Harmonising social, environmental and economic development in Local Projects
The article describes a model for the development of depressed or deprived communities in their local environments. Its emphasis would be on essentials - like accommodation, food, water and energy as well as the creation of habitats that better meet the relationship, health and psychological needs of people. In areas of deprivation and social decomposition these are urgent priorities and the model would provide local jobs for local people meeting local needs as identified by local communities. It would involve developing local economic activity not only in the normal market sense but also through developing a mutual aid economy and redeveloping the domestic economy. The locality and neighbourhood focus matches the need to ecologically restructure the economy around energy, food and water.
The technologies and design principles for ecologically restructuring the economy are known and are already being pioneered. Such technologies imply a trend away from an economy dominated by large scale, world market focused industries. The competitive strength of these industries on national and world markets is partly based on their fossil fuel amplified productivity. The supposed efficiency of these industries is to a degree fictitious. It does not correspond to a superior contribution to human welfare because there is inadequate accounting for destructive effects on communities and environments. Traditional economic concepts like the idea of 'external costs' are inadequate ways of thinking about these destructive effects. To some degree community based strategies by focusing on local needs would escape the full force of this international competition.. Technologies like solar voltaics and wind energy, as well as insulation programmes are becoming increasingly attractive economically. In addition ecological design techniques like permaculture have shown themselves to be highly effective means for the provision of basic needs in a way that works with Nature. But to carry through these trends to full and adequate fruition millions of people need to identify local development as a more constructive way for them to pursue their interests. Holistic development needs moral and cultural changes. It needs to be recognised and supported in policy and in new legal concepts.
Entrepreneurial skills need not necessarily be at the service of economic giants pursuing maximum monetary gain. There have always been community and voluntary development efforts by people acting in their role as citizens. Local initiatives and projects would be co-ordinated by bottom upwards planning by local and regional government.
Harmonising social, environmental and economic policy.
Putting it simply economic policy, which represents the interests of the owners of the economy, gets priority over social policy which is supposed to be the net for those whose needs are not fully met directly in the economy and over environmental policy which recognises the broader natural context of human activity including the place of other species. Simplifying again we still have an approximation to the truth when we say that the interests of the rich are represented in economic policy, the poor in social policy, and other species in environmental policy. In current practice social and environmental policy must always be made to fit economic policy. This chapter is about looking at how things can work when we develop project based strategies for poor communities in which social and environmental needs get first priority and economic activity is organised accordingly. This is because conventional development approaches for regions or localities suffering economic decline, high unemployment, environmental degradation and social decomposition have failed. These approaches assume that competing to attract inwards investment by large firms is what is needed to solve local unemployment problems and indirectly regenerate local communities.
However, this approach is futile. The countless thousands of regions in decline and the millions of neighbourhoods around the world cannot all 'win' in a competitive game of trying to attract resources for the establishment of new industries. It is intrinsic to competition that there be losers.
When social policy and environmental policy gets second place to economic policy they are inevitably limited in what they can achieve. Competitiveness means a flexible and cheap labour force - but flexibility and cheapness means that the habitat , relationship and health needs of the labour force are neglected, their chances for a balanced life and their ability to support vulnerable non-employed members of the community tend to be neglected. In addition environmental sustainability seems to be incompatible with increasing the competitiveness of local economies. For example, developing transport networks to deepen the connection of localities into national and international markets intensifies the use of transport and destroys biotops. Developers usually want greenfield sites. This not only leaves former areas of dereliction in their state of decay but also gobbles up more land under hard surfaces and entails more travel and transport to get local workers to the new sites. There is a temptation, in order to attract inward investment, not to make polluters pay to clear up their mess.
New ways of thinking are necessary . What is needed is a system of ideas that not only involves a different way of thinking about economic policy ( a different theory for local economic development) but challenges the very claim of economics to be the central focus for thinking about how to advance human welfare. In this chapter I hope to show that we can indeed think of ways which will create local jobs for local people by meeting local needs - but that this local economic strategy would be a subordinate aspect of a community development strategy which I term holistic development. Such a holistic development strategy would involve rebuilding community life and repatterning human environment interactions - thereby increasing welfare through improved quality of life.
