The Briarpatch Network

March 2008

You can mark on your calendar March 2, 2008 as the date the Masonite Super Leakage Center (MSLC) died a quiet death. That was the date that the Hummer dealer in Silicon Valley stopped selling Hummers and decided to close shop. Instead of Peak Oil, we might call it Peak Hummer. Ever higher gas prices had already destroyed the SUV market and pushed the housing market and financial system into alarming disarray, but Peak Hummer was the perfect symbol of the coming transition to a saner way of living: simpler, less wasteful, more local. Other recent markers are Sharper Image going bankrupt and the Borders book chain up for sale. The so-called free market can get very nasty when the economics no longer work, even with the massive subsidies paid for with our taxes.

Shopping malls no longer work simply because they are the most wasteful, uneconomic way of getting stuff from the maker to the buyer. Transporting low-quality stuff thousands of miles from a manufacturer on the other side of the world onto a truck, going to a dock, onto a ship, crossing the ocean, onto another truck at that dock, on to a centralized warehouse, unloading, sorting, stocking, picking, loading on another truck, crossing the US, unloading at a store in a mall, sorting, and stocking again. And then, the most wasteful and expensive of all, buyers getting into their individual cars, driving to the mall, loading up with stuff, driving back home.

It’s those last miles that doomed the MSLC because the least wasteful, most efficient distribution of stuff over long distances is from decentralized warehouses or the makers themselves by small transport to towns, homes and businesses directly, i.e. post office, UPS, FedEx. The next most efficient is when buyers combine errands by going to the town center where the city, county, courts, libraries, offices, restaurants, markets, farmers markets, shops, artisans, artists, etc. are tightly situated. I’ve read that there is not one super mall being built in the US this year. Peak Hummer.

DDR is not going to walk away yet. Their business model, and their current investment group require that they continue planning for the future or else their stock price will collapse, their jobs will cease, and they’ll go out of business. So they will put on their best face and keep plugging away at foisting their monstrosity, now painted a bright natural green, on our community. And we will keep defending our community against them until the writing on their wall monitor gets to font size 1000 and starts flashing bright red.

Then they will slink away and leave us in peace to grow our food locally and make much-higher-quality stuff nearby.

Dave Smith

Anderson Valley Advertiser 12/19/07
Ukiah Daily Journal 12/27/07

To The Editors:

For the past thousands of years we have enjoyed an abundance of food, energy, and water. Here in North America, we’ve been so gifted by nature’s seemingly unlimited storehouse that profligacy hardly mattered. There was always more from wherever it all came from. Chopped most of the trees down here? No problem. We can get more from over there. Waste? Dump it over the hill, or into the water. Pollution? Let it dissipate into the ocean and air. Just put it somewhere else and get it out of sight. Someone will deal with it later.

Well, it didn’t dissipate, it is now later, and we’re the “someones.” Disastrous climate change is caused by energy usage waste products that did not dissipate as planned. We are having now to deal with the consequences of energy profligacy, both from its waste, and its depletion. As Richard Heinberg writes in his book, Peak Everything: “Our starting point, then, is the realization that we are today living at the end of the period of greatest material abundance in human history – an abundance based on temporary sources of cheap energy that made all else possible… our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels – and to do this as peacefully, equitably and intelligently as possible.”

Does that mean that the good times are over? Maybe not. They could be just beginning. Think that Hummer driver is happier than you? Think again. “International studies of self-reported levels of happiness show that once basic survival needs are met, there is little correlation between happiness and per capita consumption of fossil fuels.” (ibid.)

Happiness comes from living meaningful lives and has nothing to do with money or using up our heritage of abundance. The old fashioned value of conserving is the way to preserve abundance for our shared future… and it is a value recognized across the political spectrum by those who really care. And what can be more meaningful than helping one’s community transition to an abundant future based on renewable resources rather than polluting, depleting ones stolen from others now that our own are running out?

Gifts conserved are gifts with meaning. The sun pours out its life-giving abundance. The earth pours down its waters, and pushes up its plants and trees. Sun, soil, and water are the true basis of abundance and are freely given. Our care and usage, or carelessness and waste, says who we are as a community.

Just what would be a “peaceful” transition to the future? It will be a movement from our giant industrialism to human-scale agrarianism. Wendell Berry (Fatal Harvest) defines it: “…whereas industrialism is a way of thought based on monetary capital and technology, agrarianism is a way of thought based on land… [it] rises up from the fields, woods, and streams – from the complex of soils, slopes, weathers, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed. The agrarian mind is therefore not regional or national, let alone global, but local. “

Conserving our local gifts of productive land begins with protecting and preserving. Only then do we contemplate usage, and only the local community must decide that usage because it is only our local community who knows and cares about protection and preservation of the whole.

A colonizer from outside only cares about exploitation of their piece: piece of land, piece of the market, piece of the resource. The whole — what is vital to those of us who will live out our lives here together as a community – is not of their concern. Therefore our decisions as a democratic community are prior — take precedence — over the colonizer’s. We trust our elected public servants to serve our community, not them; our interests, not theirs; our future, not someone else’s… by properly designating usage through zoning.

Our local agrarian future, based on the whole of our land and relationships, informed by an ethic of conserving and the reality of resource depletion, requires that Ukiah Valley land be preserved for engaging with a very different future than was once planned. It is not some distant future; it is coming now with every new drought, ice melt, rising sea, fiercer storm, and resource war, reported daily. It will be a local future, whether we like it or not, because of continually rising energy costs. It will be a smaller future, based not on grandiose money-making schemes, but on local farming and local, small-scale enterprise.

Whether or not we have an abundant and meaningful future here in Mendocino County depends entirely on us and how soon we start planning and transitioning to it. The gift of precious, close-in ag land, and industrial land preserved for human-scale enterprise based on renewable energy and appropriate technology, are crucial to our future. Keeping the zoning based on community needs for our future independence, or losing them now to outside colonizers intent on their own personal wealth accumulation, may make the difference between a future of abundance and happiness, or one of struggle and pain.

I vote for stopping the headlong rush by county civil servants and elected officials to foist property zoning changes on our community, paid for in various ways by devious outside colonizers.

I vote for a meaningful future of conserving, local independence, abundance, and good times.

Dave Smith
Ukiah

Do you remember the schoolyard bully? The guy stomping around with his chest all puffed out as if he owned the world? The guy who walked loudly and carried a little stick? When someone would finally face him down, he’d wilt like a noodle in hot water. A Mr. Tiny Harris recently got all huffy (”Chicken Little in action UDJ 11/30/07) about “Chicken Little’s” who are “stupid” for trying to stop the Masonite Super Leakage Center. He quotes us in jest: “The sky is falling, the mountains are going to fall, we can’t allow it. Our economy will suffer.” And he goes on and on with the same opinions that have already been shown as unsupported by facts numerous times in this newspaper. Then Mr. Tiny concludes with “So, for you Chicken Littles: the sky is not falling. It’s a rumor.”

