly what we need to feed the world, mitigate climate change and let everyone thrive in good health and wealth in a post-fossil fuel economy”
A fully referenced illustrated version of this paper is posted on SIS members’ website. Membship details here
Why Dream Farm?
We featured Professor George Chan’s “zero emission” or “integrated food and waste management system” in an article entitled “Dream Farm” in a recent issue of our magazine (SiS 27). This farm could potentially solve the energy and food crisis that the world is facing (see Box 1), and contribute significantly to mitigating climate change. That is why we are proposing to set up Dream Farm II here in Britain.
Box 1
Why We Need Dream Farm
No more cheap fossil fuels
United States food sector uses 17 percent and Canada 11.2 percent energy, not including export-import, food-processing machinery and buildings, waste collection and treatment, and roads for transport
Water running out
It takes 1 000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain; aquifers are severely depleted in major breadbaskets of the world
Productivity falling
Grain yields fell for four successive years; world reserves are at lowest levels in 30 years
Loss of croplands from unsustainable practices
The world loses 20 m ha, or 1.3 percent croplands annually from soil erosion and salination; replacing lost croplands accounts for 60 percent deforestation annually, which greatly accelerates global warming
Urgent need to reduce emissions
Food sector in a European country (France) is responsible for more than 30 percent carbon emissions, not including import/export, household use and storage, processing, and imported fertilizers
Global warming threatens food production
Yields fall 10 percent for every deg. C rise in night temperature; the latest prediction is an increase in the earth’s average temperature of 1.9 to 11.5 deg. C within this century
We have an energy crisis, and cheap fuel is a thing of the past, but our current food system is very energy intensive. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that the food sector consumes about 10-15 percent of total energy in industrialised countries, though only 2-5 percent are on the farm, due to fertilisers, pesticides and machinery. Estimates for the US and Canadian food sector put the figure at 17 percent & 11.2 percent respectively, which include total energy consumed on the farm, processing, transport, packaging, and storing farm products, as well as energy used by households to purchase, store and prepare food. The figures do not include energy costs in food-processing machinery and buildings, waste collection and waste treatment, or roads for transport; nor do they include energy consumed in importing/exporting food. The globalised food trade is destroying the livelihood of family farmers all over the world as corporations consolidate control of the commodity market and the food supply chain [6], and subsidized food surpluses are dumped from the rich countries in the North on poor countries in the South. The globalised food trade also wastes huge amounts of fossil fuels and spews extra tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The depletion of water is perhaps the most serious, as industrial agriculture is extremely thirsty. It takes 1 000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain; aquifers are pumped dry in the world’s major breadbaskets in the United States, China and India.
Not only water is depleted but also soil and soil nutrients and fertility, so productivity has been falling. Grain yields fell for four successive years from 2000 to 2003, and the world reserves are still at the lowest levels in 30 odd years.
Unsustainable practices over the past decades have resulted in massive losses of croplands from salination and soil erosion, totalling 20 million ha a year, or 1.3 percent of the world’s croplands. Replacing lost croplands accounts for 60 percent of deforestation, greatly accelerating climate change. That is why catastrophes such as hurricane Katrina, flood, drought and extreme weather are increasingly frequent, impacting further on food production.
There is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change, and a lot can be done through our food system. An estimate of the French food sector put its carbon emissions at more than 30 percent national total; not including import/export, household use and storage, food processing, and imported fertilizers.
Global warming itself threatens food production through the increase in temperature alone. Yields fall by 10 percent for every deg C rise in night temperature; and the latest predicted rise in average global temperature is 1.9 to 11.5 deg. C within this century when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaches 560 ppm, double the pre-industrial level.
Veteran world watcher Lester Brown summarises the fallout of the “environmental bubble economy” built on decades of unsustainable exploitation of the earth’s resources: “..collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, expanding deserts, rising CO2 levels, eroding soils, rising temperatures, falling water tables, melting glaciers, deteriorating grasslands, rising seas, rivers that are running dry, and disappearing species.” He warns that the environmental bubble economy is due for collapse, the most vulnerable sector being food; the biggest challenge, therefore, is how to feed the world.
He also says we need to restructure the economy at “wartime speed” to one that tells the ecological truth.
What Lester Brown hasn’t quite said is that the old economic model is responsible for much human suffering and poverty. The old model not only lays waste to the earth, it lays waste to people and society, and for the same reasons. It is the mistaken fundamentalist belief in the survival of the fittest; and that competition and exploitation are the laws of the market as much as the laws of nature.
Dream Farm a new model
What we need above all is a new model, a new paradigm; and that’s what Dream Farm is about. It is a unit of self-sufficiency in energy and food based on reciprocity and synergistic relationships rather than competition, it is a nucleation centre of the sustainable food production and consumption system that we need for a post fossil fuel economy, and a microcosm of the new paradigm working in a very concrete way.
That is why ISIS is proposing to set up a Dream Farm II for demonstration, education and research purposes; combining the best and most appropriate technologies to showcase the new paradigm and at the same time, to act as an incubator and resource centre for knowledge and technologies that really serve people and planet.
If you wish to support this or get involved in any way, please contact us.
Mobilising human ingenuity
Figure 1 is a very schematic diagram of George Chan’s system, which I shall call Dream Farm I. As is clear from George’s excellent presentation, the farms are very diverse, depending on local resources, ingenuity and imagination.
Figure 1. Dream Farm I according to George Chan
The anaerobic digester takes in livestock manure plus wastewater and generates biogas, which provides all the energy needs for heating, cooking and electricity. The partially cleansed wastewater goes into the algal basin where the algae produce by photosynthesis all the oxygen needed to detoxify the water, making it safe for the fish. The algae are harvested to feed chickens, ducks, geese and other livestock. The fishpond supports a compatible mixture of 5-6 fish species. Water from the fishpond is used to ‘fertigate’ crops growing in the fields or on the raised dykes. Aquaculture of rice, fruits and vegetables can be done in floats on the surface of the fishpond. Water from the fishpond can also be pumped into greenhouses to support aquaculture of fruits and vegetables. The anaerobic digester yields a residue rich in nutrients that is an excellent fertiliser for crops. It could also be mixed with algae and crop residues for culturing mushrooms after steam sterilisation. The residue from mushroom culture can be fed to livestock or composted. Crop residues are fed back to livestock. Crop and food residues are used to grow earthworms to feed fish and fowl. Compost and worm castings go to condition the soil. Livestock manure goes back into the anaerobic digester, thus closing the grand cycle. The result is a highly productive farm that’s more than self-sufficient in food and energy.
What I love most about George’s farms is how happy the animals look. They are organically fed and toilet-trained (!) to deposit their manure directly into a shunt that goes to the digester, so the animals and their living quarter are spotlessly clean, which makes for healthy and contented animals.
I have described Dream Farm as an “abundantly productive farm with zero input and zero emission powered by waste-gobbling bugs and human ingenuity.”
There’s a lot of human ingenuity among scientists and engineers and other professionals who would like nothing better than to use their ingenuity for the good of people and planet and to create a sustainable world for all its inhabitants. But they have so little opportunity under the dominant regime.
Dream Farm II
I was truly inspired by George’s work, and the idea of setting up Dream Farm II soon occurred to me. Fortunately, the first person I spoke to about Dream Farm II, after making contact with George Chan, was Kenneth Spelman; that was in August 2005. I needed a good engineer, George said, and there were two possibilities. I rang Kenneth first and tried the idea on him, and he got very excited right away.
And so over the next months, we assembled a team of potential partners for a proposal to the UK Carbon Trust, which seemed like the ideal funding agency for the project. The Carbon Trust required 50 percent of the funding to come from industry. The companies we approached mostly liked the idea; it was a heady time. We managed to submit the proposal just before the November deadline.
Unfortunately, the proposal failed to get through even the first round. We have since learned that the Blair government’s idea of reducing carbon emissions is to build more nuclear power plants, which are widely known to be ecologically disastrous simply in terms of the radioactive wastes generated, also highly uneconomical; and provides little, if any savings on greenhouse gas emissions compared to a gas-fired electricity generating plant (SiS 27). The Blair government’s “energy from waste” programme is limited to burning wastes in incinerators that spew toxic fumes for miles around.
But we are not giving up, and I hope you will see why. I take this opportunity to thank George Chan for his encouragement and answering numerous questions over the e-mail, Kenneth Spelman, likewise, and undertaking to donate practically all the building works involved for the Carbon Trust proposal. Thanks are also due to our intended partners, Biogas Technology Limited, CHP Services Ltd., and ElmFarm Research Centre; and to David McGrath of SiGen, James Bakos of SHEC, Peter Saunders, Peter Rae, and others who gave valuable comments and suggestions. The Carbon Trust proposal was put together with great enthusiasm from everyone concerned and at “wartime speed”.
Integrated Reduced Emissions Food and Energy Farm
For the Carbon Trust proposal, we had to call Dream Farm something boring: Integrated Reduced Emissions Food and Energy Farm, IREFE, for short. Kenneth’s advice was never mention waste, or else the waste bureaucracy will descend on us like a tonne of bricks.
The aims of IREFE are: to maximize productivity and balanced growth; to minimise environmental impact, hence “zero emission”, “zero waste”, and even “zero input” are the ideals; and most important of all, to achieve self-sufficiency in food and energy.
These aims are also the basis of the new economic model (see “Sustainable food systems for sustainable development SiS 27), described in the complete version of the present proposal.
What really excites me about George’s dream farm is that it demonstrates concretely a theory of the organism I first presented in the second edition of my book The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms, published in 1998.
At around the same time, I proposed that we could look at sustainable systems as organisms. This idea has been developed more completely in a paper published with theoretical ecologist Robert Ulanowicz at the University or Maryland.
The important features of zero-emission systems are the same as those of the zero-waste or ‘zero-entropy’ model of organisms and sustainable systems. Entropy is made of dissipated energy, or waste energy that is useless for doing work, and simply clogs up the system, like ordinary waste.
The zero-entropy model predicts balanced development and growth as opposed to the dominant economic model of infinite, unsustainable growth. This disposes of the myth that the alternative to the dominant model is to have no development or growth at all.
Back to the practicalities: how are the aims of Dream Farm achieved?
First, we harvest greenhouse gas (biogas methane) not just from livestock manure and used water, but also crop residues and certain food wastes, which constitute feedstock for the anaerobic digester to produce fuel for on-farm energy needs and mobile uses for transport and farm machinery, substituting for fossil fuels. Notice how this reduces carbon emissions twice over, first by preventing methane and nitrous oxide from the farm wastes going into the atmosphere, and second from the fossil fuels saved by burning methane instead. But that’s not the only benefit of our approach, as distinct from the UK government’s approach of burning the wastes.
As a result of confining the farm ‘wastes’ in the anaerobic digester, nutrients, especially nitrogen, are conserved, instead of being lost as ammonia and nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas; or else leached into ground and surface waters as pollutants. These nutrients can now support the growth of algae, fish, livestock etc. for maximum farm productivity.
Harvesting sunlight is what crops do naturally, as do the algae in the aerobic digestion basin that produce all the oxygen needed to purify the partially cleansed water coming out of the anaerobic digester, and the phytoplankton in the fishpond that feed one or more of the several species of fish co-existing happily in poly-culture. Solar panels are incorporated, especially as the new generations of solar panels are much more affordable, durable and easy to install.
Conserving and regenerating potable water free of pollutants is a very important aspect of this farm, as water shortage and deprivation are affecting many parts of the world. After being cleansed by the algae, the water goes into the fishpond. From there it can be further polished by various species of aquatic plants before it is returned to the aquifers. Water from the fishpond also returns to the aquifers by being used to ‘fertigate’ the crops, and filtered through the layers of soil and subsoil.
Dream Farm is run strictly on organic principles, because pesticides and other chemicals will kill the bacteria in the biogas digester. There is now substantial evidence that organic foods are healthier; not only free from harmful pesticide residues, but also enriched in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals.
Energy is used at the point of generation. This micro-generation is gaining favour all over the world. It doesn’t depend on a grid and is therefore most suitable for developing countries. In developed countries, local micro-generation protects against power failures and black outs, not to mention terrorist attacks on the grid. A study in the UK estimated that up to 69 percent of the energy is lost through generating electricity at power stations and piping it over the grid.
What better way to reduce food miles and all the associated environmental impacts of food import/export than consuming locally produced food fresh and full of goodness, instead of goodness knows what?
A recently released report on Food Miles commissioned by UK’s DEFRA (Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs) put the direct social, environmental and economic costs of food transport at more than £9 billion each year; with congestion accounting for £5 billion, accidents for £2 billion, and the remaining £2 billion due to greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, noise and infrastructure damage. The gross value of the agricultural section was £6.4 billion and the food and drink manufacturing sector £19.8 billion. In other words, the £26.2 billion worth of agriculture and the food and drink industry involves externalising £9 billion, or 34 percent of the costs to the taxpayer.
Appropriate technologies a matter of design
The anaerobic biogas digester is the key technology in Dream Farm.
Digesters can be any size, ranging from small ones made of plastic material, disused petrol drum, moulded fibre-glass to big ones made of reinforced concrete as George has shown us. I have seen small ones buried in the ground serving a single family, which are simple and easy to maintain and mammoth constructions serving the manufacturing or waste-treatment industry.
I found one that treated wastes from a school toilet in Addis Ababa, also buried underground with two covered potholes. Animal manure could be added through one of the holes, and stirred with a wooden stick. The second pothole revealed a pipe and valve, presumably for controlling the flow of biogas.
Another I spotted recently in Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre near Lusaka, Zambia, was no longer in use; it was built next to a pig house, now empty.
Two big ones – 2 500 m3 each – were installed on a 1 000 acre farm in Wisconsin with more than 1 000 dairy cows. They are fully automated, heated, monitored, with alarm fitted, valves, whistles, what have you. The farmer is reported to be happy with his investment.
But as George has warned, the more automated, the more parts there are to go wrong. So the challenge is to design something affordable, easy to use and maintain, on a more human scale.
Pierre Labyrie, who works for Eden (énergié, dévelopment, environment) Toulouse, France, an organisation helping farmers install biogas digesters, tells me that the typical digester installed is 2 000 m3, even for small farmers with only 100 cows. The reason seems absurd. Farmers in Europe are by law required to store four-months worth of manure in slurry lagoons, which have to be that big. Rather than getting the law changed now that fresh manure is being treated and there is no need to store the slurry, they find it simpler to construct big digesters. But that means extra capital and maintenance expenses for the farmer. I have posed this question to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, and am awaiting a reply.
These digesters are not very good to look at. We need landscape architects and engineers to work together to design a beautiful and perfectly functional farm. What can be done besides the main crops and livestock, with trellised fishponds, algae shallows, grazing fields, woodlands, orchards, vegetable, herb and flower gardens, some floating on water….
The company that made the big digesters also provided a combined heat and power generation unit based on an internal combustion engine, which burns the biogas and generates electricity and heat. These heat and power generation units can now produce electricity at about 30 percent efficiency, with 50 percent recovery of power as heat, giving an overall power conversion efficiency as high as 85 percent.
Savings on carbon emissions
At an initial stocking rate of 0.8 cow/acre on a 1 000 acre Minnesota farm, 2 063 kWh/cow was produced per year from biogas. I did a little calculation on the energy yield and carbon emissions saved per cow per year. The amount of methane required to generate that amount of electricity is 620 m3 or 0.4464 tonnes, assuming 30 percent efficiency in converting to electricity. This is equivalent to 9.828 tonnes CO2 equivalent, using global warming potential of 22 for methane. The amount of oil saved per cow by using the methane as fuel is 0.553 tonne, which represents an additional 1.715 t CO2 equivalent saved (1 tonne oil = 3.1 tonne CO2). Hence the total savings by processing manure produced from a single cow per year, counting only methane is 11.543 t CO2 equivalent.
A 100-acre farm with 80 cows - a nice size for a demonstration farm, with plenty of room for woodlands, an on-site gourmet restaurant to take advantage of all that lovely fresh organic food plus an analytical research laboratory - would yield more than 160 000 kWh per year in energy and save 923.4 t CO2 equivalent in emissions.
If all the farm manure produced in the UK – estimated at 200 m tonnes - were to be treated in biogas digesters and the biogas harvested for fuel use, the carbon emissions saved would be more than 14 percent of the national emissions.
But we can do much better than that. When other farm and food residues are included, the yield of biogas can be far higher (see later). A 1 000 t CO2 equivalent saving a year is quite realistic. The market price (16 Jan 2006) was €23.35 per tonne CO2 equivalent. So 1 000 tonnes is worth more than 23 000 euros in carbon credits.
(I was informed by UK’s Department of Trade and Industry that one would be unable to gain carbon credits in Britain through the Kyoto route, i.e., Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or Joint Implementation (JL). CDM projects are in developing countries only, and while JL projects are eligible in developed countries, the UK has not yet signed up to it. One option may be voluntary emission reduction (VERs) credits, which are sold to the retail market for offsetting companies and individual emissions on a voluntary basis. Watch this space)
Livestock manure is in fact rather low down in the league of biogas yield. Fats and grease are way up there with 961 m3 per tonne. Bakery waste not far behind at 714 m3 (see Fig. 2). Waste paper, not included in this chart, is also a good substrate for generating biogas.
Figure 2. Yield of biogas with different feedstock
As you can see, it is possible to produce an excess of biogas, if that is needed.
The incentive for producing more biogas is that methane can be used directly as fuel for cars and farm machinery after being cleaned up and compressed.
Biogas digestion is certainly a far better way of getting energy from wastes than just burning wastes. It also makes nonsense of the ‘biofuels’ that the UK and other governments are supporting, which involves burning biomass or making ethanol out of maize and soybean, especially the glut of GM maize and GM soybean that Monsanto can’t sell. Even ethanol from agricultural wastes is not sustainable, because you lose irreplaceable soil nutrients and generates pollutants. Similarly, burning crops will involve mining irreplaceable nutrients from the soil.
Highly productive self-sufficient farm, research centre & incubator for new technologies, new ideas
A schematic diagram of Dream Farm II (Integrated Reduced Emissions Food and Energy Farm, IREFE) is presented in Fig. 3. This is an improved version of the one submitted to the Carbon Trust, mainly in the addition of solar power.
Figure 3. Dream Farm II
As mentioned, new generations of solar panels are cheaper and easier to install and maintain, and there is no reason not to include them as a core technology for generating energy alongside the biogas digester. (We shall definitely need extra energy for the on-site gourmet restaurant and the analytical lab.)
Our approach is to get the farm up and running on core technologies while newer technologies are integrated or substituted at the periphery as time goes on. As said, we want the farm to serve research/education purposes and as an incubator and resource centre for new technologies, new designs, new ideas.
For example, combined heat and power generation is currently done using an internal combustion engine, which is noisy, and produces some noxious fumes. The ideal is to have heat and power generation with a fuel cell.
Fuel cells are theoretically highly efficient and emission-free. A fuel cell generates electricity, operating on pure hydrogen, and produces nothing but water as by-product.
In a proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) most suitable for on-farm use, a proton-conducting polymer membrane separates the two electrodes, typically made of carbon paper coated with platinum catalyst.
On the anode (negative electrode) side, hydrogen splits into protons and electrons. The protons are conducted through the membrane to the cathode (positive electrode), but the electrons travel to an external circuit to supply electrical power before returning to the fuel cell via the cathode.
At the cathode catalyst, oxygen reacts with the electrons and combines with the protons to form water. A fuel cell typically converts the chemical energy of its fuel into electricity with an efficiency of about 50 percent. (The rest of the energy is converted into heat.)
New generations of fuel cells are under development that can take methane and reform it into hydrogen inside. The farm in Wisconsin tried out a prototype, but it did not perform as well as the internal combustion engine. A major problem was that the biogas had to be substantially cleaned up before it could be fed to the fuel cell, leading to great losses of methane [40].
Methane can be purified to less stringency and compressed as fuel for mobile use: to run cars and farm machinery. Cars run on biogas methane are available in some countries and gaining in popularity, especially in Sweden, which already has biogas methane refuelling stations dotted around the country.
Another route to go is to convert the methane to hydrogen at high efficiency using a new solar-assisted thermocatalytic process, and then use the hydrogen to run vehicles. Yet another route is to have a two-staged anaerobic digestion, the first stage at slightly acidic conditions, which optimises the production of hydrogen, with a second stage under neutral pH for methane production.
Hydrogen storage is still a problem, though it is a very active area of research at the moment. Tanked hydrogen is now used to run buses on an experimental basis all over the world including the UK; but for smaller vehicles in particular, the ideal is to store hydrogen in a lightweight solid absorbent and use that with a fuel cell. There are promising developments in those areas also.
Benefits of Dream Farm II
It is clear that as far as energy is concerned, IREFE is not only self-sufficient, but can also export electricity to the grid. Some of the energy can be used to heat the biogas digester, to make it work more efficiently. Surplus electricity can also be used to recharge hybrid gas-electric cars.
As far as food is concerned, there is a complete menu, limited only by the imagination and industry, rich enough to supply an on-site organic gourmet restaurant, all for free. I am thinking of the fishpond possibilities: fresh water oysters and other bivalves, crayfish, prawns, silver carp, grass carp, what else? Specialty mushrooms, rocket, mange tous peas, salad greens, orange beetroot, blue potatoes… plenty of room for research and innovation there.
There’s certainly enough food to spill over to local villages, schools, old people’s homes, nearby cities, delivered fresh everyday.
In short,
Dream Farm is exactly what we need to feed the world, mitigate climate change to let everyone thrive in good health and wealth in all senses of the word in a post-fossil fuel economy.
Unfortunately, our government prefers other solutions to the energy crisis. It doesn’t realise there is a food crisis yet, and is emphatically against UK being self-sufficient in food.
When asked about UK’s food policy, a DEFRA spokesperson wrote on behalf of the Minister for the Environment Elliot Morley:
“Supporting greater UK self-sufficiency in food is incompatible with the concept of the European single market, in which different countries specialise according to comparative advantage. In an increasingly globalised world the pursuit of self-sufficiency for its own sake is no longer necessary nor desirable.”
We need something like Dream Farm not only to feed the world, or to mitigate climate change, or to avert the energy crisis. Yes, it is all of those and more. Most important of all, we need to mobilise human ingenuity and creativity, to make us go on dreaming and working for a better world.
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magaz...article=040710x
Web Exclusive: Wendell Berry interview complete text
by Rose Marie Berger
Sojourners associate editor Rose Marie Berger and photographer Ryan Beiler spent a Sunday afternoon in February with Wendell Berry at his farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Berry is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including The Unsettling of America, What are People For?, Life is Beautiful, Citizenship Papers, and The Art of the Commonplace. He has farmed in a traditional manner for nearly forty years. Berry spoke with Sojourners about religious practice, Bluegrass country, defending against Wal-Mart, usury, and Jesus. - The Editors
ROSE MARIE BERGER: Tell me about this land, about this bioregion, about the history of your farm.
WENDELL BERRY: We're on the west side of the Kentucky River, in the Kentucky River Valley. Some people call this the Outer Bluegrass; there are other names for it. We have limestone soils. An old ocean or sea laid down these layers of limestone. There are lots of trees here. There are white, chinquapin, red, black, and shumard oaks. Those are the principle ones. And we have two or three kinds of ash, maples, several varieties of hickory, black walnut, sycamore, black locust, honey locust, cedar, basswood, red elm, slippery elm. We used to have chestnuts once. Tanya and I have 125 acres altogether, 75 here and about 50 on Cane Run.
This place where we're sitting today, is the old property known as Lane's Landing. Twelve acres, more or less, the deed says. Tanya and I bought it in 1964 and moved in the next year. So we've been here thirty-nine years.
My mother was raised in Port Royal. And her father's land borders this. My father was born and grew up on a farm just the other side of Lacie. My brother lives there now.
This is tobacco country. We've lost two-thirds of the allotment in the last few years, courtesy of the global economy. Not the anti-smoking people. This is traditionally a mixed farming country. Tobacco was the staple crop, but we also grew corn and small grains. The small grains were grown as cover crops on the tobacco and corn ground.
The farms were around a hundred acres when I was a boy, on the average; they're about 150 on the average now. But the farming that was done here when I first knew it, in the 1940s and '50s, at its best, was very good farming. In addition to the crops I named, we raised cattle, sheep and hogs, sometimes all three on the same farm. And every farm had a kitchen garden, a flock of chickens, meat hogs, and at least enough cows to supply the household with milk.
BERGER: You really had a working, home economy. How does the local tobacco economics fit with the global economics? How has that shift from local to global been experienced here?
BERRY: Tobacco acreages have declined here because the companies can fill their needs more cheaply elsewhere. The other products we grow are thrown into the world market to compete as best they can. With the help of subsidies, of course. In Kentucky we have always raised for export. One of this state's problems is that it hasn't added value to its agricultural products. I would say we are adding less now than ever. Louisville used to have two or three packing plants, for instance, and a stockyard. But no more. Most of the things that are produced in this state are shipped out, to have the value added elsewhere.
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together. The wives would go to town with eggs and cream once a week, buy groceries with the proceeds, and sometimes come home with money. Or they'd sell a few old hens, that sort of thing. So that's the first lesson to learn about agriculture, as far as I'm concerned: It needs a sound subsistence basis. People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities. That's what we're working for now. We want to develop a local food economy that local producers will supply and that the local consumers will support. It's ridiculous that we should be importing food into this state while our farmers are suffering.
BERGER: What are the models that are being used here in Kentucky to resist the economic pressure from the larger market?
BERRY: Community-supported agriculture, farmer's markets, direct marketing of meat, that sort of thing. There's an effort under way to develop a retail market for local produce. But this is hard to bring about.
The local landscape used to contribute food to Louisville. There was a significant amount of truck farming going in those days. That's gone. The stockyard's gone, the packinghouses are gone. So there's Louisville economically and culturally isolated from its rich agricultural landscape. Which is ridiculous.
BERGER: It's almost a process of reweaving the city life with its agricultural counterpart - its breadbasket.
BERRY: That's right - building commercial linkages between the city and its local countryside. And there are good reasons to do that. You've got the prospect, to begin with, of better, fresher food. You've got the possibility that consumers could influence production.
You have the possibility that urban consumers, by fulfilling their responsibility to local producers, can make secure their local food supply in the face of various threats. The paramount one, now on everybody's mind, is terrorism, but there are also the threats of epidemic and disease. In other words, the influence of local consumers could work, not only to maintain farming in the local landscape, but also to diversify it. And American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the present food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.
BERGER: That happened in Venezuela a few years ago. They had an oil producer's strike and people lost their gasoline supply. As a result they couldn't truck food anywhere. Whole communities were starving because they couldn't get access to food in stores, and they didn't have any capacity to feed themselves.
BERRY: What could be more terrible? There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. And from what I read, the curve of discovery and production of petroleum is about to decline. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
BERGER: In Life is a Miracle, you talk about cloning and genetic engineering. Genetically modified organisms are being promoted by agribusiness as "a way to feed the poor people of the world." What kind of ethical values should we be operating under when we think about cloning, GMO, and genetic engineering?
BERRY: The first ethical requirement is a decent suspicion of the claims of people who have something to sell. I'm not reading anything that suggests that genetic engineering is increasing production. Some recent things I've read suggest that productivity of Round-up ready soybeans is less than that of other varieties.
I think that the real reason for genetic engineering is to put absolute control of the food system into corporate hands. They don't want anybody - farmer or urban consumer or anybody else - to have anything whatsoever that they don't buy from a corporation at the corporation's price. In other words, economic totalitarianism is the goal. And I don't think the difference between political totalitarianism and economic totalitarianism is worth lingering over. If you're not economically free, if you don't have economic choices, you're not free.
BERGER: Your collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, has been published recently and you wrote an amazing set of articles for Orion about the national security agenda. As I read through sections of the Patriot Act, I was reminded of an old poem of yours titled "Do Not Be Ashamed." It says, "Though you have done nothing shameful,/ they will want you to be ashamed./ They will want you to kneel and weep/ and say you should have been like them."
BERRY: Well it's sort of normal to wish that things like that would not be applicable any longer and it's discouraging to see that they stay current. You wish that a book like The Unsettling of America would become obsolete, but it's more relevant now than it ever was. I don't think that national security can be achieved the way we're trying to achieve it. I don't think that being the strongest country in the world can necessarily make us the most secure country. And the fact remains that we're destroying our country ourselves.
It's easy to get the idea that we're stationing troops all over the world to protect our right to destroy our own country. I think that if you were seriously interested in security, you would make the country secure in its regions. You'd make it possible for the people to eat with far less public transportation. To do that you'd have to think in a different way. And we've got to face the likelihood that the people in charge are simply not capable of thinking that way. They've never thought in that way. Their doctrine is maximum force relentlessly applied. That's the doctrine of war. But it's also the doctrine of industrial agriculture. It's the way the industrial system works.
Look at the way we mine coal, for instance. Look at the way we're logging the forests. These are not sustainable procedures. They're not even conservative procedures. Wes Jackson has started calling this the "Prodigal Era." By that he means the era in which we're going to use up most of the topsoil and most of the fossil fuels.
BERGER: It seems like it always comes back eventually to the individual's choice. Does one choose to live in an economy of grace, based on generosity, or in an economy of scarcity based on acquisition?
BERRY: You have to realize that people are working very hard to remove that choice, to make it impossible to make such a choice. And they can do that simply by putting the land entirely under corporate control. It can happen. We're pretty well advanced into a corporate or capitalist totalitarianism. And it's a very strange thing to see happen, because we were lately so much afraid of communist totalitarianism. You can remove that choice we were talking about simply by making it impossible for small economic enterprises to survive.
You can use Wal-Mart as a weapon, for instance, to destroy the economic centers of small towns and small cities.
BERGER: The method of disarming such a weapon is carving out a local economy, a local space, and defending it?
BERRY: You've got to defend it; you've got to defend it economically. You've got to have some kind of fidelity between consumers and producers. The great corporations can use volume discounts to make it impossible for anybody else to be in business. And they are doing that.
BERGER: And you have that partnership of slightly increased unemployment - no benefits, poor wages - so it's a push and a pull. People are pushed into the arms of Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart is pulling them with cheap products produced in labor conditions that are exploitative.
BERRY: Healthcare and health insurance are so expensive that almost nobody can afford them. Most people can't.
BERGER: How do you see that playing out in terms of the rural poverty here?
BERRY: Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma we're in now. But you've got to see the connection between the poverty of the people and the impoverishment of the place. If you buy the products, and you don't give an adequate payment in money, then that means that the producer doesn't give adequate care.
The worst example of rural poverty we have right here is that of migrant farm workers. Well, they're "temporary workers," is the way to put that. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
BERGER: One ends up lacking affection. The migrant workers perhaps don't have a particular affection for the place other than just the work and the money, and the place and the people and economy never develops an investment in them because they're on their way out.
BERRY: That's right. Because they're temporary and replaceable. They're more readily replaceable than the slaves were. Also in Kentucky some corporations, Fruit of the Loom, for instance, have just left for places that are more exploitable than Kentucky. And then we have, west of here, the hog and chicken factories. That's another story of corporate abuse of places and people.
BERGER: This organic mechanism of resistance is trying to establish a community/regional area and beginning to develop alternative models of connection between the producer and the consumer, and begin to create some trading zones that are micro-trading zones.
BERRY: Yes. You can hope only to take it back a little at a time. There is no master plan. And I would be very suspicious of a master plan if I knew of one. It's got to happen a little at a time. You've got to confront the very difficult economic problem of making a local supply and a local demand come into existence simultaneously. I don't know that that's ever been done before in the way we will have to do it. And nobody knows how well it's going to succeed. But there are hopeful signs. It would be no trouble to take you and show you things that are working, but there are not enough of them yet.
BERGER: I want to ask you also about Harlan and Anna Hubbard, about the influence they've had on your life. And also the tension between the nomadic, pilgrim experiment that they launched off into versus rootedness, staying in one place, making a deep commitment to a particular area.
BERRY: Well, Harlan and Anna Hubbard were a married couple who began their life together by building a shanty boat and making a sort of epic drift down the rivers from Brent, Kentucky, above Cincinnati, to New Orleans and then on out into the bayous. In the early fifties, that journey having completed itself, they returned to Kentucky and bought a remote property, known as Payne Hollow, on the Ohio River in Trimble County. They built a house there and remained there, living mostly from their land and the river until they died.
They were musicians; they played duets every day of their life together. They played Mozart, Brahms, and Bach, those people. Harlan made prints, drawings, oils, and watercolors. And he was a writer. He published in his lifetime two wonderful books, one called Shantyboat that was an account of their trip down the rivers, and another called Payne Hollow, which is a distillation of their life at Payne Hollow. Their life was exemplary in a lot of ways. They did little harm. They lived abundantly, by their own efforts, and with a very small expenditure of money. In their frugal life they experienced much joy and made much beauty. They were teachers to a lot of people, and I'm one of them.
BERGER: How did you come to meet them, originally?
BERRY: By accident. A friend and I were on a canoe trip. We stopped there to see if we could get some drinkable water. We had replenished our water supply with the city water of Madison, Indiana, and we were finding it hard to swallow.
BERGER: I've gone back and looked again at some of the ways that Harlan engaged his spirituality or religion, his reading of the Bible, and how at one point I think he said something about how he experiences the Bible not as revelation but as confirmation, and that he comes to these lessons in his life, and is sometimes surprised that the Bible also has come to those lessons. And I find that sort of engagement with Christianity very appealing in the sense that it feels very authentic, and lets the faith be a humanizing faith.
BERRY: I think Harlan was a man with a very strong religious impulse, or religious nature. But I don't think the formal religions, the churches of this area, had much to offer him. It's hard to nail Harlan's religion down very firmly. I did the best I could in a chapter of my little book about Harlan and his work.
Thinking about Harlan as a religious man is quite different from thinking about, say, Thomas Merton as a religious man, because there's not a body of doctrine that Harlan subscribed to. He didn't endorse any creed. He was a man at large with his faculties and his gifts and his inspiration, his great relish of life and of his world, which he said was "heaven." You look to see what Harlan painted when he was "painting heaven" and you see landscapes of northern Kentucky and Payne Hollow.
BERGER: What was your connection with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived here in Kentucky?
BERRY: My connection with him was the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who has grown steadily in reputation since he died. Thomas Merton was interested in photography, and I guess that led him to Gene, who was no more conventionally religious than Harlan Hubbard. Gene was a wizard. He had an incredible gift of seeing and of picture-making. But let's don't say "incredible." It was perfectly credible when you saw what he could do. He had a very great gift. Merton could see that, and he made a friend of Gene. Gene and his wife Madelyn took Tanya and me down there twice.
Merton was a man who understood how to be a companion. He had a lot of humor, and I think he knew something about how to be happy or how to enjoy happiness when he had it. I liked him tremendously. He had a very lively countenance; a very bright, curious, amused eye.
When we went down there the first time, he just dropped it out casually, and I think with great secret amusement, that he was thinking about joining an Indian tribe. I think Merton was a profound Christian. Some people seem to think that when he went East he was abandoning his faith or his vocation. I don't think he was at all. His talks to religious groups in Alaska (Thomas Merton in Alaska) on that last trip were wonderful.
