Before long, the elephant will turn on its handlers. It’ll tear up our “global village,” creating chaos, crushing crops, huts, innocent villagers, and other living things, while its masters dither with budgets, birth certificates, dead terrorists, and taxes.
The scary truth is that the economic, environmental, social, and political crises we’re facing are red flags warning us that the system we’re all counting on is headed for collapse. Global leaders are approaching these crises as though they were distinct and unrelated, when in reality, the problem is globalization itself.
To those who still believe in “the myth of perpetual growth and universal prosperity,” consider this hard truth:
Life rules; we don’t.
Economies of every kind and size are dependent on the largest economy—the largest supplier of goods and services—of which they are a part.
For us—contrary to what you may assume—the largest economy is not the global monetary economy.
It’s the biosphere—Life itself. You see, Life manages Earth’s accounts sustainably, which is how it has managed to last for four billion years. The global economy does not manage Earth’s accounts sustainably. Under its influence we are living beyond Earth’s means.
If we continue to degrade and spend down Earth’s trust accounts of good soils, fresh water, and oceanic carbon sinks, for example, it doesn’t matter how much money is floating around in the econosphere or who has it. We can’t restore depleted resources and degraded natural systems overnight the way the Fed can print more money or raise a debt ceiling. That’s why my bottom line is that “life rules; we don’t.”
Once our global economy has exhausted the natural resources and ecosystem services that are our true and common wealth, it can’t get any bigger. We’re almost to that tipping point now. And the leaders and systems that have caused and perpetuated this crisis can’t and won’t solve it for us. Like Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem with the same kind of consciousness—the same worldview—that created it. The blind can’t lead the blind out of this mess.
So what should Americans do before the global economy stops delivering the goods reliably or at all? We should learn from the most successful economic system on the planet.
Life teaches us how long-lasting, sustainable economies work. These economies are local, not global.
Think about it this way: The Earth doesn’t have one ecosystem or climate, but many as different from each other as oranges are from apples. Diversity is the way Life guaranteed some living things and systems would have the skills to survive almost any cataclysm. This means that we can diversify. We can relocalize or, in more realistic terms, re-regionalize economically, fit ourselves into these smart living systems and work with them. To do that, we need to figure out what natural and human resources we still have to work with closer to home and how to use them sustainably to provide the necessities and maybe some niceties for ourselves and each other.
The end of cheap-easy.
What makes me think now’s the time to relocalize? The increasing number of resources essential to our present way of living that were once cheap and abundant—what I call “cheap-easy”—but no longer are:
1) Oil and other fossil fuels. We’re quickly depleting the worldwide supply of oil, and there are no new cheap-easy fields. We don’t want to admit it, but abundant, inexpensive oil is history. What difference does that make? For one thing, there’s no replacement that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it.
Nearly all the goods and services the global economy provides are in one way or another oil-dependent. When oil’s too expensive or gone, so are they. Plus, energy analysts predict that we can add to the end of cheap-easy oil the imminent end to cheap-easy coal and natural gas. And if there are no cheap-easy fossil fuels, there is no global economy.
2) Good weather. Only dyed-in-the-wool deniers still believe the climate isn’t changing. The world is becoming warmer overall, but the weather is also more unpredictable and violent. Cheap-easy weather is on the way out.
The familiar species and ecosystems with which humans have cohabited for time immemorial are caput if the familiar, congenial climate is no more. Already, weather-related emergencies and disasters, crop and business losses, and species and human migrations alone have made the world’s new weather costly in lives and money. Plus, these events have served to further destabilize the economy.
3) Water. Frighteningly, worldwide demand for water will exceed supply by 50 percent as soon as 2025. Water-intensive globalized agri-business and livestock operations, global industrialization and pollution, growing population, and wasteful distribution processes have contributed to the shortfall in freshwater supplies around the world.
With rising prices and rationing, we’ll soon be saying “so long” to cheap-easy water.
4) Food. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the end of cheap-easy oil, water, and weather signals the end of cheap-easy food. Arable land is already at a premium everywhere in the world, and what there is of it is being depleted and degraded by fossil-fueled farming techniques.
Of the world’s seven billion people, a third are well fed, at least for now, a third are underfed, and a third—a couple billion people!—hover between malnutrition and starvation. If we’re not careful, that number will only grow.
5) Prosperity. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what a roller coaster ride the global economy has taken most Americans on. You’ve probably felt the recession’s effects yourself.
No matter what they promise, politicians can’t conjure prosperity out of thin air. And in an economy facing this many pending scarcities, the goods and services on which it makes its money will be adversely affected. Credit, cash, capital—the keys to conventional definitions of prosperity—will, like the other items in this list, cease to be either cheap or easy to get.
No global? Go local.
Thoughts of bringing economies closer to home flourish whenever a prevailing economy fails to deliver the goods people expect from it, or when it seems to deliver more harm than good. And unless you’re among the top 10 percent of Americans, you’re already experiencing some of that harm.
Though the drift toward globalization is 400 years old, the fully globalized economy is only about 60 years old. Meanwhile, we modern humans have been innovating solutions to the challenge of providing for ourselves for 100,000 years. Surely we can relearn how to live without globalization, and go back to more localized economies.
The teachings, teachers, tools, and techniques for doing this already exist. All we need is the will.
Relocalization is the way.
We live in a blind time—blindness is made
the chief consideration; it is a living,
a way of getting bread. Nobody throws
money to those who see. —Alex Comfort
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About the Author:A memoirist, magazine and book editor, freelance writer, and editor of the bi-monthly online newsletter Starting Point, Ellen LaConte has been published in numerous magazines and trade journals on subjects ranging from organic gardening, the environment and alternative technologies to the evolution of consciousness, democracy theory, and complex living systems. After three decades of homesteading in Connecticut and Maine, she gardens now on a half-acre in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina.
About the Book:
Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it
(Green Horizon, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-4502-5918-7, $21.95, www.ellenlaconte.com may be ordered by bookstores and is available through major online booksellers.