We need a holistic paradigm of human welfare to replace the economic one. In economic policy it is implicit that the way to be 'better off' is to be able to buy more 'goods and services'. However, as Alan Durning of the Worldwatch Institute has argued " Most psychological data show that the main determinants of happiness in life are not related to consumption at all; prominent among them are satisfaction with family life, especially marriage, followed by satisfaction with work, leisure and friendships". (quoted in Ekins, Hillman and Hutchinson "Wealth Beyond Measure", Gaia Books Ltd. London 1992 p46). If we shift the focus slightly and ask people what is important to their well being, to their health or what are sources of stress then again money and income by no means comes top of the list - environmental issues, the circumstances in which people live and life style are what people think about.
Community psychologists who have surveyed these issues find that top of the list in depressed localities are issues like fear of crime and community security, air pollution, noise and traffic - the last because of noise, danger to children, fumes, the destruction of community life etc. (Janet Bostock and David Beck "Participating in Social Enquiry and Action", Journal of Community and Applied Psychology, Vol. 3 pp213-224 1993. See also my Mental Health and the Environment in Care in Place, Vol. 1 No 2 , June 1994). What this implies is the need for a paradigm of development that focuses on people and their relationships in the places they live in - a paradigm of development based on communities in their environments. As has been argued above we need to think about health, habitats (homes, neighourhoods and broader environments), relationships and economic arrangements together.
This different approaches matches the need to ecologically restructure the economy. The strategically central location for ecological redesign and redevelopment of the economy, which would seek to prevent environmental problems arising in the first place, are in the home and neighbourhood. Ecological restructuring is locality specific. Insulation programmes, the development of drinking quality water saving measures, the development of organic urban food sources and improved strategies for urban green spaces, the repatterning of cities to reduce the need for transport and a curb on private transport in favour of public transport, the development of locally appropriate renewable energy sources matched to local needs etc. - all these have to be developed according to local conditions. So too do arrangements to pool or share access to products so that it is not necessary to make as many - those that are made being used more intensively by being shared. (The principle behind libraries which are local arrangements). These changes not only represent new jobs that can be created, they would not only reduce toxic emissions, but could provide a host of other opportunities and positive 'knock on' effects.
When an energy saving programme for the housing stock is implemented this reduce the need for electric power and greenhouse gases from the power station. In addition there are a host of further beneficial effects. The increased energy efficiency reduces heating bills, therefore increases disposable income and that reduces rent arrears. Tenants want to move less and this reduces voids for the housing department. There is a reduced need for maintenance because of less decay caused by damp. There is less physical and mental ill health to tenants leading to reduced expenditures to the local health service. There is better housing department staff morale. On top of this the process as a whole creates jobs and gives people a future.
Neighbourhood redevelopment can also directly improve people's emotional health and well being. Different kinds of community environmental patterns influence both the number and quality of relationships people can form with either beneficial or negative and 'psycho-toxic' effects. Natural and built settings can considerably enhance or degrade the quality of everyday life and are likely to effect mood. People from poorer communities tend also to have less opportunities to escape to more congenial places (in their holidays or at the weekends). "The environmental characteristics focused on by green activists as in need of change for reasons of minimising pollution, maintaining species diversity, preventing global warming and so on are not necessarily the same environmental characteristics we are thinking about when we consider the negative psychological effects of people's surroundings. Nevertheless, the technologies and different designs to resolve the environmental crisis of planetary ecology will often need to be implemented in the same places and spaces as those locations where we can find examples of 'environmental psychological toxicity'. The psychological need to have a room of one's own must be met in the same building we also need to make energy efficient and we must design and build for both these elements together." (Brian Davey, Mental Heath and the Environment, Care in Place, Vol. 1 No 2. June 1994 )
In place of a paradigm in which greater human welfare is pursued through economic development but is constrained by the environment we need a paradigm in which human welfare is advanced through development focused on communities in their environments. In this alternative model economy and employment would be seen as aspects of a broader process. The other dimensions of holistic development are improvements in natural processes (strengthening biodiversity and reducing ecological toxicity) and improvements in community and social life.
Mobilising local resources: exogenous and endougenous development
This is a strategy where the details cannot be developed at national or international levels (except in very small countries perhaps). It is at the local level that the community knows best what its needs are, what its human resources are (arising from its history and culture), what natural resources are (wind and water and sun etc.), what specific environmental toxicity and restoration work needs to be tackled. It is, for example, the local observers who notices the existence of, and threat to, rare species; who notices that a particular spoil heap is ideal as a site for a wind generator; who has a detailed knowledge of underground water courses and senses the danger from toxic mine waters; whose knowledge of local human and natural history contains a memory of appropriate local species for urban agricultures etc.
