"A Water ethic/scale of economics "
May 20, 2006
"A Water Ethic: Cure for the Coming
Crisis" is the title of author Kirpatrick Sale's June
2nd lecture for the Great Barrington Land Conservancy. Mr.
Sale will speak about how for centuries
humans have attempted to have control and dominance over
the forces of nature, most especially of water, but in
the 21st century we have come to the point where our control
and use of water has reached a crisis. We depend upon water
even more than we do oil, but what isn't being polluted
and defiled is being used up, in this country and around
the world, at a disastrous rate. It is no exaggeration
to say that the wars of the coming century will most likely
about water, and when they are over there still won't be
enough to go around.
"The only way we can escape from the coming crisis
is by developing a 'water ethic,' similar to Aldo Leopold’s
land ethic, but about this precious and vital resource."
Mr. Sale's talk is part of a weekend of festivities
dedicating the William Stanley Overlook on the Great
Barrington River Walk (www.gbriverwalk.org). The
Observation Platform for the Overlook is directly across
the Housatonic River from the site of the historic Horace
Day rubberwear factory. It was here in 1886 that Stanley
successfully transmitted high voltage alternating current
electricity. Interpretative signage tells the story of
Stanley’s experiments and his role in Great Barrington’s
industrial history.
Great Barrington is proud of its River Walk, which also
features the W. E. B. Du Bois River Garden, honoring
Great Barrington's native son. The River Walk is demonstrating
the potential for developing riverfront access along
trashed and abused areas, so that more pristine riparian
areas may remain forever wild. River Walk has shown how
public access need not compromise river ecology and water
quality, by creating vegetative buffers of native species,
mitigating non-point source pollution with drop inlets,
installing a rain garden and permeable trail surfaces,
and addressing degraded soils with "compost tea".
Most important, the process of building the River Walk
trail (now counting over two thousand volunteers) continues
to strengthen Great Barrington's own "river ethic". It
is appropriate that Mr. Sale's Water Ethic address will
be made in our town!
Kirkpatrick Sale is a contributing editor for the "Nation" and
the author of nine previous books, including "Human
Scale," "Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional
Vision," "Conquest of Paradise: Christopher
Columbus and Columbian Conquest," "Rebels against
the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial
Revolution," and "The Fire of His Genius: Robert
Fulton and American Dream." He was named by "Utne
Reader" as one of the 100 Living Visionaries. He
makes his home in Cold Spring, New York.
In 1980 Mr. Sale was appointed a founding board member
of the E. F. Schumacher Society. He was responsible
for suggesting the creation of the Schumacher Library
with its stellar collection of books on local economics. Mr.
Sale's essay "Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of
Economics" is printed below for your information. It
was first published in the February 2006 "Re-inventing
Economics" issue of "Vermont Commons," guest
edited by Susan Witt. Additional essays by Mr. Sale may
be read online at the publications section of the E.
F. Schumacher Society's web site (www.smallisbeautiful.org).
Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org
* * * * *
Economics
of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics:
Towards
Basic Principles of a Bioregional Economy
by Kirkpatrick
Sale
from "Vermont Commons" (www.vtcommons.org)
Economics of scale is what conventional industrial economies
are all about, finding ways to more profitably and efficiently
exploit nature. But the scale of economics is what
the new economies of the future must be about, finding
the ways to live so that healthy communities may foster
a healthy earth.
There are only two essentials to consider in coming
at the problem of the optimum scale for an economy to
produce and distribute goods and services: the natural
ecosystem and the human community. An economy that
does harm to the natural world—depleting resources,
extincting species, maltreating animals, producing pollution,
piling up wastes—has grown too large; an economy
that is out of democratic and humanitarian human control—where
decisions are made by a few distant corporate individuals
and a polity whose choices are beyond individual influence—has
grown too large.
Let us take the economic scale that is optimum for the
earth’s systems. It would be based on conservation,
stability, sustainability, recycling, harmony. That
means, for starters, an economy at a bioregional scale—that
of a watershed or river valley, or a mountain system,
or a lakeshore—for it more or less dictates the
economy appropriate to it: an economy based on a watershed,
for example, automatically considers downriver populations
as well as headwater ones. The human constructs
would adapt to the environment rather than be imposed,
and human uses would be confined to those the bioregion
allowed.
In Vermont terms, it would be possible to think of the
western watershed of the Connecticut River, with
all the rivers running eastward from the Green Mountains,
as a bioregion (though it would of course demand cooperation
with the New Hampshirites, who share the Connecticut). Another
bioregion would encompass the watershed to the west of
the Green Mountains, to Lake Champlain.
