Today’s post is by regular contributor, Richard Jurin. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
“Ecological harm, and hence human harm, by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors is done in the name of the free market and free enterprise… By default, this creates freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods” Wendell Berry.
Our current economic model is just that – a model – an artificial construct based on both faith and fear. Faith in that we believe that a piece of paper with 100 printed upon it is worth 100 times a similar piece of paper with just 1 printed upon it. And fear because we believe that resources, and even money, are scarce and we have to compete aggressively to ensure we all have enough for our needs. Most market economists and business leaders expound the myth of a free-market, but there is no such thing. All markets have rules and restrictions in order to function. Our current global market-economic system was first conjured up centuries ago by merchants and hierarchy leaders seeking to gain control and competitive advantage. They rigged the rules to fit their needs and convinced the rest of us that this was the only way to live and hope to gain prosperity, which could come only from acquisition of money and material goods. Mention ‘Return-on-Investment’ and most people think of economic returns and not socio-cultural ones; yet social benefits are more primary than economic ones when health, happiness, true prosperity, and community benefit are considered.
Since the 1980s, the world has been caught in a whirlwind of economic transformation called ‘Globalization.’ While it has had many benefits, one major consequence has been the erosion of local economic systems, local knowledge, and local supply chains (i.e., The Walmart Effect). We’ve come too far technologically to go back to the mythical days of a self-sufficient agrarian society where simple technology and poor energy options were limiting factors to technological progress. Yet, if we aspire to a sustainable world where true resilience and adaptation are primary factors, then we have to take-back local control of food, energy, and yes, even the economy as local considerations, and not think solely of them as national-international ones. To be in a truly sustainable world, we have to rebuild the local systems as partners of the global systems, not one or the other.
We first need to stop thinking that a top-down market-driven economic system, which focuses primarily on monetary profit, is the only way to live. The key is to find balance between self-sufficient local systems and those requiring regional, national or international scale of production. One of our greatest barriers is to break through dominant beliefs that current systems are unalterable. Most of our lifestyles are based on mental constructs: we have complete control of how we manage them.
We don’t have to wait for global economic collapse to begin rebuilding these local systems. Indeed, considering the problems of global market-economic control and its inherent consequence of being unable to deal with ecological systems – its very design is to destroy such systems – rebuilding the local economic systems may be the only solution we have to resolving them and thereby, nearly all our ecological problems. The question therefore is what could a local economy look like that serves a community’s ability to thrive, and also preserves the integrity of the natural systems that support life?
We can locally change the economic rules to benefit the community by first changing expectations. In a market-economy, we are accustomed to commodifying everything and owning everything we need or want. Most people were once monetarily poor and before they became more affluent and materialistic they battered for almost everything – goods and services.
Materialistic consumerism is the big problem. One aspect that makes consumerism within the market economy so attractive is convenience. At home, with items you use every day (e.g., cups, plates, food preparation utensils, pots and pans, etc.), it makes sense you own them, but consider how many items you use only occasionally. For example, in a neighborhood of 50 homes with lawns, each home probably has its own lawn mower that is used maybe once a week for 4-5 months of the year. Cars, on average, are in use only 5% of the time – the rest of the time they sit idle in garages or parking lots. Now expand this to almost everything in your life.
The idea of sharing or borrowing was once normal in most communities. Most people accept libraries as an information and computer connectivity system. In essence it is a – central storage resource – that houses shared books, digital resources and computers that anyone can borrow and use. Imagine a central resource where you can check out a multitude of items when you need them by booking them for use at specific times. This is the concept of the Library-Economy – community owned and run goods and services.
Before you discount the expanded library-economy idea, imagine expanding this idea to everything you might need only on a more occasional basis. Instead of every homeowner with a lawn owning a lawnmower, they merely booked one out once a week and then returned it. Imagine that when you needed a car, you could just go and book one out and then return it. Many cities now have community bicycles/scooter racks where registered users can check out a bike, ride it to a destination, where they then return it to a rack to be used by other people. A library economy is not new, but it can be expanded to provide almost any item that you need. And it can run alongside a highly-modified kind of capitalist economy where desirable goods can still be included within the business world.
As library-economy advocate, Chirs Agnos, says, “After years of exploring the root causes behind inequality, environmental destruction, social upheaval and disconnection, it’s the market itself—with its foundations in competition, ownership, and profit— that is driving the very crises we’re trying to solve. Whether it’s high food prices, war, corruption, housing affordability, it all goes back to market design.”
How do we get to that kind of library model while living within the current system? In many places around the world in smaller enclaves, it is happening where mindful individuals come together and make it happen. That all sounds very noble, but for a lot of people, I think a royal kick up the butt may be the triggering agent – probably an economic collapse that drives it out of necessity. Whether by choice or necessity, I envision a huge community centered warehouse managed like a current book library. It will be driven by a non-market economy that is non-transactional and managed by those unsung community heroes – librarians, in the broadest sense. So how could a non-transactional, non-market economy function, especially within the economic mindsets that currently dominate?
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Richard can be contacted at: richardjurin@gmail.com