It’s not a rumor, Mr. Tiny. The sky did fall today, but since the world apparently revolves around you, and the sky didn’t fall on you personally, then you believe that it didn’t fall on anyone else. One recent study (Institute of Local Self-Reliance website) concluded that, as Wal-Mart builds supercenters in southern California, the company… will cut grocery workers’ income from $18.25 an hour in wages and benefits [to] just $9.63 per hour. As Wal-Mart expands in the region, it will replace high-wage jobs with low-wage jobs.

When someone has their wages and benefits cut in half, the sky falls on them.

Another study on the same website documents losses in downtown stores after Wal-Mart opened. “General merchandise stores were most affected,” the study notes. “Other types of stores that closed include: automotive stores, hardware stores, drug stores, apparel stores, and sporting goods stores.”

When someone is forced into bankruptcy and must close their local, family-owned business, the sky falls on them.

This has been happening all across our country for many years now. Maybe you feel secure personally in your business or job, Mr. Tiny, but somewhere — on someone — the sky fell today.

A man named John Donne once wrote a poem you might want to look up some time. It’s called: “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Dave Smith

To The Editor
Ukiah Daily Journal

Recently in the UDJ, a columnist poked fun at the riff-raff walking up and down State street — the homeless who use State street as their main route to get a meal. A neighbor mentioned how parents in her neighborhood drive their kids to a school that is only blocks away. A local businessperson talks about how the employees of a local savings institution hate walking to a parking lot that is three blocks away. Another businessperson complains continuously about owners and employees of downtown businesses who park their cars in front of his business, taking away parking spots that a customer could use.

Now comes the most rigorous study on cancer ever, by the World Cancer Research Fund: “to avoid cancer, don’t eat too much, stay lean, avoid red meat, and walk.” Another report says America’s obesity epidemic and global warming might not seem to have much in common. But “public health experts suggest people can attack them both by cutting calories and carbon dioxide at the same time. How? Get out of your car and walk or bike half an hour a day instead of driving. That’s how Americans can simultaneously save the planet and their health, say doctors and climate scientists. The payoffs are huge… One numbers-crunching scientist calculates that if all Americans between 10 and 74 walked just half an hour a day instead of driving, they would cut the annual U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, by 64 million tons. About 6.5 billion gallons of gasoline would be saved. And Americans would also shed more than 3 billion pounds overall, according to these calculations.”

For some reason, walking has gotten a bad name. If you have to walk or ride the bus, you must be poor. If you bicycle, you must have gotten a DUI. If you skateboard, you’re a threat to the community.

We’re going to stop the Masonite Super Leakage Mall for sure. But one thing Mall owners get right is this: they park on the fringe of the parking lot, and if an employee takes a parking spot close in, they’re fired on the spot. How much time is being lost by downtown merchants and employees moving cars around town every hour and a half to avoid a parking ticket? How much money is lost forgetting to move cars? Why are merchants and employees and civil servants fighting for parking spots with our own customers and citizens who want to use our service? Are we and our time more important than our own customers? How dumb is that?

Hey, there is free all-day parking out on Dora Street. There are bicycle racks around town. We need more walkers, bicyclers, skateboarders, and bussers. Join a worthy cause. Get healthy and save the planet. Get smart and save downtown parking for our neighbors who want to support local business.

See you on the sidewalk.

Dave Smith

Once upon a time, members of my generation broke free and created what was labeled a “counterculture.” Because the surrounding culture was not living up to our young ideals, we began creating our own work, our own services, and our own communities.

I prefer to call what many of us were doing a “parallel culture,” as my experience was more about building something new rather than countering or opposing. Between the straight culture and the anticulture, we chose to be part of a third way, seeking to build something positive out of the chaos rather than just spending all our time protesting and demonstrating. We chose to compose new social and workplace structures and relationships, practicing and feeling them, discovering how to make them meaningful and how to restore a measure of love and joy and amazing grace to our daily work. Sure, we made mistakes, but we were willing to fail young rather than take our assigned places and nod off into the ethical and moral wasteland we found around us.

Along with many others, I had responded to John F. Kennedy’s call to service. We believed we could and would change the world, and we did. Along with our protests and marches for civil rights, farm workers’ contracts, and the environment, we organized free universities, cooperative food stores, and small alternative community businesses. We had passionate faith in the future and look back now with pride at our accomplishments. We stopped a war. We put civil rights into law. We shut down the building of new nuclear plants. We passed the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act — every one of them now being chipped away by the culture that was then being countered. We created movements built around human potential, women’s rights, the environment, alternative health, and natural foods. Many of the positive results have by now been diffused into the overall culture as part of our everyday lives. One of many examples is how the organic foods market has gone mainstream, while enjoying a 20% annual growth.

For me, the sixties and seventies were not about selfishness and doing our own thing, an interpretation that has been perversely sensationalized by the media. Those years were delightfully exuberant with passion, idealism, possibility, higher vision, and work from the heart. They were a way out of the suffocating soullessness imposed by a scientific materialist worldview– the conformity that corporate mega machine behaviorism requires, and the individualistic selfishness hyped by its marketing. Alienated by the rugged cowboy models of isolated, independent manhood, many of us practiced tribal values of mutual aid and support, the common good in community, and the use of our gifts and creativity for others. We relearned how to take responsibility for each other, have faith in each other, help each other, care about each other, share with each other, cooperate with each other—values that have kept cultures together since humankind began. We were lighthearted and joyous in our abilities to live simply and walk lightly on the Earth. We worked hard at what we believed in and had an enormous amount of fun doing it. Our daily life glowed with purpose and meaning, and we believed deeply what one of the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, had written: that without feeling and emotion, nothing can really be known. He was echoing Thoreau, who said that a person has not really seen a thing who has not felt it.

As budding business persons, we were inspired and energized by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow wrote that personal salvation is a by-product of self-actualizing work and self-actualizing duty, and that the proper management of the work lives of human beings can improve them and improve the world.

