Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
Bill McKibben
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0805087222
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"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.
When to Rob a Bank: And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
Management: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Creative Urban Regions: Harnessing Urban Technologies to Support Knowledge City Initiatives
Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (Revised and Enlarged 2nd Edition)
it’s hard to swim against the tide of cheap good that keeps flowing in. A few years ago a Vermonter named Andrew Leinoff decided to go into oats. He and a friend found some old equipment and started experimenting. They worked out a good rotation for their fields—soybeans, then buckwheat, then the oats—and they eventually managed to make their ancient machinery work at least sporadically. (“One time my friend turned on the huller and it blew apart,” Leinoff recalled. “Missed him by inches and made
farmer at the end of your suburban road tastes better. But it’s more than that—it’s better because it comes from a . . . farmer down at the end of your suburban road. Getting that tomato—from his farmstand, from a farmers’ market, from your CSA share, even from a bin at an enlightened supermarket—requires you to live with a stronger sense of community in mind. Requires that you reorient your personal compass a little bit. Requires that you shed a certain amount of your hyper-individualism and
Norman Rockwell old-town-green fantasy. It is not; economies can be localized as easily in cities and suburbs as in rural villages (maybe more easily), and in ways that look as much to the future as the past, that rely more on the solar panel and the Internet than the white picket fence. In fact, given the trendlines for phenomena like global warming and oil supply, what’s nostalgic and sentimental is to insist that we keep doing what we’re doing now simply because it’s familiar. The good life of
124 | DEEP ECONOMY neighbor was prudent insurance against future personal need.”56 For the most part, people felt a little constrained about showing off wealth; indeed, until fairly recently in American history someone who was making tons of money was viewed with mixed emotions, at least if he wasn’t giving back to the community. “For the rich,” Whybrow observes, “the reward system would be balanced between the pleasure of self-gain and the civic pride of serving others. By these means the most
Cody, the residents of Powell decided they didn’t want to see their downtown wither and die. Following the example of a town in Montana, they decided to open their own clothing store. “We had between five hundred and five hundred and fifty investors, and they each invested five hundred to a thousand dollars,” said Mike Riley, as we sit in his spare office behind the Powell Mercantile, which opened in 2002. The Merc looks pretty much like small-town department stores used to look, with racks of