Deep Economy Addresses Real Wealth of Nations

How Communites Can Save the Economy, the Environment and Humanity

Apr 2, 2009

Bill McKibben makes his readers want to buy a bike, boycott China and Wal-Mart and start frequenting their local farmers markets just for the sake of conversation.

McKibben’s writing is enthralling as he addresses the issue of economic growth in Deep Economy, his national bestseller, with an unusual outlook – maybe, he writes, nations need to stop making their economies bigger and start making them more durable, sustainable and livable. He doesn’t argue that developed countries should revert back to undeveloped status, or that the wealthy should donate all of their money into a pot to be divvied out to everybody else, or that every American should eschew industry and return to farming with ox-driven plows.

His suggestions for improvement, however, make one think and not the least because he makes a compelling argument that if citizens of the world don’t make these changes soon, they will be forced to make much more drastic changes when oil, land, water and other resources simply run out. Do it now, he says, and it will be done with more favorable terms. The reader gets an overwhelming feeling that something is very wrong through the first half of the book but the sense that there is hope for fixing it as he goes along.

More is Not Always Better

For most of recorded history, more has equaled better. More land for farmers meant a greater likelihood of a good crop, more money for poor people means more food on the table and less worry about tomorrow. More money for peasants in Chinese slums means a way out of their dead-end lives. But that’s not the cast for most people anymore, especially most Americans. The average American has enough on which to survive, and usually a little extra.

Now, McKibben argues, most people just equate more with better, even though studies have shown that more money only buys more happiness up to a measly $10,000 per person. A bigger economy – one in which more money is spent, without taking inflation, joblessness, lack of health insurance, fair wages or working conditions or job satisfaction into account – is seen as better than an economy like that of Bangladesh, where villagers realized pesticides were making them sick and shipping out their crops was making them poor. Monetarily, the economy is weak, but many of the people of this country, though poor, have sufficient for themselves and others and report being happier than many people in from more developed economies.

Meanwhile, the importing, exporting, factories, Hummers, mining and other activities of the developed world are churning out more and more pollutants every year, taking a huge toll on the environment and costing the world, both now and into the future, untold billions of dollars.

Economist Thomas Friedman, in a recent column in the New York Times, made a similar point in a plea to the G-20 leaders for “Market to Mother Nature” accounting: “It’s now obvious that the reason we’re experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risks in both arenas – producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.”

Community and Creativity vs. Hyper individualism

Farming used to be the American pastime. Not so anymore, with a supermajority of the United States’ food coming from just a few large, government-subsidized farms, ranches and chicken farms. That food stocks the shelves of most supermarkets at a low, low cost to the consumer, but a high cost to the environment, small farmers both locally and international and the brutally treated and slaughtered animals. No one seems to care much because every citizen is in this for himself, not for his neighbor or the rest of the community.

Most food is shipped around the country; even though apple orchards in upstate New York produce more apples than the Big Apple eats in a year, those apples are shipped thousands of miles away, sucking up fossil fuel and polluting the environment, while New York City ships it apples from thousands of miles away.

That’s just the way it is? Not hardly, McKibben says, citing his home state of Vermont. He spent one year eating food he could only buy locally, which in some states would leave him surviving on one crop or old canned fruit during the winter months. But not only do they have a thriving farmers market in many of the cities, the state also boasts an entirely local radio station, and residents regularly show up at their annual town meetings to discuss what they want the government to do for them. The cities and towns send their locals to the state and national government, not the big-money politicians looking for a Senate seat.

More Community, Less Money, Greater Happiness

Vermont and Bangladesh are just examples. Every economy can do it, McKibben says. Every community willing to buy locally, every resident that will take into account what’s best for his neighbor as well as himself, every individual who, instead of isolating himself in a gas-guzzler while commuting takes a bus and talks to his seatmate, each consumer who opts for better instead of more, will be change in the right direction. And the reader is left with the sense that it is his responsibility to act.

He ends with a few of the more dire predictions about what could happen and a plea for world citizens to change. “It’s our greatest challenge – the only real question of our time – to see whether we can transform those economies enough to prevent some damage and to help us cope with what we can’t prevent. To see if we can manage to mobilize the wealth of our communities to make the transition tolerable, even sweet, instead of tragic.”

The copyright of the article Deep Economy Addresses Real Wealth of Nations in Philosophy Books is owned by Heidi Toth. Permission to republish Deep Economy Addresses Real Wealth of Nations in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.