But we lost our way. We were devastated by the deaths of progressive political leaders, brought down so suddenly and shockingly, and we were left lamenting what could have been. The Vietnam War dragged on as the positive and creative alternatives gave way to deep divisions and antagonism. Many of us gave it all up to despair, drugs, and deluded insurrections. And in our confusion we took the easy way out and lost ourselves by moving back into what the institutions of our culture had planned for us all along: safe careers, cake and circuses, bright shiny chariots, and commutes to tall buildings. Sure, you could say that we were on the losing side of the culture wars, or you could say it was simply time for us to grow up, move on, raise our families, and take our places of responsibility. Many of us turned inward, feeling that the only real change is spiritual and psychological, and that what is important is personal growth. But personal growth without an eventual return to the scene of the crimes to take up compassionate action is only escape into navel-gazing denial and the postponement of personal and social defeat. The goal is not either/or, it’s both/and. It takes both personal growth and social involvement to live the purposeful, meaningful life that is the fulfillment of our human potential.
~~

Excerpted from To Be Of Use 

November 2, 2007
Published Nov. 7, Anderson Valley Advertiser

To the Editor:

“Society is like a stew: If you don’t stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.” ~~ Edward Abbey

The cards are now on the table for all to see. The Board of Supervisor’s Tuesday Oct 30 meeting was a classic effort to confuse and reframe the issues surrounding the Masonite Super Leakage Center (MSLC) debate. For example, one Supervisor “couldn’t understand why” local citizens wanted to save the site for industrial uses while at the same time trying to stop the demolition of the buildings until a full inspection of potential hazardous wastes could be investigated before they come wafting over us, and running under us, in the air and water. During public input, Mr. John Graff piled on by stating: “it wasn’t that many months ago that these same people who are speaking now wanted Masonite saved… Now that that’s not going to happen it’s going to be a Love Canal? I can’t imagine why you would stop it unless you had facts.” The accusation being that we are simply being obstructionist and not truly concerned about the toxic issue, even though many of us here in this county have been involved in the issue of toxic chemicals for decades.

Yes, we insist on keeping the Masonite site zoned for industrial uses. Yes, we are concerned that Masonite’s documented uses of harmful chemicals, and the long history in our country of illegal and mindless dumping of toxic wastes by irresponsible corporations to save money, could harm our personal health if not thoroughly and responsibly investigated by independent, overseeing agencies as we’ve requested. This is consistent with the recent Board of Supervisors formal adoption of the Precautionary Principles, which is “a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.”

The County CEO and Board of Supervisors are attempting to reframe who is responsible by now calling it “the former Masonite site.” No, we will continue to call it by its honest descriptor name, the “Masonite Super Leakage Center” because, whether or not it has been sold to a new owner, the Masonite company itself and its executives are still morally and legally responsible for the consequences of their actions while owning the site. We will also use the term “Leakage” because the profits from this proposed abomination will leak out of our community and go who knows where, and because there is potential leakage of toxic chemicals into our community. This practice of re-naming something, so as to divert attention from what it really is, needs to stop. And for the owner to use the term “crossroads” in their new name is also a misnomer. Our community crossroads is at Perkins and State streets, not on the freeway.

John Mayfield’s recent letter (UDJ Sunday 10/28/07) states: “I and my family have lived downwind of the Masonite site and the fairgrounds for more than 30 years and miss seeing the large steam plumes on a cool morning” reminding us of the famous line from the movie Apocalypse Now: “Nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Local business and political leaders who are pushing Dumb Growth (DAG) ahead — Supervisors Pinches, Delbar, and Wattenburger, along with M/S Mayfield, Mulheran and Graff — can access extensive documented evidence of irresponsible, illegal dumping, and the failure of governmental agencies to enforce the law in the book “A Civil Action” and at the website of Bill Moyer’s documentary “Trade Secrets” at http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/transcript.html. Since that may be too much to ask, and they would rather be “entertained” by their information sources, there is a rentable movie made from the book starring John Travolta.

With the Supervisor elections coming up next year, the choices are becoming clear. Hopefully localized democracy will triumph, we will rid ourselves of dishonesty and betrayal, and the cream will rise to the top.

Dave Smith
~~

To The Editors:

The executives over at DDR (Dumb-em Down Research) would have us believe that the Masonite Leakage Super-Center (MLSC) is a done deal. No way.

6/8/07 In a unanimous decision yesterday, the California Supreme Court fortified efforts by cities across the state to restrict the development of big-box stores, favor small-scale retailers, and protect the vitality of downtowns. The ruling upholds the authority of cities to adopt planning and zoning ordinances that have a direct impact on economic competition and that treat businesses differently based on the scale of their stores. Many officials mistakenly believe that zoning ordinances that impact economic competition are either unconstitutional or otherwise beyond the authority of local governments. Citizens groups seeking to enact ordinances that restrict or prohibit big-box or chain retailers often encounter this argument. The court cited several valid public purposes that might be served by such a zoning law, including maintaining the vitality of the downtown and neighborhood retail districts, preventing urban decay, controlling the location and scale of development, limiting the number and intensity of particular uses, and allowing only as much retail growth as residents can support without undermining existing businesses.

At Sprawl-Busters.com you will find a list of 330 communities who have beaten a big box store in their community at least once, or pressured a developer to withdraw.

At NewRules.org you will find these victories over the forces of Dumb Growth:

Voters in Agawam, Mass soundly rejected two ballot measures that would have allowed National Realty & Development Corporation to build a 563,000-square-foot shopping center (about ten football fields, plus another 25 football fields worth of parking). Although NRDC did not name tenants, the project likely would have included two or more big-box stores and numerous mid-sized and smaller chain retailers.

Voters in the small town of Damariscotta, Maine, overwhelming approved a local law barring stores over 35,000 square feet (about the size of a medium grocery store). The vote puts an end to Wal-Mart’s plans to build a 187,000-square-foot supercenter in this village of just 2,000 people.

Voters in Frisco, Colorado, resoundingly defeated a plan to develop a Home Depot superstore.

The City Council of Santa Maria, California, voted unanimously to deny Wal-Mart’s request to rezone land for a supercenter. The vote took place before an overflow crowd of more than 200 citizens. Nearly forty people spoke at the hearing.

By a margin of 71 to 29 percent, Ogunquit, Maine voters in this small town overwhelmingly approved a measure that bans formula restaurants. The policy change was initiated by a citizen’s petition. Supporters ran a well-organized campaign that included direct outreach to voters, two mailings, and handing out homemade cookies that said “Yes on 3.”

Despite an expensive PR campaign that included a slick DVD, lots of advertising, multiple mailings, and even free ice cream, residents of Wayland, Massachusetts, rejected a developer’s plans to build a large “town center” retail development during a special town meeting. Dubbed the “Wayland Town Center,” the project was to include about 200,000 square feet of chain retail with 120 housing units. The stores were to be laid out along a faux “Main Street.” But residents argued the project was not a town center, but a shopping center.