BERGER: He just seemed to be moving deeper and deeper, which in some ways made it easier to connect across a variety of spiritual expressions.
BERRY: He had, I think, a very fortunate impulse to reach out to other religions. And we need to pay attention to that, because there are people now who would carry us right into a religious war. That's a big problem, I think.
BERGER: The end of Christendom.
BERRY: Well, Christendom is all right, but it doesn't have to exclude everybody else. It doesn't have to go to war against them. And it doesn't have to be so stupid as to condemn other faiths that it doesn't know anything about.
BERGER: One of the lines in Life is a Miracle says, "It's impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced." It's a brilliant line!
BERRY: You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.
BERGER: Some of the work being done, more by poets rather than theologians, in reclaiming the roots of biblical language - digging in for what almost intuitively or artistically makes sense rather than the science of translation - seems to bring life back.
BERRY: If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens. If you don't have an economic practice, you don't have a practice. Christians conventionally think they've done enough when they've gone to the store and shopped. But that isn't an economic life. It isn't an economic practice. If you take seriously those passages in the scripture that say that we live by God's spirit and his breath, that we live, move, and have our being in God, the implications for the present economy are just devastating. Those passages call for an entirely generous and careful economic life.
BERGER: There are a number of explorations and economic models in the scriptures, in terms of the Sabbath economics, jubilee economics, but there's not enough experimenting among Christians or people of faith with alternative models of economics.
BERRY: There's a fairly explicit attempt back there in the early books of the Old Testament to see that property doesn't accumulate into too few hands. There's a real attempt at economic democracy. The idea of the Jubilee year is a deliberate affront to what we now call capitalism. There's a lot that's been said, not just in the Bible, but in the biblical tradition in literature, on the subject of usury. Dante was pretty explicit about it. It would put you in hell because it implied, among other things, a contempt for nature. It's an attempt to go around the natural world and human work and make money grow out of itself. It's an attempt to make value grow in the abstract, without work, without a real product. As lots of people have said, this goes against the real economy of the world. Ezra Pound has a great canto on usury, two of them as a matter of fact. "With usura hath no man a house of good stone." Nobody can have good things when you let money become its own value.
BERGER: As the epigraph to Citizenship Papers you quote 2 Peter 2:3, "And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you." I don't know that I have ever heard that phrase in this context. Suddenly it becomes revolutionary.
BERRY: Yes. The gospels, and sometimes the epistles, are pretty revolutionary. They propose a revolution of about 180 degrees.
One of the popular versions of the Bible has in the back an index of great stories and great chapters, and not one of them from the gospels.
But Christ was quite explicit, for instance, about his pacifism. You can't be more explicit than "Love your enemies." He did run those people out of the temple, but he didn't kill them.
People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We don't know anything about them. But he apparently didn't ask them what creed they subscribed to, or what their sexual preference was, or any of that. He fed them. He healed them. He forgave them. He is clear about sin, but he was also for forgiveness.
BERGER: Well there's so much in that way of engaging people - and the sin and forgiveness model's a good one - that is all about promoting life and opening up possibilities for life. It's never about shutting life down, closing people off, stopping them in their tracks. It's about opening up possibilities for people.
BERRY: That's right. That's right. A completely decent and authentic way of putting it, I think.
BERGER: Of all your writing, Life is a Miracle is the one that I think is the most brilliant because it calls into question the entire myth of progress.
BERRY: You know, it helps an old man to hear that!
BERGER: There are not enough people who are asking questions about the post-Enlightenment era, and the myth of progress and where it's taking us. Even our contemporary Christian mindset is just built on this myth that the world just keeps getting better and that the past was worse than the present.
BERRY: It gets taken for granted, that's why it's so easy to attack. People are handing out this stuff without thinking about it.
BERGER: How is that myth of progress operating on us as people, and what are the reasons for calling it into question, or subverting it?
BERRY: Well, that's two questions, isn't it? How does it operate on us? It substitutes this infinite advance toward better and better life in the material sense for the old pilgrimage, which you make by effort and grace, to become a better person. And I guess that's the reason you need to subvert it if you can. It takes people's minds off the important things. It becomes, at it's worst, a kind of determinism: All we have to do is just passively go along and things will get better and better, and we'll be happier and happier. That's why we need honest accounting.
I think all the time about the medical industry's emphasis on longevity. It's a substitution of quantity for any idea of completeness or wholeness or any sense of real fulfillment or real worth, so that you prolong life past the time where it's worth living, and then you brag about it. Without any acknowledgment of the possibility that somebody's life might become a burden, or that some things are worse than death.
BERGER: Death becomes simply an inconvenience to be shuddered away.
BERRY: As if it might not at some point be a great relief. As if it might not be a blessed deliverance.
All the questions about progress reduce to the question of what your measures are. And what is the measure of progress? It is possible to measure the progress of the last two or three hundred years in soil erosion. We can measure it in the rate of species extinction. We can measure it in pollution, in the toxicity of the world. Those things, like power and speed, are perfectly measurable.
But we need also to raise the questions that are not quantitative. How happy are people? What do we make of all this complaining? How healthy are people? How are love and beauty faring? What do we make of all this doctoring and medication that's going on all the time at such a great expense? That's not to deny that this so-called progress has given us things that are worth having. A hot bath every night is a good thing. I affirm that it is good, and wish to record my gratitude. There are other good things, but real harms also have been done.
BETH NEWBERRY: How does your identity as a writer connect to a region, a place, and a land?
BERRY: Well, I was born here, not in this house, but in this county. I grew up in these little towns, and in the countryside, on the farms. All my early memories are here. All the voices that surrounded me from the time I became able to hear were from here. Tanya and I came back here in 1964 and have lived here for 39 years, raised our children here. How could you draw a line separating this place and my identity? If you've known these places from your early youth, that means that you have a chance to know them in a way that other people never will.
I think often of the importance of a language spoken by people who are really local, who really know where they are and have lived there a long time; that language has a particularity about it that no language of bureaucracy or government or the university can ever have. It has a designating power that's utterly precise. Knowing the landscape in common and knowing it intimately, minutely, that has to be the basis of a language. That's where it starts, and you can raise it up from there, in successive levels of abstraction. But if you lose that power to particularize and designate precisely, in some sense you don't have a language anymore. So having a common tongue can mean that at one level you have the dictionary in common, you have the English vocabulary. But to have a common tongue in the sense that you can speak in detail, knowledgably and responsibly, about a well-known place, a well-known ecosystem and a well-known human community, is quite another thing.
BERGER: Is there a tension between self-sufficient communities and balkanism? Is there a danger of isolation in developing sustainable communities? If a community withdraws into itself so much, or becomes removed from a larger system of relationship, is there a danger of setting up enemy tensions between communities? Prejudice?
BERRY: I'll honor the question if you will acknowledge that this can happen in cities as well as in the country. People are always saying that these terrible things happen in little towns and rural communities, but of course they happen in cities just as readily, and for the same reasons. I suppose the direct way to deal with this is to point out that no community is or ever can be entirely self-sufficient. It's dependent on other communities, not only for supplies, but also for conversation and goodwill.
We're a pretty bad species in a lot of ways and in other ways a pretty good one. We can become a warrior civilization and live by piracy; on the other hand, we're capable of lovingkindness, of genuine affection, of generosity, of friendship, of peaceability, of forgiveness and gratitude. It's a question of where you want to put your influence, how you want to apply the little means that you have. It's too easy to say that country people are provincial and prejudiced, as if the worst things that humans are capable of hadn't also risen up in cosmopolitan, highly sophisticated, urban civilizations. That's just a passing of blame. If you can blame it all on people out in the provinces then you don't have to worry about what's going on in your urban neighborhood or in your urban soul.
One of the oldest human artifacts is the trade route. People were trading in obsidian and other rare things long before history. So we know there's going to be trade, we know that you can't isolate a culture and keep it going without cultural interchange. You can't live without influence, you can't live without change, you can't live without trade.
The serious question is whether you're going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It's a difficult business, being human.
Rose Marie Berger is an associate editor of Sojourners.
Web Exclusive: Wendell Berry interview complete text
by Rose Marie Berger
Sojourners associate editor Rose Marie Berger and photographer Ryan Beiler spent a Sunday afternoon in February with Wendell Berry at his farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Berry is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including The Unsettling of America, What are People For?, Life is Beautiful, Citizenship Papers, and The Art of the Commonplace. He has farmed in a traditional manner for nearly forty years. Berry spoke with Sojourners about religious practice, Bluegrass country, defending against Wal-Mart, usury, and Jesus. - The Editors
ROSE MARIE BERGER: Tell me about this land, about this bioregion, about the history of your farm.
WENDELL BERRY: We're on the west side of the Kentucky River, in the Kentucky River Valley. Some people call this the Outer Bluegrass; there are other names for it. We have limestone soils. An old ocean or sea laid down these layers of limestone. There are lots of trees here. There are white, chinquapin, red, black, and shumard oaks. Those are the principle ones. And we have two or three kinds of ash, maples, several varieties of hickory, black walnut, sycamore, black locust, honey locust, cedar, basswood, red elm, slippery elm. We used to have chestnuts once. Tanya and I have 125 acres altogether, 75 here and about 50 on Cane Run.
This place where we're sitting today, is the old property known as Lane's Landing. Twelve acres, more or less, the deed says. Tanya and I bought it in 1964 and moved in the next year. So we've been here thirty-nine years.
My mother was raised in Port Royal. And her father's land borders this. My father was born and grew up on a farm just the other side of Lacie. My brother lives there now.
This is tobacco country. We've lost two-thirds of the allotment in the last few years, courtesy of the global economy. Not the anti-smoking people. This is traditionally a mixed farming country. Tobacco was the staple crop, but we also grew corn and small grains. The small grains were grown as cover crops on the tobacco and corn ground.
The farms were around a hundred acres when I was a boy, on the average; they're about 150 on the average now. But the farming that was done here when I first knew it, in the 1940s and '50s, at its best, was very good farming. In addition to the crops I named, we raised cattle, sheep and hogs, sometimes all three on the same farm. And every farm had a kitchen garden, a flock of chickens, meat hogs, and at least enough cows to supply the household with milk.
BERGER: You really had a working, home economy. How does the local tobacco economics fit with the global economics? How has that shift from local to global been experienced here?
BERRY: Tobacco acreages have declined here because the companies can fill their needs more cheaply elsewhere. The other products we grow are thrown into the world market to compete as best they can. With the help of subsidies, of course. In Kentucky we have always raised for export. One of this state's problems is that it hasn't added value to its agricultural products. I would say we are adding less now than ever. Louisville used to have two or three packing plants, for instance, and a stockyard. But no more. Most of the things that are produced in this state are shipped out, to have the value added elsewhere.
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together. The wives would go to town with eggs and cream once a week, buy groceries with the proceeds, and sometimes come home with money. Or they'd sell a few old hens, that sort of thing. So that's the first lesson to learn about agriculture, as far as I'm concerned: It needs a sound subsistence basis. People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities. That's what we're working for now. We want to develop a local food economy that local producers will supply and that the local consumers will support. It's ridiculous that we should be importing food into this state while our farmers are suffering.
BERGER: What are the models that are being used here in Kentucky to resist the economic pressure from the larger market?
BERRY: Community-supported agriculture, farmer's markets, direct marketing of meat, that sort of thing. There's an effort under way to develop a retail market for local produce. But this is hard to bring about.
The local landscape used to contribute food to Louisville. There was a significant amount of truck farming going in those days. That's gone. The stockyard's gone, the packinghouses are gone. So there's Louisville economically and culturally isolated from its rich agricultural landscape. Which is ridiculous.
BERGER: It's almost a process of reweaving the city life with its agricultural counterpart - its breadbasket.
BERRY: That's right - building commercial linkages between the city and its local countryside. And there are good reasons to do that. You've got the prospect, to begin with, of better, fresher food. You've got the possibility that consumers could influence production.
You have the possibility that urban consumers, by fulfilling their responsibility to local producers, can make secure their local food supply in the face of various threats. The paramount one, now on everybody's mind, is terrorism, but there are also the threats of epidemic and disease. In other words, the influence of local consumers could work, not only to maintain farming in the local landscape, but also to diversify it. And American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the present food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.
BERGER: That happened in Venezuela a few years ago. They had an oil producer's strike and people lost their gasoline supply. As a result they couldn't truck food anywhere. Whole communities were starving because they couldn't get access to food in stores, and they didn't have any capacity to feed themselves.
BERRY: What could be more terrible? There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. And from what I read, the curve of discovery and production of petroleum is about to decline. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
BERGER: In Life is a Miracle, you talk about cloning and genetic engineering. Genetically modified organisms are being promoted by agribusiness as "a way to feed the poor people of the world." What kind of ethical values should we be operating under when we think about cloning, GMO, and genetic engineering?
BERRY: The first ethical requirement is a decent suspicion of the claims of people who have something to sell. I'm not reading anything that suggests that genetic engineering is increasing production. Some recent things I've read suggest that productivity of Round-up ready soybeans is less than that of other varieties.
I think that the real reason for genetic engineering is to put absolute control of the food system into corporate hands. They don't want anybody - farmer or urban consumer or anybody else - to have anything whatsoever that they don't buy from a corporation at the corporation's price. In other words, economic totalitarianism is the goal. And I don't think the difference between political totalitarianism and economic totalitarianism is worth lingering over. If you're not economically free, if you don't have economic choices, you're not free.
BERGER: Your collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, has been published recently and you wrote an amazing set of articles for Orion about the national security agenda. As I read through sections of the Patriot Act, I was reminded of an old poem of yours titled "Do Not Be Ashamed." It says, "Though you have done nothing shameful,/ they will want you to be ashamed./ They will want you to kneel and weep/ and say you should have been like them."
BERRY: Well it's sort of normal to wish that things like that would not be applicable any longer and it's discouraging to see that they stay current. You wish that a book like The Unsettling of America would become obsolete, but it's more relevant now than it ever was. I don't think that national security can be achieved the way we're trying to achieve it. I don't think that being the strongest country in the world can necessarily make us the most secure country. And the fact remains that we're destroying our country ourselves.
It's easy to get the idea that we're stationing troops all over the world to protect our right to destroy our own country. I think that if you were seriously interested in security, you would make the country secure in its regions. You'd make it possible for the people to eat with far less public transportation. To do that you'd have to think in a different way. And we've got to face the likelihood that the people in charge are simply not capable of thinking that way. They've never thought in that way. Their doctrine is maximum force relentlessly applied. That's the doctrine of war. But it's also the doctrine of industrial agriculture. It's the way the industrial system works.
Look at the way we mine coal, for instance. Look at the way we're logging the forests. These are not sustainable procedures. They're not even conservative procedures. Wes Jackson has started calling this the "Prodigal Era." By that he means the era in which we're going to use up most of the topsoil and most of the fossil fuels.
BERGER: It seems like it always comes back eventually to the individual's choice. Does one choose to live in an economy of grace, based on generosity, or in an economy of scarcity based on acquisition?
BERRY: You have to realize that people are working very hard to remove that choice, to make it impossible to make such a choice. And they can do that simply by putting the land entirely under corporate control. It can happen. We're pretty well advanced into a corporate or capitalist totalitarianism. And it's a very strange thing to see happen, because we were lately so much afraid of communist totalitarianism. You can remove that choice we were talking about simply by making it impossible for small economic enterprises to survive.
You can use Wal-Mart as a weapon, for instance, to destroy the economic centers of small towns and small cities.
BERGER: The method of disarming such a weapon is carving out a local economy, a local space, and defending it?
BERRY: You've got to defend it; you've got to defend it economically. You've got to have some kind of fidelity between consumers and producers. The great corporations can use volume discounts to make it impossible for anybody else to be in business. And they are doing that.
BERGER: And you have that partnership of slightly increased unemployment - no benefits, poor wages - so it's a push and a pull. People are pushed into the arms of Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart is pulling them with cheap products produced in labor conditions that are exploitative.
BERRY: Healthcare and health insurance are so expensive that almost nobody can afford them. Most people can't.
BERGER: How do you see that playing out in terms of the rural poverty here?
BERRY: Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma we're in now. But you've got to see the connection between the poverty of the people and the impoverishment of the place. If you buy the products, and you don't give an adequate payment in money, then that means that the producer doesn't give adequate care.
The worst example of rural poverty we have right here is that of migrant farm workers. Well, they're "temporary workers," is the way to put that. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
BERGER: One ends up lacking affection. The migrant workers perhaps don't have a particular affection for the place other than just the work and the money, and the place and the people and economy never develops an investment in them because they're on their way out.
BERRY: That's right. Because they're temporary and replaceable. They're more readily replaceable than the slaves were. Also in Kentucky some corporations, Fruit of the Loom, for instance, have just left for places that are more exploitable than Kentucky. And then we have, west of here, the hog and chicken factories. That's another story of corporate abuse of places and people.
BERGER: This organic mechanism of resistance is trying to establish a community/regional area and beginning to develop alternative models of connection between the producer and the consumer, and begin to create some trading zones that are micro-trading zones.
BERRY: Yes. You can hope only to take it back a little at a time. There is no master plan. And I would be very suspicious of a master plan if I knew of one. It's got to happen a little at a time. You've got to confront the very difficult economic problem of making a local supply and a local demand come into existence simultaneously. I don't know that that's ever been done before in the way we will have to do it. And nobody knows how well it's going to succeed. But there are hopeful signs. It would be no trouble to take you and show you things that are working, but there are not enough of them yet.
BERGER: I want to ask you also about Harlan and Anna Hubbard, about the influence they've had on your life. And also the tension between the nomadic, pilgrim experiment that they launched off into versus rootedness, staying in one place, making a deep commitment to a particular area.
BERRY: Well, Harlan and Anna Hubbard were a married couple who began their life together by building a shanty boat and making a sort of epic drift down the rivers from Brent, Kentucky, above Cincinnati, to New Orleans and then on out into the bayous. In the early fifties, that journey having completed itself, they returned to Kentucky and bought a remote property, known as Payne Hollow, on the Ohio River in Trimble County. They built a house there and remained there, living mostly from their land and the river until they died.
They were musicians; they played duets every day of their life together. They played Mozart, Brahms, and Bach, those people. Harlan made prints, drawings, oils, and watercolors. And he was a writer. He published in his lifetime two wonderful books, one called Shantyboat that was an account of their trip down the rivers, and another called Payne Hollow, which is a distillation of their life at Payne Hollow. Their life was exemplary in a lot of ways. They did little harm. They lived abundantly, by their own efforts, and with a very small expenditure of money. In their frugal life they experienced much joy and made much beauty. They were teachers to a lot of people, and I'm one of them.
BERGER: How did you come to meet them, originally?
BERRY: By accident. A friend and I were on a canoe trip. We stopped there to see if we could get some drinkable water. We had replenished our water supply with the city water of Madison, Indiana, and we were finding it hard to swallow.
BERGER: I've gone back and looked again at some of the ways that Harlan engaged his spirituality or religion, his reading of the Bible, and how at one point I think he said something about how he experiences the Bible not as revelation but as confirmation, and that he comes to these lessons in his life, and is sometimes surprised that the Bible also has come to those lessons. And I find that sort of engagement with Christianity very appealing in the sense that it feels very authentic, and lets the faith be a humanizing faith.
BERRY: I think Harlan was a man with a very strong religious impulse, or religious nature. But I don't think the formal religions, the churches of this area, had much to offer him. It's hard to nail Harlan's religion down very firmly. I did the best I could in a chapter of my little book about Harlan and his work.
Thinking about Harlan as a religious man is quite different from thinking about, say, Thomas Merton as a religious man, because there's not a body of doctrine that Harlan subscribed to. He didn't endorse any creed. He was a man at large with his faculties and his gifts and his inspiration, his great relish of life and of his world, which he said was "heaven." You look to see what Harlan painted when he was "painting heaven" and you see landscapes of northern Kentucky and Payne Hollow.
BERGER: What was your connection with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived here in Kentucky?
BERRY: My connection with him was the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who has grown steadily in reputation since he died. Thomas Merton was interested in photography, and I guess that led him to Gene, who was no more conventionally religious than Harlan Hubbard. Gene was a wizard. He had an incredible gift of seeing and of picture-making. But let's don't say "incredible." It was perfectly credible when you saw what he could do. He had a very great gift. Merton could see that, and he made a friend of Gene. Gene and his wife Madelyn took Tanya and me down there twice.
Merton was a man who understood how to be a companion. He had a lot of humor, and I think he knew something about how to be happy or how to enjoy happiness when he had it. I liked him tremendously. He had a very lively countenance; a very bright, curious, amused eye.
When we went down there the first time, he just dropped it out casually, and I think with great secret amusement, that he was thinking about joining an Indian tribe. I think Merton was a profound Christian. Some people seem to think that when he went East he was abandoning his faith or his vocation. I don't think he was at all. His talks to religious groups in Alaska (Thomas Merton in Alaska) on that last trip were wonderful.
BERGER: He just seemed to be moving deeper and deeper, which in some ways made it easier to connect across a variety of spiritual expressions.
BERRY: He had, I think, a very fortunate impulse to reach out to other religions. And we need to pay attention to that, because there are people now who would carry us right into a religious war. That's a big problem, I think.
BERGER: The end of Christendom.
BERRY: Well, Christendom is all right, but it doesn't have to exclude everybody else. It doesn't have to go to war against them. And it doesn't have to be so stupid as to condemn other faiths that it doesn't know anything about.
BERGER: One of the lines in Life is a Miracle says, "It's impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced." It's a brilliant line!
BERRY: You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.
BERGER: Some of the work being done, more by poets rather than theologians, in reclaiming the roots of biblical language - digging in for what almost intuitively or artistically makes sense rather than the science of translation - seems to bring life back.
BERRY: If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens. If you don't have an economic practice, you don't have a practice. Christians conventionally think they've done enough when they've gone to the store and shopped. But that isn't an economic life. It isn't an economic practice. If you take seriously those passages in the scripture that say that we live by God's spirit and his breath, that we live, move, and have our being in God, the implications for the present economy are just devastating. Those passages call for an entirely generous and careful economic life.
BERGER: There are a number of explorations and economic models in the scriptures, in terms of the Sabbath economics, jubilee economics, but there's not enough experimenting among Christians or people of faith with alternative models of economics.
BERRY: There's a fairly explicit attempt back there in the early books of the Old Testament to see that property doesn't accumulate into too few hands. There's a real attempt at economic democracy. The idea of the Jubilee year is a deliberate affront to what we now call capitalism. There's a lot that's been said, not just in the Bible, but in the biblical tradition in literature, on the subject of usury. Dante was pretty explicit about it. It would put you in hell because it implied, among other things, a contempt for nature. It's an attempt to go around the natural world and human work and make money grow out of itself. It's an attempt to make value grow in the abstract, without work, without a real product. As lots of people have said, this goes against the real economy of the world. Ezra Pound has a great canto on usury, two of them as a matter of fact. "With usura hath no man a house of good stone." Nobody can have good things when you let money become its own value.
BERGER: As the epigraph to Citizenship Papers you quote 2 Peter 2:3, "And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you." I don't know that I have ever heard that phrase in this context. Suddenly it becomes revolutionary.
BERRY: Yes. The gospels, and sometimes the epistles, are pretty revolutionary. They propose a revolution of about 180 degrees.
One of the popular versions of the Bible has in the back an index of great stories and great chapters, and not one of them from the gospels.
But Christ was quite explicit, for instance, about his pacifism. You can't be more explicit than "Love your enemies." He did run those people out of the temple, but he didn't kill them.
People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We don't know anything about them. But he apparently didn't ask them what creed they subscribed to, or what their sexual preference was, or any of that. He fed them. He healed them. He forgave them. He is clear about sin, but he was also for forgiveness.
BERGER: Well there's so much in that way of engaging people - and the sin and forgiveness model's a good one - that is all about promoting life and opening up possibilities for life. It's never about shutting life down, closing people off, stopping them in their tracks. It's about opening up possibilities for people.
BERRY: That's right. That's right. A completely decent and authentic way of putting it, I think.
BERGER: Of all your writing, Life is a Miracle is the one that I think is the most brilliant because it calls into question the entire myth of progress.
BERRY: You know, it helps an old man to hear that!
BERGER: There are not enough people who are asking questions about the post-Enlightenment era, and the myth of progress and where it's taking us. Even our contemporary Christian mindset is just built on this myth that the world just keeps getting better and that the past was worse than the present.
BERRY: It gets taken for granted, that's why it's so easy to attack. People are handing out this stuff without thinking about it.
BERGER: How is that myth of progress operating on us as people, and what are the reasons for calling it into question, or subverting it?
BERRY: Well, that's two questions, isn't it? How does it operate on us? It substitutes this infinite advance toward better and better life in the material sense for the old pilgrimage, which you make by effort and grace, to become a better person. And I guess that's the reason you need to subvert it if you can. It takes people's minds off the important things. It becomes, at it's worst, a kind of determinism: All we have to do is just passively go along and things will get better and better, and we'll be happier and happier. That's why we need honest accounting.
I think all the time about the medical industry's emphasis on longevity. It's a substitution of quantity for any idea of completeness or wholeness or any sense of real fulfillment or real worth, so that you prolong life past the time where it's worth living, and then you brag about it. Without any acknowledgment of the possibility that somebody's life might become a burden, or that some things are worse than death.
BERGER: Death becomes simply an inconvenience to be shuddered away.
BERRY: As if it might not at some point be a great relief. As if it might not be a blessed deliverance.
All the questions about progress reduce to the question of what your measures are. And what is the measure of progress? It is possible to measure the progress of the last two or three hundred years in soil erosion. We can measure it in the rate of species extinction. We can measure it in pollution, in the toxicity of the world. Those things, like power and speed, are perfectly measurable.
But we need also to raise the questions that are not quantitative. How happy are people? What do we make of all this complaining? How healthy are people? How are love and beauty faring? What do we make of all this doctoring and medication that's going on all the time at such a great expense? That's not to deny that this so-called progress has given us things that are worth having. A hot bath every night is a good thing. I affirm that it is good, and wish to record my gratitude. There are other good things, but real harms also have been done.
BETH NEWBERRY: How does your identity as a writer connect to a region, a place, and a land?
BERRY: Well, I was born here, not in this house, but in this county. I grew up in these little towns, and in the countryside, on the farms. All my early memories are here. All the voices that surrounded me from the time I became able to hear were from here. Tanya and I came back here in 1964 and have lived here for 39 years, raised our children here. How could you draw a line separating this place and my identity? If you've known these places from your early youth, that means that you have a chance to know them in a way that other people never will.
I think often of the importance of a language spoken by people who are really local, who really know where they are and have lived there a long time; that language has a particularity about it that no language of bureaucracy or government or the university can ever have. It has a designating power that's utterly precise. Knowing the landscape in common and knowing it intimately, minutely, that has to be the basis of a language. That's where it starts, and you can raise it up from there, in successive levels of abstraction. But if you lose that power to particularize and designate precisely, in some sense you don't have a language anymore. So having a common tongue can mean that at one level you have the dictionary in common, you have the English vocabulary. But to have a common tongue in the sense that you can speak in detail, knowledgably and responsibly, about a well-known place, a well-known ecosystem and a well-known human community, is quite another thing.
BERGER: Is there a tension between self-sufficient communities and balkanism? Is there a danger of isolation in developing sustainable communities? If a community withdraws into itself so much, or becomes removed from a larger system of relationship, is there a danger of setting up enemy tensions between communities? Prejudice?
BERRY: I'll honor the question if you will acknowledge that this can happen in cities as well as in the country. People are always saying that these terrible things happen in little towns and rural communities, but of course they happen in cities just as readily, and for the same reasons. I suppose the direct way to deal with this is to point out that no community is or ever can be entirely self-sufficient. It's dependent on other communities, not only for supplies, but also for conversation and goodwill.
We're a pretty bad species in a lot of ways and in other ways a pretty good one. We can become a warrior civilization and live by piracy; on the other hand, we're capable of lovingkindness, of genuine affection, of generosity, of friendship, of peaceability, of forgiveness and gratitude. It's a question of where you want to put your influence, how you want to apply the little means that you have. It's too easy to say that country people are provincial and prejudiced, as if the worst things that humans are capable of hadn't also risen up in cosmopolitan, highly sophisticated, urban civilizations. That's just a passing of blame. If you can blame it all on people out in the provinces then you don't have to worry about what's going on in your urban neighborhood or in your urban soul.
One of the oldest human artifacts is the trade route. People were trading in obsidian and other rare things long before history. So we know there's going to be trade, we know that you can't isolate a culture and keep it going without cultural interchange. You can't live without influence, you can't live without change, you can't live without trade.
The serious question is whether you're going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It's a difficult business, being human.
Rose Marie Berger is an associate editor of Sojourners.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/11/rosen.htm
Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens?
Christine Rosen
On Wednesday, February 22, Christine Rosen discussed
this article on National Public Radio. Click here to hear the interview.
"The Image Culture" (Fall 2005)
"Playgrounds of the Self" (Summer 2005)
"The Age of Egocasting" (Fall 2004/Winter 2005)
"Our Cell Phones, Ourselves" (Summer 2004)
"The Democratization of Beauty" (Spring 2004)
"Romance in the Information Age" (Winter 2004)
"Why Not Artificial Wombs?" (Fall 2003)
"Eugenics—Sacred and Profane" (Summer 2003)
"Liberty, Privacy, and DNA Databases" (Spring 2003)
ne of the best recent advertising campaigns is for a new line of high-end washers and dryers made by General Electric. A supermodel and a dorky scientist collide on the street, falling unexpectedly in love, uniting brains and beauty, utility and aestheticism. The fruit of this union is the household appliance of the future—sophisticated, sleek, an electronic image of domestic bliss for our times. The perfect washer and dryer create the perfect family.
Given the great range and power of our contemporary technologies, it is hardly surprising that our expectations for modern machines are especially high at home. We seek movie-quality entertainment with our oversized, flat-panel, high-definition televisions. We seek business-quality communication by installing satellite-powered Internet access in our home offices. We seek restaurant-quality kitchens with our six-burner stovetops and cappuccino-making machines. We want the latest high-tech contrivance or convenience, hoping that it will make old jobs easier, or that it will fulfill new longings we never knew existed.
At the same time, some of the most remarkable household appliances are now so mundane that we rarely think of them as technologies at all. Consider—or reconsider—the washing machine. In many homes, it is relegated to the basement or some other hidden corner. It is used often but not given much attention by its owner unless it breaks. Most households still have reasonably priced models, almost always in white, so loud and unattractive that they are kept out of public view. Despite its humble status, however, the electric washing machine represents one of the more dramatic triumphs of technological ingenuity over physical labor. Before its invention in the twentieth century, women spent a full day or more every week performing the backbreaking task of laundering clothes. Hauling water (and the fuel to heat it), scrubbing, rinsing, wringing—one nineteenth-century American woman called laundry “the Herculean task which women all dread.” No one who had the choice would relinquish her washing machine and do laundry the old-fashioned way.
Today, technology aids us in performing even the simplest domestic tasks. We have vacuums, juicers, blenders, dishwashers, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, bread machines, coffee makers, ice cream makers, food processors, microwave ovens, and much more. Yet if our domestic machines are more advanced than ever, it is unclear by what standard we should judge their success.
Many people justify buying the latest household machine as a way to save time, but family life seems as rushed as ever. Judging by how Americans spend their money—on shelter magazines and kitchen gadgets and home furnishings—domesticity appears in robust health. Judging by the way Americans actually live, however, domesticity is in precipitous decline. Families sit together for meals much less often than they once did, and many homes exist in a state of near-chaos as working parents try to balance child-rearing, chores, long commutes, and work responsibilities. As Cheryl Mendelson, author of a recent book on housekeeping, observes, “Comfort and engagement at home have diminished to the point that even simple cleanliness and decent meals—let alone any deeper satisfactions—are no longer taken for granted in many middle-class homes.” Better domestic technologies have surely not produced a new age of domestic bliss.
Ironically, this decline in domestic competence comes at a time of great enthusiasm for “retro” appliances and other objects that evoke experiences that many Americans rarely have. We seem to value our domestic gadgets more and more even as we value domesticity less and less. Wealthy Americans can purchase an expensive, “old-fashioned” cast-iron Aga stove, but they cannot buy the experience it is intended to conjure: a cozy kitchen filled with the scents and signs of a person devoted to the domestic satisfaction of those who share a home. And middle-class Americans can buy machines that aim to make their domestic chores more pleasurable or efficient, but the ideal of transforming domestic labor into a “lifestyle” is a fantasy. The machines promise to restore peace and comfort to domestic life, but such nostalgia (whose literal meaning is “homesickness”) is not a recipe for domestic happiness.
The New Electric Servants
If we are nostalgic for the idea of old-fashioned hearth and home, a brief history of housework will quash any longing for doing things the old-fashioned way. It is difficult to overstate the extraordinary physical challenge household labor posed before the creation of modern domestic technology. Cooking, cleaning, laundering, and caring for children—almost exclusively the lot of women—required considerable endurance, and exhaustion and injury were common. During her visit to the United States in the 1830s, the British writer Frances Trollope was appalled to find the country’s married women suffering from pallid complexions and poor posture that she attributed to their ceaseless domestic toil (although women’s lot was not much better in Trollope’s native Britain).
Rapid changes occurred in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950. As historian Ruth Cowan notes, “Before 1860 almost all families did their household work in a manner that their forebears could have imitated”—that is, in a pre-industrial manner, with the benefit of certain simple tools but without the aid of sophisticated domestic technologies. By 1960, only those living in the poorest or most isolated communities lived this way. With minor modifications, improvements, and the addition of certain features, these early twentieth-century technologies are still the ones we use in the twenty-first century.
One of the first domestic technologies to influence the American home was the wood- or coal-burning cast-iron cooking stove, first patented and regularly produced in the 1830s and found in many American homes by the 1850s. Like many domestic technologies that would follow, the new stoves saved labor, but mostly male labor. Since stoves burned fuel more efficiently than the open fireplaces that Americans previously used to prepare food, the constant demand for fuel-gathering was reduced. But since fuel-gathering was traditionally a task for men and older children, the stoves did little to alleviate the demands on women’s time.
By the early twentieth century, many more new appliances were available. The first motorized dishwasher was exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and by 1908, appliance manufacturers were offering electric ranges and electric dishwashers. Electric refrigerators followed in 1914. By 1920, electric sewing machines, electric irons, and the earliest vacuum cleaners appeared on the market. By the early 1940s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than half of all American homes had washing machines and refrigerators, and nearly half had vacuum cleaners. The editor of Common Sense in the Household, an early aficionado of the vacuum, described this “miraculous” technology as follows: “It is like play to see ravelings, lint, feathers, and hair and other scraps drawn into the maw of the cleaner and vanish from sight.”
But as more appliances found their way into American homes, something else began to find its way out of it: servants. In the nineteenth century, many middle class homes employed a servant to help with laundry and housekeeping, and advertisements for cleaning products often featured images of servants in starched aprons industriously polishing floors. By the early 1920s, far fewer Americans employed a servant, and they had all but disappeared from advertisements, replaced by pictures of ecstatic wives using their new “electric servants”—appliances. A Hoover vacuum ad from the 1920s featured a glamorous flapper in drop-waist satin dress and pearls, her wavy bob slickly coiffed and her eyes fixed on the floor as she enthusiastically vacuums.
