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Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Useful Inefficiencies
McKibben is one of our best modern thinkers on environmentalism and conservation, ever since debuting with his classic "The End of Nature" in 1989. In this new book he has largely tackled mainstream economic theory and how it has inflicted worldwide damage on the environment and on human communities. Standard development economics suffers from an unyielding focus on efficiencies and consumption, but this more often than not leads to widespread damage and unhappiness. Planners and politicians focus obsessively on per capita utility and efficiency, and vehemently disdain anything that may reduce efficiency for some individuals but may very well improve communities and the planet. McKibben's great contribution here is his coverage of new studies of human happiness. Especially in America, we have passed the point of gaining any more happiness from increased consumption of things, and we have become largely unhappy over the ensuing loss of community and nature. A new worldwide understanding of how economics really works has become imperative - more is no longer better.
McKibben has located many useful examples around the world of communities practicing new sustainable development strategies with demonstrated benefits for all involved. Unfortunately, the areas in which such great things are happening have particular political and economic conditions that make such experiments beneficial (including the American location McKibben covers most often - politically distinctive rural Vermont). The underlying flaw in this book is that McKibben must resort to pretty wishful idealism when applying these local success stories to the world economic system. A related problem is that the second half of the book, where the rubber should be meeting the road in realistically applying the local to the global, largely degenerates into repetitive descriptions of benefits in lieu of real prescriptions for change. However, McKibben definitely deserves credit for explaining in an accessible way all the tragic flaws of mainstream economic theory (see the books and articles he cites for the real lowdown), and it's about time us regular folks resisted the power players - for the benefit of ourselves and our larger community. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating:  - Turbines and Prayer Wheels
This is a wonderful book that swings your emotions from despair to joy and back. I marveled over the story of the village of Gorasin in Bangladesh where the people said no to pesticides after living with their devastating effects and the village has become an organic oases. That is the theme of the book, communities with members from near or far working together to make lives better.
McKibben mentions Heifer International, one of my favorite organizations, and their impact on one man in China with the donation of 48 rabbits and lots of technical advice and the wave of change in his community because of his successful rabbit enterprise.
A group called Future Generations trained some villagers in Tibet and the villagers devised and installed a system that carried water "through a series of split-bamboo pipes, and then through a turbine that used the dynamo from a junked car. A hydrology expert could have helped them build a more efficient system, but all the locals knew how to repair this setup."".....(Also, the hydrology expert might not have thought to use the water pouring out of the turbine to spin a prayer wheel.)"
World community - helping local people meld the old and the new.
But, McKibben asserts, it is time for the haves of the world to share more than knowledge, it is time to cut back on what we use. "Most obviously, if the rich world began making less extreme demands on the planet, poor countries would have more physical margin to work with - a little slack. ...If we Americans can use less coal and gas and oil, we'll in effect free some of the atmosphere to absorb the carbon that the poor world must emit to meet basic needs."
There is so much more in this book to ponder and act on, put it high on your reading list.
Rating: - Quite a scary future
Wow, makes me want to move to Vermont and become an organic farmer. I found this book to bring up some very good points about our current unsustainable economic situation. Over the past 300 years we have created an economic "machine" based on efficiency and production that will be very hard to change intentionally. McKibben offers some ideas on what the new New Deal will need to be if we want to continue a sustainable economy, which includes taking everything back to a local scale. Food, work, consumer goods need to develop inside the community where one lives. Less efficiency, more community and "neighborliness". It's a great idea. I just wonder if people will choose this before the collapse of our current system or try to figure something out after it's too late. I pesimistically think the latter.
Rating: - Growing Smaller
The main premise of this book is that the local economy is the deeper economy. Thus the healthier and wealthier community. Bill McKibben hardly ever deals in the abstract, rather he is constantly giving examples and providing illustrations of how this type of economy gets practiced locally. He describes the little experiments of living locally . . . such as one winter how he canned all of his food ahead of time and only ate things within a local radius. His goal is to make a connection between the local community and the economy. He spends a good portion of his time sharing about the relationships he has formed in his quest to shop and consume on a local scale. Consequently, the value of relationships in driving and sustaining a healthy economy are focused on a lot. It's not some over-romanticized look back into the past and the way things used to be. Rather it's an imaginative redreaming of how one can exist both in urban and suburban settings at a local level, valuing relationships and health over fast and easy. The book is extremely insightful and a moderately easy read. And well worth it.
Rating: - Thoughtful and far-sighted
Bill McKibben is an incredibly hard-working, dedicated journalist and environmentalist who has become an activist. His premise is simple but goes against the prevailing wisdom.....that we can redevelop our regional economies, thus saving money in transportation and creating jobs locally. McKibben and others have done this in Vermont, recreating a home-based economy, in many ways, albeit a very sophisticated one that incorporates Middlebury College, the internet and many other international resources. In these days of contaminated food products being shipped in from China, McKibben's simple prescription to reinvigorate our local economies
looks very prophetic these days.
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