On Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy 

Bill McKibben’s new book looks like a must-read. What impresses me is how he’s got it right about the primary contradiction of our era: not bourgeoisie vs. working class, but rather what he describes as “Wal-Mart Nation” vs. “Farmers’ Market Nation” (i.e., a statist/multinational economic paradigm vs. a localist/communitarian economic paradigm). Below are excerpts from this week’s NYT review.

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New York Times Book Review - April 22, 2007

DEEP ECONOMY
The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
By Bill McKibben

Review by Lance Morrow

(excerpts)

Bill McKibben’s aim in Deep Economy is to present “a new mental model of the possible.” It’s a good time to try. Franklin Roosevelt was able to explore new paradigms of government because he took office amid the financial wreckage of early 1933. There may be an equivalent opportunity now - not because the world economy has failed but because its pace of success (China growing at a rate of nearly 10 percent year after year, for example) and headlong consumption of the planet’s resources, especially fossil fuels, may be setting the world up for disaster.

Economic rationales (more = better) that came in with Adam Smith seem spiritually threadbare - spectacularly pointless. And not only pointless but something worse, stupid. The political and environmental crises of the 21st century may so reconfigure the world’s outlook that basic rethinking becomes possible.

McKibben says in effect, we are two nations: 1) Wal-Mart Nation (gigantic, globalized, unsustainable in the face of climate change and the trashing of nature and the coming exhaustion of the world’s fossil fuels); and 2) Farmers’ Market Nation (manageably small, localized, communitarian, neighborly, calibrated to the human scale).

McKibben makes his case on anecdotal, environmental, moral and, as it were, aesthetic grounds. He defends his “economics of neighborliness” [what the Greens call Community-based Economics] against the charge that it is “sentimental, nostalgic.” In fact, he insists: “Given the trend lines for phenomena like global warming and oil supply, what’s nostalgic and sentimental is to insist that we keep doing what we’re doing now simply because it’s familiar.”

His alternative, an intelligent, socially responsible, nonideological localism - essentially a readjustment of material expectations and therefore of our “hyperindividualistic” economic metabolisms - “might better provide goods like time and security that we’re short of.”

McKibben focuses on questions about the ultimate purposes of economic activity and about how human beings might construct a future. His short-form thesis is: “A single-minded focus on increasing wealth has driven the planet’s ecological systems to the brink of failure, without making us happier . . . We need to once again depend on those around us for something real.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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