Many advertisements were overt in pushing their products as replacements for paid human labor. A 1938 ad for Hoover vacuums showed a housewife slumped in an armchair, broom by her side, thinking, “It’s so silly to go on wearing myself out when I can have a maid at 4d a day”—a “tireless, dependable maid” called “the Hoover!” In their 1929 study, Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd recorded the thoughts of one woman who found that “my labor-saving devices just about offset my lack of a maid.” But as the Lynds’ survey of Middletown housewives revealed, “a number feel that while the actual physical labor of housework is less ... rising standards in other respects use up the saved time.” This claim was echoed by other domestic experts of the era. Writing in 1919, domestic efficiency expert Christine Frederick noted, “Increasingly high standards of sanitation in the home have made cleaning one of the most important divisions of housework.” Nevertheless, Frederick decreed, “there is no question of the economy in replacing the human by the mechanical servant.”
American enthusiasm for new domestic appliances remained high into the 1950s, as soldiers returning from World War II married, set up house, and raised the baby boom generation. The automatic dishwasher was even a highlight of the impromptu debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow at the American National Exhibit in July 1959. When Nixon showed Khrushchev a model American kitchen, with its “newest model” dishwasher and a washing machine with a built-in panel of controls, Khrushchev responded quickly (and untruthfully), “We have such things.” When Nixon noted that such technologies made things easier for American housewives, Khrushchev said petulantly, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.” (Other attitudes toward women were evidently universal: at one point during their tour, when Khrushchev noticed Nixon admiring a group of young women modeling bathing suits, he said, “You are for the girls too.”)
By the 1950s, as Cowan notes, new technologies allowed the American housewife “to produce single-handedly what her counterpart of 1850 needed a staff of three or four to produce: a middle-class standard of health and cleanliness for herself, her spouse, and her children.” But her new electric servants did not easily translate into spending less time on housework, even if they reduced a great deal of the most back-breaking drudgery.
Object Love
During Khrushchev’s and Nixon’s “kitchen debate,” Khrushchev needled Nixon by asking, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”
Khrushchev might have been describing the modern American wedding registry. A tour of a typical registry reveals an extraordinary level of acquisitiveness for odd or luxuriously impractical machines: espresso makers costing thousands of dollars, exotic waffle irons, “professional-quality” pasta makers and even tiny blowtorches that allow budding dessert chefs to brown a perfect crème brûlée. The Williams-Sonoma kitchen company reportedly sells a $900 machine dedicated solely to the making of panini. Today’s in-the-know amateur cooks covet the Thermomix, a combination of mixer, blender, food processor, and miniature stove, unfortunately not available in stores. Purchasing one, as one New York Times food writer found, is akin to attending a series of bizarre, cult-like Tupperware parties.
Even practical technologies have become extremely fussy—and extremely expensive—in their modern incarnations. For $460, you can buy a vacuum that attaches to your waist with a padded belt for ease of carrying and features a HEPA filtration system. “With the Euroclean Hip Vac,” the product summary notes, “you not only vacuum more efficiently, you clean more effectively with the hospital-grade power of HEPA filtration to eliminate 99.99% of particles 0.3 microns and larger.” This expensive, hospital-grade technology is advertised in a catalogue, “Gaiam Harmony,” whose motto is “Simple choices make a difference.”
Unsurprisingly, much of our desire for domestic technology is focused on the kitchen, and high-end kitchen appliances are one of the most sought-after features in a home. The Market Forecaster report from Kitchen and Bath Business projected that Americans would spend $68.3 billion in 2005 to remodel their kitchens, and that “high-end [remodeling] jobs—those priced at $15,000 or more—are expected to increase almost 6 percent from 2004.” Scanning the luxury home and apartment listings in any urban newspaper, one finds a familiar litany of highlighted features: In Boston, for example, a “gourmet kitchen with granite countertops, Sub-Zero and Gaggenau appliances,” and in New York, “Sub-Zero refrigerators, Gaggenau appliances, granite countertops in the gourmet kitchen.” Similarly, the popular website Homeportfolio.com lists the brands of appliances considered desirable by design-conscious homeowners: Viking, Miele, Bosch, Wolf, Sub-Zero. A “coffee system” by Miele featured on the site—the price coyly “withheld by manufacturer”—likely costs more than a basic refrigerator and resembles a small spaceport.
One professional chef who occasionally cooks private dinners for wealthy patrons recently told the New York Times about the “spectacularly well-equipped kitchens I have seen, literally breathtaking. They’ve got these great big Viking or Garland or Aga stoves, gorgeous stone countertops ... multiple dishwashers, sometimes two, even three Sub-Zero refrigerators.... I walk into these kitchens and I just swoon.” This object love seems especially keen for those who seek the ultimate in modern domestic technology: “professional-grade” or “gourmet” appliances. Indeed, the word “gourmet” is now more frequently used as an adjective than a noun—to describe things in the home rather than the kind of person who might live there. Gourmet once meant a person who knew about and appreciated fine food and drink. Today gourmet is more likely to describe a state-of-the-art blender.
The Perfect Kitchen
One of the most popular professional-grade appliance purveyors, Gaggenau, offers sleek stainless-steel ovens and range-tops, some using the latest in induction-style heating elements, “the very best of today’s kitchen technology.” The company’s website even offers a movie depicting the illustrious history of Gaggenau, although it is too tasteful to provide prices for its stoves and ranges (if you have to ask, you can’t afford them). The history reads like a Grimms’ fairy tale: “Gaggenau is a small town at the northern edge of the Black Forest. Here, following the Thirty-Years’ War in 1683, Count Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden approved the establishment” of factories. (Left unmentioned in this history is the fact that the little town of Gaggenau was also the site of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.) More popular (and somewhat less expensive) are Viking ovens and range-tops, which promise six-burner, restaurant-quality cooking experiences and the ability to boil water in a minute or two.
If Gaggenau is the preferred professional-grade appliance of those with a modern aesthetic, and Viking is the one for those who want professional quality but can’t quite afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a stove, then the enameled cast-iron Aga stove is the favorite appliance of those seeking an old-fashioned relationship with cooking. A Swedish physicist invented the Aga, which stands for “Amalgamated Gas Accumulator,” in the 1920s, and until the late twentieth century Aga stoves were merely middle-class appliances, particularly popular in British kitchens. Today, an Aga is a financial and architectural commitment: Nearly five feet wide and weighing almost 1,300 pounds, a full-size Aga costs between $12,000 and $13,000, plus shipping, and must be installed (at additional cost) by a certified Aga installer, who often ends up calling in an engineer to insure that the kitchen floor is structurally capable of bearing the über-stove’s weight.
The Aga is also an emotional investment. As the company’s website notes, “Owning an Aga is more than just owning a range, its living a way of life.” Powered by natural gas or electricity, the Aga can remain on all the time, and with no dials or settings, it requires learning how to cook by moving food items around a series of differently heated ovens and burners. Aga’s marketing message doesn’t emphasize this complicated cooking process. Instead, a recent Aga print advertisement shows a beautiful woman with tousled dark hair, a come-hither smile and daring décolletage biting into a piece of well-roasted chicken. Behind her rests a gleaming black Aga stove and the headline: “Aga: Cook better. Eat better. Taste better. Live better.” Like other high-end appliance manufacturers, Aga plays on consumers’ desire for retro appliances that remind them of the “good old days” when homemade meals were a regular part of family life. The advertisement also helpfully stokes consumer envy by noting, “For eighty years, the legendary Aga cooker has been the choice of serious cooks, celebrities and even royalty in Europe. Now, it is the heart of the most beautiful kitchens in North America.”
If Aga has a rival, it is the La Cornue stove—“the Rolls Royce of stoves,” as one owner described it to the New York Times. “Vikings are good, but this one has all the beauty you would associate with a nineteenth-century kitchen in Provence, and it’s state of the art. It took us ten years to get it, and it has our names on it,” engraved on a brass plaque. Even more rarified is the Bonnet, a stove the New York Times described as “custom-made by hand in France in solid cast iron with an installer flown over to assemble it on site.” It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The desire to own such high-end appliances stems in part from that familiar impulse: envy. “I go to other people’s houses and come home and gnash my teeth,” one woman told the Times, describing her angst about her Aga-free kitchen. As one interior designer put it: “People want what the kitchen embodies: success. It could cost $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 in a minute.” The eager manipulation of this base emotion is nothing new, of course. Writing in 1957, sociologist David Riesman observed, “Americans resent being deprived of the things they are supposed to have, and advertising tempts us with the halo of association rather than with objects per se.” Appliance manufacturers are skilled at conjuring happy associations of home, hearth, and happiness, and print advertisements often feature images of convivial families and friends gathered in their well-appointed kitchen, surrounded by gleaming stainless-steel appliances.
The Aga and its kin are also clearly status markers. Commenting on stoves that looked like “nickel-plated nuclear reactors” and kitchens with vast “refrigeration complexes,” David Brooks skewered the pretensions of high-end appliance owners in his book Bobos in Paradise. The bobo (bourgeois bohemian) kitchen is a “culinary playground providing its owners with a series of top-of-the-line peak experiences,” Brooks wrote. And with this comes an undercurrent of the worst sort of reverse snobbery. “Spending on conspicuous displays is evil,” Brooks notes, “but it’s egalitarian to spend money on parts of the house that would previously have been used by the servants.”
Such high-end appliances promise to help us overcome our weaknesses. Whether our failing is sloth, inhibition, ineptitude, or simply lack of discipline, the technologies will make it easier to master our domestic vices and cultivate our domestic virtues. Don’t have time to bake bread from scratch? The bread machine will do it for you. Too busy to make a meal from scratch? Buy the Advantium, General Electric’s super-fast cooking oven, which costs around $1,500. On its website, GE promotes the Advantium as a “revolutionary breakthrough in cooking technology,” although the foods it promises to cook quickly include prepackaged frozen meals such as pepperoni pizza and breaded seafood filets. As one press release notes: “Whether your schedule is slightly hectic, very busy, or out of control, there is a GE cooking product to fit your needs. The latest cooking products are so easy to use and give time-crunched consumers the ability to prepare and enjoy beautifully cooked foods fast, faster or fastest.” In other words: the right stove will help people get control of their lives.
Perhaps this is why high-end appliance manufacturers use epic language to describe their wares: to fortify our belief in the technology’s ability to conquer life’s crises and unleash life’s pleasures. We live in an age when appliances have histories and legends, and when we are expected to value the domestic technologies we purchase for more than their practical merit. Buying a particular stove like the Aga is buying into a particular “lifestyle,” complete with magazines and social networks. As a result, domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning are not merely the drudgery of daily life, they are also extensions of the self.
Of course, buying these high-end products is beyond the economic reach of most middle-class consumers. But the ethos they embody—domestic technology as lifestyle—is not. This is why many lower-end brands eventually mimic the appeal of their more expensive counterparts. Even at Target and Wal-Mart, one is made to believe that buying the right machine can transform our domestic labors into domestic pleasures, and that we can enjoy the refined tastes of the wealthy at prices normal people can afford. Manufacturers of affordable appliances used to emphasize the reliability and practicality of their wares; today they are more likely to mimic the language of high-end appliances, with references to the professional-quality features and tasteful aesthetic of even the lowliest blender.
Interestingly enough, the most expensive, sophisticated appliances are often the least reliable. According to Consumer Reports, “Pro-style models [of ovens and range-tops] such as the Viking...were among the lowest scorers, despite their high-heat burners.” One Viking stove selling for $4,000 was deemed to have a “smallish oven and [was] among the least effective at self-cleaning.” As for reliability, Consumer Reports survey data “show that Viking and Thermador gas ranges...have been repair-prone,” and that “more firepower doesn’t necessarily mean better cooking.” Same story for refrigerators: Consumer Reports gave the Sub-Zero 650/G model (which retails for around $6,000) a rating of “fair” for ease of use, noting that it “lacks some features you’ll find on lower-priced models.” And like Viking, the brand has a poor record of reliability: “Sub-Zero has been the most repair-prone brand of top- and bottom-freezer refrigerators,” and Sub-Zero company’s overall repair history is 28 percent, compared to 7 percent for refrigerators manufactured by Whirlpool, which sell for $800 to 1,000. The conclusion: “Price, styling, or the word ‘professional’ are no guarantee of excellent performance or durability.” The image of domestic perfection is sometimes far from the reality.
The Empty Kitchen
So what benefits do these appliances bring? Do more advanced domestic technologies save us time, make us happier, expand life’s pleasures, or liberate us from life’s drudgeries?
In a 2004 article in the British Journal of Sociology, researchers Michael Bittman, James Rice, and Judy Wajcman argue that most domestic appliances “do not save women any time”—and women, alas, are still the ones who perform the bulk of household duties. The authors speculate that one reason for this failure is that the quantity and quality of what is produced in the home has increased—that is, families are enjoying “better meals, cleaner clothes, or more attractive gardens.” Our domestic technologies might make us more efficient, but they also impose higher standards of domestic performance.
In some ways, this is obviously correct. Even the hardest working homemaker and her fleet of servants in ages past could never match the cleanliness made possible by certain modern machines. In the war against dirt and germs, times are clearly better. But the modern kitchen, for all its progress, tells a far more ambiguous story, one that is deeply revealing about the relationship between domestic technology and domestic happiness.
“It must be remembered,” wrote Isabella Beeton in 1869, that the kitchen “is the great laboratory of every household, and that much of the ‘weal or woe,’ as far as regards bodily health, depends upon the nature of the preparations concocted within its walls.” Today, the laboratory is filled with the finest equipment, but there is often no one to use it. Despite purchasing more and better appliances, home-cooking and family dinners are both racing toward extinction. American Demographics reports that between 1985 and 1995, “the number of hours women spent cooking per week dropped 23 percent, and the number of hours men cooked dropped by 21 percent.” By 1997, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that more than one in five households used their (non-microwave) oven “less than once weekly” and only 42 percent “make a hot meal once a day.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditures survey, the average family spent $3,129 on food at home and $2,211 on food away from home in 2003. Wealthier families (those with incomes of $70,000 or above) spend even more on food away from home—nearly half (49.2 percent) of their household food budgets. Another American Demographics article noted the trend toward purchasing “home-meal replacement options,” such as the prepared foods one can buy at the supermarket. “Americans increasingly prefer meals they can make quickly and eat on the run,” the article noted. “Almost half of weekday meals today (44 percent) are prepared in less than 30 minutes.”
Eating together is now so unusual that the Nickelodeon television network teamed up with the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) and declared the fourth Monday in September to be “Family Day—A Day to Eat Dinner With Your Children.” Families pledge to eat together and turn off their television sets in the hope of sparking spontaneous dinner conversation (the irony of a television network urging families to turn off their TVs and have dinner together was evidently lost on organizers of the event).
Changing family structure has something to do with this transformation of domestic life. Most women now work outside the home, and working parents with children find they have little time to prepare regular meals. Instead, we eat on the run, with one-fifth of all meals now consumed in a car. Commercial food purveyors are responding to the demand for car-friendly convenience by creating handheld products, such as scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese that come in push-up tubes. Supermarkets have set up triage-like “meal solution centers” that offer precooked meals “just like Mom used to make.” Meals have become modern problems in need of solutions. As historian and designer Vicki Matranga aptly put it, “Americans now want convenience. The kitchen is a showplace where you heat up your food in the microwave.” The perfect kitchen is also the empty kitchen.
Insuring Domestic Tranquility
In an earlier era, domestic doyennes like Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, authors of The American Woman’s Home (1869), encouraged women to view housework as both science and art, and emphasized women’s moral responsibility for keeping a clean and well-functioning home. They were willing to criticize American women—sometimes harshly—for failing in their domestic duties: “The American table, taken as a whole, is inferior to that of England or France,” they wrote. “The management of food is nowhere in the world, perhaps, more slovenly and wasteful.”
If there is a modern heiress to Beecher and Stowe, it is Cheryl Mendelson. “Although a large, enthusiastic minority of home cooks grow more and more sophisticated,” she writes, “the majority become ever more de-skilled.” This is echoed by the kitchen-design website, Homeportfolios.com, which reports that “despite a deluge of cooking programs, celebrity chefs, and state-of-the-art appliances, on average, we’re preparing fewer meals than generations past.” But instead of lamenting this fact, it stays upbeat. “No matter,” reassures the site. “The kitchen still draws us in with its irresistible charm.” This is like saying the bedroom is a comfortable place for insomniacs.
The result is a great disconnect between our domestic fantasies and our domestic reality, between the high-tech façade with its image of home and hearth and the kind of lives we actually live. We have fancier kitchens but fewer family dinners. We have gourmet cooking machines that sit largely unused and oversized freezers filled with microwave dinners. We have high hopes but limited energy for performing domestic labor, and we tend to devalue unpaid labor in the home despite its positive effects on family life. We purchase increasingly specialized, professional-quality domestic appliances at a time when our desire to use them regularly is waning.
Wealthy Americans in particular buy Viking stoves hoping that the right machine will make them want to cook, failing to recognize (or admit) that it is not the technology they lack but the will. By spending so much money on machines, they seek to buy domestic happiness on the cheap. And the makers of these machines ingeniously appeal to this longing, evoking both nostalgia for a lost era of domesticity and the dream of automating all our domestic labors.
Of course, neither cultural nostalgia nor technological progress can restore the domestic tranquility we feel we have lost. What is necessary is a sober defense of the worth of domestic life, including those labors—chopping vegetables, sweeping a floor, setting a table—that are hardly glorious in themselves but essential parts of the domestic satisfactions we still seem to want. “As people turn more and more to outside institutions to have their needs met (for food, comfort, clean laundry, relaxation, entertainment, society, rest),” writes Mendelson, “domestic skills and expectations further diminish, in turn decreasing the chance that people’s homes can satisfy their needs. The result is far too many people who long for home even though they seem to have one.”
Unlike some feminist critics of domesticity, who argue for the lowering of domestic standards—Cowan wants to overthrow the “senseless tyranny of spotless shirts and immaculate floors,” for example—Mendelson and others seek to elevate the domestic sphere in a culture that too often denigrates or neglects it. They hope to appeal to the deeply-felt yearning most people have for a comfortable and well-functioning home life. And perhaps, in a strange sense, they want to make us worthy of our fancy machines, which means recognizing the permanent limits of domestic technology to produce domestic happiness. Not a brilliant way to sell the newest appliances, but a recipe for learning again how—and why—to use the ones we already have.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her new book My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood was just published by PublicAffairs Books.
Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens?
Christine Rosen
On Wednesday, February 22, Christine Rosen discussed
this article on National Public Radio. Click here to hear the interview.
"The Image Culture" (Fall 2005)
"Playgrounds of the Self" (Summer 2005)
"The Age of Egocasting" (Fall 2004/Winter 2005)
"Our Cell Phones, Ourselves" (Summer 2004)
"The Democratization of Beauty" (Spring 2004)
"Romance in the Information Age" (Winter 2004)
"Why Not Artificial Wombs?" (Fall 2003)
"Eugenics—Sacred and Profane" (Summer 2003)
"Liberty, Privacy, and DNA Databases" (Spring 2003)
ne of the best recent advertising campaigns is for a new line of high-end washers and dryers made by General Electric. A supermodel and a dorky scientist collide on the street, falling unexpectedly in love, uniting brains and beauty, utility and aestheticism. The fruit of this union is the household appliance of the future—sophisticated, sleek, an electronic image of domestic bliss for our times. The perfect washer and dryer create the perfect family.
Given the great range and power of our contemporary technologies, it is hardly surprising that our expectations for modern machines are especially high at home. We seek movie-quality entertainment with our oversized, flat-panel, high-definition televisions. We seek business-quality communication by installing satellite-powered Internet access in our home offices. We seek restaurant-quality kitchens with our six-burner stovetops and cappuccino-making machines. We want the latest high-tech contrivance or convenience, hoping that it will make old jobs easier, or that it will fulfill new longings we never knew existed.
At the same time, some of the most remarkable household appliances are now so mundane that we rarely think of them as technologies at all. Consider—or reconsider—the washing machine. In many homes, it is relegated to the basement or some other hidden corner. It is used often but not given much attention by its owner unless it breaks. Most households still have reasonably priced models, almost always in white, so loud and unattractive that they are kept out of public view. Despite its humble status, however, the electric washing machine represents one of the more dramatic triumphs of technological ingenuity over physical labor. Before its invention in the twentieth century, women spent a full day or more every week performing the backbreaking task of laundering clothes. Hauling water (and the fuel to heat it), scrubbing, rinsing, wringing—one nineteenth-century American woman called laundry “the Herculean task which women all dread.” No one who had the choice would relinquish her washing machine and do laundry the old-fashioned way.
Today, technology aids us in performing even the simplest domestic tasks. We have vacuums, juicers, blenders, dishwashers, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, bread machines, coffee makers, ice cream makers, food processors, microwave ovens, and much more. Yet if our domestic machines are more advanced than ever, it is unclear by what standard we should judge their success.
Many people justify buying the latest household machine as a way to save time, but family life seems as rushed as ever. Judging by how Americans spend their money—on shelter magazines and kitchen gadgets and home furnishings—domesticity appears in robust health. Judging by the way Americans actually live, however, domesticity is in precipitous decline. Families sit together for meals much less often than they once did, and many homes exist in a state of near-chaos as working parents try to balance child-rearing, chores, long commutes, and work responsibilities. As Cheryl Mendelson, author of a recent book on housekeeping, observes, “Comfort and engagement at home have diminished to the point that even simple cleanliness and decent meals—let alone any deeper satisfactions—are no longer taken for granted in many middle-class homes.” Better domestic technologies have surely not produced a new age of domestic bliss.
Ironically, this decline in domestic competence comes at a time of great enthusiasm for “retro” appliances and other objects that evoke experiences that many Americans rarely have. We seem to value our domestic gadgets more and more even as we value domesticity less and less. Wealthy Americans can purchase an expensive, “old-fashioned” cast-iron Aga stove, but they cannot buy the experience it is intended to conjure: a cozy kitchen filled with the scents and signs of a person devoted to the domestic satisfaction of those who share a home. And middle-class Americans can buy machines that aim to make their domestic chores more pleasurable or efficient, but the ideal of transforming domestic labor into a “lifestyle” is a fantasy. The machines promise to restore peace and comfort to domestic life, but such nostalgia (whose literal meaning is “homesickness”) is not a recipe for domestic happiness.
The New Electric Servants
If we are nostalgic for the idea of old-fashioned hearth and home, a brief history of housework will quash any longing for doing things the old-fashioned way. It is difficult to overstate the extraordinary physical challenge household labor posed before the creation of modern domestic technology. Cooking, cleaning, laundering, and caring for children—almost exclusively the lot of women—required considerable endurance, and exhaustion and injury were common. During her visit to the United States in the 1830s, the British writer Frances Trollope was appalled to find the country’s married women suffering from pallid complexions and poor posture that she attributed to their ceaseless domestic toil (although women’s lot was not much better in Trollope’s native Britain).
Rapid changes occurred in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950. As historian Ruth Cowan notes, “Before 1860 almost all families did their household work in a manner that their forebears could have imitated”—that is, in a pre-industrial manner, with the benefit of certain simple tools but without the aid of sophisticated domestic technologies. By 1960, only those living in the poorest or most isolated communities lived this way. With minor modifications, improvements, and the addition of certain features, these early twentieth-century technologies are still the ones we use in the twenty-first century.
One of the first domestic technologies to influence the American home was the wood- or coal-burning cast-iron cooking stove, first patented and regularly produced in the 1830s and found in many American homes by the 1850s. Like many domestic technologies that would follow, the new stoves saved labor, but mostly male labor. Since stoves burned fuel more efficiently than the open fireplaces that Americans previously used to prepare food, the constant demand for fuel-gathering was reduced. But since fuel-gathering was traditionally a task for men and older children, the stoves did little to alleviate the demands on women’s time.
By the early twentieth century, many more new appliances were available. The first motorized dishwasher was exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and by 1908, appliance manufacturers were offering electric ranges and electric dishwashers. Electric refrigerators followed in 1914. By 1920, electric sewing machines, electric irons, and the earliest vacuum cleaners appeared on the market. By the early 1940s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than half of all American homes had washing machines and refrigerators, and nearly half had vacuum cleaners. The editor of Common Sense in the Household, an early aficionado of the vacuum, described this “miraculous” technology as follows: “It is like play to see ravelings, lint, feathers, and hair and other scraps drawn into the maw of the cleaner and vanish from sight.”
But as more appliances found their way into American homes, something else began to find its way out of it: servants. In the nineteenth century, many middle class homes employed a servant to help with laundry and housekeeping, and advertisements for cleaning products often featured images of servants in starched aprons industriously polishing floors. By the early 1920s, far fewer Americans employed a servant, and they had all but disappeared from advertisements, replaced by pictures of ecstatic wives using their new “electric servants”—appliances. A Hoover vacuum ad from the 1920s featured a glamorous flapper in drop-waist satin dress and pearls, her wavy bob slickly coiffed and her eyes fixed on the floor as she enthusiastically vacuums.
Many advertisements were overt in pushing their products as replacements for paid human labor. A 1938 ad for Hoover vacuums showed a housewife slumped in an armchair, broom by her side, thinking, “It’s so silly to go on wearing myself out when I can have a maid at 4d a day”—a “tireless, dependable maid” called “the Hoover!” In their 1929 study, Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd recorded the thoughts of one woman who found that “my labor-saving devices just about offset my lack of a maid.” But as the Lynds’ survey of Middletown housewives revealed, “a number feel that while the actual physical labor of housework is less ... rising standards in other respects use up the saved time.” This claim was echoed by other domestic experts of the era. Writing in 1919, domestic efficiency expert Christine Frederick noted, “Increasingly high standards of sanitation in the home have made cleaning one of the most important divisions of housework.” Nevertheless, Frederick decreed, “there is no question of the economy in replacing the human by the mechanical servant.”
American enthusiasm for new domestic appliances remained high into the 1950s, as soldiers returning from World War II married, set up house, and raised the baby boom generation. The automatic dishwasher was even a highlight of the impromptu debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow at the American National Exhibit in July 1959. When Nixon showed Khrushchev a model American kitchen, with its “newest model” dishwasher and a washing machine with a built-in panel of controls, Khrushchev responded quickly (and untruthfully), “We have such things.” When Nixon noted that such technologies made things easier for American housewives, Khrushchev said petulantly, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.” (Other attitudes toward women were evidently universal: at one point during their tour, when Khrushchev noticed Nixon admiring a group of young women modeling bathing suits, he said, “You are for the girls too.”)
By the 1950s, as Cowan notes, new technologies allowed the American housewife “to produce single-handedly what her counterpart of 1850 needed a staff of three or four to produce: a middle-class standard of health and cleanliness for herself, her spouse, and her children.” But her new electric servants did not easily translate into spending less time on housework, even if they reduced a great deal of the most back-breaking drudgery.
Object Love
During Khrushchev’s and Nixon’s “kitchen debate,” Khrushchev needled Nixon by asking, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”
Khrushchev might have been describing the modern American wedding registry. A tour of a typical registry reveals an extraordinary level of acquisitiveness for odd or luxuriously impractical machines: espresso makers costing thousands of dollars, exotic waffle irons, “professional-quality” pasta makers and even tiny blowtorches that allow budding dessert chefs to brown a perfect crème brûlée. The Williams-Sonoma kitchen company reportedly sells a $900 machine dedicated solely to the making of panini. Today’s in-the-know amateur cooks covet the Thermomix, a combination of mixer, blender, food processor, and miniature stove, unfortunately not available in stores. Purchasing one, as one New York Times food writer found, is akin to attending a series of bizarre, cult-like Tupperware parties.
Even practical technologies have become extremely fussy—and extremely expensive—in their modern incarnations. For $460, you can buy a vacuum that attaches to your waist with a padded belt for ease of carrying and features a HEPA filtration system. “With the Euroclean Hip Vac,” the product summary notes, “you not only vacuum more efficiently, you clean more effectively with the hospital-grade power of HEPA filtration to eliminate 99.99% of particles 0.3 microns and larger.” This expensive, hospital-grade technology is advertised in a catalogue, “Gaiam Harmony,” whose motto is “Simple choices make a difference.”
Unsurprisingly, much of our desire for domestic technology is focused on the kitchen, and high-end kitchen appliances are one of the most sought-after features in a home. The Market Forecaster report from Kitchen and Bath Business projected that Americans would spend $68.3 billion in 2005 to remodel their kitchens, and that “high-end [remodeling] jobs—those priced at $15,000 or more—are expected to increase almost 6 percent from 2004.” Scanning the luxury home and apartment listings in any urban newspaper, one finds a familiar litany of highlighted features: In Boston, for example, a “gourmet kitchen with granite countertops, Sub-Zero and Gaggenau appliances,” and in New York, “Sub-Zero refrigerators, Gaggenau appliances, granite countertops in the gourmet kitchen.” Similarly, the popular website Homeportfolio.com lists the brands of appliances considered desirable by design-conscious homeowners: Viking, Miele, Bosch, Wolf, Sub-Zero. A “coffee system” by Miele featured on the site—the price coyly “withheld by manufacturer”—likely costs more than a basic refrigerator and resembles a small spaceport.
One professional chef who occasionally cooks private dinners for wealthy patrons recently told the New York Times about the “spectacularly well-equipped kitchens I have seen, literally breathtaking. They’ve got these great big Viking or Garland or Aga stoves, gorgeous stone countertops ... multiple dishwashers, sometimes two, even three Sub-Zero refrigerators.... I walk into these kitchens and I just swoon.” This object love seems especially keen for those who seek the ultimate in modern domestic technology: “professional-grade” or “gourmet” appliances. Indeed, the word “gourmet” is now more frequently used as an adjective than a noun—to describe things in the home rather than the kind of person who might live there. Gourmet once meant a person who knew about and appreciated fine food and drink. Today gourmet is more likely to describe a state-of-the-art blender.
The Perfect Kitchen
One of the most popular professional-grade appliance purveyors, Gaggenau, offers sleek stainless-steel ovens and range-tops, some using the latest in induction-style heating elements, “the very best of today’s kitchen technology.” The company’s website even offers a movie depicting the illustrious history of Gaggenau, although it is too tasteful to provide prices for its stoves and ranges (if you have to ask, you can’t afford them). The history reads like a Grimms’ fairy tale: “Gaggenau is a small town at the northern edge of the Black Forest. Here, following the Thirty-Years’ War in 1683, Count Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden approved the establishment” of factories. (Left unmentioned in this history is the fact that the little town of Gaggenau was also the site of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.) More popular (and somewhat less expensive) are Viking ovens and range-tops, which promise six-burner, restaurant-quality cooking experiences and the ability to boil water in a minute or two.
If Gaggenau is the preferred professional-grade appliance of those with a modern aesthetic, and Viking is the one for those who want professional quality but can’t quite afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a stove, then the enameled cast-iron Aga stove is the favorite appliance of those seeking an old-fashioned relationship with cooking. A Swedish physicist invented the Aga, which stands for “Amalgamated Gas Accumulator,” in the 1920s, and until the late twentieth century Aga stoves were merely middle-class appliances, particularly popular in British kitchens. Today, an Aga is a financial and architectural commitment: Nearly five feet wide and weighing almost 1,300 pounds, a full-size Aga costs between $12,000 and $13,000, plus shipping, and must be installed (at additional cost) by a certified Aga installer, who often ends up calling in an engineer to insure that the kitchen floor is structurally capable of bearing the über-stove’s weight.
The Aga is also an emotional investment. As the company’s website notes, “Owning an Aga is more than just owning a range, its living a way of life.” Powered by natural gas or electricity, the Aga can remain on all the time, and with no dials or settings, it requires learning how to cook by moving food items around a series of differently heated ovens and burners. Aga’s marketing message doesn’t emphasize this complicated cooking process. Instead, a recent Aga print advertisement shows a beautiful woman with tousled dark hair, a come-hither smile and daring décolletage biting into a piece of well-roasted chicken. Behind her rests a gleaming black Aga stove and the headline: “Aga: Cook better. Eat better. Taste better. Live better.” Like other high-end appliance manufacturers, Aga plays on consumers’ desire for retro appliances that remind them of the “good old days” when homemade meals were a regular part of family life. The advertisement also helpfully stokes consumer envy by noting, “For eighty years, the legendary Aga cooker has been the choice of serious cooks, celebrities and even royalty in Europe. Now, it is the heart of the most beautiful kitchens in North America.”
If Aga has a rival, it is the La Cornue stove—“the Rolls Royce of stoves,” as one owner described it to the New York Times. “Vikings are good, but this one has all the beauty you would associate with a nineteenth-century kitchen in Provence, and it’s state of the art. It took us ten years to get it, and it has our names on it,” engraved on a brass plaque. Even more rarified is the Bonnet, a stove the New York Times described as “custom-made by hand in France in solid cast iron with an installer flown over to assemble it on site.” It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The desire to own such high-end appliances stems in part from that familiar impulse: envy. “I go to other people’s houses and come home and gnash my teeth,” one woman told the Times, describing her angst about her Aga-free kitchen. As one interior designer put it: “People want what the kitchen embodies: success. It could cost $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 in a minute.” The eager manipulation of this base emotion is nothing new, of course. Writing in 1957, sociologist David Riesman observed, “Americans resent being deprived of the things they are supposed to have, and advertising tempts us with the halo of association rather than with objects per se.” Appliance manufacturers are skilled at conjuring happy associations of home, hearth, and happiness, and print advertisements often feature images of convivial families and friends gathered in their well-appointed kitchen, surrounded by gleaming stainless-steel appliances.
The Aga and its kin are also clearly status markers. Commenting on stoves that looked like “nickel-plated nuclear reactors” and kitchens with vast “refrigeration complexes,” David Brooks skewered the pretensions of high-end appliance owners in his book Bobos in Paradise. The bobo (bourgeois bohemian) kitchen is a “culinary playground providing its owners with a series of top-of-the-line peak experiences,” Brooks wrote. And with this comes an undercurrent of the worst sort of reverse snobbery. “Spending on conspicuous displays is evil,” Brooks notes, “but it’s egalitarian to spend money on parts of the house that would previously have been used by the servants.”
Such high-end appliances promise to help us overcome our weaknesses. Whether our failing is sloth, inhibition, ineptitude, or simply lack of discipline, the technologies will make it easier to master our domestic vices and cultivate our domestic virtues. Don’t have time to bake bread from scratch? The bread machine will do it for you. Too busy to make a meal from scratch? Buy the Advantium, General Electric’s super-fast cooking oven, which costs around $1,500. On its website, GE promotes the Advantium as a “revolutionary breakthrough in cooking technology,” although the foods it promises to cook quickly include prepackaged frozen meals such as pepperoni pizza and breaded seafood filets. As one press release notes: “Whether your schedule is slightly hectic, very busy, or out of control, there is a GE cooking product to fit your needs. The latest cooking products are so easy to use and give time-crunched consumers the ability to prepare and enjoy beautifully cooked foods fast, faster or fastest.” In other words: the right stove will help people get control of their lives.