The Vancouver City Council voted 8-3 to deny approval for a 130,000-square-foot Wal-Mart superstore. The council also voted down plans for an adjacent Canadian Tire, a big-box retailer that sells automotive supplies, sports and leisure goods, and housewares at 455 superstores across Canada. The council then voted to place a temporary moratorium on big-box development in that part of Vancouver and to review the city’s “highway-oriented retail” policy. Wal-Mart proposed a store with ecologically-friendly features, including a windmill, a system for using rainwater in the toilets, natural lighting, and underground wells for heating and cooling.

But the council concluded that the store would induce more driving, ultimately causing more environmental harm than could be mitigated by its innovative design. Large-format stores are by their very size designed for driving and not well-suited to shopping by foot, bicycle, or public transit. Wal-Mart’s presence would also undermine the survival of many small neighborhood businesses located within walking distance of homes.

Voters in San Luis Obispo, California, have defeated a 650,000-square-foot big-box shopping center. The Marketplace project, which included a Target, Lowe’s, Whole Foods, Old Navy, Circuit City, and several other chains, was to be built on 130 acres of prime farmland at the gateway to the city. Supporters said that the project would help San Luis Obispo capture retail spending from neighboring towns and thereby boost the city’s sales tax revenue. (Because California communities are limited in their ability to raise property taxes, they depend heavily on sales tax and compete fiercely with nearby towns in a kind of arms race to attract ever larger stores and shopping centers.) Opponents argued that the massive project would undermine the city’s lively downtown and local businesses, destroy rich farmland that lies in a floodplain, generate some 20,000 car trips a day, and contribute significant pollution in a city that currently has relatively good air quality.

‘Nuff said.

Dave Smith
~~

To Editors:

The concept of money leakage out of our community has been misused recently by those wishing to promote even more leakage, and then spinning it to mean less leakage. We’ve all grown so tired of that cynical game.

DDR the Maller, Ukiah Planning Commissioner Mulheran, and their hyper-growth fellow travelers describe leakage as the sales lost by traveling to Santa Rosa to buy consumer goods, and their “cure” is to bring the big boxes here to our county. That, of course, doesn’t stop leakage at all, but rather makes the Big Boxers even more efficient at extracting and transferring wealth out of our community.

Wikipedia defines it: “Retail leakage occurs when members of a community spend money outside that community or when money spent inside that community is transferred outside the community.” It’s like having a problem with a fox coming over the ridge every evening to grab a chicken from your yard, and deciding that the best way to deal with the problem is to provide him with a nice little cave nearby so he doesn’t have to come so far.

Our money leaks out of our community mainly through businesses not owned locally. The biggest leakages are through chain store and internet retail sales, and national banking of credit cards and mortgages. The solution to minimize the leakage and circulate our money locally is to not shop at chain stores and use local and regional credit unions. By using credit unions we also promote democratic control of money.

By circulating our money locally, we enrich ourselves and our neighbors instead of distant, unknown investors and corporations.

Some of us, myself included, can feel somewhat hypocritical because at the same time we are decrying the leakage from our own community, we ourselves may have investments and jobs in corporations who are doing the same thing to other communities. This is the fix that we have gotten ourselves into by buying into short-sighted economic solutions that no longer work, and having to now make transitions that could become painful, both personally and as a community, if not carefully mapped out and navigated smartly together as neighbors.

We can only start from where we live… and change how we use, and don’t use, our money. We have to draw a line around where we and our neighbors are and say “circle the wagons, it stops right here.”

Dave Smith
~~

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Published AVA: Oct 10, 2007
Published UDJ: Oct 11, 2007

To the Editors:

The recent “forums” put on by DDR, the new Masonite owner, are truth-revealing, but not as DDR had hoped. Although I boycotted them myself, knowing they would be nothing but propagandizing and diversion, they are available for viewing as a wonderful community service at KMECRadio.org.

The framing of the forums were: “What are the requests of the community to DDR?” repeated continuously throughout the meetings. This tries to put our community and citizens into a subservient position to DDR, begging for crumbs from the table of what they are portraying as an already done deal. That’s the whole game… repositioning the project from what it is: DDR having to get approval for changing the zoning; to “Pretty please, can you put solar on the buildings?”

DDR plans to bring in their own architects and builders from outside the county if they can buy off our County Supervisors to change the zoning that our community has carefully designated. A local architectural design firm has been hired to put lipstick on the pig by making the big box monstrosity “look like Mendocino County.” C’mon, that is classic Orwellian! The only way to make the Masonite site look like Mendocino County is to dig up all the asphalt and concrete, replant Redwood trees, and return it to forest.

You can also watch planning commissioner Mr. Mulheran continue expressing his “feeling” that a Big Box Supercenter will bring customers to downtown Ukiah, ignoring the extensive research showing that exactly the opposite has occurred in boarded up towns across this country for the past forty years.

Don’t be hoodwinked by smooth, highly paid, “caring” consultants brought in from who knows where to “share our concerns.” This is not a done deal. We as an aroused citizenry can save this property for desperately needed, entrepreneurial, innovative new small industry. We can revitalize our downtown, locally-owned shops, to keep our money here building our own community instead of leaving for parts unknown to line the pockets of those who already have way more than their fair share.

And we have only one “request” - no, a demand - loud and clear, to DDR: “LEAVE OUR COUNTY!”

Dave Smith
~~
Photo Credit: Evan Johnson
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	October 10, 2007

Dave Pollard: Natural Education, Natural Enterprise, Natural Community: Creating a Virtuous Cycle

Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability - Permaculture

Do The Right Thing - Sharon Astyk

Theory of Anyway - Pat Meadows

Ethanol Will Bankrupt Our Topsoil - Alice Friedemann

The Agenda Restated - Jim Kunstler

~~

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From To Be Of Use

Enlightened management is one way of taking religion seriously, profoundly, deeply, and earnestly. Of course, for those who define religion just as going to a particular building on Sunday and hearing a particular kind of formula repeated, this is all irrelevant. But for those who define religion … in terms of deep concern with the problems of human beings, with the problems of ethics, of the future of man, then this kind of philosophy, translated into the work life, turns out to be very much like the new style of management and of organization. … And the qualities of the superior managers have been worked out, i.e., they are more democratic, more compassionate, more friendly, more helpful, more loyal … a certain kind of democratic manager makes more profit for the firm as well as making everybody happier and healthier. ~~ Abraham Maslow

I don’t think we can discuss meaningful work without discussing the spiritual. I consider myself a pilgrim without a spiritual or religious axe to grind or system to sell you. Linking up with our fundamental source is a path toward wholeness and enlightenment, and the spiritual, within a religious tradition or not, is reflected in the work we do and how we do it. We have apparently been born with an inner guidance system, most directly accessible through our inner voice, through prayer, through meditation, the symbology of our dreams, and the myths that underlie our culture. All we need do is open ourselves to it and explore the messages that are constantly being offered. This is crucial to finding vocation, purpose, and meaning, because as we understand ourselves, guidance seems to come from everywhere, and life becomes purposeful and magical. And this is the foundation of hope.