The economic side of this process lies in the recognition that most of the resources for change of this sort already exist in the communities themselves - in unemployed or underemployed people as well as in unemployed (empty) buildings and derelict sites, in recyclable wastes and partially obsolete but still usable equipment. In its employment dimension we are talking about local jobs for local people meeting local needs as identified by local communities. The main problem is not an absence of resources in an area but an absence of a way of mobilising them.
In the market economy resources are mobilised because people are paid an income for work (or for making available their money) and can then buy goods. During industrialisation, as particular localities or regions are drawn into national and international markets, increasing amount of money income is earned producing the goods that are 'exported' out of the locality to the rest of the national and international economy - by successful industries that are in their heyday. This money income, earned by 'exporting', is used to buy goods 'imported' into the area - as well as to buy goods and services that are produced inside the area. This is exogenous development - it is where local economies become outwardly focused and specialised parts of national and transnational economic processes. Economic policy makers have tended to assume that this is the only way a region can develop and the assumption, when jobs are short, is that big inward investment must be won for firms that will not mainly be selling in the area but will be focused on (competitive) national and international markets.
When the national and international focused industries of this sort decline or collapse local incomes shrivel and no one has the money to buy either 'imported goods' or local goods and services. But strategies can be developed so that local unemployed labour, buildings and sites are used to improve local living conditions close to home. This is endogenous development - inwardly focused on development of the locality so that it can provide for more of its own needs from home resources.
Endogenous development of a region means can operate on three levels. (1) Where economic activity and employment is generated in an ordinary sense on local markets. Local demand for things like building works finds local suppliers and traders. (2) The development of a local mutual aid economy between members of local communities. A mutual aid economy uses various means of mobilising resources when the cash has drained out an area (because local industries have declined). These means are not transactions for money in the orthodox sense but do represent ways in which people can trade and exchange their skills. They use accounting systems which overcome the disadvantages of barter but money does not change hands. LETS schemes have been remarkably successful in regenerating localities in decline. Builders clubs enable people to help each other in rebuilding their respective homes. More generally when people become active together in their local community, to jointly organise and provide community facilities and services, they are providing services that meet needs - albeit sometimes not in a market valued way. The variety of schemes described here represent, in varying degrees, a continuum between normal market transactions at the one end and activity that takes place inside the home at the other. (3) The third level at which holistic development occurs is in re-developing the domestic economy. Within the household, as feminists have been pointing out for some while, economic activity occurs that is critical to the quality of life and standards of living - though it does not receive a market valuation.
A crucial aspect of endogenous development lies in improving living conditions, productivity and the range of supply where people are living, loving and working - in and on their own homes. Partly this involves work which may be unpaid in wage terms - but work from which those involved nevertheless gain because they receive the product or benefit from their own activity. (The foods from one's own garden, a new room for one's house, a place for one's child to be looked after ).
In redeveloping homes and neighbourhoods it will be possible to rethink, redesign and redevelop around people's needs in the home so that habitats can be made more suitable to their emotional and health needs. For example in contrast to the warehousing of the urban poor there is a need to recognise that couples need space to be together and space to be on their own to regulate their relationships. In the design of accommodation for families with children there is a need to recognise that children need their own space, separate from the adult realm, and another realm they share with adults, otherwise the whole of a house or flat takes on the characteristics of a childrens room with toys, childrens clothes etc. everywhere. This stresses their relations with adults. Again, in the connection between houses people have certain rights for intimacy gradients and spatial connections. It is, for example, important to their emotional development and long run psychological health, that children should be able to find safe footpath connection to children their own age to play with. (Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, 1977)
Ideas like these which are intrinsic to holistic development, the design of the environment in which people live, will help people take the tension and pressure out of their relationships. They are the things we turn to thinking about when we give less priority to forms of development where the focus is how we can buy more in the supermarket after we have worked in the new local factory - giving more emphasis instead to how we can be happier and healthier where we live.