Perhaps this is why high-end appliance manufacturers use epic language to describe their wares: to fortify our belief in the technology’s ability to conquer life’s crises and unleash life’s pleasures. We live in an age when appliances have histories and legends, and when we are expected to value the domestic technologies we purchase for more than their practical merit. Buying a particular stove like the Aga is buying into a particular “lifestyle,” complete with magazines and social networks. As a result, domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning are not merely the drudgery of daily life, they are also extensions of the self.
Of course, buying these high-end products is beyond the economic reach of most middle-class consumers. But the ethos they embody—domestic technology as lifestyle—is not. This is why many lower-end brands eventually mimic the appeal of their more expensive counterparts. Even at Target and Wal-Mart, one is made to believe that buying the right machine can transform our domestic labors into domestic pleasures, and that we can enjoy the refined tastes of the wealthy at prices normal people can afford. Manufacturers of affordable appliances used to emphasize the reliability and practicality of their wares; today they are more likely to mimic the language of high-end appliances, with references to the professional-quality features and tasteful aesthetic of even the lowliest blender.
Interestingly enough, the most expensive, sophisticated appliances are often the least reliable. According to Consumer Reports, “Pro-style models [of ovens and range-tops] such as the Viking...were among the lowest scorers, despite their high-heat burners.” One Viking stove selling for $4,000 was deemed to have a “smallish oven and [was] among the least effective at self-cleaning.” As for reliability, Consumer Reports survey data “show that Viking and Thermador gas ranges...have been repair-prone,” and that “more firepower doesn’t necessarily mean better cooking.” Same story for refrigerators: Consumer Reports gave the Sub-Zero 650/G model (which retails for around $6,000) a rating of “fair” for ease of use, noting that it “lacks some features you’ll find on lower-priced models.” And like Viking, the brand has a poor record of reliability: “Sub-Zero has been the most repair-prone brand of top- and bottom-freezer refrigerators,” and Sub-Zero company’s overall repair history is 28 percent, compared to 7 percent for refrigerators manufactured by Whirlpool, which sell for $800 to 1,000. The conclusion: “Price, styling, or the word ‘professional’ are no guarantee of excellent performance or durability.” The image of domestic perfection is sometimes far from the reality.
The Empty Kitchen
So what benefits do these appliances bring? Do more advanced domestic technologies save us time, make us happier, expand life’s pleasures, or liberate us from life’s drudgeries?
In a 2004 article in the British Journal of Sociology, researchers Michael Bittman, James Rice, and Judy Wajcman argue that most domestic appliances “do not save women any time”—and women, alas, are still the ones who perform the bulk of household duties. The authors speculate that one reason for this failure is that the quantity and quality of what is produced in the home has increased—that is, families are enjoying “better meals, cleaner clothes, or more attractive gardens.” Our domestic technologies might make us more efficient, but they also impose higher standards of domestic performance.
In some ways, this is obviously correct. Even the hardest working homemaker and her fleet of servants in ages past could never match the cleanliness made possible by certain modern machines. In the war against dirt and germs, times are clearly better. But the modern kitchen, for all its progress, tells a far more ambiguous story, one that is deeply revealing about the relationship between domestic technology and domestic happiness.
“It must be remembered,” wrote Isabella Beeton in 1869, that the kitchen “is the great laboratory of every household, and that much of the ‘weal or woe,’ as far as regards bodily health, depends upon the nature of the preparations concocted within its walls.” Today, the laboratory is filled with the finest equipment, but there is often no one to use it. Despite purchasing more and better appliances, home-cooking and family dinners are both racing toward extinction. American Demographics reports that between 1985 and 1995, “the number of hours women spent cooking per week dropped 23 percent, and the number of hours men cooked dropped by 21 percent.” By 1997, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that more than one in five households used their (non-microwave) oven “less than once weekly” and only 42 percent “make a hot meal once a day.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditures survey, the average family spent $3,129 on food at home and $2,211 on food away from home in 2003. Wealthier families (those with incomes of $70,000 or above) spend even more on food away from home—nearly half (49.2 percent) of their household food budgets. Another American Demographics article noted the trend toward purchasing “home-meal replacement options,” such as the prepared foods one can buy at the supermarket. “Americans increasingly prefer meals they can make quickly and eat on the run,” the article noted. “Almost half of weekday meals today (44 percent) are prepared in less than 30 minutes.”
Eating together is now so unusual that the Nickelodeon television network teamed up with the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) and declared the fourth Monday in September to be “Family Day—A Day to Eat Dinner With Your Children.” Families pledge to eat together and turn off their television sets in the hope of sparking spontaneous dinner conversation (the irony of a television network urging families to turn off their TVs and have dinner together was evidently lost on organizers of the event).
Changing family structure has something to do with this transformation of domestic life. Most women now work outside the home, and working parents with children find they have little time to prepare regular meals. Instead, we eat on the run, with one-fifth of all meals now consumed in a car. Commercial food purveyors are responding to the demand for car-friendly convenience by creating handheld products, such as scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese that come in push-up tubes. Supermarkets have set up triage-like “meal solution centers” that offer precooked meals “just like Mom used to make.” Meals have become modern problems in need of solutions. As historian and designer Vicki Matranga aptly put it, “Americans now want convenience. The kitchen is a showplace where you heat up your food in the microwave.” The perfect kitchen is also the empty kitchen.
Insuring Domestic Tranquility
In an earlier era, domestic doyennes like Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, authors of The American Woman’s Home (1869), encouraged women to view housework as both science and art, and emphasized women’s moral responsibility for keeping a clean and well-functioning home. They were willing to criticize American women—sometimes harshly—for failing in their domestic duties: “The American table, taken as a whole, is inferior to that of England or France,” they wrote. “The management of food is nowhere in the world, perhaps, more slovenly and wasteful.”
If there is a modern heiress to Beecher and Stowe, it is Cheryl Mendelson. “Although a large, enthusiastic minority of home cooks grow more and more sophisticated,” she writes, “the majority become ever more de-skilled.” This is echoed by the kitchen-design website, Homeportfolios.com, which reports that “despite a deluge of cooking programs, celebrity chefs, and state-of-the-art appliances, on average, we’re preparing fewer meals than generations past.” But instead of lamenting this fact, it stays upbeat. “No matter,” reassures the site. “The kitchen still draws us in with its irresistible charm.” This is like saying the bedroom is a comfortable place for insomniacs.
The result is a great disconnect between our domestic fantasies and our domestic reality, between the high-tech façade with its image of home and hearth and the kind of lives we actually live. We have fancier kitchens but fewer family dinners. We have gourmet cooking machines that sit largely unused and oversized freezers filled with microwave dinners. We have high hopes but limited energy for performing domestic labor, and we tend to devalue unpaid labor in the home despite its positive effects on family life. We purchase increasingly specialized, professional-quality domestic appliances at a time when our desire to use them regularly is waning.
Wealthy Americans in particular buy Viking stoves hoping that the right machine will make them want to cook, failing to recognize (or admit) that it is not the technology they lack but the will. By spending so much money on machines, they seek to buy domestic happiness on the cheap. And the makers of these machines ingeniously appeal to this longing, evoking both nostalgia for a lost era of domesticity and the dream of automating all our domestic labors.
Of course, neither cultural nostalgia nor technological progress can restore the domestic tranquility we feel we have lost. What is necessary is a sober defense of the worth of domestic life, including those labors—chopping vegetables, sweeping a floor, setting a table—that are hardly glorious in themselves but essential parts of the domestic satisfactions we still seem to want. “As people turn more and more to outside institutions to have their needs met (for food, comfort, clean laundry, relaxation, entertainment, society, rest),” writes Mendelson, “domestic skills and expectations further diminish, in turn decreasing the chance that people’s homes can satisfy their needs. The result is far too many people who long for home even though they seem to have one.”
Unlike some feminist critics of domesticity, who argue for the lowering of domestic standards—Cowan wants to overthrow the “senseless tyranny of spotless shirts and immaculate floors,” for example—Mendelson and others seek to elevate the domestic sphere in a culture that too often denigrates or neglects it. They hope to appeal to the deeply-felt yearning most people have for a comfortable and well-functioning home life. And perhaps, in a strange sense, they want to make us worthy of our fancy machines, which means recognizing the permanent limits of domestic technology to produce domestic happiness. Not a brilliant way to sell the newest appliances, but a recipe for learning again how—and why—to use the ones we already have.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her new book My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood was just published by PublicAffairs Books.
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/archiv...al_Economy.html
The Idea of a Local Economy
by Wendell Berry
LET US BEGIN BY ASSUMING what appears to be true: that the so-called "environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions.
This is good, of course; obviously, we can©ˆt hope to solve these problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened with "publicity," we have to be aware also that as issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the ®!=rst place, of gross oversimplification.
The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.
And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.
What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the "developed" world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of "service" that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.
The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - that the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their "values," or had a "change of heart," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," and that such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their political and economic proxies.
The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world.
WE LIVE, AS WE MUST SOONER or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of "the many" who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.
Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the "free market" and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to "the many" - in, of course, the future.
These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental because they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there is no justification, and because they issue a cold check on the virtue of political and/or economic rulers. They seek, that is, to preserve the gullibility of the people by appealing to a fund of political virtue that does not exist. Communism and "free-market" capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely - "the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the benefit of the many" - and keep it at a distance.
The fraudulence of these oligarchic forms of economy is in their principle of displacing whatever good they recognize (as well as their debts) from the present to the future. Their success depends upon persuading people, first, that whatever they have now is no good, and second, that the promised good is certain to be achieved in the future. This obviously contradicts the principle - common, I believe, to all the religious traditions - that if ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now; we are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future. And both communism and capitalism have found such principles to be a great embarrassment. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good thing in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient to have people saying things like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them." Communists and capitalists alike, "liberal" and "conservative" capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, "I am doing this because I can©ˆt do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable." The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.
The idea of an economy based upon several kinds of ruin may seem a contradiction in terms, but in fact such an economy is possible, as we see. It is possible however, on one implacable condition: the only future good that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy itself. And how does it disguise this outcome from its subjects, its short-term beneficiaries, and its victims? It does so by false accounting. It substitutes for the real economy, by which we build and maintain (or do not maintain) our household, a symbolic economy of money, which in the long run, because of the self-interested manipulations of the "controlling interests," cannot symbolize or account for anything but itself. And so we have before us the spectacle of unprecedented "prosperity" and "economic growth" in a land of degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing families, and perishing communities.
THIS MORAL AND ECONOMIC ABSURDITY exists for the sake of the allegedly "free" market, the single principle of which is this: commodities will be produced wherever they can be produced at the lowest cost, and consumed wherever they will bring the highest price. To make too cheap and sell too high has always been the program of industrial capitalism. The idea of the global "free market" is merely capitalism©ˆs so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a "right" within its presumptive territory. The global "free market" is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby "freeing" the hounds.
The "right" of a corporation to exercise its economic power without restraint is construed, by the partisans of the "free market," as a form of freedom, a political liberty implied presumably by the right of individual citizens to own and use property.
But the "free market" idea introduces into government a sanction of an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely that the "free market" is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money. Wal-Mart, for example, as a large corporation "freely" competing against local, privately owned businesses has virtually all the freedom, and its small competitors virtually none.
To make too cheap and sell too high, there are two requirements. One is that you must have a lot of consumers with surplus money and unlimited wants. For the time being, there are plenty of these consumers in the "developed" countries. The problem, for the time being easily solved, is simply to keep them relatively affluent and dependent on purchased supplies.
The other requirement is that the market for labor and raw materials should remain depressed relative to the market for retail commodities. This means that the supply of workers should exceed demand, and that the land-using economy should be allowed or encouraged to overproduce.
To keep the cost of labor low, it is necessary first to entice or force country people everywhere in the world to move into the cities - in the manner prescribed by the United States' Committee for Economic Development after World War II - and second, to continue to introduce labor-replacing technology. In this way it is possible to maintain a "pool" of people who are in the threatening position of being mere consumers, landless and also poor, and who therefore are eager to go to work for low wages - precisely the condition of migrant farm workers in the United States.
To cause the land-using economies to overproduce is even simpler. The farmers and other workers in the world's land-using economies, by and large, are not organized. They are therefore unable to control production in order to secure just prices. Individual producers must go individually to the market and take for their produce simply whatever they are paid. They have no power to bargain or make demands. Increasingly, they must sell, not to neighbors or to neighboring towns and cities, but to large and remote corporations. There is no competition among the buyers (supposing there is more than one), who are organized, and are "free" to exploit the advantage of low prices. Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to make up their losses "on volume," and overproduction inevitably makes for low prices. The land-using economies thus spiral downward as the money economy of the exploiters spirals upward. If economic attrition in the land-using population becomes so severe as to threaten production, then governments can subsidize production without production controls, which necessarily will encourage overproduction, which will lower prices - and so the subsidy to rural producers becomes, in effect, a subsidy to the purchasing corporations. In the land-using economies production is further cheapened by destroying, with low prices and low standards of quality, the cultural imperatives for good work and land stewardship.
THIS SORT OF EXPLOITATION, long familiar in the foreign and domestic economies and the colonialism of modern nations, has now become "the global economy," which is the property of a few supranational corporations. The economic theory used to justify the global economy in its "free market" version is again perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what is good for the corporations will sooner or later - though not of course immediately - be good for everybody.
That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result, all the world©ˆs people will be economically secure - in the future. It would be hard to object to such a proposition if only it were true.
But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines.
In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the "free market" will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.
In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the "efficiency" of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence.
This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious moral flaws and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed by most political leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion makers." The powers that be, while continuing to budget huge sums for "national defense," have apparently abandoned any idea of national or local self-sufficiency, even in food. They also have given up the idea that a national or local government might justly place restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and its people.
The global economy is now institutionalized in the World Trade Organization, which was set up, without election anywhere, to rule international trade on behalf of the "free market" - which is to say on behalf of the supranational corporations - and to overrule, in secret sessions, any national or regional law that conflicts with the "free market." The corporate program of global free trade and the presence of the World Trade Organization have legitimized extreme forms of expert thought. We are told confidently that if Kentucky loses its milk-producing capacity to Wisconsin, that will be a "success story." Experts such as Stephen C. Blank, of the University of California, Davis, have proposed that "developed" countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where food can no longer be produced cheaply enough, should give up agriculture altogether.
The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person." But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who "let their money work for them," expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super government with the power to overrule nations. I don©ˆt mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy.
UNSURPRISINGLY, AMONG PEOPLE WHO WISH to preserve things other than money - for instance, every region's native capacity to produce essential goods - there is a growing perception that the global "free market" economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom, to industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies; and furthermore, that it is inherently an enemy to good work and good economic practice. I believe that this perception is correct and that it can be shown to be correct merely by listing the assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high in the world at large. These assumptions, so far as I can make them out, are as follows:
1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things do not matter and are of no worth.
2. That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns.
3. That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy.
4. That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice.
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
7. That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.
8. That it is all right for a nation's or a region's subsistence to be foreign based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled by corporations.
9. That, therefore, wars over commodities - our recent Gulf War, for example - are legitimate and permanent economic functions.
10. That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications, and transportation, which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.
11. That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.
12. That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds, and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade.
13. That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one's natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.
These assumptions clearly prefigure a condition of total economy. A total economy is one in which everything - "life forms," for instance, or the "right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes - and especially democratic processes - are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world.
Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy the character and culture also from the inside.
In an essay on the origin of civilization in traditional cultures, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote that "the principle of justice is the same throughout...[it is] that each member of the community should perform the task for which he is fitted by nature..." The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable. That is why Coomaraswamy spoke of industrialism as "the mammon of injustice," incompatible with civilization. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray."
AWARE OF INDUSTRIALISM'S potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitably distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government's obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods of our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global "free market." But now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global economy is intended as a means of subverting them.
In default of government protections against the total economy of the supranational corporations, people are where they have been many times before: in danger of losing their economic security and their freedom, both at once. But at the same time the means of defending themselves belongs to them in the form of a venerable principle: powers not exercised by government return to the people. If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves.
How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy - something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy. People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the local community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an influence over the kind and quality of their food, and to preserve and enhance the local landscapes. They want to give everybody in the local community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make a national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is greater.
I am assuming that there is a valid line of thought leading from the idea of the total economy to the idea of a local economy. I assume that the first thought may be a recognition of one's ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.
And then, perhaps, one begins to see from a local point of view. One begins to ask, What is here, what is in me, that can lead to something better? From a local point of view, one can see that a global "free market" economy is possible only if nations and localities accept or ignore the inherent instability of a production economy based on exports and a consumer economy based on imports. An export economy is beyond local influence, and so is an import economy. And cheap long-distance transport is possible only if granted cheap fuel, international peace, control of terrorism, prevention of sabotage, and the solvency of the international economy.
Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.
SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.
Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community's subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally. In charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.
The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as "protectionism" - and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not "isolationism."
Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies of Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: "Whenever the timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers abandon their farms to fell as many trees as possible." We should notice especially that the goal of production was "as many...as possible." And Schweitzer makes my point exactly: "These people could achieve true wealth if they could develop their agriculture and trade to meet their own needs." Instead they produced timber for export to "the world economy," which made them dependent upon imported goods that they bought with money earned from their exports. They gave up their local means of subsistence, and imposed the false standard of a foreign demand ("as many trees as possible") upon their forests. They thus became helplessly dependent on an economy over which they had no control.
Such was the fate of the native people under the African colonialism of Schweitzer©ˆs time. Such is, and can only be, the fate of everybody under the global colonialism of our time. Schweitzer's description of the colonial economy of the Ogowe region is in principle not different from the rural economy now in Kentucky or Iowa or Wyoming. A total economy for all practical purposes is a total government. The "free trade" which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings "unprecedented economic growth," from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
The Idea of a Local Economy
by Wendell Berry
LET US BEGIN BY ASSUMING what appears to be true: that the so-called "environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions.
This is good, of course; obviously, we can©ˆt hope to solve these problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened with "publicity," we have to be aware also that as issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the ®!=rst place, of gross oversimplification.
The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.
And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.
What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the "developed" world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of "service" that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.
The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - that the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their "values," or had a "change of heart," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," and that such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their political and economic proxies.
The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world.
WE LIVE, AS WE MUST SOONER or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of "the many" who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.
Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the "free market" and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to "the many" - in, of course, the future.
These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental because they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there is no justification, and because they issue a cold check on the virtue of political and/or economic rulers. They seek, that is, to preserve the gullibility of the people by appealing to a fund of political virtue that does not exist. Communism and "free-market" capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely - "the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the benefit of the many" - and keep it at a distance.
The fraudulence of these oligarchic forms of economy is in their principle of displacing whatever good they recognize (as well as their debts) from the present to the future. Their success depends upon persuading people, first, that whatever they have now is no good, and second, that the promised good is certain to be achieved in the future. This obviously contradicts the principle - common, I believe, to all the religious traditions - that if ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now; we are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future. And both communism and capitalism have found such principles to be a great embarrassment. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good thing in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient to have people saying things like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them." Communists and capitalists alike, "liberal" and "conservative" capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, "I am doing this because I can©ˆt do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable." The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.
The idea of an economy based upon several kinds of ruin may seem a contradiction in terms, but in fact such an economy is possible, as we see. It is possible however, on one implacable condition: the only future good that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy itself. And how does it disguise this outcome from its subjects, its short-term beneficiaries, and its victims? It does so by false accounting. It substitutes for the real economy, by which we build and maintain (or do not maintain) our household, a symbolic economy of money, which in the long run, because of the self-interested manipulations of the "controlling interests," cannot symbolize or account for anything but itself. And so we have before us the spectacle of unprecedented "prosperity" and "economic growth" in a land of degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing families, and perishing communities.
THIS MORAL AND ECONOMIC ABSURDITY exists for the sake of the allegedly "free" market, the single principle of which is this: commodities will be produced wherever they can be produced at the lowest cost, and consumed wherever they will bring the highest price. To make too cheap and sell too high has always been the program of industrial capitalism. The idea of the global "free market" is merely capitalism©ˆs so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a "right" within its presumptive territory. The global "free market" is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby "freeing" the hounds.
The "right" of a corporation to exercise its economic power without restraint is construed, by the partisans of the "free market," as a form of freedom, a political liberty implied presumably by the right of individual citizens to own and use property.
But the "free market" idea introduces into government a sanction of an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely that the "free market" is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money. Wal-Mart, for example, as a large corporation "freely" competing against local, privately owned businesses has virtually all the freedom, and its small competitors virtually none.
To make too cheap and sell too high, there are two requirements. One is that you must have a lot of consumers with surplus money and unlimited wants. For the time being, there are plenty of these consumers in the "developed" countries. The problem, for the time being easily solved, is simply to keep them relatively affluent and dependent on purchased supplies.
The other requirement is that the market for labor and raw materials should remain depressed relative to the market for retail commodities. This means that the supply of workers should exceed demand, and that the land-using economy should be allowed or encouraged to overproduce.
To keep the cost of labor low, it is necessary first to entice or force country people everywhere in the world to move into the cities - in the manner prescribed by the United States' Committee for Economic Development after World War II - and second, to continue to introduce labor-replacing technology. In this way it is possible to maintain a "pool" of people who are in the threatening position of being mere consumers, landless and also poor, and who therefore are eager to go to work for low wages - precisely the condition of migrant farm workers in the United States.
To cause the land-using economies to overproduce is even simpler. The farmers and other workers in the world's land-using economies, by and large, are not organized. They are therefore unable to control production in order to secure just prices. Individual producers must go individually to the market and take for their produce simply whatever they are paid. They have no power to bargain or make demands. Increasingly, they must sell, not to neighbors or to neighboring towns and cities, but to large and remote corporations. There is no competition among the buyers (supposing there is more than one), who are organized, and are "free" to exploit the advantage of low prices. Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to make up their losses "on volume," and overproduction inevitably makes for low prices. The land-using economies thus spiral downward as the money economy of the exploiters spirals upward. If economic attrition in the land-using population becomes so severe as to threaten production, then governments can subsidize production without production controls, which necessarily will encourage overproduction, which will lower prices - and so the subsidy to rural producers becomes, in effect, a subsidy to the purchasing corporations. In the land-using economies production is further cheapened by destroying, with low prices and low standards of quality, the cultural imperatives for good work and land stewardship.
THIS SORT OF EXPLOITATION, long familiar in the foreign and domestic economies and the colonialism of modern nations, has now become "the global economy," which is the property of a few supranational corporations. The economic theory used to justify the global economy in its "free market" version is again perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what is good for the corporations will sooner or later - though not of course immediately - be good for everybody.
That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result, all the world©ˆs people will be economically secure - in the future. It would be hard to object to such a proposition if only it were true.
But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines.
In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the "free market" will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.
In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the "efficiency" of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence.
This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious moral flaws and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed by most political leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion makers." The powers that be, while continuing to budget huge sums for "national defense," have apparently abandoned any idea of national or local self-sufficiency, even in food. They also have given up the idea that a national or local government might justly place restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and its people.
The global economy is now institutionalized in the World Trade Organization, which was set up, without election anywhere, to rule international trade on behalf of the "free market" - which is to say on behalf of the supranational corporations - and to overrule, in secret sessions, any national or regional law that conflicts with the "free market." The corporate program of global free trade and the presence of the World Trade Organization have legitimized extreme forms of expert thought. We are told confidently that if Kentucky loses its milk-producing capacity to Wisconsin, that will be a "success story." Experts such as Stephen C. Blank, of the University of California, Davis, have proposed that "developed" countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where food can no longer be produced cheaply enough, should give up agriculture altogether.
The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person." But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who "let their money work for them," expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super government with the power to overrule nations. I don©ˆt mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy.
UNSURPRISINGLY, AMONG PEOPLE WHO WISH to preserve things other than money - for instance, every region's native capacity to produce essential goods - there is a growing perception that the global "free market" economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom, to industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies; and furthermore, that it is inherently an enemy to good work and good economic practice. I believe that this perception is correct and that it can be shown to be correct merely by listing the assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high in the world at large. These assumptions, so far as I can make them out, are as follows:
1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things do not matter and are of no worth.
2. That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns.
3. That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy.
4. That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice.
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
7. That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.
8. That it is all right for a nation's or a region's subsistence to be foreign based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled by corporations.
9. That, therefore, wars over commodities - our recent Gulf War, for example - are legitimate and permanent economic functions.
10. That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications, and transportation, which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.
11. That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.
12. That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds, and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade.
13. That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one's natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.
These assumptions clearly prefigure a condition of total economy. A total economy is one in which everything - "life forms," for instance, or the "right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes - and especially democratic processes - are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world.
Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy the character and culture also from the inside.
In an essay on the origin of civilization in traditional cultures, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote that "the principle of justice is the same throughout...[it is] that each member of the community should perform the task for which he is fitted by nature..." The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable. That is why Coomaraswamy spoke of industrialism as "the mammon of injustice," incompatible with civilization. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray."
AWARE OF INDUSTRIALISM'S potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitably distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government's obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods of our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global "free market." But now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global economy is intended as a means of subverting them.
In default of government protections against the total economy of the supranational corporations, people are where they have been many times before: in danger of losing their economic security and their freedom, both at once. But at the same time the means of defending themselves belongs to them in the form of a venerable principle: powers not exercised by government return to the people. If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves.
How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy - something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy. People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the local community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an influence over the kind and quality of their food, and to preserve and enhance the local landscapes. They want to give everybody in the local community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make a national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is greater.
I am assuming that there is a valid line of thought leading from the idea of the total economy to the idea of a local economy. I assume that the first thought may be a recognition of one's ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.
And then, perhaps, one begins to see from a local point of view. One begins to ask, What is here, what is in me, that can lead to something better? From a local point of view, one can see that a global "free market" economy is possible only if nations and localities accept or ignore the inherent instability of a production economy based on exports and a consumer economy based on imports. An export economy is beyond local influence, and so is an import economy. And cheap long-distance transport is possible only if granted cheap fuel, international peace, control of terrorism, prevention of sabotage, and the solvency of the international economy.
Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.
SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.
Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community's subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally. In charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.
The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as "protectionism" - and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not "isolationism."
Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies of Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: "Whenever the timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers abandon their farms to fell as many trees as possible." We should notice especially that the goal of production was "as many...as possible." And Schweitzer makes my point exactly: "These people could achieve true wealth if they could develop their agriculture and trade to meet their own needs." Instead they produced timber for export to "the world economy," which made them dependent upon imported goods that they bought with money earned from their exports. They gave up their local means of subsistence, and imposed the false standard of a foreign demand ("as many trees as possible") upon their forests. They thus became helplessly dependent on an economy over which they had no control.
Such was the fate of the native people under the African colonialism of Schweitzer©ˆs time. Such is, and can only be, the fate of everybody under the global colonialism of our time. Schweitzer's description of the colonial economy of the Ogowe region is in principle not different from the rural economy now in Kentucky or Iowa or Wyoming. A total economy for all practical purposes is a total government. The "free trade" which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings "unprecedented economic growth," from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
Below the favorable surface [of the economy], there are as dangerous and intractable circumstances as I can remember.. Nothing in our experience is comparable. But no one is willing to understand this and do anything about it. We are consuming about six per cent more than we are producing. What holds the world together is a massive flow of capital from abroad. it's what feeds our consumption binge. the United States economy is growing on the savings of the poor. A big adjustment will inevitably become necessary, long before the social security surpluses disappear and the deficit explodes. We are skating on increasingly thin ice.
--former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker
(Remarks made at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Feb. 19, 2005)
--former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker
(Remarks made at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Feb. 19, 2005)
....how the hell do you consume more than you produce?
Defeats the purpose of economics doesn't it?
Defeats the purpose of economics doesn't it?
^ready and available credit and poor lending policies of banks
it's more than bad 'economics' it's bad moral choices
it's more than bad 'economics' it's bad moral choices
QUOTE(BoA '02 @ May 10 2006, 08:36 AM) [snapback]2492923[/snapback]
....how the hell do you consume more than you produce?
Defeats the purpose of economics doesn't it?
are you serious...?
basic supply & demand.. were almost never at perfect equilibrium for any market. nothing bad or unethical about this concept, it's fundamental to economics...
What demand is higher than supply? That's not consuming.
(In response to Papabear)
So what you're trying to say is we're spending more money than we have? Still doesn't explain how we collectively are consuming more than we are producing.
hmm...
oh wait I think I get it.
So the general gist is that the US is consuming more crap (including net exports) than its actually producing. And you guys are capable of doing that because of all those borrowings you guys are making off the Asian countries. Asian countries being 'the poor' in this context.
That's funny, because the US consumers are supposed to be the ones with all the cash to invest elsewhere. Not the other way around.
I see I'm the only one questioning anything here. PROBABLY because it's in response to the only one that anybody would be bothered to read.
And by questioning I don't necessarily mean questiong the credibility of, but asking for the specifics - why, how and let's make this more understandable.
(In response to Papabear)
So what you're trying to say is we're spending more money than we have? Still doesn't explain how we collectively are consuming more than we are producing.
hmm...
oh wait I think I get it.
So the general gist is that the US is consuming more crap (including net exports) than its actually producing. And you guys are capable of doing that because of all those borrowings you guys are making off the Asian countries. Asian countries being 'the poor' in this context.
That's funny, because the US consumers are supposed to be the ones with all the cash to invest elsewhere. Not the other way around.
I see I'm the only one questioning anything here. PROBABLY because it's in response to the only one that anybody would be bothered to read.
And by questioning I don't necessarily mean questiong the credibility of, but asking for the specifics - why, how and let's make this more understandable.
^good luck figuring out the financial/banking (and credit) system [i'm still trying to figure it out] -- why does the U.S. seem so wealthy? a lot depends on the way banks are allowed to operate
QUOTE(BoA '02 @ May 12 2006, 05:49 AM) [snapback]2508884[/snapback]
What demand is higher than supply? That's not consuming.
(In response to Papabear)
So what you're trying to say is we're spending more money than we have? Still doesn't explain how we collectively are consuming more than we are producing.
hmm...
oh wait I think I get it.
So the general gist is that the US is consuming more crap (including net exports) than its actually producing. And you guys are capable of doing that because of all those borrowings you guys are making off the Asian countries. Asian countries being 'the poor' in this context.
That's funny, because the US consumers are supposed to be the ones with all the cash to invest elsewhere. Not the other way around.
quite honestly, we haven't really been producing much all together. Decades ago, the dollar was strong because of the stuff we produced. Nowadays it's strong because we say so while the other countries believe us, much of this has to do with our control over world finance. Aside from weapons, theres not really much we make that the rest of the world is willing to buy from us.. but we sure like to buy from them.
QUOTE
QUOTE
QUOTE(BoA '02 @ May 10 2006, 08:36 AM)
....how the hell do you consume more than you produce?
Defeats the purpose of economics doesn't it?
are you serious...?
basic supply & demand.. were almost never at perfect equilibrium for any market. nothing bad or unethical about this concept, it's fundamental to economics...
What demand is higher than supply? That's not consuming.
in the short run you can consume more then you produce, because of social surplus. ... when quantity demanded is higher then supply, it causes "shortages" (usually temporary), in an attempt to regain equilibrium usually a few different things can happen such as the price can go up, when price etc isn't effective eneagh, such as for very innelastic products, it causes shortages. if the product is a neccesity and something is disrupting the market or w/e, usually thats when the government steps in with regulation etc. thats about as short/simplified as i can say it. hope that makes sense.
QUOTE(Range @ May 12 2006, 05:14 PM) [snapback]2511566[/snapback]
quite honestly, we haven't really been producing much all together. Decades ago, the dollar was strong because of the stuff we produced. Nowadays it's strong because we say so while the other countries believe us, much of this has to do with our control over world finance. Aside from weapons, theres not really much we make that the rest of the world is willing to buy from us.. but we sure like to buy from them.
100% agreed that America is like that. Manufacturing jobs are important not only for a strong dollar but also to generate wealth since secondary industries are wealth generating jobs. Since America lacks manufacturing jobs because tons of jobs are sent abroad to India and China, America will fall sooner or later with the housing bubble and the fall of the US dollar.
From Energy Bulletin:
50 Million? 100 Million? 200 Bazillion? How Many Farmers Do We Need to Change the World?
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Books
Bill McKibben On Reforming Our Supersized Society (PDF)
50 Million? 100 Million? 200 Bazillion? How Many Farmers Do We Need to Change the World?
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Books
Bill McKibben On Reforming Our Supersized Society (PDF)
QUOTE(funzone36 @ Nov 25 2006, 12:37 PM) [snapback]4238696[/snapback]
100% agreed that America is like that. Manufacturing jobs are important not only for a strong dollar but also to generate wealth since secondary industries are wealth generating jobs. Since America lacks manufacturing jobs because tons of jobs are sent abroad to India and China, America will fall sooner or later with the housing bubble and the fall of the US dollar.
I have comment in that there's two key things you have to remember
1. Even though manufacturing is done elsewhere, the ones who profit the most are the ones handling the sales, and those are usually foreign corporations.
example: In a laptop, China may make the hard drive, Korea may make the LCD, and Taiwan may assemble them.. but in the end it's up to the large corporation like HP and Dell on whom they want the manufacturing to be done by.and it is them who sells it and makes the bulk of the money, not the LCD guys or the HD guys. Should costs go up in one area, they could easily switch to some one cheaper. Here's an example
http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20061128PD200.html
Compal is an ODM based in Taiwan that is used often by HP, Dell, etc to make notebooks for them.. however if they want to maintian the contract of these big corporations, they have to offer them the cheapest price possible. Since wages in China are rising, Compal is now considering moving production to Vietnam as well. ultimately China or Vietnam, in the end of the chain, it is HP and Dell that sells it and benefits from it.
another example: we watched this video of this Canadian suit company (forgot the name). They had the materials for the suit made in Russia. When the Russian company and its workers started to demand higher wages.. the Canadians simply said "no", and moved down deeper into Russia for even cheaper labor. Once they started demanding higher wages too. they just said no, and moved deeper and deeper, and after Russia ran out of cheap labor.. moved down to India. This is just the materials. The buttons for the suit were made in China, while assembly was in Sri Lanka.. etc it may sound expensive to have everything done in different places, but its actually cheaper and you get to avoid some customs issues too. But in the end, the one who really benefits is the Canadian company as they receive the entire Suit assembled together, then sell it to retailers.
2. manufacturing is always migratory.
which reflects the movement of cheap labor and technology. The US once built their TVs, particularly in the 40s-50s when they were the primary ones using it. Manfacturing later moved to Japan when the Japanese were able to make it, and for less too. Once Japan's wages got higher and their companies developing their own line.. manufacturing moved to Korea, Malaysia and China... and later on, it'll probably move elsewhere after that.
That's like making every country get out of poverty because even though those corporations get more money, the developing countries also get more money than usual.
Anyway, even though corporations can still benefit from outsourcing, importing more than exporting is still bad in the long term. I really don't see how the dollar can strengthen again unless US export more than import.
And don't forget. Outsourcing provides less job opportunies for graduated students and other workers working on those outsourced jobs even if those companies are still there. Does high unemployment look good for the USA?
