|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 'Deep Economy' a Sobering, Necessary Read |
| [Review] Bill McKibben's powerful new book argues for 'economics of neighborliness' |
|
Benjamin Terrall (bterrall)  |
 Email Article
 Print Article
|
|
|
|
Published 2007-10-31 04:18 (KST) |
|
|
|
In 1989, Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, one of the first books to address global warming as an emerging problem. In recent years his essays in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's and other journals have closely examined the increasing evidence of ways in which greenhouse gasses produced by humans are threatening the future of life on earth.
Published earlier this year, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future is a call for a deeper commitment to decreasing carbon emissions. McKibben offers a thorough critique of conventional economic wisdom that growth is always good and more is always better and argues for a new approach to economics that puts value on sustainable, local production -- an "economics of neighborliness."
 |
TODAY'S TOP STORIES |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
FROM THE SECTION |
|
|
|
|
| Stressing the importance of models like local farmers' markets, McKibben writes, "The 'food system' has been made over in the name of efficiency and growth as much as any other: the average bite of food an American eats has traveled fifteen hundred miles before it reaches her lips."
Though the book discusses activist projects in his home state of Vermont, McKibben is far from a simplistic or provincial thinker. He looks at community-supported agriculture farms in various states, cites studies from all over the world, interviews factory workers in China and investigates innovative "agroecological" alternatives to factory farms in Bangladesh and Cuba.
His critique of the worship of global trade is rooted in the common sense observation that humanity's current addiction to fossil fuels cannot continue without speeding systemic environmental disaster.
The timeliness of that message is underscored by the Oct. 25 release of a new United Nations report, the fourth "Global Environment Outlook" (GEO-4), which warns that human waste and abuse of the environment is nearing "a point of no return" that puts the planet's survival at risk. The study, involving more than 1,400 scientists, found that human consumption had far outstripped available resources.
The GEO-4 report finds biodiversity to be seriously threatened by the impact of human activities: 30 percent of amphibians, 23 percent of mammals and 12 percent of birds are under threat of extinction, while 1 in 10 of the world's largest rivers run dry every year before reaching the sea.
Calling the political responses to global climate change "woefully inadequate," the report's authors say their objective is "not to present a dark and gloomy scenario, but an urgent call to action."
Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently reported that there have been at least 70,000 additional deaths a year globally from current warming that was experienced as of 2005.
McKibben blows apart rosy paeans to global growth that dominate the U.S. media, writing, "Alongside the exhilaration of the flattening earth celebrated by [New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman, the planet (and our country) in fact contains increasing numbers of flattened people, flattened by the very forces that are making a few others wildly rich."
But though McKibben agrees with the Left's push for more equitable distribution of wealth, he challenges progressives to think beyond the usual parameters of political debate. McKibben writes, "Critics in the Democratic Party and the union movement typically demand even faster growth. They're as intellectually invested in the current system as the average CEO."
McKibben writes of the U.S. obsession with "efficiency": "On its altar we have sacrificed a great deal: our small farms were inefficient compared with factory farms; our local retailers were inefficient compared with working more hours. Relationships were inefficient compared with things. And in a certain, limited sense, each of these ideas is correct. If you leave certain factors (pollution, say, and unhappiness) out of account, we've built a society more efficient than any the world has ever seen." And though industrial agriculture supports a system that provides starvation wages or, in the case of some areas of Brazil that McKibben looks at, slave labor, "if people were paid more along the way, that efficiency would be compromised."
Of course, for people to care how our national economy affects Brazilian workers living in bondage, they first have to become less obsessed with themselves. Part of that necessarily involves getting beyond what McKibben calls "hyper-individualism." Pointing out that "even the U.S. military now recruits under the slogan 'An Army of One,' the antithesis of every old idea about the brotherhood of soldiers," McKibben argues, "We've been well and truly sold on the idea of the individual; 55 percent of Americans under the age of thirty think they will end up being rich. And if you're going to be rich, what do you need anyone else for? You can see the political results of Looking Out for Number One in the deterioration of all the institutions of our common life."
McKibben's powerful book is a bracing and deeply important read. I'm with Barbara Ehrenreich, who says on the dust jacket, "I'd like to see Deep Economy read in every Econ 101 class."
|
|
©2007 OhmyNews
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Comments Note: Kindly refrain from personal attacks and profanity. |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
How worried are you about the H1N1 influenza virus? |
|
 |
| * Vote to see the result. |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
RSS
Del.icio.us
Digg 
reddit
Y! MyWeb
.jpg)