We seem to be intuitive myth-makers, which is a way to make truth available to ourselves as we grow in understanding. An eternal conflict is being waged between the light and the dark, between the spiritual and the material, and every human predicament, every historical situation is a phase of the struggle. “Be kind,” said the philosopher Philo of Alexandria, “for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Every situation we face with our work is also part of this ongoing challenge.

No matter how much you’ve explored your inner life, you can still ask the questions that are key to finding meaning in your work. What is it that you most love, most care about? What goes on inside your head and your heart as you first awake, as you drive to and from your job? Though the answer springs from the unconscious, it is your companion. It is your love. It is your addiction. It is your quality. It is your meaning. It is your ruler. What we do reflects our inner life. By looking at what we actually spend our time doing, we can know what our inner life is all about. Unless, of course, what you’re doing is killing your inner life.

You may be numb from everyday coping with your job or business. There is the constant hammering of responsibility, the juggling of priorities, the competitors trying to eat your niche for lunch — and gradually, imperceptibly, you deaden. Your work doesn’t work for you anymore. It doesn’t make you alive anymore. In fact, it has become deadly boring. But what to do? Your security is important, and considering all this is risky. You have a mortgage and car payments. But what if you could be more fulfilled doing something completely different?

You notice that you’re beginning not to care much about anything but your own family and close friends. There’s just too much sadness and tragedy in the world, way too much to do anything about. There is much more you would like to do, but you need a paycheck and the choices for how to get one are few, so you just soldier on, give where you can, help when you can, but it doesn’t fulfill that deep desire for meaning.

Deadening your feelings may be your only way to cope, but the problem is, as Helen Keller reminded us, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched. They must be felt with the heart.” Closing off our hearts to the pain may also close us off to the feelings of awe and beauty, our reasons for being alive.

Years ago my parents owned a weekend home in a community built around a golf course and lake. There were many bored retirees there, living “the good life” — which seemed to consist of a daily schedule of rising late, getting boozed up in the afternoon, going out to dinner, and crashing early, drunk in front of the tube. Was this worth working a lifetime for?

I tried retiring for a while, still many years before retirement age. We moved our family to acreage in redwood country, off the grid. It was great living in nature, with the river, horses, and goats — paradise. But it wasn’t long before restlessness set in. I started driving to town a lot and hanging out in bookstores. Then came complete existential boredom. Was this the American dream everyone was talking about: being useless? Maybe I was a workaholic, needing to cover a hole in my soul by escaping through work. But I certainly didn’t feel that. The ennui was much more borne of a feeling that I still had work to do, that there was something I was here for, a calling — and it was not to just hang out. There was a specific task, as yet unknown, that only I could do, and if I didn’t do it, it would not get done.

I tried some short-term business consulting, but at the time that wasn’t my gig at all. There was no connection, no feeling, no hands-on, real work, no team, no context, no mission. Each company seemed to exist solely to exist. Their missions seemed to be: “Our core competence is to sell as much stuff as possible (it doesn’t matter how or what), so that the people at the top can make as much money as possible by paying the people under them as little as possible.” We are already stuffed with stuff, and here was some more stuff. Where there is real care, real quality, real commitment to good creative work and artful design skillfully wrought, that’s not stuff; that’s beauty, a crucial and useful aspect of meaning. But when it’s just more stuff, a bit of a product tweak that’s supposed to be a giant leap forward with great fanfare, who needs it? Where’s the calling? Where’s the sense of greater purpose?

How Are We to Live and Work?
People in every time and place have held in common, through their wisdom traditions, some basic beliefs about our lives and work here on Earth. In modern language, they believed (and believe) that the material world we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is imbued with living spirit that is aware, intentional, and directional — not random, or by chance, or chaotic. They believe that for an individual’s life and work to have meaning and purpose, life itself must have meaning and purpose. They believe that with our freedom of consciousness come responsibilities and duties for the well-being of the whole. They believe that life is verb — pattern, process, and action — not noun — thing, subject, and object. They believe that myths and dreams are truths that bypass our rational ego or mind, that communicate to us directly from our underlying connected consciousness and link our individual intelligence to foundational wisdom. Finally, they believe that our ego or mind — the incessant compulsive chatter from past internal programming that distracts our attention from what is real, here, and right now — should be put to use for the greater good rather than being the master of our personal daily lives.

Our rational, linear world of business and work needs the balance of spirit and mystery and wonder and respect for the mysterious and unknown. That is where the art and creativity of business comes from. How do we find this balance? Is there a Business Muse?

Wavebands of Meaning
In 1965, Edward Matchett began an investigation into the nature of the creative mind that was sponsored by the Science Research Council of Great Britain and received the assistance of hundreds across the world. He wrote that creative energy, which engenders creative action, comes to any creator in a kind of relaxed reaching out … “the potential creator’s whole being outstretched ready to receive… The focus of attention in every moment is totally on the incoming flow of energy, requiring the full cooperation of all of the person’s own spirit, mind and body.”

Matchett wrote further that anyone “can experience and produce meaning … simply by becoming open, positive, and receptive to the whole universe,” but “there cannot be any superstition or some limiting belief-system that blocks the way. It can be done only in trustful simplicity … and comes in response to our humble need of assistance, our expectation of the best, and our commitment to produce work of real worth.”

Matchett saw the individual as a kind of receiver who can tune into a “waveband of meaning,” something that we can access by “asking for it truly” because it is what we actually are in our deepest self, and that it comes by being true to what lies deepest within us. It continually calls us to be free by letting “everything everywhere be filled with meaning.”

A similar perspective is offered by author Brenda Ueland, who felt that the more we use our creative power, the more we have available to use — and that we should use our creative power “because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.”

Creative work comes in many forms but is best cultivated in an atmosphere of trust and good cheer. The offices I love working in are fun to be in, even when things may not be looking great for sales, or when the new product isn’t selling up to plan. A great place to work never takes itself too seriously. Hard, serious, efficient work gets done, but there’s always time for a joke, a light moment, a friendly smile, a helpful comment. A lot can be accomplished with trust and good cheer. Offices of good cheer, doing good work, are conducive to the wavebands of meaning that bring epiphanies of true creativity.
~~
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From Wendell Berry

A community economy is not an economy in which well-placed persons can make a ‘killing’. It is an economy whose aim is generosity and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance.

