With
gold reaching all time highs in value, and other indicators that our global
economy is in serious trouble (or seen more positively, ripe for a reset) money as we know it, and commerce
as we know it may well vanish, or drastically change in the not too distant
future. So perhaps, now more then ever, it’s time to look at how to build and
maintain robust local economies.
This
week’s guest writer Wayne Maceyka takes an interesting, inspiring look at how
that can happen. Part 1 of a 2 part series, we encourage your thoughts, ideas,
and questions in the comments below.
Considering
the seismic activity that's been rumbling through the global economy over the
past few years (it's not over, unemployment here in the United States is over 10%, the highest since 1983 and there are fears that
commercial property loans, additional residential mortgages, and energy prices
will squash a full-fledged recovery - in the traditional sense of the word),
perhaps looking at our economy through a different lens would be interesting.
For me,
that lens has been building local and regional economies as a way to buffer
regions from the winds of globalization and perhaps address some of our
environmental challenges as well.
Why import items that
meet basic human needs (food for instance) when much of it can be supplied from
nearby? Of course, “nearby”, “local”, and “regional” are relative terms, the
definitions of which are up for debate, but lets leave that discussion for
another day Why is “going local” a good idea? It reduces our dependence on long
distribution chains that are vulnerable to energy price fluctuations, reduces environmental
impact, and perhaps most importantly helps keep financial capital circulating
within the region.
This recirculation of financial capital supports regional businesses and the jobs and value they create, further increasing the region’s resilience in the face of large-scale economic challenges. Will every city, county or state be self-sufficient in the next 20 years? Probably not, though depending upon your beliefs around peak oil (see Jeff Rubin below) perhaps they’ll have to be. The point is not to seek protectionist self-sufficiency, but cooperative interdependence on a scale consistent with human needs and natural resources.
If you’re curious about
the role of energy prices in the relocalization of economies, Jeff Rubin’s book
Why
Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is worth the read. His analysis is couched in economics
and not ideology in a way that I found engaging and that may appeal to people
of many backgrounds - maybe not even green. In addition, The Oil Drum, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and
the International Energy Agency provide
interesting and sometimes contradictory information and analyses.
Michael Shuman's (of small-mart & BALLE) book Going
Local provides a wonderful overview of reasons to go local and ways to help
us get there. An example that made
an impression on me (similar to the aluminum can energy analysis in Natural Capitalism) of the
power of purchasing locally is a study from Austin, TX about bookstores. In
this example $0.13 of a dollar spent at the local Borders stayed in the local
economy; $0.45 of every dollar spent at the locally owned bookstore stayed in
the local economy. Those 32 cents adds up; instead of exporting that capital to
another location, the capital is kept within the community building the social
and economic so important to our quality of life.
Douglas Rushkoff's authorship of Life, Inc.
adds some weight to the idea of a local focus. While not an outright recommendation
for local
economies comes to similar conclusions about the value of local communities. He discusses the problems associated
with the rise of "corporatism"; the idea that we've reached a point
where nearly all facets of human relationships are mediated by a corporation.
(I am writing this on a site enabled/owned by Google).
The book starts with a
personal anecdote about his neighborhood in Brooklyn; he posted a warning on
the community listserv about getting robbed on his street. Instead of receiving
support and concern from his neighbors, he was reprimanded for posting
something publicly that could adversely affect property values. The point? When
the pursuit of profit supersedes the value of community, something's shifted in
a dangerous way.
So, how might we address these social and economic challenges within our communities and regions? Please share your ideas and thoughts below. In Part II, I’ll look at some of the organizations working in this space, what they’re doing and the (sometimes) competing ideology around “going local”.
~~~
Wayne Maceyka is innately inquisitive. He holds an ME from Worcester
Polytechnic Institute and a freshly minted Sustainable MBA from the Bainbridge
Graduate Institute. His passion: creating resilient economies to generate,
restore, & preserve capital -- social, natural, & financial.
Organizations working in the regional food system and those seeking to make
“waste” a feedstock are of particular interest to him. When not “saving the world”, he works
for the measurement technology firm Mettler-Toledo.
Find him
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