Yes, those companies still make a profit but how much money do you think unemployed Americans workers have? Companies can only profit when the consumers actually has money to spend.
Previously, you said Singapore doesn't manufacture a lot becaues of outsourcing. Well, a search on Google indicates that they do export lots of products.
good url: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9597_22-6060771.html
Outsourcing Savings Deemed "Unrealistic"...
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/cont...htm?chan=search
Anyway, even though corporations can still benefit from outsourcing, importing more than exporting is still bad in the long term. I really don't see how the dollar can strengthen again unless US export more than import.
And don't forget. Outsourcing provides less job opportunies for graduated students and other workers working on those outsourced jobs even if those companies are still there. Does high unemployment look good for the USA?
Yes, those companies still make a profit but how much money do you think unemployed Americans workers have? Companies can only profit when the consumers actually has money to spend.
Previously, you said Singapore doesn't manufacture a lot becaues of outsourcing. Well, a search on Google indicates that they do export lots of products.
good url: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9597_22-6060771.html
Outsourcing Savings Deemed "Unrealistic"...
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/cont...htm?chan=search
Peak Moment: Local Currencies: Replacing Scarcity with Trust
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 February 2007 Local Money Peak Moment Television
In Brief: Francis Ayley established over a dozen local currencies in the UK before moving to the U.S. He contrasts our standard, scarcity- and debt-based money system with local currencies in which "there's always as much as you need." Local currencies like his Fourth Corner Exchange issue money when members trade goods and services. Communities with local currencies will be less affected when recession or depression hits the mainstream economy. Episode 49.
Francis Ayley established over a dozen local currencies in the UK before moving to the U.S. He contrasts our standard, scarcity- and debt-based money system with local currencies in which "there's always as much as you need." Local currencies like his Fourth Corner Exchange issue money when members trade goods and services. Communities with local currencies will be less affected when recession or depression hits the mainstream economy. Episode 49.
Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment, a television series emphasizing positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action. How can we thrive, build stronger communities, and help one another in the transition from a fossil fuel-based lifestyle?
mp3
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5 February 2007 Local Money Peak Moment Television
In Brief: Francis Ayley established over a dozen local currencies in the UK before moving to the U.S. He contrasts our standard, scarcity- and debt-based money system with local currencies in which "there's always as much as you need." Local currencies like his Fourth Corner Exchange issue money when members trade goods and services. Communities with local currencies will be less affected when recession or depression hits the mainstream economy. Episode 49.
Francis Ayley established over a dozen local currencies in the UK before moving to the U.S. He contrasts our standard, scarcity- and debt-based money system with local currencies in which "there's always as much as you need." Local currencies like his Fourth Corner Exchange issue money when members trade goods and services. Communities with local currencies will be less affected when recession or depression hits the mainstream economy. Episode 49.
Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment, a television series emphasizing positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action. How can we thrive, build stronger communities, and help one another in the transition from a fossil fuel-based lifestyle?
mp3
Bill McKibben's homepage
interview
Salon Books
His intro to Deep Economy:
Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy
Sieze the Momentum
Of Mites and Men
wiki
National Geographic Voices
AnnOnline interview
interview
Salon Books
His intro to Deep Economy:
QUOTE
In my new book, Deep Economy, I’ve set out to challenge the prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, “more” is no longer synonymous with “better”—indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. I want us to think in new ways about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases need not be at odds with the things we truly value.
The time has come to move beyond “growth” as the paramount economic ideal and begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. This concept is already blossoming around the world with striking results, from the burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those who worry about environmental threats, there are solutions to work through the worst of those problems; for those who wonder if there isn’t something more to life than buying, I encourage you to consider your life as an individual and as a member of a larger community.
Deep Economy offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. I believe that the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own.
The time has come to move beyond “growth” as the paramount economic ideal and begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. This concept is already blossoming around the world with striking results, from the burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those who worry about environmental threats, there are solutions to work through the worst of those problems; for those who wonder if there isn’t something more to life than buying, I encourage you to consider your life as an individual and as a member of a larger community.
Deep Economy offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. I believe that the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own.
Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy
Sieze the Momentum
Of Mites and Men
wiki
National Geographic Voices
AnnOnline interview
America’s Remaining Jobs Are Not The Most Productive
Published 03/30/07 by Amber Metcalf
The top jobs for Americans are neither valuable for the country nor achievable for the majority of the nation. Research conducted by Money Magazine and Salary.com showed the 20 best jobs for young Americans belong solely to the service industry, in a servant economy .
What’s wrong with the service industry? The service industry creates an intangible product that is therefore non-tradable and unbeneficial for our country. Service companies sell just that: a service (example: giving each other hair cuts). Since this is not a physical product, the U.S. cannot sell it to competing nations. The result is money passed around among Americans instead of money coming into the nation from countries that buy our products.
According to the study, staff nurse, personal trainer, and school teacher are among the top 20 jobs for young Americans in addition to several management and specialist positions. While they may be highly self-satisfying, 72 percent of Americans are not eligible for the nation’s top job titles. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the national college graduation rate was 28 percent in 2006. So in addition to holding no national benefit, these jobs are highly unattainable for nearly three-quarters of the nation because most require a bachelor’s degree.
The past five years have seen job growth in the service industry only with a net job loss in goods-producing activities. This is attributed mainly to the exporting of these jobs through outsourcing.
The U.S. has sent the majority of jobs in the production industry overseas leaving us with service jobs that most of us are not qualified to obtain. As one-fourth of the nation gets richer in their service-industry positions, the rest of us become rapidly unemployed as more and more industrial jobs leave the country.
Published 03/30/07 by Amber Metcalf
The top jobs for Americans are neither valuable for the country nor achievable for the majority of the nation. Research conducted by Money Magazine and Salary.com showed the 20 best jobs for young Americans belong solely to the service industry, in a servant economy .
What’s wrong with the service industry? The service industry creates an intangible product that is therefore non-tradable and unbeneficial for our country. Service companies sell just that: a service (example: giving each other hair cuts). Since this is not a physical product, the U.S. cannot sell it to competing nations. The result is money passed around among Americans instead of money coming into the nation from countries that buy our products.
According to the study, staff nurse, personal trainer, and school teacher are among the top 20 jobs for young Americans in addition to several management and specialist positions. While they may be highly self-satisfying, 72 percent of Americans are not eligible for the nation’s top job titles. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the national college graduation rate was 28 percent in 2006. So in addition to holding no national benefit, these jobs are highly unattainable for nearly three-quarters of the nation because most require a bachelor’s degree.
The past five years have seen job growth in the service industry only with a net job loss in goods-producing activities. This is attributed mainly to the exporting of these jobs through outsourcing.
The U.S. has sent the majority of jobs in the production industry overseas leaving us with service jobs that most of us are not qualified to obtain. As one-fourth of the nation gets richer in their service-industry positions, the rest of us become rapidly unemployed as more and more industrial jobs leave the country.
http://www.newsoutherner.com/Wendell_Berry_interview.htm
How can a family ‘live at the center of its own attention?’
Wendell Berry’s thoughts on the good life
BY HOLLY M. BROCKMAN
If you profess to embrace family values and you shop at Wal-Mart, think again. The global economy, powered by big corporations such as Wal-Mart, destroys families with low prices made possible by low wages.
Such are the teachings of Wendell Berry, 71, a lifelong advocate of family values, sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship. Berry’s writings promote local economies as a healthier, more eco-friendly way of life. He has authored more than 40 books and is among 35 Kentucky writers whose work is featured in a new anthology on the devastation that mountaintop removal mining has wrought in Southern Appalachia.
Berry lives, writes and farms at Lane’s Landing near Port Royal, Ky.
Holly M. Brockman: I've heard you use the term "useful" in some of your talks, and it certainly permeates all your essays and other writing. What does usefulness mean? Who is somebody who is useful and why?
Wendell Berry: There’s a kind of language that obscures its subject. Such language makes it harder to see and to think. By the word usefulness I mean language or work that enables seeing, makes clarity. Wes Jackson’s work and language have been wonderfully useful to me in that way. Harry Caudill too, by his books and his conversation, helped me to see and think and make the radical criticism. Gary Snyder and I agree on a lot of things, but his point of view is different from mine and it has been immensely useful to me. Some differences make for binocular vision.
HB: And what does it mean in the context of human daily living and beyond? Let's say into the corporate world?
WB: Usefulness stands in opposition to the frivolous. John Synge wrote about the Aran Islands where the people were poor and yet all the useful things in their life were beautiful. The issue of usefulness has a kind of cleansing force. If you ask, "Is it useful?" probably you’re going to have fewer things you don’t need. You are useful to your family if you’re bringing home the things they need. Beyond that, maybe you are useful to other people by your work. The corporate world is much inclined to obscure this usefulness by making and selling a lot of things that people don’t need. For instance, a lively and important question is how much light we use at night and what we use it for and need it for. I’m old enough to remember when the whole countryside was dark at night except for the lights inside the houses, and now the countryside at night is just strewn with these so-called security lights. How much of this do we need? How much of it is useful? We have a marketplace that is full of useless or unnecessary commodities. I don’t want to be too much of a crank, but there are many things that people own to no real benefit, such as computer games and sometimes even computers.
HB: How does your notion of usefulness differ from the old Protestant work ethic?
WB: The Protestant work ethic has never been very discriminating about kinds or qualities of work or even the usefulness of work. To raise the issue of usefulness is to call for some means or standard of discrimination. The Protestant work ethic doesn’t worry about the possibility of doing harmful work or useless work.
HB: In order to be better stewards of our own lives and therefore those resources around us—land, soil, each other— how do we work toward a more sustainable, community-oriented life?
WB: I think you have to begin with an honest assessment of the value or the possibility of personal independence. What is the limit of individualism or personal autonomy? Once you confess to yourself that you need other people, then you’re in a position to look around your neighborhood and see how neighborly it is, starting with how neighborly you are yourself. The question of stewardship naturally follows. How careful is your neighborhood of the natural gifts such as the topsoil on which it depends.
HB: Large chunks of what used to be taken care of by family members—caring for children, the elderly and education—has been outsourced to corporations in the form of daycare, preschool and corporate sponsorship of education initiatives. You've written extensively about this and that these are signs of familial breakdown. Why is it a breakdown and what impact does it have on a family?
WB: The issue here is the extent to which a family is like a community in its need to live at the center of its own attention. A family necessarily begins to come apart if it gives its children entirely to the care of the school or the police, and its old people entirely to the care of the health industry. Nobody can deny the value of good care even away from home to people who have become helplessly ill or crippled, or, in our present circumstances, the value of good daytime care for the children of single parents who have to work. Nevertheless, it is the purpose of the family to stay together. And like a community, a family doesn’t stay together just out of sentiment. It is certainly more pat to stay together if the various members need one another or are in some practical way dependent on one another. It’s probably worth the risk to say that families need to have useful work for their children and old people, little jobs that the other members are glad to have done.
HB: What are some things we can do—small things, perhaps—until we actually make a commitment on a broader scale, to initiate husbandry (whose trajectory will be felt globally) to ourselves, our families and our communities?
WB: I think this starts with an attempt at criticism of one’s own economy, which may be the same thing as good accounting. What are the things that one buys? How necessary or useful are they? What is their quality? Are they well grown or well made? What is their real cost to their producers and to the ecosystems in which they were produced? Almost inevitably when one asks these questions, one discovers that they are extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to answer. That frequently is because the things we buy have been produced so far away as to make impossible any stewardly interest on the part of the consumer. And this recognition leads to an even better question: How can these mysterious products brought here from so far away be replaced by products that have been produced near home? And that question, of course, leads to all manner of thoughts and questions about the possibility of a better, more self-sufficient local economy. What can we neighbors do for one another and for our place? What can our place do for us without damage to us or to it?
HB: Is it possible to reshape our thinking in baby steps or must we make sweeping changes?
WB: Oh, let’s be against sweeping changes and in favor of doing things in small steps. Let’s not discourage ourselves by trying for too much or subject ourselves to the tyranny of somebody else’s big idea.
HB: If everything is left to the individual and the community, how can each avoid being so overburdened that no one has much time for activism and intellectual pursuit?
WB: In other words, how can you have a livable life and do everything? Everything ought not to be left to individuals and communities. Government exists to do for people what they can’t do for themselves. Farmers individually or in their communities, for instance, can’t enact effective programs for price supports with production control so a government can do that, and at one time our federal government did do that. Maybe I’d better say at this point that I am an unabashed admirer of the tobacco programs of The New Deal.
HB: Many progressives live transitive lives (you included having spent time in New York, California and abroad) having fled small towns for the more intellectually stimulating environment or a college town. How do we close that gap and encourage progressives and intellectuals to find safety and comfort outside an academic setting?
WB: The geographer Carl Sauer said, "If I should move to the center of the mass I should feel that the germinal potential was out there on the periphery.” I think there should always be some kind of conversation between the center and the periphery. So you need people in the periphery who can talk back to the people in the center.
HB: What encouraged you to settle back in your hometown of Port Royal, Ky., after finding rewarding intellectual and academic success?
WB: It was clear I’d be thinking about this place (Port Royal) the rest of my life, and so you could argue that I might as well have come back so as to know it. But that’s only a supposition. The reason I came back was because I wanted to. Tanya and I wanted to. We hadn’t been homesick but when we started down the New Jersey turnpike with the New York skyline behind us, it was exhilarating.
HB: How do we encourage progressives to settle down and where should they stay? Would you see possibility in them forming communities among themselves or would you see them successful in joining already established rural communities where they might not feel initially welcomed?
WB: Well, people do form intentional communities. I have visited a few that seemed pleasant enough. But I’ve never lived in one, and so I don’t really know about them. I’m not willing to say, as general advice, that urban people should move to the country. I’ve never advised anybody to give up a well-paying city job and try to farm for a living.
HB: Rural, community-based living has the thinking, stereotyped perhaps, that there is an innate distrust of outsiders. Do you see truth in this thinking? What can be done to re-shape this thinking?
WB: There’s truth in it, but it’s also true that distrust is a major disease of our time, wherever you live. I don’t have any idea what can be done about that. The only way to stop somebody from distrusting you is to be trustworthy and to prove it over a longish period of time.
HB: Do you believe community-based living has historically bred conservative rather than progressive ideas?
WB: That depends entirely on the community you’re in. Communities of coal miners have supported the union movement. Small farmers have in this part of the country supported the tobacco program. On the other hand, I suppose that if you live in a community that is thriving, providing good work for its members and unthreatened by internal violence, you would probably try to conserve it. I suppose that Amish communities have tried to be conservative that way. If you live in an enclave of wealth and privilege, probably you tend to be conservative in a more familiar way. And, in my opinion, that is the wrong kind of conservatism.
HB: Many people grow up in small towns and find great comfort in their natural and familial surroundings, but their thinking and ambitions aren't rewarded there either by lack of jobs or lack of embracement of ideas—certainly, a misuse of the community's resources. How can youngsters and young adults be encouraged to stay home and still be fulfilled?
WB: This question depends on what you mean by intellectual stimulation and whether or not you can get it from the available resources. It’s perfectly possible to live happily in a rural community with people who aren’t intellectual at all (as we use the term). It is possible to subscribe to newspapers and magazines that are intellectually challenging, to read books, to correspond with like-minded people in other places, to visit and be visited by people you admire for their intellectual and artistic attainments. It’s possible to be married to a spouse whose thoughts interest you. It’s possible to have intellectually stimulating conversations with your children. But I’ve had in my own life a lot of friends who were not literary or intellectual at all who were nevertheless intelligent, mentally alive and alert, full of wonderful stories, and whose company and conversation have been indispensable to me. I’ve spent many days in tobacco barns where I did not yearn for the conversation of the college faculty.
HB: Farmers markets and coops where people buy a share of a farmer's harvest and pick it up weekly or bi-weekly have gained in popularity. So have weekly, predictable roadside stands. Why is this so important to a community?
WB: Well, the obvious reason is that a good local economy feeds the local community. But markets of the right kind and scale also fulfill an important social function. They are places where neighbors, producers and consumers meet and talk. People come to the farmer’s market to shop and might stand around and talk half a day. Country stores have fulfilled the same functions. People feel free to sit up at the Hawkins Farm Center in Port Royal. It’s a great generosity on the part of the Hawkins family, and a great blessing to the community.
HB: Why is providing food to a local community so important in sustaining it?
WB: Because the most secure, freshest and the best-tasting food supply is local food produced by local farmers who like their work, like their products and like having them appreciated by people they know. A local food system, moreover, is subject to the influence of its consumers and the dangers and vulnerabilities of a large, high-centralized, highly chemicalized, industrialized food system held together by long distance transportation. A locally adapted local food economy is the most secure against forms of political violence, epidemics and other threats.
How can a family ‘live at the center of its own attention?’
Wendell Berry’s thoughts on the good life
BY HOLLY M. BROCKMAN
If you profess to embrace family values and you shop at Wal-Mart, think again. The global economy, powered by big corporations such as Wal-Mart, destroys families with low prices made possible by low wages.
Such are the teachings of Wendell Berry, 71, a lifelong advocate of family values, sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship. Berry’s writings promote local economies as a healthier, more eco-friendly way of life. He has authored more than 40 books and is among 35 Kentucky writers whose work is featured in a new anthology on the devastation that mountaintop removal mining has wrought in Southern Appalachia.
Berry lives, writes and farms at Lane’s Landing near Port Royal, Ky.
Holly M. Brockman: I've heard you use the term "useful" in some of your talks, and it certainly permeates all your essays and other writing. What does usefulness mean? Who is somebody who is useful and why?
Wendell Berry: There’s a kind of language that obscures its subject. Such language makes it harder to see and to think. By the word usefulness I mean language or work that enables seeing, makes clarity. Wes Jackson’s work and language have been wonderfully useful to me in that way. Harry Caudill too, by his books and his conversation, helped me to see and think and make the radical criticism. Gary Snyder and I agree on a lot of things, but his point of view is different from mine and it has been immensely useful to me. Some differences make for binocular vision.
HB: And what does it mean in the context of human daily living and beyond? Let's say into the corporate world?
WB: Usefulness stands in opposition to the frivolous. John Synge wrote about the Aran Islands where the people were poor and yet all the useful things in their life were beautiful. The issue of usefulness has a kind of cleansing force. If you ask, "Is it useful?" probably you’re going to have fewer things you don’t need. You are useful to your family if you’re bringing home the things they need. Beyond that, maybe you are useful to other people by your work. The corporate world is much inclined to obscure this usefulness by making and selling a lot of things that people don’t need. For instance, a lively and important question is how much light we use at night and what we use it for and need it for. I’m old enough to remember when the whole countryside was dark at night except for the lights inside the houses, and now the countryside at night is just strewn with these so-called security lights. How much of this do we need? How much of it is useful? We have a marketplace that is full of useless or unnecessary commodities. I don’t want to be too much of a crank, but there are many things that people own to no real benefit, such as computer games and sometimes even computers.
HB: How does your notion of usefulness differ from the old Protestant work ethic?
WB: The Protestant work ethic has never been very discriminating about kinds or qualities of work or even the usefulness of work. To raise the issue of usefulness is to call for some means or standard of discrimination. The Protestant work ethic doesn’t worry about the possibility of doing harmful work or useless work.
HB: In order to be better stewards of our own lives and therefore those resources around us—land, soil, each other— how do we work toward a more sustainable, community-oriented life?
WB: I think you have to begin with an honest assessment of the value or the possibility of personal independence. What is the limit of individualism or personal autonomy? Once you confess to yourself that you need other people, then you’re in a position to look around your neighborhood and see how neighborly it is, starting with how neighborly you are yourself. The question of stewardship naturally follows. How careful is your neighborhood of the natural gifts such as the topsoil on which it depends.
HB: Large chunks of what used to be taken care of by family members—caring for children, the elderly and education—has been outsourced to corporations in the form of daycare, preschool and corporate sponsorship of education initiatives. You've written extensively about this and that these are signs of familial breakdown. Why is it a breakdown and what impact does it have on a family?
WB: The issue here is the extent to which a family is like a community in its need to live at the center of its own attention. A family necessarily begins to come apart if it gives its children entirely to the care of the school or the police, and its old people entirely to the care of the health industry. Nobody can deny the value of good care even away from home to people who have become helplessly ill or crippled, or, in our present circumstances, the value of good daytime care for the children of single parents who have to work. Nevertheless, it is the purpose of the family to stay together. And like a community, a family doesn’t stay together just out of sentiment. It is certainly more pat to stay together if the various members need one another or are in some practical way dependent on one another. It’s probably worth the risk to say that families need to have useful work for their children and old people, little jobs that the other members are glad to have done.
HB: What are some things we can do—small things, perhaps—until we actually make a commitment on a broader scale, to initiate husbandry (whose trajectory will be felt globally) to ourselves, our families and our communities?
WB: I think this starts with an attempt at criticism of one’s own economy, which may be the same thing as good accounting. What are the things that one buys? How necessary or useful are they? What is their quality? Are they well grown or well made? What is their real cost to their producers and to the ecosystems in which they were produced? Almost inevitably when one asks these questions, one discovers that they are extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to answer. That frequently is because the things we buy have been produced so far away as to make impossible any stewardly interest on the part of the consumer. And this recognition leads to an even better question: How can these mysterious products brought here from so far away be replaced by products that have been produced near home? And that question, of course, leads to all manner of thoughts and questions about the possibility of a better, more self-sufficient local economy. What can we neighbors do for one another and for our place? What can our place do for us without damage to us or to it?
HB: Is it possible to reshape our thinking in baby steps or must we make sweeping changes?
WB: Oh, let’s be against sweeping changes and in favor of doing things in small steps. Let’s not discourage ourselves by trying for too much or subject ourselves to the tyranny of somebody else’s big idea.
HB: If everything is left to the individual and the community, how can each avoid being so overburdened that no one has much time for activism and intellectual pursuit?
WB: In other words, how can you have a livable life and do everything? Everything ought not to be left to individuals and communities. Government exists to do for people what they can’t do for themselves. Farmers individually or in their communities, for instance, can’t enact effective programs for price supports with production control so a government can do that, and at one time our federal government did do that. Maybe I’d better say at this point that I am an unabashed admirer of the tobacco programs of The New Deal.
HB: Many progressives live transitive lives (you included having spent time in New York, California and abroad) having fled small towns for the more intellectually stimulating environment or a college town. How do we close that gap and encourage progressives and intellectuals to find safety and comfort outside an academic setting?
WB: The geographer Carl Sauer said, "If I should move to the center of the mass I should feel that the germinal potential was out there on the periphery.” I think there should always be some kind of conversation between the center and the periphery. So you need people in the periphery who can talk back to the people in the center.
HB: What encouraged you to settle back in your hometown of Port Royal, Ky., after finding rewarding intellectual and academic success?
WB: It was clear I’d be thinking about this place (Port Royal) the rest of my life, and so you could argue that I might as well have come back so as to know it. But that’s only a supposition. The reason I came back was because I wanted to. Tanya and I wanted to. We hadn’t been homesick but when we started down the New Jersey turnpike with the New York skyline behind us, it was exhilarating.
HB: How do we encourage progressives to settle down and where should they stay? Would you see possibility in them forming communities among themselves or would you see them successful in joining already established rural communities where they might not feel initially welcomed?
WB: Well, people do form intentional communities. I have visited a few that seemed pleasant enough. But I’ve never lived in one, and so I don’t really know about them. I’m not willing to say, as general advice, that urban people should move to the country. I’ve never advised anybody to give up a well-paying city job and try to farm for a living.
HB: Rural, community-based living has the thinking, stereotyped perhaps, that there is an innate distrust of outsiders. Do you see truth in this thinking? What can be done to re-shape this thinking?
WB: There’s truth in it, but it’s also true that distrust is a major disease of our time, wherever you live. I don’t have any idea what can be done about that. The only way to stop somebody from distrusting you is to be trustworthy and to prove it over a longish period of time.
HB: Do you believe community-based living has historically bred conservative rather than progressive ideas?
WB: That depends entirely on the community you’re in. Communities of coal miners have supported the union movement. Small farmers have in this part of the country supported the tobacco program. On the other hand, I suppose that if you live in a community that is thriving, providing good work for its members and unthreatened by internal violence, you would probably try to conserve it. I suppose that Amish communities have tried to be conservative that way. If you live in an enclave of wealth and privilege, probably you tend to be conservative in a more familiar way. And, in my opinion, that is the wrong kind of conservatism.
HB: Many people grow up in small towns and find great comfort in their natural and familial surroundings, but their thinking and ambitions aren't rewarded there either by lack of jobs or lack of embracement of ideas—certainly, a misuse of the community's resources. How can youngsters and young adults be encouraged to stay home and still be fulfilled?
WB: This question depends on what you mean by intellectual stimulation and whether or not you can get it from the available resources. It’s perfectly possible to live happily in a rural community with people who aren’t intellectual at all (as we use the term). It is possible to subscribe to newspapers and magazines that are intellectually challenging, to read books, to correspond with like-minded people in other places, to visit and be visited by people you admire for their intellectual and artistic attainments. It’s possible to be married to a spouse whose thoughts interest you. It’s possible to have intellectually stimulating conversations with your children. But I’ve had in my own life a lot of friends who were not literary or intellectual at all who were nevertheless intelligent, mentally alive and alert, full of wonderful stories, and whose company and conversation have been indispensable to me. I’ve spent many days in tobacco barns where I did not yearn for the conversation of the college faculty.
HB: Farmers markets and coops where people buy a share of a farmer's harvest and pick it up weekly or bi-weekly have gained in popularity. So have weekly, predictable roadside stands. Why is this so important to a community?
WB: Well, the obvious reason is that a good local economy feeds the local community. But markets of the right kind and scale also fulfill an important social function. They are places where neighbors, producers and consumers meet and talk. People come to the farmer’s market to shop and might stand around and talk half a day. Country stores have fulfilled the same functions. People feel free to sit up at the Hawkins Farm Center in Port Royal. It’s a great generosity on the part of the Hawkins family, and a great blessing to the community.
HB: Why is providing food to a local community so important in sustaining it?
WB: Because the most secure, freshest and the best-tasting food supply is local food produced by local farmers who like their work, like their products and like having them appreciated by people they know. A local food system, moreover, is subject to the influence of its consumers and the dangers and vulnerabilities of a large, high-centralized, highly chemicalized, industrialized food system held together by long distance transportation. A locally adapted local food economy is the most secure against forms of political violence, epidemics and other threats.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267
The Ecology of Work
Environmentalism can't succeed until it confronts the destructive nature of modern work—and supplants it
by Curtis White
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
Art by Teun Hocks
Last of a two-part series. See The Idols of Environmentalism for part one.
I
ENVIRONMENTALISTS SEE THE ASPHALTING of the country as a sin against the world of nature, but we should also see in it a kind of damage that has been done to humans, for what precedes environmental degradation is the debasement of the human world. I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the damage to the human world has been done through work, through our jobs, and through the world of money.
We are not the creators of our own world; we merely perform functions in a system into which we were born. The most destructive aspect of our jobs is that in them we are mere “functionaries,” to borrow Josef Pieper’s term. Just as important, we have a function outside of work: consumption. Money in hand, we go into the market to buy the goods we no longer know how to make (we don’t even know how to grow and preserve our own food) and services we no longer know how to perform (frame a house? might as well ask us to design a spaceship).
Challenging our place in this system as mere isolated functions (whether as workers or consumers) is a daunting task, especially for environmentalists, who tend to think that human problems are the concern of somebody else (labor unions, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, etc.). We’re about the “Earth first.” My argument is simply that the threats to humans and the threats to the environment are not even two parts of the same problem. They are the same problem. For environmentalism, confronting corporations and creating indignant scientific reports about pollution is the easy stuff. But these activities are inadequate to the real problems, as any honest observer of the last thirty years of environmental activism would have to concede. The “last great places” cannot be preserved. We can no more preserve them than we can keep the glaciers from melting away. Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.
Unfortunately, on these shores the suggestion that there is something fundamentally destructive in work, money, and capitalism leads quickly to emotional denials. This is so even among self-described environmentalists, card-carrying members of the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. So we try to persuade ourselves that capitalism can become green. I don’t believe that capitalism can become green, simply because the imperatives of environmentalism are not part of its way of reasoning. Capitalism can think profit but it can’t think nature. It’s not in its nature to think nature. What is part of its nature is marketing ("We’re organic! Buy us!"), even while its actions—industrial livestock practices that masquerade as Earth-friendly, for instance—are really only about market share, dividends, and stock value.
Capitalism as a system of ever-accelerating production and consumption is, as we environmentalists continually insist, not sustainable. That is, it is a system intent on its own death. Yet the capitalist will stoically look destruction in the face before he will stop what he’s doing, especially if he believes that it is somebody else whose destruction is in question. Unlike most of the people living under him, the capitalist is a great risk-taker largely because he believes that his wealth insulates him from the consequences of risks gone bad. Ever the optimistic gambler with other people’s money, the capitalist is willing to wager that, while there may be costs to pay, he won’t have to pay them. Animals, plants, impoverished people near and far may have to pay, but he bets that he won’t. If called upon to defend his actions, he will of course argue that he has a constitutionally protected right to property and the pursuit of his own happiness. This is his “freedom.” At that point, we have the unfortunate habit of shutting up when we ought to reply, “Yes, but yours is a freedom without conscience.”
Being willing to say such things about capitalism does not mean that one has a special access to the Truth, but it also doesn’t mean that one is a mere ideologue, or that most dismissible of things, a communist. It merely requires honesty about what looks us right in the face. It requires intellectual conscience.
For instance, as a matter of conscience we should be willing to say that the so-called greening of corporate America is not as much about the desire to protect nature as it is about the desire to protect capitalism itself. Environmentalists are, on the whole, educated and successful people, many of whom have prospered within corporate capitalism. They’re not against it. They simply seek to establish a balance between the needs of the economy (as they blandly put it) and the needs of the natural world. For both capitalism and environmentalism, there is a hard division between land set aside for nature and land devoted to production. Environmentalists consider the preservation of a forest a victory, but part of the point of that victory is (usually) that humans can’t live in this forest. Private interests have been bought out. The forest is now “set aside.” We could draw a national map that showed those spaces that we imagine conform to a fantasy of natural innocence (wilderness, forests, preserves, parks) and those spaces given over to the principles of extraction, exploitation, and profit. The boundary lines within this map are regularly drawn and redrawn by the government in some of our most bitter political fights. ("Mineral extraction! Why, that’s a national wildlife area!” “Snail darter! Why, that’s economic development!") But regardless of which political party is drawing this map, we humans are left right where we have always been, at the mercy of the boss, behaving like functionaries, and participating in the very economic activities that will continue to eat up the natural world. For all its sense of moral urgency, environmentalism too has abandoned humans to the inequalities, the exploitation, and the boredom of the market, while it tries to maintain the world of nature as a place of innocence where a candy wrapper on the ground is a blasphemy. It’s a place to go for a weekend hike before returning to the unrelenting ugliness, hostility, sterility, and spiritual bankruptcy that is the suburb, the strip mall, the office building, and the freeway (our “national automobile slum,” as James Howard Kunstler puts it). Ideally, the map of natural preservation and the map of economic activity would be one map.
II
HERE’S A BALD ASSERTION FOR WHICH I have no proof scientific or otherwise: a human society would never willingly harm nature. This is a way of saying that violence is not a part of human nature. This of course contradicts the opinion commonly held by Christianity and science alike that humans are by nature violent. This fatalism has the effect of making us accept wars, the victimization of the vulnerable, and the rapacious destruction of the natural world as tragic but inevitable. But what this fatalism about our “nature” ignores is the fact that the violence with which environmentalists are most concerned is not the aberrant violence of the individual human but the violence of organizations. In particular, the violence that we know as environmental destruction is possible only because of a complex economic, administrative, and social machinery through which people are separated from responsibility for their misdeeds. We say, “I was only doing my job” at the paper mill, the industrial incinerator, the logging camp, the coal-fired power plant, on the farm, on the stock exchange, or simply in front of the PC in the corporate carrel. The division of labor not only has the consequence of making labor maximally productive, it also hides from workers the real consequences of their work.
People outside of such social and economic organizations might hunt in nature, fish, gather, harvest, use nature to their own ends in countless ways, but they would never knowingly destroy it, not because they are by nature good and benevolent, but because destruction is not necessary, it’s a lot of hard work, and it’s self-evidently self-defeating. For example, the near extinction of the buffalo was not driven by the thought “Well, if I shoot one I might as well shoot them all,” or game sport gone mad, or sheer maliciousness toward the animal. Ultimately, it was driven by the market for buffalo hides in that far-off place that was never once home to a buffalo, New York City. The extermination of the buffalo was driven by the same logic that drives the clearcutting of forests and the construction of high-pollution coal-fired power plants today: entrepreneurial freedom, the desire for profit, and “jobs for working people.”
If all this is so, it is only possible to conclude from our behavior for the last two hundred years that ours is not a human society; that it is a society outside of the human in some terrible sense. And, in fact, it was one of the earliest insights of Karl Marx that the kind of work provided by capitalism was alienating. That is, it made us something other than what we are. It dehumanized us. And so, in our no-longer-human state, it became perfectly natural for us to destroy nature (which should sound to you just as perverse as the situation really is). Alienation in work means that instead of knowing something about a lot of things concerned with human fundamentals like food, housing, clothing, and the wise and creative use of our free time, we know one small thing. One task in an ocean of possible tasks.
Aldous Huxley provided a very different and a very human account of work in The Perennial Philosophy. He called it “right livelihood” (a concept he borrowed from Buddhism). For Huxley, work should serve other people, provide learning experiences that deepen the worker, and do as little harm as possible. (You will note that there is nothing in this description about a competitive compensation and benefits package.) But what percentage of American jobs conforms to this description? Five percent? Even in the new “creative” information economy where the claim could be made that computer designers and software technicians are constantly learning, is it a learning that deepens? That serves others broadly? And what of the mindless, deadening work of data processors and telemarketers—our modern, miserable Bartlebys and Cratchits—locked in their cubicles from San Jose to Bangalore? Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble ("supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices") when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons. We all have our place, our “job,” and it is an ever less human place. We are diligent, disciplined, and responsible, but because of these virtues we are also thoughtless.
TO THE END THE REIGN OF WORK as something for “functionaries,” and to end the destruction that results from that fractured form of work, we have two options. First, we can simply wait for the catastrophic failure of global capitalism as a functioning economic system. Books on peak oil, sinking water tables, and the impending doom of global warming are abundant and convincing. Huge human populations, especially in the East and Africa, are at risk of mass starvation, civil war, and the disastrous loss of human habitat due to rising ocean levels and desertification. Capitalism will have no choice but to retreat from responsibility for these crises even though they are part of the true costs of doing business.
