The communitarian manifesto

“DEEP ECONOMY” is a riff on “deep ecology,” a philosophical and scientific perspective that views humankind as but one species in the grand web of life. Ecology, of course, refers to the intricate pattern of relations between living entities and their environment. We most often use the word “economy” to refer to “the structure of economic life,” to quote Webster’s. But economy derives from the Greek word oikonomia, which translates as “household manager.” The archaic definition for economy, therefore, is management of a household. The second definition is “thrifty and efficient use of material resources.” The latter is the exact opposite, as Bill McKibben so vividly illustrates, of today’s growth-focused global economy.

The fact that we envision the economy as an almost mystical mega-force that dominates every aspect of our existence, rather than something within our control, is one motivating factor for McKibben’s masterfully crafted, deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding treatise. Another is the hard truth that the “doctrine of endless economic expansion” enriches few and is proving increasingly unjust and deleterious for many.

And then there is this grim reality: “One consequence of nearly three hundred years of rapid economic growth has been stress on the natural world: we’ve dug it up, eroded it away, cut it down.” Not only have we seriously depleted the planet’s resources, our incessant burning of fossil fuels (how inventive we’ve been in making use of this ancient cache of energy) has instigated global warming, which is underway at a rate much more rapid than anyone imagined possible just a few years ago. Yet, “to most of us the health of the economy seems far more palpable, far more real, than the health of the planet.”

A hard-working journalist of conscience, McKibben wrote in 1989 one of the first books about global warming, “The End of Nature,” a book just as bracing now as then. In the interim, he has tackled some of the most intriguing and baffling aspects of our lives, confronting overpopulation in “Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families,” and questioning our enthrallment to technological innovations in “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.” In “Wandering Home,” McKibben treks across his beloved home turf in Vermont and the Adirondacks, visiting people who have developed innovative ways to live in sync with nature’s cycles and capacities. Now, in his 10th book, McKibben offers an incisive critique of the unintended consequences of our oil-fueled, growth-oriented economy, and he calls for a new ecological paradigm.

Writing with reassuring exactitude and geometric clarity (John McPhee is a mentor), offhand wit and warmth (he cares), McKibben neatly summarizes the work of forward-looking scientists and economists as he explores the ways that growth economics have led us astray. Take the assumption that more is better. Certainly this is true as people move from poverty to prosperity. But at some point the quest for wealth and consumer goods yields negative returns: We end up with “more stuff and less happiness.”

McKibben isn’t indulging in self-help babble when he makes this deceptively simple observation. Happiness is a significant quality-of-life indicator, and evidence shows that happiness is diminishing in inverse proportion to the economy’s expansion. McKibben marshals the evidence to quantify what so many of us observe: People are overworked and harried, and we are getting less by working more. Think about the loss of health insurance and pensions. As McKibben writes, “Just as our increasing ‘prosperity’ has somehow managed to produce less time, it has also magically undercut our security.” And we’re not the only species to suffer. As we focus on corporate profit rather than personal and societal well-being, the damage we’re doing to the biosphere grows ever more severe.

The economic imperative has had another curious consequence. McKibben writes, “The story of the last five hundred years is the story of continued emancipation. The people of the modern world have freed themselves from innumerable oppressions: absolute monarchy, feudalism, serfdom, slavery.” However, enthralled by growth economics, the mesmerizing evolution of technology, and our cherished myth of the rugged individual, we have taken the notion of liberation so far, McKibben believes, that we’ve become “hyper-individualists,” with a diminished sense of connection to others and to the Earth. Civic involvement weakens (look at low voter turnout), and, most disturbing, we accept economic inequality, the huge gap between “the rich and everyone else” that McKibben describes as “so gross that it’s almost as much farce as tragedy.”

Direct, common-sensical and unabashedly sincere, McKibben is a master of stark equations, striking analogies and resonant metaphors. He likes parables, sounding now and then like the Sunday school teacher he wryly admits having been. He is a writer on a mission, but he is not overbearing. He does not issue doomsday pronouncements; there isn’t a hint of holier-than-thou smugness. No guilt-tripping or humankind-bashing. McKibben is concerned, even alarmed, but he strives to be hopeful.

And he is proactive. As part of his inquiry into the economics of food, a crucial subject, McKibben decides to eat only local foods over the course of one Vermont winter. As he chronicles his instructive experiment, he presents harrowing insights into the truth about big agriculture, citing industrialized farming abominations with cruelty to animals at one end of the grim spectrum and wastefulness at the other. Thanks to our “system of consolidation,” McKibben observes, “the average bite of food an American eats has traveled fifteen hundred miles before it reaches her lips.” Because “a gallon of gasoline weighs about seven pounds, and when you burn it you release about five pounds of carbon into the atmosphere,” this isn’t the ideal way to go.

Hence McKibben’s pleasure in chronicling the rise in urban gardens, community-supported farms and the farmers’ market, where fresh, healthy and environmentally sustaining food is sold by the farmers who grow it to the individuals who will eat it in a personal exchange that is nourishing for body and soul. “When you go to the farmers’ market, in other words, you’re not just acquiring tomatoes, you’re making friends.” This is the “economics of neighborliness,” which fosters that all-important sense of connection and responsibility to one another and to the planet. With the farmers’ market as the nucleus, McKibben constructs his paradigm for community economics, which he believes can liberate us from an impersonal economic system grown malevolent and enable us to reduce fossil fuel use and slow global warming.

Local economies rooted in potentially self-sufficient communities (as alternatives to our current immense and unwieldy system) make good sense. As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Of course, energy is the overarching challenge. Can we localize energy? Can we establish viable and durable substitutes for fossil fuels? Solar and wind power in enlightened Vermont are encouraging, but they comprise mere drops in the bucket. And while a Hong Kong health club has cleverly harnessed the leg power generated on its treadmills and Stairmasters to keep the lights on, most of the news out of a quickly industrializing China, as McKibben documents, has the makings of an ecological nightmare.

McKibben is wise to remind us that our forefathers invented the “idea of economic growth,” a concept that has now run its course, because we are capable of creating a new deep economy, one that genuinely values life.

Ultimately, McKibben’s intelligent, balanced and inspiring manifesto sets forth a beautiful truth: What is best for humankind is best for the whole of the living world. The big question is, as global warming gathers force, will we have time to make changes of our own devising? *