Above all this strategy of holistic development around fundamental needs would give many people who stand little chance of competing successfully in the market, the means for social re-integration. A society that celebrates winning and winners turns its back on those who must inevitably fall in the group of losers - only noticing them when they run wild in that inarticulate rage which arises from the sense that the cards have been stacked against them all their lives, or when they make the city centre streets untidy and uncomfortable for happy families out shopping. In regions and localities suffering economic decline increasing numbers of the population fall into these outcaste groups. It is absurd to bully these people to compete in the labour market where they cannot find employed work both because there is little employment to be had and because those that do get jobs do so by benefiting from the overt or subtle forms of exclusion and discrimination against society's outcastes. In such situations a different approach can leave open the possibility of employment or self employment for later but look in the first instance for something more realistic. This might be, for example, a different strategy which improves the quality of life by - (1) encouraging creative activity not for an employer but for oneself and friends; (2) organising this creative activity in convivial social settings in group projects and (3) gearing it to reduce one's costs of living and/or directly improve one's living environment through one's efforts.
Many people have an upper limit on their money income set by welfare rights entitlements (in the UK). If they get a job the loss of benefits makes the financial gains small or they may even lose out. In these circumstances the most sensible way to advance their economic position is to pursue activities which reduce their financial outgoings in activities which are fun with people who become friends. An example is a group of women who meet once a week in a community centre to rework fabrics. They do some highly creative craft work which recycles clothes and other household textiles in order to make textile jewellery, hats, rugs, covers, clothing etc. They have fun being creative together in a convivial atmosphere, exchanging ideas and they save money. In some cases they also sell their work. By being out of the house they save on fuel bills. They do not at first see themselves as recycling and meeting a green agenda but are actually doing this as well.
Creating a life worth living outside of employment people puts people in a better state to look for paid employment because self esteem is enhanced, confidence and skills developed, and life is stabilised. Many people leave family or institutional homes with virtually no skills for looking after themselves and it does not make sense to expect them to find work, or to set up stable relationships, before they have stabilised their domestic arrangements. In an ideal world domestic relationships fit into a neighbourhood with community support arrangements.
To employ huge bureaucracies of officials with the role of supporting or bullying socially excluded people into finding any old paid employment is a waste of the time of the socially excluded people and of the officials in the brueaucracies themselves. Unfortunately much of what passes for help by the employment services is experienced as unwelcome and futile pressure to find employment because it occurs before people have been able to stabilise their lives, build up their confidence and self esteem and become self directing. In any case almost all jobs nowadays require people to work to a degree on their own initiative, without constant close supervision. Current trends in the employment service to put pressure on people do not help in this respect because people whose lives are in a mess need time to build up a minimal self-sufficiency first and then they need to find work that suits them - not to be pressured to take any old job. It should be remembered in this respect that work can be a major source of mental health problems - particularly where people have little control over their labour process. It has been demonstrated in research studies that it is not stress per se that is bad for your mental health at work or anywhere else - but to be in conditions where you cannot do anything about that stress. ( Joffe, Michael "The Health Effects of Control over your own Work" Review of Research Literature for the Greater London Council, Risograph, London, 1985)
Instead of putting the main focus on employment it might be better to help the "excluded groups" through projects and activities which can be seen as an improvement and extension of their domestic and neighbourhood activities and relationships. Ensuring that pursuing these activities are attractive and make life worth living by being fun and convivial in their own right, providing opportunities for experiment, and enabling people to be active alongside their children. Local needs like childcare, rebuilding one's house with one's own labour and with the help of neighbours, changes to roads, the reclamation of a spoil heap for a community orchard, the development of local water recycling facilities, the installation of solar voltaic panels on roofs, the development of a club to rework textiles are forms of economic activity which, because local, do not face international competition.
A second best strategy?
At first sight this seems second best as an economic strategy because if one's locality has a booming local industry focused on world markets the cash earned by local people can be spent on anything they want - whereas a community economic strategy of the type mentioned seems to collapse into a limited range of possibilities bounded by home, garden and care work - all of which are traditionally low grade and low paid. So is recyling, which can easily be seen to be old style "rag and bone economics" or "make do and mending old fabrics and clothes" a sign of poverty. The 'eco-freakish' ideas of community economic development involving local building, food and water strategies, seem almost to be advocating a return to pre-industrial economics - and this seems scarcely credible as a First World option.
There are a number of replies to this - the first of which is that if this is second best in comparison to an unattainable first best then we will have to mourn our inability to realise a dream, but then get down to what is practically attainable rather then pursuing a policy and practical illusion.