Unfortunately, simply waiting for catastrophe doesn’t ensure that anything good will follow from it, as Darfur has illustrated. It’s true that there will be opportunities to create locally based and sustainable communities, but it’s also true that fascism, barbarism, and regression are possible. So a second option is in order. We can start providing for a different world of work now, before the catastrophe. We need to insist on work that is not destructive, that deepens the worker, that encourages her creativity. Such a transformation requires a willingness to take a collective risk, a kind of risk very different from capitalist risk taking. The kind of risk I’m suggesting is no small matter. It means leaving a culture based on the idea of success as the accumulation of wealth-as-money. In its place we need a culture that understands success as life. For John Ruskin, humans should make “good and beautiful things” because those things will re-create us as good and beautiful in their turn. To make cheap and ugly and destructive things will kill us, as indeed we are being killed through poverty, through war, through the cheapening of our public and private lives, and through the destruction of the natural world. Of course, many will argue that leaving capitalism behind is not “realistic.” “Oh, certainly,” we’re assured, “there are inequalities in capitalism, but on the whole it provides for everyone’s prosperity, it provides the greatest good for the greatest number. Why, you’ll kill the goose that lays the golden egg! Look, if there’s a patch of forest somewhere you want to save, fine, I’ll write a check. But this sort of talk is dangerous and un-American.” What we need to recognize is that the real realism for capitalism is in the consequences of its activities. As even Al Gore understands, we are living now in the early stages of an era of consequences: catastrophic climate change, species extinction, and human population collapse. It is not naïve or unrealistic to say that we ought to change; it is only tragic if we don’t.
But let’s be honest. For the moment, not even the pleasantly affluent people who regularly support the major environmental organizations (people like me) want to hear about how bad capitalism is or to think seriously about abandoning it as an organizing principle. Most of us want to believe that our quarrel is just with rogue corporations, a few “bad apples” as President Bush likes to say, and not with capitalism as such. But thinking this is simply a form of lying. We deny what we can plainly see because to acknowledge it would require the fundamental reshaping of our entire way of living, and that is (not unreasonably) frightening for most people. Nevertheless, our loyalty to capitalism makes us fools. Worse than that, we know we’re being fooled, and yet we lack the ability not to be fooled. Not for nothing did the philosopher Paul Ricoeur once observe that capitalism is “a failure that cannot be defeated.”
III
I AM INEVITABLY ASKED AT THIS POINT in my argument just what exactly it is that I am proposing that people do. What would I put in capitalism’s place? In reply, I am always tempted to quote Voltaire’s response to the complaint that he had nothing to put in the place of the Christianity he criticized. “What!” he said, “A ferocious beast has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, what shall we put in its place!” Unlike Voltaire, I would also suggest that what has the best chance of defeating the “beast” is spirit. In accepting science as our primary weapon against environmental destruction, we have also had to accept science’s contempt for religion and the spiritual. This is the unfortunate legacy of science’s two-century-old confrontation with what it has always called “religious dogma and superstition.” But this attitude is myopic; it is science at its most stupid. Environmentalism should stop depending solely on its alliance with science for its sense of itself. It should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and a commitment to the astonishing fact of Being) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his famous essay “My Religion,” faith is not about obedience to church dogma, and it is not about “submission to established authority.” A people’s religion is “the principle by which they live.”
The establishment of those principles by which we might live would begin with three questions. First, what does it mean to be a human being? Second, what is my relation to other human beings? And third, what is my relation to Being as such, the ongoing miracle that there is something rather than nothing? If the answer to these questions is that the purpose of being human is “the pursuit of happiness” (understood as success, which is understood as the accumulation of money); and if our relation to others is a relation to mere things (with nothing to offer but their labor); and if our relation to the world is only to “resources” (that we should exploit for profit); then we should be very comfortable with the world we have. If it goes to perdition at least we can say that we acted in good faith. But if, on the other hand, we answer that there should be a greater sense of self-worth in being a human, more justice in our relation to others, and more reverence for Being, then we must either live in bad faith with capitalism or begin describing a future whose fundamental values and whose daily activities are radically different from what we currently endure. The risk I propose is simply a return to our nobility. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on a recognition of the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from frogs to forests, simply because they are.
Such a “religion” would entail a refusal to play through to the bloody end the social and economic roles into which we happen to have been born. What lies beyond the environmental movement is not only the overcoming of capitalism but self-overcoming. We take some justifiable pride in the idea that we are environmentalists, but even that identity must be transcended. A “beyond environmentalism” movement would be a sort of Party of Life. It would be a commitment to thriving, and a commitment to what is best in us. Does this mean that, for the time being, we stop working under the banner of environmentalism to oppose corporations when they are destructive? Of course not. But it is important to know that there is a problem more fundamental than a perverse “power” standing opposed to us (in villainous black caps with “Monsanto” on the brim). That deeper problem is our own integration into an order of work that makes us inhuman and thus tolerant of what is nothing less than demonic, the destruction of our own world.
THE PRINCIPLE BY WHICH THE WEST has lived for the last two centuries has been “It’s okay to use violence if you can gain something by it.” Violence against the poor, violence against the vulnerable, violence against those who possess something you want, and violence against the natural world. That is capitalism as a religious principle. What is beyond environmentalism, what is our Party of Life, is actually a return to our oldest spiritual convictions: a reverence for creation and a shared commitment to the idea that religion is finally about understanding how to live in faithful relation to what has been given to us in creation. In the end, our problem is that the busy, destructive work of functionaries has taken the place of a thoughtful, spiritual understanding about how to live. Our problem is not that we are ignoring what science has to tell us about environmental destruction. Our problem is that we are spiritually impoverished. Bankrupt, if you will.
Spiritual rebirth will mean the rediscovery of true human work. Much of this work will not be new but recovered from our own rich traditions. It will be useful knowledge that we will have to remember. Fishing as a family and community tradition, not the business of factory trawlers. Agriculture as a local and seasonal activity, not a carbon-based scheme of synthetic production and international shipping. Home- and community-building as common skills and not merely the contracted specialization of construction companies and urban planners. Even “intellectual workers” (professors and scholars) have something to relearn: their own honored place in the middle of the community and not in isolated, jargon-ridden professional enclaves.
Such knowledge was once the heart of our lives, and not that long ago. Before 1945, survival meant that most families would have all of these skills to some degree. These families were certainly materially poorer and perhaps more naïve, but they were richer in human relations, less bored, less depressed, less isolated, less addicted to food and drugs, physically healthier, and they had the rich human pleasure of knowing how to make things. It’s clear that we haven’t forgotten these skills and their pleasures entirely, but their presence for us is strange and a little unreal. What used to be life is now “fine living”: an array of expensive hobbies for the affluent that are taught through magazines, cable and PBS programs, and local guilds dedicated to gardening, basket weaving, cooking, home remodeling, quilting, and woodworking. Although we rarely recognize it in this way, through these “hobbies” we express a desire for a world that is now lost to us.
My argument is not, I assure you, a longing look back to the wonderful world of pre-war rural America. But it is to say that in the course of the last century of global capital triumphant we have been further isolated from what Ruskin called “valuable human things.” In exchange, we have been offered only the cold comfort of the television and computer monitor, and the GPS device that can locate you but only at the cost of being located in a place that is not worth knowing and certainly not worth caring about.
The turn away from this ugly, destructive, and unequal world is not something that can be accomplished by boycotting corporations when they’re bad or through the powerful work of the most concerned scientists. It will not be delivered with glossy brochures by the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, and it will certainly not be sold to you by Martha Stewart. A return to the valuable human things of the beautiful and the useful will only be accomplished, if it is ever to be accomplished, by the humans among us.
The Ecology of Work
Environmentalism can't succeed until it confronts the destructive nature of modern work—and supplants it
by Curtis White
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
Art by Teun Hocks
Last of a two-part series. See The Idols of Environmentalism for part one.
I
ENVIRONMENTALISTS SEE THE ASPHALTING of the country as a sin against the world of nature, but we should also see in it a kind of damage that has been done to humans, for what precedes environmental degradation is the debasement of the human world. I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the damage to the human world has been done through work, through our jobs, and through the world of money.
We are not the creators of our own world; we merely perform functions in a system into which we were born. The most destructive aspect of our jobs is that in them we are mere “functionaries,” to borrow Josef Pieper’s term. Just as important, we have a function outside of work: consumption. Money in hand, we go into the market to buy the goods we no longer know how to make (we don’t even know how to grow and preserve our own food) and services we no longer know how to perform (frame a house? might as well ask us to design a spaceship).
Challenging our place in this system as mere isolated functions (whether as workers or consumers) is a daunting task, especially for environmentalists, who tend to think that human problems are the concern of somebody else (labor unions, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, etc.). We’re about the “Earth first.” My argument is simply that the threats to humans and the threats to the environment are not even two parts of the same problem. They are the same problem. For environmentalism, confronting corporations and creating indignant scientific reports about pollution is the easy stuff. But these activities are inadequate to the real problems, as any honest observer of the last thirty years of environmental activism would have to concede. The “last great places” cannot be preserved. We can no more preserve them than we can keep the glaciers from melting away. Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.
Unfortunately, on these shores the suggestion that there is something fundamentally destructive in work, money, and capitalism leads quickly to emotional denials. This is so even among self-described environmentalists, card-carrying members of the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. So we try to persuade ourselves that capitalism can become green. I don’t believe that capitalism can become green, simply because the imperatives of environmentalism are not part of its way of reasoning. Capitalism can think profit but it can’t think nature. It’s not in its nature to think nature. What is part of its nature is marketing ("We’re organic! Buy us!"), even while its actions—industrial livestock practices that masquerade as Earth-friendly, for instance—are really only about market share, dividends, and stock value.
Capitalism as a system of ever-accelerating production and consumption is, as we environmentalists continually insist, not sustainable. That is, it is a system intent on its own death. Yet the capitalist will stoically look destruction in the face before he will stop what he’s doing, especially if he believes that it is somebody else whose destruction is in question. Unlike most of the people living under him, the capitalist is a great risk-taker largely because he believes that his wealth insulates him from the consequences of risks gone bad. Ever the optimistic gambler with other people’s money, the capitalist is willing to wager that, while there may be costs to pay, he won’t have to pay them. Animals, plants, impoverished people near and far may have to pay, but he bets that he won’t. If called upon to defend his actions, he will of course argue that he has a constitutionally protected right to property and the pursuit of his own happiness. This is his “freedom.” At that point, we have the unfortunate habit of shutting up when we ought to reply, “Yes, but yours is a freedom without conscience.”
Being willing to say such things about capitalism does not mean that one has a special access to the Truth, but it also doesn’t mean that one is a mere ideologue, or that most dismissible of things, a communist. It merely requires honesty about what looks us right in the face. It requires intellectual conscience.
For instance, as a matter of conscience we should be willing to say that the so-called greening of corporate America is not as much about the desire to protect nature as it is about the desire to protect capitalism itself. Environmentalists are, on the whole, educated and successful people, many of whom have prospered within corporate capitalism. They’re not against it. They simply seek to establish a balance between the needs of the economy (as they blandly put it) and the needs of the natural world. For both capitalism and environmentalism, there is a hard division between land set aside for nature and land devoted to production. Environmentalists consider the preservation of a forest a victory, but part of the point of that victory is (usually) that humans can’t live in this forest. Private interests have been bought out. The forest is now “set aside.” We could draw a national map that showed those spaces that we imagine conform to a fantasy of natural innocence (wilderness, forests, preserves, parks) and those spaces given over to the principles of extraction, exploitation, and profit. The boundary lines within this map are regularly drawn and redrawn by the government in some of our most bitter political fights. ("Mineral extraction! Why, that’s a national wildlife area!” “Snail darter! Why, that’s economic development!") But regardless of which political party is drawing this map, we humans are left right where we have always been, at the mercy of the boss, behaving like functionaries, and participating in the very economic activities that will continue to eat up the natural world. For all its sense of moral urgency, environmentalism too has abandoned humans to the inequalities, the exploitation, and the boredom of the market, while it tries to maintain the world of nature as a place of innocence where a candy wrapper on the ground is a blasphemy. It’s a place to go for a weekend hike before returning to the unrelenting ugliness, hostility, sterility, and spiritual bankruptcy that is the suburb, the strip mall, the office building, and the freeway (our “national automobile slum,” as James Howard Kunstler puts it). Ideally, the map of natural preservation and the map of economic activity would be one map.
II
HERE’S A BALD ASSERTION FOR WHICH I have no proof scientific or otherwise: a human society would never willingly harm nature. This is a way of saying that violence is not a part of human nature. This of course contradicts the opinion commonly held by Christianity and science alike that humans are by nature violent. This fatalism has the effect of making us accept wars, the victimization of the vulnerable, and the rapacious destruction of the natural world as tragic but inevitable. But what this fatalism about our “nature” ignores is the fact that the violence with which environmentalists are most concerned is not the aberrant violence of the individual human but the violence of organizations. In particular, the violence that we know as environmental destruction is possible only because of a complex economic, administrative, and social machinery through which people are separated from responsibility for their misdeeds. We say, “I was only doing my job” at the paper mill, the industrial incinerator, the logging camp, the coal-fired power plant, on the farm, on the stock exchange, or simply in front of the PC in the corporate carrel. The division of labor not only has the consequence of making labor maximally productive, it also hides from workers the real consequences of their work.
People outside of such social and economic organizations might hunt in nature, fish, gather, harvest, use nature to their own ends in countless ways, but they would never knowingly destroy it, not because they are by nature good and benevolent, but because destruction is not necessary, it’s a lot of hard work, and it’s self-evidently self-defeating. For example, the near extinction of the buffalo was not driven by the thought “Well, if I shoot one I might as well shoot them all,” or game sport gone mad, or sheer maliciousness toward the animal. Ultimately, it was driven by the market for buffalo hides in that far-off place that was never once home to a buffalo, New York City. The extermination of the buffalo was driven by the same logic that drives the clearcutting of forests and the construction of high-pollution coal-fired power plants today: entrepreneurial freedom, the desire for profit, and “jobs for working people.”
If all this is so, it is only possible to conclude from our behavior for the last two hundred years that ours is not a human society; that it is a society outside of the human in some terrible sense. And, in fact, it was one of the earliest insights of Karl Marx that the kind of work provided by capitalism was alienating. That is, it made us something other than what we are. It dehumanized us. And so, in our no-longer-human state, it became perfectly natural for us to destroy nature (which should sound to you just as perverse as the situation really is). Alienation in work means that instead of knowing something about a lot of things concerned with human fundamentals like food, housing, clothing, and the wise and creative use of our free time, we know one small thing. One task in an ocean of possible tasks.
Aldous Huxley provided a very different and a very human account of work in The Perennial Philosophy. He called it “right livelihood” (a concept he borrowed from Buddhism). For Huxley, work should serve other people, provide learning experiences that deepen the worker, and do as little harm as possible. (You will note that there is nothing in this description about a competitive compensation and benefits package.) But what percentage of American jobs conforms to this description? Five percent? Even in the new “creative” information economy where the claim could be made that computer designers and software technicians are constantly learning, is it a learning that deepens? That serves others broadly? And what of the mindless, deadening work of data processors and telemarketers—our modern, miserable Bartlebys and Cratchits—locked in their cubicles from San Jose to Bangalore? Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble ("supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices") when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons. We all have our place, our “job,” and it is an ever less human place. We are diligent, disciplined, and responsible, but because of these virtues we are also thoughtless.
TO THE END THE REIGN OF WORK as something for “functionaries,” and to end the destruction that results from that fractured form of work, we have two options. First, we can simply wait for the catastrophic failure of global capitalism as a functioning economic system. Books on peak oil, sinking water tables, and the impending doom of global warming are abundant and convincing. Huge human populations, especially in the East and Africa, are at risk of mass starvation, civil war, and the disastrous loss of human habitat due to rising ocean levels and desertification. Capitalism will have no choice but to retreat from responsibility for these crises even though they are part of the true costs of doing business.
Unfortunately, simply waiting for catastrophe doesn’t ensure that anything good will follow from it, as Darfur has illustrated. It’s true that there will be opportunities to create locally based and sustainable communities, but it’s also true that fascism, barbarism, and regression are possible. So a second option is in order. We can start providing for a different world of work now, before the catastrophe. We need to insist on work that is not destructive, that deepens the worker, that encourages her creativity. Such a transformation requires a willingness to take a collective risk, a kind of risk very different from capitalist risk taking. The kind of risk I’m suggesting is no small matter. It means leaving a culture based on the idea of success as the accumulation of wealth-as-money. In its place we need a culture that understands success as life. For John Ruskin, humans should make “good and beautiful things” because those things will re-create us as good and beautiful in their turn. To make cheap and ugly and destructive things will kill us, as indeed we are being killed through poverty, through war, through the cheapening of our public and private lives, and through the destruction of the natural world. Of course, many will argue that leaving capitalism behind is not “realistic.” “Oh, certainly,” we’re assured, “there are inequalities in capitalism, but on the whole it provides for everyone’s prosperity, it provides the greatest good for the greatest number. Why, you’ll kill the goose that lays the golden egg! Look, if there’s a patch of forest somewhere you want to save, fine, I’ll write a check. But this sort of talk is dangerous and un-American.” What we need to recognize is that the real realism for capitalism is in the consequences of its activities. As even Al Gore understands, we are living now in the early stages of an era of consequences: catastrophic climate change, species extinction, and human population collapse. It is not naïve or unrealistic to say that we ought to change; it is only tragic if we don’t.
But let’s be honest. For the moment, not even the pleasantly affluent people who regularly support the major environmental organizations (people like me) want to hear about how bad capitalism is or to think seriously about abandoning it as an organizing principle. Most of us want to believe that our quarrel is just with rogue corporations, a few “bad apples” as President Bush likes to say, and not with capitalism as such. But thinking this is simply a form of lying. We deny what we can plainly see because to acknowledge it would require the fundamental reshaping of our entire way of living, and that is (not unreasonably) frightening for most people. Nevertheless, our loyalty to capitalism makes us fools. Worse than that, we know we’re being fooled, and yet we lack the ability not to be fooled. Not for nothing did the philosopher Paul Ricoeur once observe that capitalism is “a failure that cannot be defeated.”
III
I AM INEVITABLY ASKED AT THIS POINT in my argument just what exactly it is that I am proposing that people do. What would I put in capitalism’s place? In reply, I am always tempted to quote Voltaire’s response to the complaint that he had nothing to put in the place of the Christianity he criticized. “What!” he said, “A ferocious beast has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, what shall we put in its place!” Unlike Voltaire, I would also suggest that what has the best chance of defeating the “beast” is spirit. In accepting science as our primary weapon against environmental destruction, we have also had to accept science’s contempt for religion and the spiritual. This is the unfortunate legacy of science’s two-century-old confrontation with what it has always called “religious dogma and superstition.” But this attitude is myopic; it is science at its most stupid. Environmentalism should stop depending solely on its alliance with science for its sense of itself. It should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and a commitment to the astonishing fact of Being) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his famous essay “My Religion,” faith is not about obedience to church dogma, and it is not about “submission to established authority.” A people’s religion is “the principle by which they live.”
The establishment of those principles by which we might live would begin with three questions. First, what does it mean to be a human being? Second, what is my relation to other human beings? And third, what is my relation to Being as such, the ongoing miracle that there is something rather than nothing? If the answer to these questions is that the purpose of being human is “the pursuit of happiness” (understood as success, which is understood as the accumulation of money); and if our relation to others is a relation to mere things (with nothing to offer but their labor); and if our relation to the world is only to “resources” (that we should exploit for profit); then we should be very comfortable with the world we have. If it goes to perdition at least we can say that we acted in good faith. But if, on the other hand, we answer that there should be a greater sense of self-worth in being a human, more justice in our relation to others, and more reverence for Being, then we must either live in bad faith with capitalism or begin describing a future whose fundamental values and whose daily activities are radically different from what we currently endure. The risk I propose is simply a return to our nobility. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on a recognition of the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from frogs to forests, simply because they are.
Such a “religion” would entail a refusal to play through to the bloody end the social and economic roles into which we happen to have been born. What lies beyond the environmental movement is not only the overcoming of capitalism but self-overcoming. We take some justifiable pride in the idea that we are environmentalists, but even that identity must be transcended. A “beyond environmentalism” movement would be a sort of Party of Life. It would be a commitment to thriving, and a commitment to what is best in us. Does this mean that, for the time being, we stop working under the banner of environmentalism to oppose corporations when they are destructive? Of course not. But it is important to know that there is a problem more fundamental than a perverse “power” standing opposed to us (in villainous black caps with “Monsanto” on the brim). That deeper problem is our own integration into an order of work that makes us inhuman and thus tolerant of what is nothing less than demonic, the destruction of our own world.
THE PRINCIPLE BY WHICH THE WEST has lived for the last two centuries has been “It’s okay to use violence if you can gain something by it.” Violence against the poor, violence against the vulnerable, violence against those who possess something you want, and violence against the natural world. That is capitalism as a religious principle. What is beyond environmentalism, what is our Party of Life, is actually a return to our oldest spiritual convictions: a reverence for creation and a shared commitment to the idea that religion is finally about understanding how to live in faithful relation to what has been given to us in creation. In the end, our problem is that the busy, destructive work of functionaries has taken the place of a thoughtful, spiritual understanding about how to live. Our problem is not that we are ignoring what science has to tell us about environmental destruction. Our problem is that we are spiritually impoverished. Bankrupt, if you will.
Spiritual rebirth will mean the rediscovery of true human work. Much of this work will not be new but recovered from our own rich traditions. It will be useful knowledge that we will have to remember. Fishing as a family and community tradition, not the business of factory trawlers. Agriculture as a local and seasonal activity, not a carbon-based scheme of synthetic production and international shipping. Home- and community-building as common skills and not merely the contracted specialization of construction companies and urban planners. Even “intellectual workers” (professors and scholars) have something to relearn: their own honored place in the middle of the community and not in isolated, jargon-ridden professional enclaves.
Such knowledge was once the heart of our lives, and not that long ago. Before 1945, survival meant that most families would have all of these skills to some degree. These families were certainly materially poorer and perhaps more naïve, but they were richer in human relations, less bored, less depressed, less isolated, less addicted to food and drugs, physically healthier, and they had the rich human pleasure of knowing how to make things. It’s clear that we haven’t forgotten these skills and their pleasures entirely, but their presence for us is strange and a little unreal. What used to be life is now “fine living”: an array of expensive hobbies for the affluent that are taught through magazines, cable and PBS programs, and local guilds dedicated to gardening, basket weaving, cooking, home remodeling, quilting, and woodworking. Although we rarely recognize it in this way, through these “hobbies” we express a desire for a world that is now lost to us.
My argument is not, I assure you, a longing look back to the wonderful world of pre-war rural America. But it is to say that in the course of the last century of global capital triumphant we have been further isolated from what Ruskin called “valuable human things.” In exchange, we have been offered only the cold comfort of the television and computer monitor, and the GPS device that can locate you but only at the cost of being located in a place that is not worth knowing and certainly not worth caring about.
The turn away from this ugly, destructive, and unequal world is not something that can be accomplished by boycotting corporations when they’re bad or through the powerful work of the most concerned scientists. It will not be delivered with glossy brochures by the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, and it will certainly not be sold to you by Martha Stewart. A return to the valuable human things of the beautiful and the useful will only be accomplished, if it is ever to be accomplished, by the humans among us.
http://www.bellarmine.edu/studentaffairs/G...rry_address.asp
Commencement address by Wendell Berry at Bellarmine University, 2007
In all the history of teaching and learning, our own time may be the oddest. We seem to be obsessed with education. Newspapers spend an enormous flow of ink on articles, editorials, and letters about education. Presidents of public universities appear on the op-ed pages, prophesying the death of American civilization as the inevitable result of fiscal caution. Our governmental hallways are hardly passable because of university lobbyists kneeling and pleading for public dollars. One might conclude that we are panic-stricken at the thought of any educational inadequacy measurable in unappropriated funds.
And yet by all this fuss we are promoting a debased commodity paid for by the people, sanctioned by the government, for the benefit of the corporations. For the most part, its purpose is now defined by the great and the would-be-great “research universities.” These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the “industrial model,” no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. They have repudiated their old obligation to pass on to students at least something of their cultural inheritance. The ideal graduate no longer is to have a mind well-equipped to serve others, or to judge competently the purposes for which it may be used.
Now, according to those institutions of the “cutting edge,” the purpose of education is unabashedly utilitarian. Their interest is almost exclusively centered in the technical courses called, with typical ostentation of corporate jargon, STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.
The course of study called STEM is in reality only a sort of job training for upward (and lateral) mobility. It is also a subsidy granted to the corporations, which in a system of free enterprise might reasonably be expected to do their own job training. And in the great universities even this higher job training is obstructed by the hustle and anxiety of “research,” often involving yet another corporate raid on the public domain.
I do not mean to say that it is impossible to get something like an education in even the most ambitious university. After all, if you have a library, classrooms, laboratories, and an assemblage of doctors diversely learned, you have the makings of an actual school. And in such a place a young person might still pursue a respectable course of study. But that possibility seems less and less probable.
Actual education seems now to be far more probable in the smaller schools, and I think you graduates are fortunate to have been students at Bellarmine. A school the size of this one still can function as a community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as its unifying aim. But you must not forget that the purposes and standards of the world into which you are graduating have not been set by institutions such as this one, but rather by the proponents of STEM, who would like you to have a well-paying job as an unconscious expert with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.
You are not going to discover that the STEM project recognizes the standards of ecological and community health, or that it proposes the real national security of coherent local economies or sustainable methods of land use. You will be told instead that you and your community are now ruled by a global corporate empire, to which all the earth is a “third world,” against which you have no power of resistance or self-determination, and within which you have no vocational choice except a technical and servile job which will give you a small share of the plunder.
You will be told also – ignoring our permanent dependence on food, clothing, and shelter – that you live in a “knowledge-based economy,” which in fact is deeply prejudiced against all knowledge that does not produce the quickest possible return on investment. Even as the ecologists (who manifestly are excluded from STEM) have greatly enlarged our knowledge of ecosystems, their complexity and fragility and their need for care, our knowledge of our own species has been radically simplified. STEM’s definition of humanity includes no suggestion of reverence or neighborliness or stewardship. Instead, people are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals, self-interested and greedy by nature, violent by economic predestination, and members of nothing except their careers. The lives of these “autonomous” individuals will be “successful” insofar as they subserve the purposes of the corporate-political powers, who will regard them merely as consumers, votes, and units of “human capital.”
#
At commencement exercises it is customary to invite a speaker to exhort the graduates not to think of the end of their formal education as the end of their education, but rather to continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as they go forth to the duties and trials of responsible citizenship. As the designated speaker of this ceremony, I am serious about this duty. I do hereby exhort the graduates to continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as responsible citizens. And I do so knowing that no exhortation could be more subversive in the world as defined by the proponents of STEM.
To urge you toward responsible citizenship is to say that I do not accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed or the thoughtless individualism of that world. Nor do I accept the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism as an irresistible force. I am here to say that if you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the many others, all over our country and the world, who already are resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary. Of the possibility of effective resistance there is a large, ever-growing catalogue of proofs: of projects undertaken by local people, without official permission or instruction, that work to reduce the toxicity, the violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization. The resistance I am recommending will involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning, the curriculum of which will be defined by questions such as these:
What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?
Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.
You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.
You will have to understand that the logic of success is radically different from the logic of vocation. The logic of what our society means by “success” supposedly leads you ever upward to any higher-paying job that can be done sitting down. The logic of vocation holds that there is an indispensable justice, to yourself and to others, in doing well the work that you are “called” or prepared by your talents to do.
And so you must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is an adequate context for a life. The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But I can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. I can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.
I am sure that you are going to come face to face with the questions and issues I have mentioned, and I am sure that I don’t know how you will answer. People who speak at commencements speak in hope, but also in ignorance. However you may answer, I join the rest of your elders in worrying about you and in wishing you well.
Commencement address by Wendell Berry at Bellarmine University, 2007
In all the history of teaching and learning, our own time may be the oddest. We seem to be obsessed with education. Newspapers spend an enormous flow of ink on articles, editorials, and letters about education. Presidents of public universities appear on the op-ed pages, prophesying the death of American civilization as the inevitable result of fiscal caution. Our governmental hallways are hardly passable because of university lobbyists kneeling and pleading for public dollars. One might conclude that we are panic-stricken at the thought of any educational inadequacy measurable in unappropriated funds.
And yet by all this fuss we are promoting a debased commodity paid for by the people, sanctioned by the government, for the benefit of the corporations. For the most part, its purpose is now defined by the great and the would-be-great “research universities.” These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the “industrial model,” no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. They have repudiated their old obligation to pass on to students at least something of their cultural inheritance. The ideal graduate no longer is to have a mind well-equipped to serve others, or to judge competently the purposes for which it may be used.
Now, according to those institutions of the “cutting edge,” the purpose of education is unabashedly utilitarian. Their interest is almost exclusively centered in the technical courses called, with typical ostentation of corporate jargon, STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.
The course of study called STEM is in reality only a sort of job training for upward (and lateral) mobility. It is also a subsidy granted to the corporations, which in a system of free enterprise might reasonably be expected to do their own job training. And in the great universities even this higher job training is obstructed by the hustle and anxiety of “research,” often involving yet another corporate raid on the public domain.
I do not mean to say that it is impossible to get something like an education in even the most ambitious university. After all, if you have a library, classrooms, laboratories, and an assemblage of doctors diversely learned, you have the makings of an actual school. And in such a place a young person might still pursue a respectable course of study. But that possibility seems less and less probable.
Actual education seems now to be far more probable in the smaller schools, and I think you graduates are fortunate to have been students at Bellarmine. A school the size of this one still can function as a community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as its unifying aim. But you must not forget that the purposes and standards of the world into which you are graduating have not been set by institutions such as this one, but rather by the proponents of STEM, who would like you to have a well-paying job as an unconscious expert with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.
You are not going to discover that the STEM project recognizes the standards of ecological and community health, or that it proposes the real national security of coherent local economies or sustainable methods of land use. You will be told instead that you and your community are now ruled by a global corporate empire, to which all the earth is a “third world,” against which you have no power of resistance or self-determination, and within which you have no vocational choice except a technical and servile job which will give you a small share of the plunder.
You will be told also – ignoring our permanent dependence on food, clothing, and shelter – that you live in a “knowledge-based economy,” which in fact is deeply prejudiced against all knowledge that does not produce the quickest possible return on investment. Even as the ecologists (who manifestly are excluded from STEM) have greatly enlarged our knowledge of ecosystems, their complexity and fragility and their need for care, our knowledge of our own species has been radically simplified. STEM’s definition of humanity includes no suggestion of reverence or neighborliness or stewardship. Instead, people are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals, self-interested and greedy by nature, violent by economic predestination, and members of nothing except their careers. The lives of these “autonomous” individuals will be “successful” insofar as they subserve the purposes of the corporate-political powers, who will regard them merely as consumers, votes, and units of “human capital.”
#
At commencement exercises it is customary to invite a speaker to exhort the graduates not to think of the end of their formal education as the end of their education, but rather to continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as they go forth to the duties and trials of responsible citizenship. As the designated speaker of this ceremony, I am serious about this duty. I do hereby exhort the graduates to continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as responsible citizens. And I do so knowing that no exhortation could be more subversive in the world as defined by the proponents of STEM.
To urge you toward responsible citizenship is to say that I do not accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed or the thoughtless individualism of that world. Nor do I accept the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism as an irresistible force. I am here to say that if you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the many others, all over our country and the world, who already are resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary. Of the possibility of effective resistance there is a large, ever-growing catalogue of proofs: of projects undertaken by local people, without official permission or instruction, that work to reduce the toxicity, the violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization. The resistance I am recommending will involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning, the curriculum of which will be defined by questions such as these:
What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?
Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.
You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.
You will have to understand that the logic of success is radically different from the logic of vocation. The logic of what our society means by “success” supposedly leads you ever upward to any higher-paying job that can be done sitting down. The logic of vocation holds that there is an indispensable justice, to yourself and to others, in doing well the work that you are “called” or prepared by your talents to do.
And so you must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is an adequate context for a life. The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But I can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. I can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.
I am sure that you are going to come face to face with the questions and issues I have mentioned, and I am sure that I don’t know how you will answer. People who speak at commencements speak in hope, but also in ignorance. However you may answer, I join the rest of your elders in worrying about you and in wishing you well.
Published on 22 Jul 2007 by Casaubon's Book. Archived on 22 Jul 2007.
Jack of all trades, mistress of none
by Sharon Astyk
Jack of all trades, mistress of none
by Sharon Astyk
maybe we should have a Japanese hierarchy type banking system.
Banks on top, Business on bottom.
Banks on top, Business on bottom.
Unplugged Schools
Education can ameliorate, or exacerbate, society's ills. Which will it be?
by Lowell Monke
Education can ameliorate, or exacerbate, society's ills. Which will it be?
by Lowell Monke
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/337
Land, Farmer, Community: A Sacred Trust
To Create Heaven on Earth
Photograph and text by Lisa M. Hamilton
Land, Farmer, Community: A Sacred Trust
To Create Heaven on Earth
Photograph and text by Lisa M. Hamilton
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dw...n1.41f9c51.html
Allan Carlson: Here's a way for America to give it a shot
09:34 AM CDT on Sunday, September 23, 2007
We know that state socialism doesn't work – but is the unrestrained free market the only alternative? In his forthcoming book Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared , social historian Allan C. Carlson explores 20th-century economic experiments attempted by democratic Europeans who didn't want traditional society bulldozed by either big business or big government.
What is a "family-centered economy," and how does it differ from our own economy?
Such an economy would treat the family grounded in marriage, not the individual, as its fundamental unit. Real property would be so treasured that every household would have some. Where outside employment was necessary, it would favor the payment of a "family wage" to the head-of-household so that the other parent – normally the mother – might devote herself to children and home production.
It would give strong legal and financial preferences to family-held businesses, rather than to joint-stock corporations. This economy would use differential taxation to favor small farms and independent shops, while discouraging mega-farms and retail chains. It would favor home offices for doctors, lawyers, accountants and other professionals. It would encourage families to create home businesses, to garden, to engage in modest animal husbandry and to homeschool their children. And it would frown on advertising that relied on the vices of lust, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy and pride.
With the exception of giving a preference to owner-occupied homes, our existing economy really does none of these things.
Social conservatives bemoan the destruction of the traditional family and communities, but aside from scholars like you, very few have made the connection between that phenomenon and the economic policies favored by conservative politicians. Why not?
Some of the confusion comes from the "fusionism" that has dominated conservative thought since the 1950s. This scheme sees free-market individualism in creative tension with the traditional institutions of family, neighborhood and religion. This approach made some sense when both sides faced a common enemy in expansive communism. Reaganism might have been the fusionist apogee.
However, as the communist empire rapidly dissolved in the late 1980s, the fusionist alliance no longer held. The income-maximizing capitalist had no immediate interest in preserving marriages, families or viable communities; all stood in the way of profit. The Republican Party has tried to paper over the growing chasm. Most Republicans talk "family values" and may even vote that way at times when the issue is of little importance to the corporations (for example, "same-sex marriage").
However, when the interests of families and big business collide, Republican leaders quickly line up behind the latter. For example, the bankruptcy reform act of 2005 gave vast new protections to predatory credit card issuers while turning affected families into the indentured servants of banks and credit card bureaus.
Why did the various European experiments to find aThird way" between the free-market capitalist model and the state-socialist model mostly fail?
