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.
“The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve… We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally” Wendell Berry.
When I present a library economy I am always faced with complaints or questions about convenience. Of course, the library system would have multiple numbers of small everyday items used by everyone. If you cook a lot you would have your own kitchenware stuff. The library is for many of those items we all use but only occasionally. It’s all about changing our perceptions and perspectives of how we live. If Everyday lives changed on the everyday level, then we change ourselves, which then creates change in others.
The challenge of course is getting past the self-serving mindset of, ‘what’s in it for me’ that comes from being just transactional in a market-driven economy. Being non-transactional demands trust in a system. In a library economy, the ‘librarians’ are crucial figures that manages the system. Don’t ever underestimate the incredible job done quietly by librarians at your local information library.
One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they think they will have to give up instead of what they will gain. How do we compete with the financial giants in a global economic system? “In ancient Rome, commoners didn’t riot, they ‘ghosted the city.’ Fed up with injustice, plebians staged mass walkouts called ‘Secessions of the plebs,’ abandoning Rome and leaving the elites helpless. NO labor, no support. It worked. They gained real political power” Worldhistoryedu.com. The library economy does just that.
Now, scale that library idea idea up to multiple items you use only occasionally in your home. The first step is to accept that you can ‘donate’ occasionally items to the communal library system, and release that confining sense of ownership. The item will go into the equipment ‘library’ where the librarians-technicians-mechanics will maintain, repair and replace whenever is needed for that item. You are off the hook for maintaining the item and yet whenever you need to use it, or another like it, you can just book it out. A very minor personal inconvenience but with a huge communal benefit – a building of non-transactional and developing loving relationships. It will “require good faith to start. A cycle of giving must take place by both people without expecting to receive. Over time more and more trust will develop and the relationship itself becomes the valuable thing to have” Ehsan Eafkhami.
Like any cooperative system there would be a small membership fee/tax, rental fee/ to cover costs and hiring of the ‘librarians’ and products for the library, but the system will have self-generating benefits. The membership cost could be run with ‘Local Exchange trading System (LETS)’. This could also encompass a local Cooperative Movement. The goal is to become locally self-sufficient and self-reliant on each other in a sharing cooperative society in which individual sovereignty is primary, yet the community is a nurturing location that helps everyone thrive without relying on a hierarchical govern.
Many communities transitioning to sustainable practices have Local Economic Trading Systems (LETS). These LETS keep the economy local such that trading, services, battering, and exchanges that promote the community are transparent and based on cooperation among all the members of the contributing community. In many communities, national currency is exchanged 1:1 for a local currency to ensure that all exchanges remain within the community. The aim is not profit per se, but community resilience with money as a tool and not an end-goal.
It should be paramount to understand that local businesses may be the backbone of a community or group of communities, but some more complex items will may not always arise out of the community itself. Who we invite into our communities should also be a decision to be made wisely. Currently, a new way of doing business is with the B-corporation model (https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us). These transformational kinds of businesses promote a new kind of capitalism that promotes goods and services yet establishes new metrics of success focused on community well-being and not solely profit. All decisions affecting the community are made at the community level without larger state influences dictating policies and procedures.
“We can solve our problems, but it’s not clear that we can solve our problems and get rich at the same time. And that is the current requirement for all solutions” Terence McKenna. Our priority must be Quality of Life and not Standard of living, which leads to Item three – New Metrics for Defining Success.
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Richard can be contacted at: richardjurin@gmail.com