WENDELL Berry is a strong defender of family, rural communities, and traditional family farms. These underlying principles could be described as ‘the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity, and the renewal, on sound cultural and ecological principles, of local economies and local communities’:

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature - the land, the water, the air, the native creatures - within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbours.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products - first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labour saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

12. See that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalised childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalised. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programmes, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighbourly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighbourhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.
~~

Think Little

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From To Be Of Use

Supporting local farms and small businesses takes more of our money than shopping at the big box stores. Cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap stuff degrades our environment and rides on the backs of workers, whether its a disabled veteran begging nickels on the corner, a laid-off professional standing in line at the food bank, a hungry child in a farmworker labor camp, or an Asian farmer forced off his land to work for peanuts making our shoes.

The local family organic farmer is not subsidized by our tax dollars like the huge corporate farmer making profits from the labor-saving poisons sprayed on the food we will eat. Her food gives us health, not cancer. Her farm sustains the land instead of using it up. Supporting her may cost a bit more. Consider it a donation to justice and to our own personal health and the future of our planet.

The local small-business merchants struggling to survive against the big-box MegaMaws are often sneered at as “inefficient” and “gougers” because they don’t have access to the tax dollars that corrupt politcians use to underwrite the massively inefficient corporations that export our jobs to other countries and bring back poor quality cheap crap.

The world of business has become rather cold and heartless and quietly desperate. Over the past thirty years, as corporations have become increasingly devoted to the bottom line, to the exclusion of every human consideration, and jobs are continually moving to the other side of the world, there hasn’t been much alarm in the office. The blue-collar workers downstairs were losing their jobs, but that was okay. That was hand labor, easily replaced by automation and cheap labor overseas. We in the office have education and skills and creativity. No problem.

But then something dark has started skulking around just outside our peripheral vision, waiting, watching. As consumers, we keep up our daily hunt for the cheapest price — the lower the better. It doesn’t matter where or how it is made — whether it is a car we’re buying, sheets for our bed, or food for our kids — cheap is always better. You can get breakfast for only $1.99, and that includes eggs and potatoes, three kinds of meat, juice, and coffee. Never mind the chickens squeezed so tightly together their beaks have to be burned off so they won’t peck each other to death. Bad for the bottom line. We aren’t told about that. Price is important. Never mind the pig shit overflowing into our water supply. They don’t put that on TV. Price is important. Never mind the cancers caused by our industrial food system. One person’s good deal is someone else’s raw deal. Price is important.

But now they’re coming for us in the office. Programmers in India work a lot cheaper. Price is important. Accountants in Burma have the same computers and programs and can do spreadsheets a lot cheaper. Price is important.

An undercurrent of fear seems to be running through life in the office these days. Anyone’s job can be gone in a flash. Facing the various other crises that we’re becoming aware of is going to take a lot of creativity…

but fear
is not conducive
to creativity…

to reverse
this negative trend
my friend…

buy less
buy local
pay more…

ask not for whom
the siren cries

it cries for thee…
~

~~
Calvin & Hobbes Tip: Dave Pollard
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To The Editors
Ukiah Daily Journal
Anderson Valley Advertiser

“Peak Oil” is the all-time high-point of world oil production. There has been a great debate going on for several years about when that point will be reached: 2007? 2010? 2020? At that point the end of cheap oil and cheap energy will have been reached, and though there will continue to be price fluctuations based on world-wide energy usage, the overall trend will be the lessening of supply and the resultant increasing of costs for the energy that has driven the growth of world civilization for the past 100 plus years. Continuing down the path we are on will result in endless, terror-filled wars for dwindling resources forcing more and more of our young into combat.

The Peak Oil debate is now over. That all-time high-point of world oil production was reached last year in July of 2006 (see the Energy Bulletin and The Oil Drum on-line). We will never produce more oil world-wide than we do right now. The supply of world oil will continue to decrease into whatever future is to come. Meanwhile, global demand continues to increase substantially.

A parallel debate has also been on-going over how much renewable energy from the sun, wind, and water can replace the loss of fossil fuels. Can we continue to live the affluent American lifestyle of driving cars everywhere for work and shopping, and using ships and trucks to bring cheap goods from the other side of the world to the shopping malls and internet retail giants scattered across our nation? Can we now turn more to ethanol, coal and nuclear power to sustain our extravagant, wasteful lifestyles? Although each of those energy sources have severe environmental consequences, they and the renewables together still cannot replace the constant power needed to sustain the growth in our economy and consumption that we’ve grown to expect (see new books “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society” by Ted Trainer, and “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines” by Richard Heinberg).

It is becoming clear that we cannot avoid major changes in our lifestyles, and soon. Our choice now is whether or not we continue to close our eyes and ignore this reality. The longer we wait to decrease our energy use, we increase the potential for major catastrophic upheavals further down the road. The choices of buying a Hummer, building housing on prime, close-in agricultural land, and turning zoned industrial land into a giant mall are called “dumb growth” which also increases the likelihood of disaster. It is “dumb” not because people are uninformed by our mass media, but because many are care-less and don’t want to be bothered asking important questions about our choices and our future, or think that our national political leaders will make the right choices despite the overwhelming evidence that they aren’t, or think technology will solve all problems even though our technology is almost entirely based on the cheap energy that is running out. As for those who have a personal vested interest in seeing the ugly growth to our south be imported into our county here, it may be “smart” for them personally, but it is “dumb” because it is self-centered and short-term oriented rather than community-based and sustainable.

We have the opportunity to begin adopting simpler, healthier and more community oriented lives. The essential factor in our global predicament is over-consumption. There are those in the average middle class in Europe who live on 10% of our per capita energy consumption. We’re not talking about living in caves. We can choose to find the living of a life “simple in means and rich in ends” enjoyable again. Small-scale, decentralized communities designed around permaculture principles, local and regional economies, smart management of local natural resources, local community government, passive solar and renewable energy systems, are all transitions that make common sense… going from living “lifestyles” to living real lives with meaningful purpose.

Every day we vote with our dollars and our time for the future we’re going to have. When we “buy global” and think “bottom-line” exclusively, we vote for resource wars and centralized, undemocratic corporate control of everything. When we “buy local” we vote for a local, decentralized economy with local jobs and a sustainable future. When we spend time driving to the big box malls along the freeway or to jobs and malls in Santa Rosa, we vote for pollution and global warming. When we spend time working against the malling of our villages and conversions of precious agricultural land to housing, and support/create our own locally-owned businesses, we vote for a future and a community we want to live and work in.