A second reply is that for many people it is not at all irrelevant to talk of basic needs of this sort. Official government figures in the UK show that in 1992 141,860 households (representing 407,000 people) were homeless. There are no figures for single homeless people but unofficial figures for London alone are 130,000. The British charity SHELTER estimates that there are 156,000 young homeless people in Britain - many have fled physical and sexual abuse at home, or are the victims of parental break ups. In regard to nutrition the British governments official idea of recommended daily amounts of food energy are 2150 Kcal per day - in many cases young homeless people surveyed in a recent Nottingham study were getting 749 a day. Working from the diaries of young people researchers found the majority spent between £1.00 and £2.00 per day on food and had to rely heavily on convenience foods because cooking facilities were lacking. 35% reported a variety of physical and mental disorder ranging from fractures, to illnesses such as diabetes, epilepsy, chest and skin infections. 12% of young women reported they had previous miscarriages. (It Makes You Sick. A Report on Health and Homelessness of Young People in Nottingham. Nottingham Hostels Liaison Group, November 1991). These are the people whom the British government, having cut their benefits, lectured on the immorality of begging.
Clearly a strategy based on fundamental needs is absolutely vital - food and accommodation and clothing are not at all irrelevant.
Added to this are the psychological effects of being made to feel a social inferior because one cannot compete. Much of the impact of poverty arises from the psycho-social effects of relative poverty. "There is no doubt that it is less nice to live in a home where some of the decoration is damaged by damp. Similarly a poor diet is less palatable than a good one. But taken out of their social context, these material disadvantages in themselves count for rather little compared to the low self esteem, insecurity, depression and anxiety which relative deprivation so often engenders. Pycho-social factors can dominate one's consciousness and drain one's life of its value. What really damages the all important subjective quality of life is having to live in circumstances which, by comparison with others, appears as a statement of personal failure and inferiority." ( Richard Wilkinson. "Health, Redistribution and Inequality" In "Paying for Inequality" eds. Andrew Glyn and David Miliband. IPPR with Rivers Oram Press, 1994 p. 42)
The way to recreate the self esteem of society's outcastes is not to try to help them "keep up with the Jones" in the purchase of more electronic toys but to help them play the games that the Jones's would never dream of - being ecologically and environmentally responsible and having fun while they are doing it. (You cannot really have fun with the Jones because they are such snobs). No social movement can compete against the money and power junkies in the realm of building or production runs but one can foster a superior lifestyle to that of the power addicts.
Ensuring this happens also represents pressing historical tasks that face us. To understand in what sense we must step back and take a very long view of our current problems. In so doing we need to become aware that we are living through the most rapid period of change in all of human history.
Locally appropriate economies versus local economies subordinated to world power centres
If we consider how species of plants and animals relate to their 'economies' then they fit interactively into a particular 'niche' or habitat for which they have evolved a specialised role. Animal instincts guide them to behaviours which calculate the acquisition of their energy needs over energy expenditures such as, ideally, to yield a sufficient surplus that will sustain successful reproduction. The inputs for food and habitat creation (e.g. nest building) are available from other species or their waste products. Outputs and behaviours of some species form the inputs and meet the needs of other species.
In the past human economies were also much more adapted to the local environment. Food, clothing, shelter, water supply, fuel were taken from the locality. The locality was largely self sufficient. Work, social organisation, and the customs and culture of populations were therefore largely the result of a particular climate, landscape and drainage. Together these made for locally distinctive types of agriculture, architecture, crafts, clothing, diet etc. Local populations had corresponding structures of belief, gods, rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations .(See Rene Dubos 'So Human an Animal', Abacus Books, 1973).
The local economic life, this greater self sufficiency, should not necessarily be idealised. Self sufficiency often meant poverty and vulnerability. Self sufficiency of local communities, the limited nature of communication and interchange with the rest of the world, also meant limited mental horizons, limited experience, limited development of knowledge and technique. This is why Karl Marx used the term 'the idiocy of rural life' - to describe the insular character of inward looking communities cut off from the rest of the world. But self sufficiency and the adaptation to locality mean humanity's impact on nature was limited. Social dislocations might be brought in by invasions and natural disasters but it was also limited by the power of custom and tradition because the techniques underlying economic life changed but slowly and it was prudent not to risk change at the edge of subsistence.
The trend of economic history has been away from this. As regional, national and then international markets have developed, binding all into an international net of specialisation and exchange, self sufficiency has broken down. The trend is for local economies to become specialised parts of a system of world exchange. Rather than the adaptation of economic life to localities, we got the adaption and subordination of localities to the centres that dominate the world market..
