The following article was featured in the February
2006 issue of Vermont Commons.
Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics: Towards Basic
Principles of a Bioregional Economy
by Kirkpatrick Sale
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.
What follows are what I take to be the essential elements of
a philosophy that would guide a bioregional economy, which I
have constructed from a wide reading in alternative economics,
including E.F. Schumacher’s great range of writings (particularly “Buddhist
Economics” in Small is Beautiful) mixed with various
economic ideas expressed by the Buddha himself, and not least
from the ideas I enunciated in the “Economy” chapter
of my Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (University
of Georgia Press).
- All production of goods or services would be based primarily on
a reverence for life, a biocentric understanding that life
means more than humans—it means animals, birds, insects, plants,
trees, it means the living ecosystems, streams and rivers, forests
and wetlands, hills and mountains, clouds and rains,
and it means fundamentally the living earth—Gaia herself—understood
as the only living, self-regulating planet in the galaxy (and
one which will not take human abuse indefinitely without striking
back).
- All systems have limits and they must be learned and adhered
to in every economic act, and overuse of a resource or species,
or their depletion and exhaustion, would be seen as a criminal
act of violence, and overproduction of a resource or a species,
such as the human, would be seen as a criminal act of avarice
and greed, not to mention stupidity.
- The primary unit of production would be the self-sufficient
community, within a self-regarding bioregion, which
would strive to produce all its needs, shunning long-distance
trade except for non-essential objects of beauty, and
essential political and economic decisions would be taken
democratically at that level, mindful of the health of
the entire bioregion.
- Consumption would be limited, for it is not a rightful end
in itself but merely a means to human well-being, for
which only a little is necessary to satisfy vital
human needs: the goal of economic life is not the multiplication
of wants but the satisfaction of basic needs.
- Everything produced and the means of its production would
embody the four cardinal principles (these are my distillation
of Schumacher’s intermediate technology) of smaller,
simpler, cheaper, safer—that is to say, technology on
a human scale, comprehendible, affordable for all,
and non-violent.
- The only jobs would be those that enhance the worker, contribute
to the immediate community, and produce nothing but needed
goods—and that means goods, not bads.
- All people who wish to do so would work, for the purpose
of work is not to produce things to satisfy wants but
rather primarily to nourish and develop the individual soul,
aiming at fulfilling the highest nature of the human character,
including identification with community and the satisfaction
of its needs.
- All economic decisions would be made in accordance with the
Buddhist principle: “Cease to do evil; try to do good,” and
the definition of good would be that which preserves and enhances
the integrity, stability, diversity, continuity, and beauty
of living species and systems; that which does the contrary
is evil.