When we buy local food from local farmers we’re voting for survival itself. Our globalized food system is reliant on cheap energy for transportation, chemical pesticides, tractor power, irrigation, and packaging. Each dollar rise in gasoline cost translates into several dollars rise in food costs, making the current globalized food system unaffordable in the near term.

We’ve been trained all our lives that bigger and faster is the best life possible. Maybe not. Could it be that smaller and slower also means happier? Would you rather live in Los Angeles where everything is bigger and faster? Or live in Mendocino County?

We can’t make the transitions all at once, but we can start now. We may still need to commute and work at jobs that are not sustainable long term while we begin making small, daily choices count now for our local shared future. We can stop making our food commute to us by buying local food and supporting young organic farmers. We can preserve local agricultural land so those young farmers can grow food locally for us. We can support local businesses and preserve the local economic base to build more local businesses around. We can preserve industrial land for entrepreneurs to build local businesses on. We can elect political leaders with integrity and vision for the future that makes common community sense, and replace those who would sell our community out for their own personal gain.

There are groups here planning a positive, brighter, caring future in our county, along with the necessary fight against the short-sighted and unsustainable Los Angeles future that is being foisted on us by both outsiders and insiders.

Working together is how we go from terrified to hopeful… from dumb to wise.

Dave Smith
~~
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From Small Is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher:

As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses. The system of mass production, based on sophisticated, highly capital-intensive, high energy-input dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace. The system of production by the masses mobilises the priceless resources which are possessed by all human beings, their clever brains and skilful hands, and supports them with first-class tools. The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person. The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralisation, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines. I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich. One can also call is self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology—a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.
~

Excerpted from Peak Oil Prep

[Mendocino County has been in the forefront of renewable energy systems for many years. The first solar panel was sold here in Mendocino County. Research, development and installation of high tech, clean energy systems are one of the obvious small industries we can continue to create here. Here are some low-tech ideas for the coming power-down era.]

Self-Employment Ideas

We can’t make any guarantees, but these are good possibilities. And they should get you thinking in the right direction about other likely businesses.

Barter Network
When people don’t have money, they barter. They’ve always got stuff—and skills—that they can exchange. [See Briarpatch Mutual Aid Time Bank]

Beer and Wine Making
No matter how hard times get, people will still want beer and wine. If you can turn them out at home, you’ve got an endless supply of barter material

Bicycle Sales/Repairs
The first thing you should do right now is run out and buy as many used bicycles as you can. Used bike sales and repairs should do very well. You could even add motorcycles and scooters, because of the good gas mileage they get.

Boarding House
If your home is big enough, or can be made big enough, open a boarding house. Offer rooms on a weekly or monthly basis, and include as many meals a day as you feel you’re up to. You should probably at least include breakfast and likely even dinner, giving your guests a choice as to which plan they prefer.

Car Repair
While this is no time to be in the new car business, car repair should be fine as people try to keep their existing vehicles running as long as they can—and as long as they can afford the gas. Consider basic car repair/maintenance where you go to the customer’s home to do the service. You might even have luck with ongoing maintenance contracts. You could also give car repair classes.

Cheap Luxuries
Even in hard times—actually particularly in hard times—people will want to spoil themselves now and then. But the luxury has to be cheap. It might be a special chocolate chip cookie, or delicious homemade candy. Or maybe it’s very special hand-made gift wrapping paper. Or fragrant hand-made soap or a hand-carved wooden toy.

Computer Repair
Computer repair and maintenance should be exceptionally well. People will no longer be running out to buy the latest upgrade (computer, monitor, printer, etc.) but will be more interested in keeping what they have working properly.

Consignment Shop
Consignment shops don’t have to be limited to clothing. Garden and automotive tools, household appliances, furniture.

Delivery Service
It makes much more sense to pay a slight fee to have a store deliver a purchase to you than to get in your car and make a round trip to do it yourself. Smart store owners will offer free delivery in order to attract customers. On a larger scale, companies like UPS and FedEx should do well. On a small scale, why not start your own local service? You might even consider moving people around as well as packages.

Energy Consultant
There is, and will be even more, a demand for information on how people can cut their utility bills. Armed with the information in this book, and your own research, you could offer local classes on energy conservation (and thus money conservation), and even go into homes giving people specific advice on how to save money by using less electricity and gas.

Entertainment
People want to be entertained, particularly when times are tough. Consider bringing together talented people to offer live entertainment in neighborhood or community locations. You probably won’t get rich but you’ll have a good time, and you and the entertainers will end up with more money than when you started.

Errand Service
On a more personal level than a delivery service, errand services can combine your needs with similar needs of others, to provide services cheaper than you could do them yourself. This might be pickup an delivery, but could also include banking, taking children to after-school classes and sports or pets to the veterinarian, and a variety of other activities.

Farming
You don’t have to have a huge farm to have a healthy farming business. An acre of land and a lot of hard work will produce what you need for a small-scale business. Consider specialty items such as mushrooms, herbs, or sprouts. Because of the many uses of hemp, that will be a great crop once it’s legal—or at least possible without enforcement—to grow.

Herbal Treatments
You can grow, or forage for, herbs and use them to make healing concoctions, syrups, salves, teas, and a variety of other healthy items. You could also use flowers for Aromatherapy.

Home Repair
People will have to do what they can to keep everything in their home in working order. If you have carpentry, plumbing, electrical, or other practical skills, you can be a big help to those people. You might even have success at teaching those skills to others.

Instruction
You name it, someone will be interested in it. Whether it’s using tools, playing music, sewing or storytelling. The lessons likely to do best will be those focused on basic essentials, saving money and protecting health, such as gardening, food canning, inexpensive home cooking, yoga and other health exercises, meditation and relaxation, herb foraging and use, and pet care.

Rental Library
Libraries aren’t just for videos and books. Consider offering specialty kitchenware, car and woodworking tools, games, toys, household repair tools, gardening equipment and literally anything else you can think of. However, do this for your community, not your neighborhood. In your neighborhood, you should simply be sharing.

Toys and Games
There was a time when toys were not mass-produced plastic things. They were carefully crafted from wood, cloth and other natural materials, were treasured by the children who received them, and were passed down from generation to generation. Create some yourself, and you’ll have customers.
~~
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Stew: To be in a state of agitation.

It’s 10:45 a.m. and my store opens at 11. I bought the wrong labeling tape yesterday to complete a project, the local office supply on the next block doesn’t carry it, and I’ve just enough time to drive to the Big Box office supply to replace it.