In one sense local economies have become simplified in that each locality has tended to specialise. This limits what it provides, what it exports to outside the locality. The corollary is the development in localities of larger production processes because these production processes are serving more than the local market This profoundly effects the ecology and society of each region. Above all have Third World economies been reduced to producing single cash crops or minerals for the world market. To produce a single crop is to define other species as pests and weeds and is to homogenise the environment, which is to kill its ability to sustain life since it thrives on diversity and circular interactive chains for biological fertility.
Large scale local specialisation being a burden on local ecology is also true of towns dependent on iron, coal, chemicals or other manufacturing process whose outputs of gases and soluble wastes surpass the ability of the local environment to act as a sink. It is true of regions devastated by minerals extraction in which landscapes and waterscapes are scarred and infected and left, without attempts at rehabilitation.
In addition an economy of scale and power seeks to homogenise all places in what it brings in, in what it imports into each locality. It is impossible to have an ecological economy where we all have an identical diet of beefburgers in sponges with plastic cheese served in identical buildings using identical kitchen technology, identical sources of cooking power and generating identical waste. It is impossible to adapt the economy to locality where managerial decisions take place in board rooms and in front of computer screens hundreds or thousands of miles from where they are implemented, where the decision makers do not have any local connection to the consequences of their actions and are chiefly concerned that the whole world (of people with money) buy their products.
Trends of this character change not only localities but the spaces between them. More and more places are dominated by the denser and heavier net of transport and communications that binds the whole system together - guzzling fossil fuels, spewing out pollution, causing oil wars and ripping communities apart through the spatial geometry inevitable to power transport.
To Karl Marx this growing pattern of interdependency, specialisation and exchange meant a growth of productive forces that would usher in a new society. The new society would be based on this interdependent specialisation which he termed 'socialised productive forces'. He was wrong. We now know that this kind of productive technique is unsustainable and humanity will have to make the turn back to an economics adapted to local environments or it will not survive. As we have shown it is the drive towards international large scale specialisation that is undermining world ecology and destroying communities at the same time. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto , Penguin, 1967.
Energy, economy and power - towards equalitarian technologies?
Underlying the dynamic in economic history just described have been waves of innovations whose connection are transformations in the technologies of harnessing energy (physical power) to human productive (and destructive) processes and transport systems, to food cultivation systems and to settlements.
In early civilisations animals were used to amplify the physical power available to humanity but it was the horse which became the way of measuring physical power. The horse not only pulled the plough and bulk agricultural products to markets it was for centuries the basis of military power. The control of distant empires was made possible by the horse (as well as by seaships). The water wheel and wind wheels harnessed energy for a variety of tasks - like grinding flour, while the sail increased human mobility. It made bulk carriage over long distances possible. The sailing ship, horses and gunpowder made possible the beginning of intercontinental empires.
The Industrial Revolution rapidly accelerated these processes. In a European corner of the world the human ability to modify the physical and social world was greatly amplified by the application of fuel generated energy to tools and productive processes. Fuel, as portable energy which can be organised and concentrated for human purposes is the power source of the modern age. The harnessing of fuel power to tools overwhelmed most handicraft and animal powered production and the societies still using these. Their productive relationships could not match the fuel powered technologies of production and destruction (armaments). The acceleration of this process is becoming ever faster. "Coal mining began eight hundred years ago....and incredible as it may seem, half of the total quantity ever mined has been extracted in the last 30 years. Also half of the total production of crude oil has been obtained in the last ten years only" (Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, writing in 1980, quoted in 'Economics and the Crisis of Ecology' by Narindar Singh, 3rd Edition, London 1989 p40).
The environmental crisis is a crisis for large scale production focused on an international market. It is also a crisis of, and for, the energy and power industries that have made this kind of economic structure possible, that are integral to it Since the industrial revolution waves of innovation have been connected to the development of new fuel power technologies and transport systems. (Coal - steam power and trains; oil - the internal combustion engine motor transport and powered flight, petrochemical based agricultural; electricity - distance powered space heating and appliances etc. It is the toxicity of these industries that is at the heart of the ecological crisis. Burning coal and oil in electrical generation and in the internal combustion engine is generating pollution and Greenhouse gases. Meanwhile the dynamic of the petrochemical industry has produced a stream of more and more toxic and non-biodegradable detergents, fertilisers, pesticides and other products which are destroying the self-sustaining and self-regulating mechanisms of the biosphere creating disaster for whole communities that find themselves living next to toxic waste dumps or finding that the natural systems on which they were dependent are dying (e.g. forest based societies).
