Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

"This is the oldest book on the list. It was written in 2007 and made a very deep and lasting impression on me. He’s arguing for the revival of the local. This relates back to what we were talking about with Kate Raworth and place. When McKibben writes about deep economy, he argues that a place is better off when it has a significant amount of local food, local entertainment, local culture, and local business. He argues forcefully against the idea of growth as a necessity in the economy. He says this is something introduced to society with the Industrial Revolution and the inventions of the steam engine and the cotton gin. Kate Raworth also says that she thinks it’s essential that regenerative economics be agnostic about growth, that it must not necessarily view growth as an advantage. What happens is that politicians of every stripe from left to right say, “What we need to do is to grow the economy to add more money so we can solve the problems we have.” But every time we grow the economy, we create new environmental and social problems because we’re not distributing that growth evenly; we’re distributing it increasingly unevenly. McKibben is a great storyteller. One of the tales I remember best is about working with an organic farmer. McKibben writes that on an industrial-scale farm you can get great productivity from all the fertilizers, chemicals, and water you use. Then he says you can even get greater productivity on a small organic farm, but it involves much more intelligence and much more human involvement. You’ve got to look for weeds. You’ve got to look for bugs. You can’t just create massive rows with machinery that’s going to do the work without the benefit of intelligence. There were seeds of this in industrialism itself and in capitalism, but I think it’s been overtaken in the past 50 years by the short-term success of short-term thinking. The problem is that the ideology of shareholder supremacy and quarterly profits does create tides that lift many boats—but they also flood communities. To counteract that, we need to look at smaller enterprise. We need to look at place. We’re facing an extreme environmental crisis, not only climate change but also disturbances to the web of life, the loss of species. To address that, you need to care about it. To care about it, you need to have a particular place in mind: a forest you love, or a stretch of water, or your hometown and defending its drinking water. We lost that capacity as we accelerated globalization. We got a lot of benefits from globalization, but the cost has been the ability of people to make decisions across the table, with neighbors and foes, about the future of where they live."