I rush in, grab the correct tape, and go to the counter to exchange. The trainee seems to know what she’s doing, goes through the steps, but needs a manager to punch in the right keys to complete the transaction. First, she calls for help over the loudspeaker. Waiting. Waiting. I say to her politely, “I’m late, I don’t like to be late opening my store, I’m NEVER late opening, where’s the manager?” She says “I don’t know. I hate this place, I need another job, I just want to cook, and this place is the worst. Its Saturday, there are lots of customers who have questions, and they only have me, another employee at the copy center, and a manager hiding in the back room.” I tell her that the Brewpub may be looking for a cook.

She goes looking for the manager. Waiting. Waiting. Finds him in back, he comes up to the register and says, with a big chuckle to her “Oh, you don’t need me, you just do this” as he smiles at her ineptitude, or my anger, or maybe just because he’s supposed to smile a lot at work. His smile, almost a sneer, only infuriates me more, because it’s a false smile, a meaningless smile, an uncaring smile.

I often walk over to the local office supply store around the corner. Cool, very calm, relaxed. It costs a bit more to get stuff there, or to order through their catalog online, and it takes a few days to get it. I don’t know how they survive… maybe they’ve owned the building a long time.

The manager there always greets with a beautiful welcoming smile, no matter the day, the time of day… she ALWAYS smiles a welcome, a genuine smile, not a selling smile or a mechanical smile. She cares. It glows from her face like a bright shining star. She is professional, and authentic. She could probably make more money commuting elsewhere, I don’t know. But when I think of that store… right now I’m thinking about that store, and I smile within. When I think about the Big Box, I stew.

I’m 10 minutes late opening. It wasn’t worth it. The trip, the agitation, the helplessness, the disgusted employee, the false smile.

It’s never worth it.
~~
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Excerpts from The Idea of a Local Economy
Orion Magazine (2001)
Wendell Berry

A total economy is one in which everything—“life forms,” for instance,—or the “right to pollute” is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes—and especially democratic processes—are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people’s products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations. communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world…

Aware of industrialism’s potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitable distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tarrifs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government’s obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods or our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global “free market.” But now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global economomy is intended as a means of subverting them.

In default of government protections against the total economy of the suprnational corporations, people are where they have been many times before: in danger of losing their economic security and their freedom, both at once. But at the same time the means of defending themselves belongs to them in the form of a venerable priinciple: powers not exercised by government return to the people. If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves.

How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy—something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy. People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the local community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an influence over the kind and quality of their food, and to preserve land and enhance the local landscapes. They want to give everybody in the local community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make a national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is greater.

I am assuming that there is a valid line of thought leading from the idea of the total economy to the idea of a local economy. I assume that the first thought may be a recognition of one’s ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

And then, perhaps, one begins to see from a local point of view. One begins to ask, What is here, what is in me, that can lead to something better? From a local point of view, one can see that a global “free market” economy is possible only if nations and localities accept or ignore the inherent instability of a production economy based on exports and a consumer economy based on imports. An export economy is beyond local influence, and so is an import economy. And cheap long-distance transport is possible only if granted cheap fuel, international peace, control of terrorism, prevention of sabotage, and the solvency of the international economy.

Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.

So far as I can see, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.

Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community’s subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally. In charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.

The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as “protectionism” - and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not “isolationism.”

Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies of Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: “Whenever the timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers abandon their farms to fell as many trees as possible.” We should notice especially that the goal of production was “as many…as possible.” And Schweitzer makes my point exactly: “These people could achieve true wealth if they could develop their agriculture and trade to meet their own needs.” Instead they produced timber for export to “the world economy,” which made them dependent upon imported goods that they bought with money earned from their exports. They gave up their local means of subsistence, and imposed the false standard of a foreign demand (”as many trees as possible”) upon their forests. They thus became helplessly dependent on an economy over which they had no control.

Such was the fate of the native people under the African colonialism of Schweitzer¹s time. Such is, and can only be, the fate of everybody under the global colonialism of our time. Schweitzer’s description of the colonial economy of the Ogowe region is in principle not different from the rural economy now in Kentucky or Iowa or Wyoming. A total economy for all practical purposes is a total government. The “free trade” which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings “unprecedented economic growth,” from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
~~
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From Maslow on Management (199
Abraham H. Maslow

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization… It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually what he is potentially: to become everything that one is capable of becoming…
~

To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.
~

The test for any person is—that is you want to find out whether he’s an apple tree or not—Does He Bear Apples? Does He Bear Fruit? That’s the way you tell the difference between fruitfulness and sterility, between talkers and doers, between the people who change the world and the people who are helpless in it.
~

…seeking for personal salvation is anyway the wrong road to personal salvation. The only real path [is] salvation via hard work and total commitment to doing well the job that fate or personal destiny calls you to do, or any important job that “calls for” doing… This business of self-actualization via a commitment to an important job and to worthwhile work could also be said, then, to be the path to human happiness (by contrast with the direct attack or the direct search for happiness)—happiness is an epiphenomenon, a by-product, something not to be sought directly but an indirect reward for virtue… The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important… Or I can put this very bluntly: Salvation Is a By-Product of Self-Actualizing Work and Self-Actualizing Duty.
~

…most people prefer no work at all to meaningless work, or wasted work, or made work… In self-actualizing people, the work they do might better be called “mission,” “calling,” “duty”, “vocation,” in the priest’s sense… For the truly fortunate worker, the ideally enlightened worker, to take away work (mission in life) would be almost equivalent to killing him.
~

All human beings prefer meaningful work to meaningless work. This is much like stressing the high human need for a system of values, a system of understanding the world and of making sense out of it. This comes very close to the religious quest in the humanistic sense. If work is meaningless, then life comes close to being meaningless. Perhaps here is also the place to point out that no matter how menial the chores—the dishwashing and the test-tube cleaning, all become meaningful or meaningless by virtue of their participation or lack of participation in a meaningful or important or loved goal.
~

The best way to destroy democratic society would be by way of not only political authoritarianism but of industrial authoritarianism, which is anti-democratic in the deepest sense.
~

Enlightened management is one way of taking religion seriously, profoundly, deeply, and earnestly. Of course, for those who define religion just as going to a particular building on Sunday and hearing a particular kind of formula repeated, this is all irrelevant. But for those who define religion not necessarily in terms of the supernatural, or ceremonies, or rituals, but in terms of deep concern with the problems of human beings, with the problems of ethics, of the future of man, then this kind of philosophy, translated into the work life, turns out to be very much like the new style of management and of organization.
~~
Still in print.

See also: Find Meaning in Business - Maslow and McGregor
Copyright © 1998 Ann R. Kaplan
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