The primary reason lay in the relative decency of Third Way advocates in an era dominated by violence and moral monsters. In Russia, for example, Alexander Chayanov constructed a theory of and program for "the natural family economy." He believed that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was about intellectual freedom, democracy and economic justice, involving the distribution of land to the peasants. He failed to foresee the rise and brutality of Stalin and died in the gulag.
Agrarian leaders who came to power in eastern Europe also placed their faith in democracy and constitutional governance and implemented policies favoring family-scale agriculture and manufacturing. Alas, their enemies – communists, fascists, militarists, royalists and monopolists – were more ruthless, ready to crush democracy and to murder the elected peasants. Swedish socialist homemakers, who believed that women's liberation meant freedom from working in factories, successfully built an economy favoring a family wage for the men and full-time mothering for them. However, in the early 1970s – a period known as "Red Sweden" – they fell victim to the radical social-engineering schemes of [Prime Minister] Olaf Palme.
What would a Third Way for contemporary America look like – and would it find support in either political party?
A contemporary American Third Way would build on those sweet cultural revolutions already spreading in the land. Homeschooling, a rarity three decades ago, now embraces 2.5 million children and is reinventing American education on a family-centered model.
After a century of decline, family-scale agriculture is growing again. "There has never been a better time to be a farmer" crows Small Farmer's Journal this month. Market demand for organic foods has tripled the income of many family farms; there are 4,500 farmers markets in 2007, up from 1,750 in 1994; Community Supported Agriculture farms, where farmers and their customers form a partnership, may number 3,000 (none in 1985). A surging worldwide demand for milk has also reinvigorated family dairies.
Meanwhile, the number of home-based businesses in the United States may be as high as 36 million, quadruple the number found in 1990. Since most American laws and regulations still favor mass schooling, agribusiness, centralized factories and big-box chains, these gains remain fragile. All the same, the political party that genuinely embraces this emerging family-centered Third Way will know success.
Allan C. Carlson is president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, Ill. His e-mail address is acarlson@profam.org. This Q&A was conducted by editorial columnist Rod Dreher. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.
Allan Carlson: Here's a way for America to give it a shot
09:34 AM CDT on Sunday, September 23, 2007
We know that state socialism doesn't work – but is the unrestrained free market the only alternative? In his forthcoming book Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared , social historian Allan C. Carlson explores 20th-century economic experiments attempted by democratic Europeans who didn't want traditional society bulldozed by either big business or big government.
What is a "family-centered economy," and how does it differ from our own economy?
Such an economy would treat the family grounded in marriage, not the individual, as its fundamental unit. Real property would be so treasured that every household would have some. Where outside employment was necessary, it would favor the payment of a "family wage" to the head-of-household so that the other parent – normally the mother – might devote herself to children and home production.
It would give strong legal and financial preferences to family-held businesses, rather than to joint-stock corporations. This economy would use differential taxation to favor small farms and independent shops, while discouraging mega-farms and retail chains. It would favor home offices for doctors, lawyers, accountants and other professionals. It would encourage families to create home businesses, to garden, to engage in modest animal husbandry and to homeschool their children. And it would frown on advertising that relied on the vices of lust, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy and pride.
With the exception of giving a preference to owner-occupied homes, our existing economy really does none of these things.
Social conservatives bemoan the destruction of the traditional family and communities, but aside from scholars like you, very few have made the connection between that phenomenon and the economic policies favored by conservative politicians. Why not?
Some of the confusion comes from the "fusionism" that has dominated conservative thought since the 1950s. This scheme sees free-market individualism in creative tension with the traditional institutions of family, neighborhood and religion. This approach made some sense when both sides faced a common enemy in expansive communism. Reaganism might have been the fusionist apogee.
However, as the communist empire rapidly dissolved in the late 1980s, the fusionist alliance no longer held. The income-maximizing capitalist had no immediate interest in preserving marriages, families or viable communities; all stood in the way of profit. The Republican Party has tried to paper over the growing chasm. Most Republicans talk "family values" and may even vote that way at times when the issue is of little importance to the corporations (for example, "same-sex marriage").
However, when the interests of families and big business collide, Republican leaders quickly line up behind the latter. For example, the bankruptcy reform act of 2005 gave vast new protections to predatory credit card issuers while turning affected families into the indentured servants of banks and credit card bureaus.
Why did the various European experiments to find aThird way" between the free-market capitalist model and the state-socialist model mostly fail?
The primary reason lay in the relative decency of Third Way advocates in an era dominated by violence and moral monsters. In Russia, for example, Alexander Chayanov constructed a theory of and program for "the natural family economy." He believed that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was about intellectual freedom, democracy and economic justice, involving the distribution of land to the peasants. He failed to foresee the rise and brutality of Stalin and died in the gulag.
Agrarian leaders who came to power in eastern Europe also placed their faith in democracy and constitutional governance and implemented policies favoring family-scale agriculture and manufacturing. Alas, their enemies – communists, fascists, militarists, royalists and monopolists – were more ruthless, ready to crush democracy and to murder the elected peasants. Swedish socialist homemakers, who believed that women's liberation meant freedom from working in factories, successfully built an economy favoring a family wage for the men and full-time mothering for them. However, in the early 1970s – a period known as "Red Sweden" – they fell victim to the radical social-engineering schemes of [Prime Minister] Olaf Palme.
What would a Third Way for contemporary America look like – and would it find support in either political party?
A contemporary American Third Way would build on those sweet cultural revolutions already spreading in the land. Homeschooling, a rarity three decades ago, now embraces 2.5 million children and is reinventing American education on a family-centered model.
After a century of decline, family-scale agriculture is growing again. "There has never been a better time to be a farmer" crows Small Farmer's Journal this month. Market demand for organic foods has tripled the income of many family farms; there are 4,500 farmers markets in 2007, up from 1,750 in 1994; Community Supported Agriculture farms, where farmers and their customers form a partnership, may number 3,000 (none in 1985). A surging worldwide demand for milk has also reinvigorated family dairies.
Meanwhile, the number of home-based businesses in the United States may be as high as 36 million, quadruple the number found in 1990. Since most American laws and regulations still favor mass schooling, agribusiness, centralized factories and big-box chains, these gains remain fragile. All the same, the political party that genuinely embraces this emerging family-centered Third Way will know success.
Allan C. Carlson is president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, Ill. His e-mail address is acarlson@profam.org. This Q&A was conducted by editorial columnist Rod Dreher. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.
Third Ways
How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies—And Why They Disappeared
By Allan C. Carlson
Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists, they refused to treat human labor and relationships as commodities like any other. And unlike communists, they strongly defended private property and the dignity of persons and families. Instead, the builders of these alternative economic systems wanted to protect and renew the "natural" communities of family, village, neighborhood, and parish. They treasured rural culture and family farming and defended traditional sex roles and vital home economies.
Carlson's book takes a fresh look at distributism, the controversial economic project of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton which focused on broad property ownership and small-scale production; recovers the forgotten thought of Alexander Chayanov, a Russian economist who put forth a theory of "the natural family economy"; discusses the remarkable "third way" policies of peasant-led governments in post-World War I Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania; recounts the dramatic and largely unknown effort by Swedish housewives to defend their homes against radical feminism; relates the iconoclastic ideas of economic historian Karl Polanyi, including his concepts of "the economy without markets" and "the great transformation"; and praises the efforts by European Christian Democrats to build a moral economy on the concept of homo religious—"religious man."
Finally, Carlson's work explains why these efforts—at times rich in hope and prospects—ultimately failed, often with tragic results. The tale inspires wistful regret over lost opportunities that, if seized, might have spared tens of millions of lives and forestalled or avoided the blights of fascism, Stalinism, socialism, and the advent of the servile state. And yet the book closes with hope, enunciating a set of principles that could be used today for invigorating a "family way" economy compatible with an authentic, healthy, and humane culture of enterprise.
How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies—And Why They Disappeared
By Allan C. Carlson
Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists, they refused to treat human labor and relationships as commodities like any other. And unlike communists, they strongly defended private property and the dignity of persons and families. Instead, the builders of these alternative economic systems wanted to protect and renew the "natural" communities of family, village, neighborhood, and parish. They treasured rural culture and family farming and defended traditional sex roles and vital home economies.
Carlson's book takes a fresh look at distributism, the controversial economic project of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton which focused on broad property ownership and small-scale production; recovers the forgotten thought of Alexander Chayanov, a Russian economist who put forth a theory of "the natural family economy"; discusses the remarkable "third way" policies of peasant-led governments in post-World War I Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania; recounts the dramatic and largely unknown effort by Swedish housewives to defend their homes against radical feminism; relates the iconoclastic ideas of economic historian Karl Polanyi, including his concepts of "the economy without markets" and "the great transformation"; and praises the efforts by European Christian Democrats to build a moral economy on the concept of homo religious—"religious man."
Finally, Carlson's work explains why these efforts—at times rich in hope and prospects—ultimately failed, often with tragic results. The tale inspires wistful regret over lost opportunities that, if seized, might have spared tens of millions of lives and forestalled or avoided the blights of fascism, Stalinism, socialism, and the advent of the servile state. And yet the book closes with hope, enunciating a set of principles that could be used today for invigorating a "family way" economy compatible with an authentic, healthy, and humane culture of enterprise.
http://thewitness.org/archive/9906/currentarticle.html
The bioregional vision:
an interview with Kirkpatrick Sale
In 1985, Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (Sierra Club Books) put forward the philosophy and rationale for bioregionalism. In it he wrote: "I have been led to this consideration of the shape of the bioregional vision, inevitably as it were, by the trajectory of my previous work: on American radicalism, on American regionalism, on the abject failure of American giantism. It expresses for me not merely the newest and most comprehensive form of the ideals of decentralism, participation, liberation, mutualism and community that I have expounded in all that work--but, as it stems from the most elemental perception of the crises of the planet, the ideals of ecological sanity, regional consciousness, speciate humility and global survival. It is for me, therefore, not merely a new way of envisioning and enacting a very old American ideal, but also a crucial, and perhaps virtually the only possible, means of arresting the impending ecological apocalypse."
Sale is a contributing editor of The Nation and the author of many books, including Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (Addison-Wesley, 1995).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Julie A. Wortman: Have you seen any indication that the bioregional vision has been taking root since Dwellers in the Land was first published in 1985?
Kirkpatrick Sale: In some respects the movement has remained fairly static. The main means of communication is Planet Drum, which continues to send out a publication three or four times a year from California, and there are still biannual congresses that are held. But I don't detect any real momentum there. It tends to be a lot of the same people over and over again. However, at the same time, the idea of bioregion has taken hold in lots of places. People are talking about it and mapping their own bioregions. The latest thing I got was a map from somebody in the U.S. Forest Service who had done a highly scientific designation of North America by bioregions. And I've noticed that for the academic geographer bioregions have become a familiar concept. So it's had that kind of official recognition and I keep hearing about people who have organized themselves into bioregional groups or who have had college projects of mapping out their bioregion. And New Society Publishers has also been putting out a series of books on bioregionalism--they published Dwellers in the Land in 1987 after Sierra Club dropped it. In that series there's a useful book by Douglas Aberley called Boundaries of Home (1993) on mapping your bioregion [see TW 10/95].
J.W.: The ideals that you talk about in Dwellers in the Land--decentralism, participation, liberation, mutualism and community--seem to be ideals that are much more possible to realize by focusing in on the local. But so many people in the progressive community tend to focus on global politics. Do you encounter progressives who are changing their focus?
K.S.: Well, I don't know. I happen to be involved with a group of people who are concerning themselves with anti-globalism, so I know that that's an active sentiment. The trouble is that there are not enough people in that grouping who are talking about localism as the opposite of globalism, as the alternate way to organize the world, since globalism is going to be so destructive.
The basic understandings of ecology have not generally been part of progressive politics. Environmentalism is seen as a matter for the Sierra Club. But I'm finding progressive politics rather vacant these days--progressives think largely in terms of electoral politics and government as solutions. But once you start thinking in terms of the local, then you are pointing in the direction of thinking bioregionally.
J.W.: Would the Community Food Security movement qualify as bioregionalist?
K.S.: Well, there's quite a number of groups doing food work and community-supported agriculture. These are local ways of operating that don't necessarily call themselves bioregional, but which in fact are acting out the principles of bioregionalism. Another connection is through the simple living movement, which obviously overlaps with the community agriculture and local food-growing movements as well. And, again, that represents the direction towards self-sufficiency to which bioregionalism points.
I should note that I am part of the group that has finally established an independent organization to keep the ideas of back-to-the-land movement pioneers Scott and Helen Nearing alive [TW 9/92. We've taken their home, Forest Farm, in Harborside, Maine, and established the Good Life Center [named after their best-known book, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (Schocken Books)]. We are raising funds and publishing their material and material about them. Many of the people involved with the Good Life Center think in terms of bioregions and use that rubric to describe what they're doing.
J.W.: You say in Dwellers in the Land that there are plenty of people who are focusing in on very specific topics--like water quality--but who know they have to be part of a larger effort. Is the Green Party trying to work that sort of coalition?
K.S.: It would be hard for me to say. The last I looked at the Green Party in New York City--I live only 60 miles from Manhattan, in Cold Spring, N.Y.--there was no understanding of ecology, much less bioregionalism. And the people who ran for office here in this county were running on essentially an anti-development platform. I would bet they would mostly know the word bioregional, but I don't think that that formed a big part of their approach. The Green Party--with which I was involved for the first six or seven years--has been a disappointment in that regard because it has tried to be a kind of a left-liberal catchall. And so, in spite of the name of the party, the environmental part of that has never been a big component.
J.W.: What do you think it's important for the average person who's at least superficially attracted to bioregionalism to understand about it? What's the piece of work they need to do in order to "get" what bioregionalism is?
K.S.: Well, where does your water come from? That's the first understanding to get--to understand that it comes from someplace and goes someplace and that you are a part of it and that anything you do to harm it will be harming you and others. That gets you thinking about sewage and garbage and agricultural run-off. And next you begin to understand what a healthy ecosystem is at a bioregional level.
I mean, the way to "get" bioregionalism is to think about water. Water is going to be an increasingly serious issue as the water systems increasingly get fouled. On the Hudson, where I am, the river is a good deal cleaner than it used to be and the worst of the superfund sites have been--or at least claim to have been--cleaned up. And there are sewage treatment plants everywhere up and down the river now which there weren't 20 years ago. So something has been done, but it's been done because people began to understand that they were killing the river. But even so there are PCBs in the river that are never going to be removed.
J.W.: The way corporations operate seems so contradictory to a bioregional perspective--do you have a perspective on standing up to them?
K.S.: You're quite right that corporations are antithetical and hostile to the idea of bioregionalism, not only because they don't like to operate at that scale, but also because it emphasizes local self-sufficiency. And of course self-sufficiency is anathema to capitalism, which has to have increasingly wider and open markets to survive. But as corporations gain more power, they represent a greater and greater threat to any successful operations on a bioregional level--which only goes to suggest that the various groups that are working to limit corporate power make the most sense. Such groups are consciously trying to get state legislatures--which incorporate corporations--to exercise their powers to limit and control corporations. But this whole voluntary simplicity movement is also inherently anti-corporate, as is the community-supported agriculture movement.
J.W.: And I suppose the focus on water that you suggest would be a good way to begin trying get at corporate practices?
K.S.: Well, yes. Corporate agribusiness, for example, is a major polluter of water and a major user of water. But corporations being what they are, and the economic system being what it is, I don't see that trying to get them to change is probably a very fruitful way to go. Better the idea of withdrawing from corporate influence--that is to say, living simply and locally.
J.W.: Are you aware of any international coalition building around bioregionalism?
K.S.: Yes. Peter Berg and the people at Planet Drum have taken that on as a kind of mission and there are bioregional groups in Japan. In fact the opposition to what the Olympics did there to destroy the ecosystem of that particular valley where the winter games were held was led by people who were explicitly bioregional.
J.W.: Dwellers in the Land seems to very clearly state the case for bioregionalism, but I'm wondering if you've changed or adjusted any of the views that are contained in it over the past 15 years?
K.S.: I don't think so. I used it recently in teaching a course in England and it stood up pretty well. If anything, I think it's going to be more and more relevant. I think it will be especially relevant when this global system collapses.
J.W.: Are you seeing that coming soon?
K.S.: Well, I have predicted that it will occur by 2020, by which time we will need books like that one and others by people who have been in the bioregional movement as guidelines for how to remake our life when it is no longer dominated by corporations and massive governments.
J.W.: Will those governments and corporations collapse because of having just used up resources?
K.S.: Partly that, but also the ecological disasters that will go along with that--from global warming to new diseases, to ozone layers vanishing and water drying up and forests being cut. The combination of those continuing crises will produce connected and multiple disasters.
J.W.: I guess Y2K is becoming a kind of warning bell for some people?
K.S.: Well, yeah, it is an expression of people's doubts and fears about this technology around us. But it's also being used opportunistically by people who want to raise issues of community and self-help and the like.
J.W.: Is that contrary to a bioregional perspective?
K.S.: Not at all, it's quite consistent. I'm just a little cynical about taking Y2K as the reason for doing this kind of organizing, since I don't believe that in fact all that much is going to happen when January comes around. J.W.: But the ecological disaster is coming?
K.S.: Yes, that is going to come and I don't see any means of halting it, at least as long as corporations remain as powerful as they are. They will sow their own destruction, it seems quite clear to me.
J.W.: You say that bioregionalism taps a deeper wisdom that comes from the earth. And there are a lot of people yearning for a more grounded spiritual life. Do you think people will begin to shift to a bioregional perspective out of a simple desire to become more spiritually grounded?
K.S.: Well, I would say that maybe what I underplayed in Dwellers in the Land was the necessity for a spiritual basis for one's identity with the earth. In fact, I think if there's going to be any successful lives for us or even successful resistance to the corporate onslaught, it will come from people who have a spiritual identity with the earth. That, of course, inevitably leads to a bioregional understanding. But I'm not sure how many people who are searching for spiritual answers are going in the direction of nature and the earth, as they ought to.
J.W.: I was really taken by your observation about how indigenous people sort themselves out tribally in a kind of bioregional way. So you can look at the tribes and where they are located and it pretty much follows bioregions. It seems to me that that would suggest that there is a real good reason for a person with a bioregional perspective to make alliances with native people.
K.S.: That has always been an important part of the bioregional movement. A good percentage of native people still retain perceptions out of their tribal experience that are identical with bioregionalism, though of course they use other words to describe it. What I would say to progressives is that what you've left out of your politics all along is a spiritual understanding. And the spiritual understanding we ought to have is connected to that of the native populations, for whom the earth was a sacred goddess.
The bioregional vision:
an interview with Kirkpatrick Sale
In 1985, Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (Sierra Club Books) put forward the philosophy and rationale for bioregionalism. In it he wrote: "I have been led to this consideration of the shape of the bioregional vision, inevitably as it were, by the trajectory of my previous work: on American radicalism, on American regionalism, on the abject failure of American giantism. It expresses for me not merely the newest and most comprehensive form of the ideals of decentralism, participation, liberation, mutualism and community that I have expounded in all that work--but, as it stems from the most elemental perception of the crises of the planet, the ideals of ecological sanity, regional consciousness, speciate humility and global survival. It is for me, therefore, not merely a new way of envisioning and enacting a very old American ideal, but also a crucial, and perhaps virtually the only possible, means of arresting the impending ecological apocalypse."
Sale is a contributing editor of The Nation and the author of many books, including Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (Addison-Wesley, 1995).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Julie A. Wortman: Have you seen any indication that the bioregional vision has been taking root since Dwellers in the Land was first published in 1985?
Kirkpatrick Sale: In some respects the movement has remained fairly static. The main means of communication is Planet Drum, which continues to send out a publication three or four times a year from California, and there are still biannual congresses that are held. But I don't detect any real momentum there. It tends to be a lot of the same people over and over again. However, at the same time, the idea of bioregion has taken hold in lots of places. People are talking about it and mapping their own bioregions. The latest thing I got was a map from somebody in the U.S. Forest Service who had done a highly scientific designation of North America by bioregions. And I've noticed that for the academic geographer bioregions have become a familiar concept. So it's had that kind of official recognition and I keep hearing about people who have organized themselves into bioregional groups or who have had college projects of mapping out their bioregion. And New Society Publishers has also been putting out a series of books on bioregionalism--they published Dwellers in the Land in 1987 after Sierra Club dropped it. In that series there's a useful book by Douglas Aberley called Boundaries of Home (1993) on mapping your bioregion [see TW 10/95].
J.W.: The ideals that you talk about in Dwellers in the Land--decentralism, participation, liberation, mutualism and community--seem to be ideals that are much more possible to realize by focusing in on the local. But so many people in the progressive community tend to focus on global politics. Do you encounter progressives who are changing their focus?
K.S.: Well, I don't know. I happen to be involved with a group of people who are concerning themselves with anti-globalism, so I know that that's an active sentiment. The trouble is that there are not enough people in that grouping who are talking about localism as the opposite of globalism, as the alternate way to organize the world, since globalism is going to be so destructive.
The basic understandings of ecology have not generally been part of progressive politics. Environmentalism is seen as a matter for the Sierra Club. But I'm finding progressive politics rather vacant these days--progressives think largely in terms of electoral politics and government as solutions. But once you start thinking in terms of the local, then you are pointing in the direction of thinking bioregionally.
J.W.: Would the Community Food Security movement qualify as bioregionalist?
K.S.: Well, there's quite a number of groups doing food work and community-supported agriculture. These are local ways of operating that don't necessarily call themselves bioregional, but which in fact are acting out the principles of bioregionalism. Another connection is through the simple living movement, which obviously overlaps with the community agriculture and local food-growing movements as well. And, again, that represents the direction towards self-sufficiency to which bioregionalism points.
I should note that I am part of the group that has finally established an independent organization to keep the ideas of back-to-the-land movement pioneers Scott and Helen Nearing alive [TW 9/92. We've taken their home, Forest Farm, in Harborside, Maine, and established the Good Life Center [named after their best-known book, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (Schocken Books)]. We are raising funds and publishing their material and material about them. Many of the people involved with the Good Life Center think in terms of bioregions and use that rubric to describe what they're doing.
J.W.: You say in Dwellers in the Land that there are plenty of people who are focusing in on very specific topics--like water quality--but who know they have to be part of a larger effort. Is the Green Party trying to work that sort of coalition?
K.S.: It would be hard for me to say. The last I looked at the Green Party in New York City--I live only 60 miles from Manhattan, in Cold Spring, N.Y.--there was no understanding of ecology, much less bioregionalism. And the people who ran for office here in this county were running on essentially an anti-development platform. I would bet they would mostly know the word bioregional, but I don't think that that formed a big part of their approach. The Green Party--with which I was involved for the first six or seven years--has been a disappointment in that regard because it has tried to be a kind of a left-liberal catchall. And so, in spite of the name of the party, the environmental part of that has never been a big component.
J.W.: What do you think it's important for the average person who's at least superficially attracted to bioregionalism to understand about it? What's the piece of work they need to do in order to "get" what bioregionalism is?
K.S.: Well, where does your water come from? That's the first understanding to get--to understand that it comes from someplace and goes someplace and that you are a part of it and that anything you do to harm it will be harming you and others. That gets you thinking about sewage and garbage and agricultural run-off. And next you begin to understand what a healthy ecosystem is at a bioregional level.
I mean, the way to "get" bioregionalism is to think about water. Water is going to be an increasingly serious issue as the water systems increasingly get fouled. On the Hudson, where I am, the river is a good deal cleaner than it used to be and the worst of the superfund sites have been--or at least claim to have been--cleaned up. And there are sewage treatment plants everywhere up and down the river now which there weren't 20 years ago. So something has been done, but it's been done because people began to understand that they were killing the river. But even so there are PCBs in the river that are never going to be removed.
J.W.: The way corporations operate seems so contradictory to a bioregional perspective--do you have a perspective on standing up to them?
K.S.: You're quite right that corporations are antithetical and hostile to the idea of bioregionalism, not only because they don't like to operate at that scale, but also because it emphasizes local self-sufficiency. And of course self-sufficiency is anathema to capitalism, which has to have increasingly wider and open markets to survive. But as corporations gain more power, they represent a greater and greater threat to any successful operations on a bioregional level--which only goes to suggest that the various groups that are working to limit corporate power make the most sense. Such groups are consciously trying to get state legislatures--which incorporate corporations--to exercise their powers to limit and control corporations. But this whole voluntary simplicity movement is also inherently anti-corporate, as is the community-supported agriculture movement.
J.W.: And I suppose the focus on water that you suggest would be a good way to begin trying get at corporate practices?
K.S.: Well, yes. Corporate agribusiness, for example, is a major polluter of water and a major user of water. But corporations being what they are, and the economic system being what it is, I don't see that trying to get them to change is probably a very fruitful way to go. Better the idea of withdrawing from corporate influence--that is to say, living simply and locally.
J.W.: Are you aware of any international coalition building around bioregionalism?
K.S.: Yes. Peter Berg and the people at Planet Drum have taken that on as a kind of mission and there are bioregional groups in Japan. In fact the opposition to what the Olympics did there to destroy the ecosystem of that particular valley where the winter games were held was led by people who were explicitly bioregional.
J.W.: Dwellers in the Land seems to very clearly state the case for bioregionalism, but I'm wondering if you've changed or adjusted any of the views that are contained in it over the past 15 years?
K.S.: I don't think so. I used it recently in teaching a course in England and it stood up pretty well. If anything, I think it's going to be more and more relevant. I think it will be especially relevant when this global system collapses.
J.W.: Are you seeing that coming soon?
K.S.: Well, I have predicted that it will occur by 2020, by which time we will need books like that one and others by people who have been in the bioregional movement as guidelines for how to remake our life when it is no longer dominated by corporations and massive governments.
J.W.: Will those governments and corporations collapse because of having just used up resources?
K.S.: Partly that, but also the ecological disasters that will go along with that--from global warming to new diseases, to ozone layers vanishing and water drying up and forests being cut. The combination of those continuing crises will produce connected and multiple disasters.
J.W.: I guess Y2K is becoming a kind of warning bell for some people?
K.S.: Well, yeah, it is an expression of people's doubts and fears about this technology around us. But it's also being used opportunistically by people who want to raise issues of community and self-help and the like.
J.W.: Is that contrary to a bioregional perspective?
K.S.: Not at all, it's quite consistent. I'm just a little cynical about taking Y2K as the reason for doing this kind of organizing, since I don't believe that in fact all that much is going to happen when January comes around. J.W.: But the ecological disaster is coming?
K.S.: Yes, that is going to come and I don't see any means of halting it, at least as long as corporations remain as powerful as they are. They will sow their own destruction, it seems quite clear to me.
J.W.: You say that bioregionalism taps a deeper wisdom that comes from the earth. And there are a lot of people yearning for a more grounded spiritual life. Do you think people will begin to shift to a bioregional perspective out of a simple desire to become more spiritually grounded?
K.S.: Well, I would say that maybe what I underplayed in Dwellers in the Land was the necessity for a spiritual basis for one's identity with the earth. In fact, I think if there's going to be any successful lives for us or even successful resistance to the corporate onslaught, it will come from people who have a spiritual identity with the earth. That, of course, inevitably leads to a bioregional understanding. But I'm not sure how many people who are searching for spiritual answers are going in the direction of nature and the earth, as they ought to.
J.W.: I was really taken by your observation about how indigenous people sort themselves out tribally in a kind of bioregional way. So you can look at the tribes and where they are located and it pretty much follows bioregions. It seems to me that that would suggest that there is a real good reason for a person with a bioregional perspective to make alliances with native people.
K.S.: That has always been an important part of the bioregional movement. A good percentage of native people still retain perceptions out of their tribal experience that are identical with bioregionalism, though of course they use other words to describe it. What I would say to progressives is that what you've left out of your politics all along is a spiritual understanding. And the spiritual understanding we ought to have is connected to that of the native populations, for whom the earth was a sacred goddess.
http://vtcommons.org/node/175
Small is Powerful
By Kirkpatrick Sale
When you have a bunch of crushed grapes and introduce yeast cells, you produce one of the most energetic and successful events in biology. The yeast eats up the sugar of the grape and produces alcohol as a waste byproduct, and keeps on eating and eating, happy as a, well, yeast in juice—until there is no more sugar to eat, or the alcohol content gets close to 14 percent, at which point the yeast can no longer survive. It chokes, more or less, in its own waste. And the wine is made.
This is a process ecologists call drawdown. The next steps are bloom, crash, diedown, and dieout. That is the process of many species. It is the process through which industrial civilization is going today—only we are still in the first two phases of it. Drawdown of the world’s resources at an alarming rate—to the point where the distinguished Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has declared that “Earth’s capacity to support our species is approaching the limit.” Bloom, though of course not for everyone, but about a fifth of the world’s population, and at levels of grandeur never before known to the earth.
But it is obvious that the other three ecological stages are upon us. We can already see that crash is coming. Wilson again: “The appropriation of productive land—the ecological footprint—is already too large for the planet to sustain” and “has stressed the earth beyond its ability to regenerate.” That means that unless we drastically change our ways, soon, our species—the one that calls itself sapient—will crash and die down and possibly even die out, taking with us a great many other species on the surface of the earth.
It’s very simple. There really is no argument about it. Not among serious people.
That’s the problem. So what’s the solution? Also simple: localism.
Now there are many ways of going about that, and one of the great strengths of localism is that it takes different forms in different places, adapted to its context. But there are two forms that I think hold some real promise for the future: bioregionalism and separatism.
I won’t bore you with a lot of stuff about bioregionalism—I’ve written a book, still available, that spells it out in some detail. For all its 7-syllable grandeur, it just means life-place, the way that nature has patterned herself, the scale at which she has organized distinctive flora and fauna, water and climate, rocks and soils. The borders of such bioregions of course are fuzzy, but they are there: the world, the continents, are really made up of small self-defining regions.
As original people everywhere knew. Like American Indians. I have seen a map of Indian tribes’ territories in the mid-19th century, when the American government was trying to draw up treaties with them. Almost all the territories are watersheds of large rivers—in other words, bioregions that contain distinctive flora and fauna. That is the way the Indians naturally settled themselves, how they lived on the land.
As earth scientists know. The latest map from the U.S. Forest Service’s Ecosystem Management Division in Fort Collins, Colorado, is of “Ecoregions of North America,” with provinces mapped out by what can only be called a bioregional method, though naturally with an emphasis on trees because that’s their charge. The result is essentially a map of bioregions.
As other professionals know. Geographers as long ago as 1985 began using the term; landscape architects, too, who were recently enjoined by the president of the American Society of Landscape Architects to operate with a “bioregional hypothesis.”
As we all know, really, in our heart of hearts, when we stop to think of it. We know that we live in a natural region of some sort, with distinctive natural elements, a river, say, or a lake, or a mountain range. City dwellers tend to overlook this, and cities tend these days to ignore their hinterlands and look to the world. But most other people do see themselves as part of a region of some kind. They know where their water comes from and where it goes, what the typical animal and tree species are, and so on. Industrial capitalism has done much to destroy that identity, and globalism finds it anathema, but it is there nonetheless.
So bioregions are a reality, and bioregionalism is about trying to think about living, and growing and eating and traveling and using and eventually governing, within them. To put it briefly, the whole concept is simply trying to give people a new way of thinking about nature, and then acting within it.
That is the first, and the absolute necessary, principle by which we can think about localism. The other principle is separatism, which I take to encompass secession, regionalism, tribalism, self-determination, and all forms of devolution. It is clearly a movement of our time, whatever counterforces of globalism and imperialism exist. It is, as I’ve noted before, the worldwide trend since World War II, capped most recently by the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It is also a strong and growing trend in the United States, for all the superficial unity wrought by mass marketing and mass media. The red-state and blue-state divisions are only one form of it, though they point to a real and serious gulf in the land.
The response to the last presidential election in this country has been regional and holds the seeds of a real separatist movement. A group on the West Coast called MoveonCalifornia was established in November 2004 and has since been holding meetings under the rubric of a “Committee to Explore California Secession.” The League of the South, which has been pressing for Southern secession for some decades, has found renewed fervor for its cause. A group in New Mexico has proposed a “Republica del Norte” that might include Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and southern Colorado. Hawaii has three secessionist organizations and there’s a move to have a statewide referendum on a return to the independent state it once was. The Alaska Independence Party has been a real force in the state for years—it even got Walter Hickel elected governor on its slate in 1991, though he soon rejected the party—and now has grown to more than 20,000 members, the largest statewide third party in America. And a group in New York City, connected to a weekly called the Brooklyn Rail, has been writing and meeting and propagandizing for a Free NYC movement.
It’s too soon to say what any of these organizations will achieve. But it’s important to see that they exist and they express a very deep-seated attitude of regionalism in this country that goes way back and has recently been revivified.
At one time our diets, sex lives, family relations, education, and jobs were all under the serious and daily control of churches and kings. We are no longer under their thrall, at least not in this country. Is it so fantastic to think about being as free of the regular interference of the government of the nation-state?
Let us think back to the emergence of the mammalian class, long eons ago. Their success was due to the fact that, unlike the dinosaurs that until then had dominated the earth, they were small and able to adapt to all kinds of diurnal and climatic conditions the big lizards were not. They were able to survive and eventually to proliferate, even dominate. Let us imagine we are in another political Eocene epoch now, again watching the emergence of nimble, smaller forms to challenge the old, collapsing dinosaurs of nation and empire.
Small is Powerful
By Kirkpatrick Sale
When you have a bunch of crushed grapes and introduce yeast cells, you produce one of the most energetic and successful events in biology. The yeast eats up the sugar of the grape and produces alcohol as a waste byproduct, and keeps on eating and eating, happy as a, well, yeast in juice—until there is no more sugar to eat, or the alcohol content gets close to 14 percent, at which point the yeast can no longer survive. It chokes, more or less, in its own waste. And the wine is made.
This is a process ecologists call drawdown. The next steps are bloom, crash, diedown, and dieout. That is the process of many species. It is the process through which industrial civilization is going today—only we are still in the first two phases of it. Drawdown of the world’s resources at an alarming rate—to the point where the distinguished Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has declared that “Earth’s capacity to support our species is approaching the limit.” Bloom, though of course not for everyone, but about a fifth of the world’s population, and at levels of grandeur never before known to the earth.
But it is obvious that the other three ecological stages are upon us. We can already see that crash is coming. Wilson again: “The appropriation of productive land—the ecological footprint—is already too large for the planet to sustain” and “has stressed the earth beyond its ability to regenerate.” That means that unless we drastically change our ways, soon, our species—the one that calls itself sapient—will crash and die down and possibly even die out, taking with us a great many other species on the surface of the earth.
It’s very simple. There really is no argument about it. Not among serious people.
That’s the problem. So what’s the solution? Also simple: localism.
Now there are many ways of going about that, and one of the great strengths of localism is that it takes different forms in different places, adapted to its context. But there are two forms that I think hold some real promise for the future: bioregionalism and separatism.
I won’t bore you with a lot of stuff about bioregionalism—I’ve written a book, still available, that spells it out in some detail. For all its 7-syllable grandeur, it just means life-place, the way that nature has patterned herself, the scale at which she has organized distinctive flora and fauna, water and climate, rocks and soils. The borders of such bioregions of course are fuzzy, but they are there: the world, the continents, are really made up of small self-defining regions.
