Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

published	March 4th 2008 by Holt Paperbacks
binding	Paperback
isbn	0805087222 (isbn13: 9780805087222)
ebook
pages	272
description	'Masterfully crafted, deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding.'-Los Angeles Times In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the bi...more [close] 'Masterfully crafted, deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding.'-Los Angeles Times In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. Deep Economy makes the compelling case for moving beyond 'growth' as the paramount economic ideal and pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. Our purchases need not be at odds with the things we truly value, McKibben argues, and the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own. [close]
date added	03-04-08 edit book

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Paul rated it:

(review of isbn 0805076263)

02/06/08

bookshelves: about-emergent-culture

Read in January, 2007

This is a fact-filled, thought-provoking book that takes a fresh look at the economic challenges that face us in our individual lives and in the larger world. Arguing for creativity instead of doctrine, and for creating values rather than value creation in the usual economic sense, Bill McKibben offers both analysis and suggestions in accessible prose (which counts for a lot in any book about economics).

McKibben's title - "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future&q...more This is a fact-filled, thought-provoking book that takes a fresh look at the economic challenges that face us in our individual lives and in the larger world. Arguing for creativity instead of doctrine, and for creating values rather than value creation in the usual economic sense, Bill McKibben offers both analysis and suggestions in accessible prose (which counts for a lot in any book about economics).

McKibben's title - "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future" - expresses the values in which his ideas are rooted. "Deep economy" is consciously modeled on the current term "deep ecology," the perspective of environmental activists that human beings are not separate from but part of the environment, and thus our efforts to manage the environment must inevitably include efforts to manage ourselves. "The wealth of communities" is an answer to Adam Smith's phrase (and book title) "the wealth of nations," suggesting (as has, for example Jane Jacobs in "The Nature of Economies" and other works) that nations belong to the economy the way humans belong to the natural environment. ("Nations don't get richer; people in them do, and often not very many of them." - p. 195) "The durable future" is another way to say sustainability, which is on the radar of today's political and business leaders. The gap between the unsustainably wealthy lifestyle of the developed world (Americans require several Earths to sustain our current habits!) and the unjustly impoverished lifestyle of much of the developing world is common knowledge. The way forward, McKibben argues, depends upon the values that guide us. For the developed world he champions, among other things, local production, offering concrete examples of its virtues and challenges from his home community in Vermont. For the developing world, he suggests proceeding with a better philosophy than the West has: "Development is not a product, ... it's a process, measured not in budgets but in energy. ... 'Change happens because of how we invest our human energy...' The key document in any development program ... is not a budget, but ... a work plan, which details the next project the community has decided on and describes the steps necessary to make it happen."( p. 211) "[C]reating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time, here and around the world." (p. 210)

Toward the end of the book (p. 225), he says: "In the twentieth century, two completely different models of how to run an economy battled for supremacy. Ours won, and not only because it produced more goods. It also produced far more freedom, far less horror. In the twenty-first century, the choices are a little less stark. No one wants to do away with markets, or to centrally plan economies; outside of China, most people are committed to some form of democracy. But the choices are no less crucial, and the stakes may be even higher. The ecological upheaval promised by global warming is more disruptive than any military threat humans have yet faced." This expression of deep economy needs to be deepened. The ecological upheaval is not separate from the military threats humans make any more than humans are separate from the environment. John Darwin, in "After Tamerlane" (pp. 421-423) offers good ballast:

"[T]he final collapse of the Europe-centred world order that had seemed so secure before 1914 ... revealed the terrifying fragility of the 'liberal world' ... It was not just a matter of the end of free trade. The 1930s had seen a scale of political violence in both Europe and East Asia that defied past comparison. Thought-control, propaganda and physical force became the daily recourse of authoritarian governments. Ideological war was waged with uncompromising ferocity. Normal feelings of humanity gave way under the strain. Most terrible of all was the boiling up not just of racial antagonism but of programmatic racism. ... What had opened up this moral abyss? ... At the root of the violence, the hatred, the murders, the search for cultural seclusion and economic self-sufficiency lay the clash between the two great forces that had shaped the world after 1890. The first was the intense globalization that opened up cultures, economies and political systems to external influence on a massive scale and at tremendous speed. ... The second was state-building ... stimulated by many of the forces that promoted globalization: improved communications, the rise of large-scale industry, and the growth of new communities. [State-building] could also exploit [these forces] to create new kinds of authority and new techniques of control. ... Until 1914, globalization and state-building had advanced together in a precarious balance. ... The First World War and its outcome destroyed the legitimacy of international order, the political framework on which globalization depended [and] bred a violent reaction against economic and cultural openness. The great contraction of trade after 1930 gave a savage twist to the mood of revolt. ... In the coming struggle for power, and perhaps survival, all that really mattered was the strength and cohesion of the nation state and the size and scale of its zone of expansion. In a fragmented world with no collective will, there were few restraints."

As current leaders openly fragment our world into "coalitions of the willing," praising globalization while making confused statements and even more confused actions regarding state-building, they risk making a world already threatened by terrorism and a stressed natural environment even more dangerous. What can we do about that? One small example: McKibben mentions microcredit lending, but does not elaborate on the hope it can offer for mitigating such political dangers. Along with producing and buying locally, perhaps McKibben's Vermont neighbors ought to be participating in microcredit lending - making it a value of their community to help faraway developing communities, and following "durable future"-values to make constructive use of globalization. Surely, living from hope rather than fear is fundamental to "durable future"-values. And as McKibben argues, it is not up to states, it's up to us....less

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