In this case, dairy and general truck farming would
naturally be at the heart of the bioregional economy,
although if a truly ecological sensibility informs it,
those farms would not allow the disastrous sort
of waste runoff that now so badly pollutes Lake Champlain
and other waterways. Nor would they use artificial
chemicals and fertilizers. Nor would they have
factory farms of 1,000-plus cows and 100,000-plus hens.
An ecologically based agriculture would depend on solar
power appropriate to the region, on human-powered machines,
on organic and pest-management systems, perennial
polyculture and permaculture, with markets geared to
seasonal and regional foods.
And the economic scale desirable for the human community
would be one in which decisions about the economy—what
is produced, from what resources, by whom, for whom,
how distributed, how recycled—are made democratically
by the various units, from towns to bioregions. Most
power would locate at the level of the community, and
it is there that we can imagine effecting some basic
economic justice—specifically, practices of workplace
ownership by the employees, workplace democracy for decision-making,
and workplace commitment to the immediate surrounding
populace—all of the things that are impossible
with large scales and distant chainstore corporations.
And here we come to an essential element of a stable
economy that dictates much of its scale: self-sufficiency. If
the farms of Vermont were part of a self-sufficient economy,
feeding the 620,000 people within its borders as its
primary mission, there would not be such a concentration
on dairy farms (and the resultant pollution problems)
and there would be a far greater diversity of animal
products and crops, ultimately to the health of the ecosystems.
Self-sufficiency is operable only at a limited scale,
where humans are able to understand the resources at
hand, can perceive and regulate the variants in the economy,
and be sure that production and distribution is made
rational and systematic. It is certainly possible
at a bioregional scale, at least bioregions conceived
as no bigger than 10- and 20,000 square miles (depending
on the size necessary for resource variables), and in
fact state governments right across the country even
now calculate much of their operations on geographic
areas of such a size, though they usually think in terms
of watersheds or forests or deserts rather than bioregions. (Although
in fact the Federal government has begun to calculate
at this scale, with a bioregional map recently put out
by the Bureau of Land Management.)
In terms of population, too, there is a limit at which
rough self-sufficiency can be achieved. I did a
lot of analysis of this for my book Human Scale some
years ago, and I found that historically self-sufficient
communities with economies of some complexity tended
to cluster in the 5,000-10,000 population range—one
urbanologist, Gideon Sjoberg, has said that “it
seems unlikely that, at least in the earlier periods,
even the larger of these cities contained more than 5,000
to 10,000 people, including part-time farmers on the
cities’ outskirts.” Medieval trading
centers commonly held up to 10,000 people for centuries,
and even when larger cities grew in the 13th and 14th
centuries to 20,000 or even 40,000, they were typically
divided into quarters--literally four parts—of
5-10,000 people.
On a modern American scale, then, we might imagine a
mixture of somewhat self-sufficient cities within more
self-sufficient counties within mostly self-sufficient
bioregions within a totally self-sufficient state, and
then the economy of self-sufficiency might be quite complex
indeed. In terms of Vermont, this might be a mix
of relatively self-sufficient cities (Barre, Bennington,
Brattleboro, Burlington (divided into quarters), Essex,
Hartford, Middlebury, Milton, Montpelier, Rutland, South
Burlington, and Springfield are obvious candidates),
within ecologically determined more self-sufficient shires
(an Otto River shire, say, and shires for the West, Black,
White, Winooski, Lemoille, Passumpsic watersheds), within
the two self-sufficient bioregions on either side of
the Green Mountains, within the state—whose economy,
if independent, could be just as self-sufficient as it
desired.
Such self-sufficient units would need to be guided by
certain maxims to provide a full range of goods and services,
and they would need to adhere to them with some ingenuity.
But the maxims are all simple and thoroughly practical. They
would include the principle of sharing, at the
community level, an adherence to recycling and repairing
(or at a more complex level, remanufacturing) almost
everything, an emphasis on handicrafts and bespoke
production rather than manufactures and mass production,
a commitment to using local raw materials instead of
imported (and especially local foods, cheaper, fresher,
safer, better-tasting, healthier), a nurturing
of local ingenuity without patent and copyright restrictions,
and an agreement to abandon as unnecessary and undesirable
almost everything manufactured at the factory level anywhere
and anyhow. All of which is no more complex than
the old New England adage:
Use
it up, wear it out,
Make
it do, or do without.
* * * * *
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