As original people everywhere knew. Like American Indians. I have seen a map of Indian tribes’ territories in the mid-19th century, when the American government was trying to draw up treaties with them. Almost all the territories are watersheds of large rivers—in other words, bioregions that contain distinctive flora and fauna. That is the way the Indians naturally settled themselves, how they lived on the land.
As earth scientists know. The latest map from the U.S. Forest Service’s Ecosystem Management Division in Fort Collins, Colorado, is of “Ecoregions of North America,” with provinces mapped out by what can only be called a bioregional method, though naturally with an emphasis on trees because that’s their charge. The result is essentially a map of bioregions.
As other professionals know. Geographers as long ago as 1985 began using the term; landscape architects, too, who were recently enjoined by the president of the American Society of Landscape Architects to operate with a “bioregional hypothesis.”
As we all know, really, in our heart of hearts, when we stop to think of it. We know that we live in a natural region of some sort, with distinctive natural elements, a river, say, or a lake, or a mountain range. City dwellers tend to overlook this, and cities tend these days to ignore their hinterlands and look to the world. But most other people do see themselves as part of a region of some kind. They know where their water comes from and where it goes, what the typical animal and tree species are, and so on. Industrial capitalism has done much to destroy that identity, and globalism finds it anathema, but it is there nonetheless.
So bioregions are a reality, and bioregionalism is about trying to think about living, and growing and eating and traveling and using and eventually governing, within them. To put it briefly, the whole concept is simply trying to give people a new way of thinking about nature, and then acting within it.
That is the first, and the absolute necessary, principle by which we can think about localism. The other principle is separatism, which I take to encompass secession, regionalism, tribalism, self-determination, and all forms of devolution. It is clearly a movement of our time, whatever counterforces of globalism and imperialism exist. It is, as I’ve noted before, the worldwide trend since World War II, capped most recently by the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It is also a strong and growing trend in the United States, for all the superficial unity wrought by mass marketing and mass media. The red-state and blue-state divisions are only one form of it, though they point to a real and serious gulf in the land.
The response to the last presidential election in this country has been regional and holds the seeds of a real separatist movement. A group on the West Coast called MoveonCalifornia was established in November 2004 and has since been holding meetings under the rubric of a “Committee to Explore California Secession.” The League of the South, which has been pressing for Southern secession for some decades, has found renewed fervor for its cause. A group in New Mexico has proposed a “Republica del Norte” that might include Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and southern Colorado. Hawaii has three secessionist organizations and there’s a move to have a statewide referendum on a return to the independent state it once was. The Alaska Independence Party has been a real force in the state for years—it even got Walter Hickel elected governor on its slate in 1991, though he soon rejected the party—and now has grown to more than 20,000 members, the largest statewide third party in America. And a group in New York City, connected to a weekly called the Brooklyn Rail, has been writing and meeting and propagandizing for a Free NYC movement.
It’s too soon to say what any of these organizations will achieve. But it’s important to see that they exist and they express a very deep-seated attitude of regionalism in this country that goes way back and has recently been revivified.
At one time our diets, sex lives, family relations, education, and jobs were all under the serious and daily control of churches and kings. We are no longer under their thrall, at least not in this country. Is it so fantastic to think about being as free of the regular interference of the government of the nation-state?
Let us think back to the emergence of the mammalian class, long eons ago. Their success was due to the fact that, unlike the dinosaurs that until then had dominated the earth, they were small and able to adapt to all kinds of diurnal and climatic conditions the big lizards were not. They were able to survive and eventually to proliferate, even dominate. Let us imagine we are in another political Eocene epoch now, again watching the emergence of nimble, smaller forms to challenge the old, collapsing dinosaurs of nation and empire.
http://www.vtcommons.org/node/358
Kirkpatrick Sale: Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics - Towards Basic Principles of a Bioregional EconomySubmitted by Rob Williams on Fri, 02/24/2006 - 9:08pm. Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics:
Towards Basic Principles of a Bioregional Economy
By Kirkpatrick Sale
Economics of scale is what conventional industrial economies are all about, finding ways to more profitably and efficiently exploit nature. But the scale of economics is what the economies of the future must be about, finding ways to live so that healthy communities may foster a healthy earth.
There are only two essentials to consider in coming at the problem of the optimum scale for an economy to produce and distribute goods and services: the natural ecosystem and the human community. An economy that does harm to the natural world – depleting resources, extincting species, producing pollution, piling up wastes – has grown too large; an economy out of democratic and humanitarian control – where decisions are made by distant corporations and a polity whose choices are beyond individual influence—has grown too large.
An economic scale optimum for the earth’s systems would be based on conservation, stability, sustainability, recycling, harmony. That means, for starters, an economy at a bioregional scale that more or less dictates the economy appropriate to it. An economy based on a watershed, for example, automatically considers downriver populations as well as headwater ones. The human constructs would adapt to the environment rather than be imposed, and human uses would be confined to those the bioregion allowed.
In Vermont terms, it would be possible to think of the western watershed of the Connecticut River, with all the rivers running eastward from the Green Mountains, as a bioregion. Another bioregion would encompass the watershed to the west of the Green Mountains, to Lake Champlain.
Dairy and general truck farming would naturally be at the heart of the bioregional economy, although if a truly ecological sensibility informs it those farms would not allow the disastrous waste runoff that now pollutes Lake Champlain and other waterways. Nor would they use artificial chemicals and fertilizers, nor allow factory farms of 1,000-plus cows and 100,000-plus hens. An ecologically based agriculture would depend on solar power appropriate to the region, on human-powered machines, on organic pest-management systems, perennial polyculture and permaculture, with markets geared to seasonal and regional foods.
The economic scale desirable for the human community would be one in which decisions about the economy – what is produced, from what resources, by whom, for whom, how distributed, how recycled – are made democratically by towns and bioregions. Most power would locate at the level of the community, where we can imagine effecting basic economic justice: workplace ownership by the employees, workplace democracy for decision-making, and workplace commitment to the surrounding populace – all the things that are impossible with large scales and distant chain store corporations.
And here we come to an essential element of a stable economy that dictates much of its scale: self-sufficiency. If Vermont’s farms were part of a self-sufficient economy, feeding the 620,000 people within its borders as its primary mission, there would not be such a concentration on dairy farms (and the resultant pollution problems), but a greater diversity of animal products and crops, ultimately to the health of the ecosystems.
Self-sufficiency is operable only at a limited scale – say, bioregions of 10,000 to 20,000 square miles – where humans can understand the resources at hand, perceive and regulate the variants in the economy, and ensure that production and distribution is made rational and systematic. In terms of population, too, there is a limit at which self-sufficiency can be achieved. In research for my book Human Scale, I found that historically self-sufficient communities with economies of some complexity tended to cluster in the 5,000-10,000 population range. Urbanologist Gideon Sjoberg has said that “it seems unlikely that, at least in the earlier periods, even the larger of these cities contained more than 5,000 to 10,000 people, including part-time farmers on the cities’ outskirts.” Even when larger cities grew in the 13th and 14th centuries to 20,000 or even 40,000, they were typically divided into quarters--literally four parts – of 5,000 to 10,000 people.
On a modern American scale we might imagine a mixture of somewhat self-sufficient cities within more self-sufficient counties within mostly self-sufficient bioregions within a totally self-sufficient state, and then the economy of self-sufficiency might be quite complex indeed. In terms of Vermont, this might be a mix of relatively self-sufficient cities (Barre, Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington, Essex, Hartford, Middlebury, Milton, Montpelier, Rutland, South Burlington and Springfield are obvious candidates), within ecologically determined more self-sufficient shires (perhaps the West, Black, White, Winooski, Lamoille, Passumpsic watersheds), within the two self-sufficient bioregions on either side of the Green Mountains, within the state – whose economy, if independent, could be as self-sufficient as it desired.
Such units would need to be guided by certain maxims to provide a full range of goods and services, and they would need to adhere to them with some ingenuity. But the maxims are simple and thoroughly practical. They would include the principle of sharing at the community level, recycling and repairing (or at a more complex level, remanufacturing) almost everything, an emphasis on handicrafts and bespoke production rather than manufactures and mass production, using raw local (instead of imported) materials, nurturing local ingenuity without patent and copyright restrictions, and agreeing to abandon as unnecessary and undesirable almost everything manufactured at the factory level anywhere and anyhow. All of which is no more complex than the old New England adage:
Use it up, wear it out,
Make it do, or do without.
What follows are what I take to be the essential elements of a philosophy that would guide a bioregional economy, which I have constructed from a wide reading in alternative economics, including E.F. Schumacher’s great range of writings (particularly “Buddhist Economics” in Small is Beautiful) mixed with various economic ideas expressed by the Buddha himself, and ideas I enunciated in the “Economy” chapter of my Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (University of Georgia Press).
1. All production of goods or services would be based primarily on a reverence for life, a biocentric understanding that includes animals, birds, insects, plants, trees, the living ecosystems, streams and rivers, forests and wetlands, hills and mountains, clouds and rains – fundamentally Gaia herself, understood as the only living, self-regulating planet in the galaxy.
2. All systems have limits and they must be learned and adhered to in every economic act; overuse, depletion or exhaustion of a resource or species would be seen as a criminal act of violence; overproduction of a resource or a species, such as the human, would be seen as a criminal act of avarice and greed.
3. The primary unit of production would be the self-sufficient community, within a self-regarding bioregion, which would strive to produce all its needs, and essential political and economic decisions would be taken democratically at that level.
4. Consumption would be limited, for the goal of economic life is not the multiplication of wants but the satisfaction of basic needs.
5. Everything produced, and the means of its production, would embody the four cardinal principles of smaller, simpler, cheaper, safer – technology on a human scale, comprehendible, affordable for all, and non-violent.
6. The only jobs would be those that enhance the worker, contribute to the community, and produce nothing but needed goods – and that means goods, not bads.
7. All people who wish to do so would work, for the purpose of work is not to produce things to satisfy wants but to nourish and develop the individual soul, aiming at fulfilling the highest nature of the human character, including identification with community and the satisfaction of its needs.
8. All economic decisions would be made in accordance with the Buddhist principle, “Cease to do evil; try to do good,” and the definition of good would be that which preserves and enhances the integrity, stability, diversity, continuity and beauty of living species and systems; that which does the contrary is evil.
That is, to my mind, the essential moral and intellectual guide to a right and successful bioregional economics.
Kirkpatrick Sale: Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics - Towards Basic Principles of a Bioregional EconomySubmitted by Rob Williams on Fri, 02/24/2006 - 9:08pm. Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics:
Towards Basic Principles of a Bioregional Economy
By Kirkpatrick Sale
Economics of scale is what conventional industrial economies are all about, finding ways to more profitably and efficiently exploit nature. But the scale of economics is what the economies of the future must be about, finding ways to live so that healthy communities may foster a healthy earth.
There are only two essentials to consider in coming at the problem of the optimum scale for an economy to produce and distribute goods and services: the natural ecosystem and the human community. An economy that does harm to the natural world – depleting resources, extincting species, producing pollution, piling up wastes – has grown too large; an economy out of democratic and humanitarian control – where decisions are made by distant corporations and a polity whose choices are beyond individual influence—has grown too large.
An economic scale optimum for the earth’s systems would be based on conservation, stability, sustainability, recycling, harmony. That means, for starters, an economy at a bioregional scale that more or less dictates the economy appropriate to it. An economy based on a watershed, for example, automatically considers downriver populations as well as headwater ones. The human constructs would adapt to the environment rather than be imposed, and human uses would be confined to those the bioregion allowed.
In Vermont terms, it would be possible to think of the western watershed of the Connecticut River, with all the rivers running eastward from the Green Mountains, as a bioregion. Another bioregion would encompass the watershed to the west of the Green Mountains, to Lake Champlain.
Dairy and general truck farming would naturally be at the heart of the bioregional economy, although if a truly ecological sensibility informs it those farms would not allow the disastrous waste runoff that now pollutes Lake Champlain and other waterways. Nor would they use artificial chemicals and fertilizers, nor allow factory farms of 1,000-plus cows and 100,000-plus hens. An ecologically based agriculture would depend on solar power appropriate to the region, on human-powered machines, on organic pest-management systems, perennial polyculture and permaculture, with markets geared to seasonal and regional foods.
The economic scale desirable for the human community would be one in which decisions about the economy – what is produced, from what resources, by whom, for whom, how distributed, how recycled – are made democratically by towns and bioregions. Most power would locate at the level of the community, where we can imagine effecting basic economic justice: workplace ownership by the employees, workplace democracy for decision-making, and workplace commitment to the surrounding populace – all the things that are impossible with large scales and distant chain store corporations.
And here we come to an essential element of a stable economy that dictates much of its scale: self-sufficiency. If Vermont’s farms were part of a self-sufficient economy, feeding the 620,000 people within its borders as its primary mission, there would not be such a concentration on dairy farms (and the resultant pollution problems), but a greater diversity of animal products and crops, ultimately to the health of the ecosystems.
Self-sufficiency is operable only at a limited scale – say, bioregions of 10,000 to 20,000 square miles – where humans can understand the resources at hand, perceive and regulate the variants in the economy, and ensure that production and distribution is made rational and systematic. In terms of population, too, there is a limit at which self-sufficiency can be achieved. In research for my book Human Scale, I found that historically self-sufficient communities with economies of some complexity tended to cluster in the 5,000-10,000 population range. Urbanologist Gideon Sjoberg has said that “it seems unlikely that, at least in the earlier periods, even the larger of these cities contained more than 5,000 to 10,000 people, including part-time farmers on the cities’ outskirts.” Even when larger cities grew in the 13th and 14th centuries to 20,000 or even 40,000, they were typically divided into quarters--literally four parts – of 5,000 to 10,000 people.
On a modern American scale we might imagine a mixture of somewhat self-sufficient cities within more self-sufficient counties within mostly self-sufficient bioregions within a totally self-sufficient state, and then the economy of self-sufficiency might be quite complex indeed. In terms of Vermont, this might be a mix of relatively self-sufficient cities (Barre, Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington, Essex, Hartford, Middlebury, Milton, Montpelier, Rutland, South Burlington and Springfield are obvious candidates), within ecologically determined more self-sufficient shires (perhaps the West, Black, White, Winooski, Lamoille, Passumpsic watersheds), within the two self-sufficient bioregions on either side of the Green Mountains, within the state – whose economy, if independent, could be as self-sufficient as it desired.
Such units would need to be guided by certain maxims to provide a full range of goods and services, and they would need to adhere to them with some ingenuity. But the maxims are simple and thoroughly practical. They would include the principle of sharing at the community level, recycling and repairing (or at a more complex level, remanufacturing) almost everything, an emphasis on handicrafts and bespoke production rather than manufactures and mass production, using raw local (instead of imported) materials, nurturing local ingenuity without patent and copyright restrictions, and agreeing to abandon as unnecessary and undesirable almost everything manufactured at the factory level anywhere and anyhow. All of which is no more complex than the old New England adage:
Use it up, wear it out,
Make it do, or do without.
What follows are what I take to be the essential elements of a philosophy that would guide a bioregional economy, which I have constructed from a wide reading in alternative economics, including E.F. Schumacher’s great range of writings (particularly “Buddhist Economics” in Small is Beautiful) mixed with various economic ideas expressed by the Buddha himself, and ideas I enunciated in the “Economy” chapter of my Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (University of Georgia Press).
1. All production of goods or services would be based primarily on a reverence for life, a biocentric understanding that includes animals, birds, insects, plants, trees, the living ecosystems, streams and rivers, forests and wetlands, hills and mountains, clouds and rains – fundamentally Gaia herself, understood as the only living, self-regulating planet in the galaxy.
2. All systems have limits and they must be learned and adhered to in every economic act; overuse, depletion or exhaustion of a resource or species would be seen as a criminal act of violence; overproduction of a resource or a species, such as the human, would be seen as a criminal act of avarice and greed.
3. The primary unit of production would be the self-sufficient community, within a self-regarding bioregion, which would strive to produce all its needs, and essential political and economic decisions would be taken democratically at that level.
4. Consumption would be limited, for the goal of economic life is not the multiplication of wants but the satisfaction of basic needs.
5. Everything produced, and the means of its production, would embody the four cardinal principles of smaller, simpler, cheaper, safer – technology on a human scale, comprehendible, affordable for all, and non-violent.
6. The only jobs would be those that enhance the worker, contribute to the community, and produce nothing but needed goods – and that means goods, not bads.
7. All people who wish to do so would work, for the purpose of work is not to produce things to satisfy wants but to nourish and develop the individual soul, aiming at fulfilling the highest nature of the human character, including identification with community and the satisfaction of its needs.
8. All economic decisions would be made in accordance with the Buddhist principle, “Cease to do evil; try to do good,” and the definition of good would be that which preserves and enhances the integrity, stability, diversity, continuity and beauty of living species and systems; that which does the contrary is evil.
That is, to my mind, the essential moral and intellectual guide to a right and successful bioregional economics.
KFUO interview with Allan Carlson: A Family-Centered Economy
wma,
mp3
Go to the second hour of the show for the part with Allan Carlson.
wma,
mp3
Go to the second hour of the show for the part with Allan Carlson.
Peak everything economics, or, what do you call this mess?
Richard Heinberg, Energy Bulletin
If you're interested in finding shelter during the storm, get thee to the productive side of the economy. Grow something, or learn to make or repair something useful.
published January 23, 2008.
Richard Heinberg, Energy Bulletin
If you're interested in finding shelter during the storm, get thee to the productive side of the economy. Grow something, or learn to make or repair something useful.
published January 23, 2008.
Interview with Wendell Berry in this month's issue of World Ark Magazine -- turn to page 16
An Agrarian-Style Economic Self Defense Plan
It occurred to me today that one of the nice things about not having much money is that I don’t have to worry about loosing it in the stock market.
But I realize full well that a falling stock market and an overall failing economy will take its toll on me and my family, just as it will on you and yours. If you don’t think so, you’re in for a rude awakening.
You don’t have to be a prophet or an economic expert to see that America is heading into a deep, dark decline. Just open your eyes. The handwriting has been on the wall for years. Ignorance won’t be bliss for much longer. I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. I’m not being pessimistic. I’m being realistic. And, believe it or not, I’m actually optimistic about the future. But it is pretty certain that we are going to go through some very tough times in the years ahead.
I came to realize that the modern American economic system was fundamentally flawed, and destined to fail, back in the 1980’s when I read a book titled "Miracle on Main Street" by F. Tupper Suassy.
Another impressionable volume was a black & white picture book of the 1930’s depression era that my parents had. It was titled The Desperate Years I was in grade school when I first looked through and studied the pictures of sadness and misery in that book. I thought to myself that if it happened once, it could happen again.
Over the years, there were other books, and there were stories from people who had lived during The Great Depression. One of my uncles has been writing a book about his recollections of the depression era. Now in his eighties, he was just a small boy during the depression, but he remembers it in great detail. He let me read the manuscript to his book.
Prior to the crash, his family’s home was paid for. But his father took out an equity loan to do some remodeling. Then came the crash and his father lost his job. There was no money. They lost their home. The family moved something like 12 times in eight years. They lived with kin in West Virginia and Ohio. They lived in abandoned houses way out in the middle of nowhere. Times were hard. Real hard. Harder than most people alive today can imagine.
People think that sort of thing can’t happen again. Don’t bet on it.
I had to laugh a couple weeks ago when I heard an NPR radio program in which they were discussing whether or not we were in a recession. Of course we are in a recession! When it gets to the point where things are so bad that the talking heads are wondering if we are in a recession, then you know for sure we are, and we’ve probably been in one for several months now. Same goes for inflation. We’ve had high inflation for longer than they admit.
Now George Bush and the congress wants to give every American a tax rebate of $800 (or something like that). Then the Fed lowered the prime lending rate .75 percent. They know it’s a bad fix we’re in. I think they’re scared. Maybe they can plug enough holes in the sinking ship to sail on a few more years. I hope so. But the ship is going to eventually sink. The whole fractional reserve banking system with its fiat money is unsustainable.
That said, I would like to give you my thoughts and suggestions for agrarian-style economic self defense.
1.) If you live in or near a city or high population center, get out. It was crystal clear to me as I looked through the old photos in “The Desperate Years” book that people in the cities were not in a good place.
3.) Buy land or get to some land in a rural area where you can fend for yourself. You need to be able to plant a garden, raise a few chickens, hunt, fish, trap, and forage for wild edibles. I’ll take fields and forest over city dumpsters any day.
5.) Eliminate debt if at all possible. I’ll take a humble little country home on a little piece of paid-off country land over a big, fancy, comfortable house with a mortgage any day. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what I’ve done.
Most modern Americans can’t bring themselves to downsize. Many have enough equity in their big mortgaged homes to sell and buy something far below their current standard of living, and have no mortgage debt. But they just can’t do it. I suspect many, in the years ahead, will wish that they did sell and downsize when they could. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
6.) Acquire the basic tools of self sufficiency. What, you may wonder, are the basic tools of self sufficiency? Well number one would be some debt free land out in the country. Then there are the actual tools--- like garden tools. A shot gun with ammo is a tool too. A grain grinder is an excellent tool for self sufficiency. A woodstove to heat your debt-free home is another tool of self-sufficiency. How-to books are tools too. Start with Carla Emery’s "Encyclopedia of Country Living." It'll tell you how to do just about everything.
5. Stock up on some basic food items. You can buy things like oatmeal, beans, rice, wheat (for the grain grinder), and other staples through food co-ops for cheap. That’s what we do, in addition to freezing and canning and drying foor from the garden. It’s a good feeling to have a well-stocked pantry.
6. Find community and get involved. Get yourself into a small rural church where folks care about and will help each other. Country people look out for and help each other. That’s always been the case. It’s not going to change when times get bad. But they won't be paying your mortgage for you.
I think you get the idea. What I’m suggesting here is that you simplify, downscale, and adopt a more self-reliant, self-responsible, lifestyle. It is going to be easier to do now than later. If nothing else, get a section of land in the country. Family members could pull together to buy land... debt-free land. It would be a place where you can go if it gets bad. With the land, you have the ability to provide, even if you have to live in a camper or a tent. Land and community are fundamental to surviving the worst of times. Land is fundamental to survival and personal freedom.
Does what I’ve just told you sound radical? Well maybe it is to you. But it isn’t radical to me. It’s the way I now live. It’s the way I decided I wanted to live years ago when I came to understand that the economic system was not sustainable. It’s not a bad way to live. I recommend it to you.
It occurred to me today that one of the nice things about not having much money is that I don’t have to worry about loosing it in the stock market.
But I realize full well that a falling stock market and an overall failing economy will take its toll on me and my family, just as it will on you and yours. If you don’t think so, you’re in for a rude awakening.
You don’t have to be a prophet or an economic expert to see that America is heading into a deep, dark decline. Just open your eyes. The handwriting has been on the wall for years. Ignorance won’t be bliss for much longer. I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. I’m not being pessimistic. I’m being realistic. And, believe it or not, I’m actually optimistic about the future. But it is pretty certain that we are going to go through some very tough times in the years ahead.
I came to realize that the modern American economic system was fundamentally flawed, and destined to fail, back in the 1980’s when I read a book titled "Miracle on Main Street" by F. Tupper Suassy.
Another impressionable volume was a black & white picture book of the 1930’s depression era that my parents had. It was titled The Desperate Years I was in grade school when I first looked through and studied the pictures of sadness and misery in that book. I thought to myself that if it happened once, it could happen again.
Over the years, there were other books, and there were stories from people who had lived during The Great Depression. One of my uncles has been writing a book about his recollections of the depression era. Now in his eighties, he was just a small boy during the depression, but he remembers it in great detail. He let me read the manuscript to his book.
Prior to the crash, his family’s home was paid for. But his father took out an equity loan to do some remodeling. Then came the crash and his father lost his job. There was no money. They lost their home. The family moved something like 12 times in eight years. They lived with kin in West Virginia and Ohio. They lived in abandoned houses way out in the middle of nowhere. Times were hard. Real hard. Harder than most people alive today can imagine.
People think that sort of thing can’t happen again. Don’t bet on it.
I had to laugh a couple weeks ago when I heard an NPR radio program in which they were discussing whether or not we were in a recession. Of course we are in a recession! When it gets to the point where things are so bad that the talking heads are wondering if we are in a recession, then you know for sure we are, and we’ve probably been in one for several months now. Same goes for inflation. We’ve had high inflation for longer than they admit.
Now George Bush and the congress wants to give every American a tax rebate of $800 (or something like that). Then the Fed lowered the prime lending rate .75 percent. They know it’s a bad fix we’re in. I think they’re scared. Maybe they can plug enough holes in the sinking ship to sail on a few more years. I hope so. But the ship is going to eventually sink. The whole fractional reserve banking system with its fiat money is unsustainable.
That said, I would like to give you my thoughts and suggestions for agrarian-style economic self defense.
1.) If you live in or near a city or high population center, get out. It was crystal clear to me as I looked through the old photos in “The Desperate Years” book that people in the cities were not in a good place.
3.) Buy land or get to some land in a rural area where you can fend for yourself. You need to be able to plant a garden, raise a few chickens, hunt, fish, trap, and forage for wild edibles. I’ll take fields and forest over city dumpsters any day.
5.) Eliminate debt if at all possible. I’ll take a humble little country home on a little piece of paid-off country land over a big, fancy, comfortable house with a mortgage any day. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what I’ve done.
Most modern Americans can’t bring themselves to downsize. Many have enough equity in their big mortgaged homes to sell and buy something far below their current standard of living, and have no mortgage debt. But they just can’t do it. I suspect many, in the years ahead, will wish that they did sell and downsize when they could. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
6.) Acquire the basic tools of self sufficiency. What, you may wonder, are the basic tools of self sufficiency? Well number one would be some debt free land out in the country. Then there are the actual tools--- like garden tools. A shot gun with ammo is a tool too. A grain grinder is an excellent tool for self sufficiency. A woodstove to heat your debt-free home is another tool of self-sufficiency. How-to books are tools too. Start with Carla Emery’s "Encyclopedia of Country Living." It'll tell you how to do just about everything.
5. Stock up on some basic food items. You can buy things like oatmeal, beans, rice, wheat (for the grain grinder), and other staples through food co-ops for cheap. That’s what we do, in addition to freezing and canning and drying foor from the garden. It’s a good feeling to have a well-stocked pantry.
6. Find community and get involved. Get yourself into a small rural church where folks care about and will help each other. Country people look out for and help each other. That’s always been the case. It’s not going to change when times get bad. But they won't be paying your mortgage for you.
I think you get the idea. What I’m suggesting here is that you simplify, downscale, and adopt a more self-reliant, self-responsible, lifestyle. It is going to be easier to do now than later. If nothing else, get a section of land in the country. Family members could pull together to buy land... debt-free land. It would be a place where you can go if it gets bad. With the land, you have the ability to provide, even if you have to live in a camper or a tent. Land and community are fundamental to surviving the worst of times. Land is fundamental to survival and personal freedom.
Does what I’ve just told you sound radical? Well maybe it is to you. But it isn’t radical to me. It’s the way I now live. It’s the way I decided I wanted to live years ago when I came to understand that the economic system was not sustainable. It’s not a bad way to live. I recommend it to you.
http://energybulletin.net/39860.html
The acorn tree syndrome strikes again
by Gene Logsdon
RELATED NEWS:
When I wrote in this space some time ago about a teacher who had discovered that most of his students did not know what kind of tree acorns grow on, I thought that would remain the top story of the year in environmental illiteracy. (One reader ventured humorously: a corn tree?) But now comes an even more astounding example: a FritoLay ad in Time magazine of January 28, 2008, page 92, shows a field of luxuriantly green potato plants in blossom, a sack of spotless potatoes in the foreground, and some people stooped among the rows of spuds, apparently, brace yourself, picking potatoes into baskets!
Need I say more? Need I explain that the erstwhile potato grower does not harvest potatoes when the vines are green and blossoming. And you don’t pick them, you dig them. How could a company that deals in potatoes make such an embarrassing mistake? Please tell me this was somebody’s joke.
Actually, I’m not all that surprised. A friend once confessed to me her own early ignorance of nature. It’s in one of my books. She had decided that it was high time she learned how to grow her own food. She planted lots of potatoes. They grew wonderfully. Then suddenly, inexplicably, as she related the story, the plants died. Not a potato had been produced, she sadly told her friends. Surveying the scene of desolation, she tripped over a bulge in the soil. What’s this? It was a potato as big as a softball. She examined the soil more closely. Why, the ground was full of potatoes!
FritoLay is not alone in making such obvious nature-ignorant errors and the reason is simply that the errors aren’t obvious to most people anymore. Our civilization has out-grown its connection to nature. Almost every time a non-agricultural magazine tries to do a story on farming, embarrassing mistakes rear their well-intentioned heads. I was mortified once to see an article I had written about black raspberries appear in print with a blackberry for an illustration. Another time a field of oats was identified in the caption as a field of wheat. Just a week ago, I saw in an article about yogurt, a photo of cows grazing a pasture, or so the caption said. Actually, the cows were young heifers, not a milk-producing udder in the bunch. The grass they were “grazing” was brown and dead, okay for heifers maybe, but not at all the kind of pasture that will produce a profitable quantity of milk.
In seminary college, a friend of mine from the farm loved to bedevil other students over their lack of knowledge about farming. Once a group of us were sitting on a porch of a residential building next to a lane that led from the school buildings to the barn where much of our milk and meat was produced. (I swear I am not making this up.) A farm worker drove by on a tractor pulling a manure spreader.
“What is that thing?” One of the students asked.
“A marshmallow picker,” my friend said, smoothly and nonchalantly.
“Oh.”
And there was the famous incident in which President Nixon was asked, after he had been discoursing on farm problems, if he knew what a soybean looked like. He said he had never seen one, and was not at all apologetic. That’s how I first knew that agriculture was no longer a part of American culture.
I don’t want to sound over-weaning. I am sure that a group of nuclear physicists could easily fool me. Most knowledge seems these days to be the property of specialists. But food is something common to every human being and extremely important to every human being. Is it not scary when so many people no longer know that potatoes grow underground? Can the nature-illiterate vote intelligently about food issues? What else that finds its way into their stomachs are they ignorant about? How many potato eaters know, for example, that now most non-organic commercial potato plants have been genetically modified to contain Bacillus thuringienses that kills potato bugs that try to feed on it?
The acorn tree syndrome strikes again
by Gene Logsdon
RELATED NEWS:
When I wrote in this space some time ago about a teacher who had discovered that most of his students did not know what kind of tree acorns grow on, I thought that would remain the top story of the year in environmental illiteracy. (One reader ventured humorously: a corn tree?) But now comes an even more astounding example: a FritoLay ad in Time magazine of January 28, 2008, page 92, shows a field of luxuriantly green potato plants in blossom, a sack of spotless potatoes in the foreground, and some people stooped among the rows of spuds, apparently, brace yourself, picking potatoes into baskets!
Need I say more? Need I explain that the erstwhile potato grower does not harvest potatoes when the vines are green and blossoming. And you don’t pick them, you dig them. How could a company that deals in potatoes make such an embarrassing mistake? Please tell me this was somebody’s joke.
Actually, I’m not all that surprised. A friend once confessed to me her own early ignorance of nature. It’s in one of my books. She had decided that it was high time she learned how to grow her own food. She planted lots of potatoes. They grew wonderfully. Then suddenly, inexplicably, as she related the story, the plants died. Not a potato had been produced, she sadly told her friends. Surveying the scene of desolation, she tripped over a bulge in the soil. What’s this? It was a potato as big as a softball. She examined the soil more closely. Why, the ground was full of potatoes!
FritoLay is not alone in making such obvious nature-ignorant errors and the reason is simply that the errors aren’t obvious to most people anymore. Our civilization has out-grown its connection to nature. Almost every time a non-agricultural magazine tries to do a story on farming, embarrassing mistakes rear their well-intentioned heads. I was mortified once to see an article I had written about black raspberries appear in print with a blackberry for an illustration. Another time a field of oats was identified in the caption as a field of wheat. Just a week ago, I saw in an article about yogurt, a photo of cows grazing a pasture, or so the caption said. Actually, the cows were young heifers, not a milk-producing udder in the bunch. The grass they were “grazing” was brown and dead, okay for heifers maybe, but not at all the kind of pasture that will produce a profitable quantity of milk.
In seminary college, a friend of mine from the farm loved to bedevil other students over their lack of knowledge about farming. Once a group of us were sitting on a porch of a residential building next to a lane that led from the school buildings to the barn where much of our milk and meat was produced. (I swear I am not making this up.) A farm worker drove by on a tractor pulling a manure spreader.
“What is that thing?” One of the students asked.
“A marshmallow picker,” my friend said, smoothly and nonchalantly.
“Oh.”
And there was the famous incident in which President Nixon was asked, after he had been discoursing on farm problems, if he knew what a soybean looked like. He said he had never seen one, and was not at all apologetic. That’s how I first knew that agriculture was no longer a part of American culture.
I don’t want to sound over-weaning. I am sure that a group of nuclear physicists could easily fool me. Most knowledge seems these days to be the property of specialists. But food is something common to every human being and extremely important to every human being. Is it not scary when so many people no longer know that potatoes grow underground? Can the nature-illiterate vote intelligently about food issues? What else that finds its way into their stomachs are they ignorant about? How many potato eaters know, for example, that now most non-organic commercial potato plants have been genetically modified to contain Bacillus thuringienses that kills potato bugs that try to feed on it?
http://globalpublicmedia.com/hooked_on_gro..._reality_report
Hooked on Growth on the Reality Report
06 Feb 2008 |
View all related to economics | growth | Resource Depletion
The Reality Report hosts David Gardner, President of Citizen-Powered Media and producer of the documentary Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity. We discuss what is it like to challenge a core belief of our society, and why is it more important than ever to do so.
Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA
mp3
Hooked on Growth on the Reality Report
06 Feb 2008 |
View all related to economics | growth | Resource Depletion
The Reality Report hosts David Gardner, President of Citizen-Powered Media and producer of the documentary Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity. We discuss what is it like to challenge a core belief of our society, and why is it more important than ever to do so.
Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA
mp3
http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2007/12/m...ralism-analysis
MODERN AGE: Secession and American Federalism (Analysis)
MODERN AGE: Secession and American Federalism (Analysis)
http://www.energybulletin.net/41976.html
The expected economic impact of an energy downturn
Gail E. Tverberg, The Oil Drum
We live in a finite world, and we are reaching limits in many ways – easy to extract oil is being exhausted, fresh water is in increasingly short supply, and climate change caused by human activity is becoming more of an issue. Because of these constraints, it is likely that economic growth will stagnate and eventually decline. [Transcript of a talk]
published March 26, 2008.
The expected economic impact of an energy downturn
Gail E. Tverberg, The Oil Drum
We live in a finite world, and we are reaching limits in many ways – easy to extract oil is being exhausted, fresh water is in increasingly short supply, and climate change caused by human activity is becoming more of an issue. Because of these constraints, it is likely that economic growth will stagnate and eventually decline. [Transcript of a talk]
published March 26, 2008.
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