The waves of connected innovations in power and transport technologies have been called the Krondatieff cycle - cycles of activity of 30 or 40 years of relatively rapid application of new technologies alternating with 30 or 40 years of stagnation. In the periods of stagnation a gradual accumulation of the techniques and ideas for the next period of innovation takes place until conditions are right for their wholesale (connected and integrated) application.
We can be said to be on the edge of just such a wave of change now - over the last few years there has been a development of technologies for the solar and wind generation of electricity which are becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuel based power sources. There has also been a growing understanding and development of skills in energy efficiency in building as well as growing understanding about the principles of ecological design and ecological cultivation. This has led some commentators to suggest that ecological technologies can underpin the next wave of economic development after the stagnation of the last few years. (See Peter Read: GREENS: A policy Response to Global Warming, National Westminster Bank Review, August 1991).
There are, however, important senses in which such a connected wave of innovations would be different from past long periods of 'growth'. The connected innovations of the future are founded on the need to reduce the energy used in production. In the past economic change processes speeded up when new power sources were added to production and transport systems and were therefore associated with increased use of energy.
Another vital difference is the effect these waves of innovation in the power industries had on economic and political relationships in the world which will not be the same in the future as in the past. In the past the new technologies of power accentuated inequality - in the future they would promote greater equality.
Coal and steam power in the factories and on the railways enabled Britain and the early manufacturing industries to begin the process of overwhelming and ruining handicraft producers world wide. That started a process of concentrating world incomes and world economic and political power. Later economic power complexes (companies and state structures) based on the oil economy, based on electricity and all the technologies electricity and electronics have made possible, have yet further skewed the world distribution of income and power. Inequality has been accentuated both within and between countries.
Whereas two hundred years ago the rich countries had an average income which was only 1.5 times that of the poor countries, by 1900 the divergence between rich and poor was about one to six. By 1970 it had risen to one to thirteen. Today the income of the richest 20% of the world's population is 150 times higher the income of the poorest 20%. (These figures were collected together from various sources by Takis Fotopoulos in an article called The Economic Foundations of an Ecological Society in Society and Nature Vol. No. 3 pp 26-7). The vital difference in the future is that technological change to introduce ecological economic relations will need to be connected to a dispersal of political and economic power to localities and a reversal of the tendency towards the concentration of political and economic power.
For most corporations and governments resolving the ecological crisis is seen as business as usual with a few modifications - catalytic converters can be put on cars, greenhouse gases can be cleaned out by flue gas desulphurisation, new products can be put on supermarket shelves. But observers who are not blinded by self interest are well aware that such measures will be hopelessly inadequate - the booming number of cars and roads quite dwarfs the effects of reducing the emissions of each. Such measures, and the trumpeting of new market opportunities in environmental protection, are the fag end of a civilisation. There is a need for technologies and designs that prevent environmental problems arising in the first place. Such technologies and designs are well known - and now well developed. They are waiting in the wings. But they imply a dispersal of power - because they are dispersed small scale solutions that must be developed in localities.
Ecological economic restructuring means a move away from large scale mono-functional supply activities geographically distant from end uses typical of the planning from the centres of power. These have big effects on eco-systems - reservoirs flooding whole valleys, power stations based on fossil fuels generating greenhouse gases, food mono-cultures standardising the countryside (i.e. killing it). They also entail energy loss and pollution in transmission, transport, pumping, processing, packaging, wholesaling and retailing functions and non usable wastes. In contrast the production arrangements of the future are about moves towards small scale supply activity adjacent to end uses. As far as possible needs are met on the spot rather than from afar. This means the need for an emphasis on developing through technologies based on cycles or partially integrated systems. Examples would include climate adjusted buildings; solar and wind energy techniques; multiple use and recycling of water etc. .; separating and recycling wastes and composting organic wastes; food production in gardens and near cities.
Where needs would be met and designed on the spot in a multiplicity of localities like this they must be designed and installed there. Locally appropriate strategies could not be defined in detail from the boardrooms and ministries of corporate and central state power. This means transferring decision making back to those localities whose development comes to be seen as the centre point of development strategy.
The ecological crisis - a crisis for power based technologies
All of this has tremendous implications for the power and transport industries. They represent a pattern of relationships for production and destruction (a peace and war economy), a taken for granted mainstream way of thinking about technology, and a structure of vested interests symbiotically intertwined with political structures, that is integral to the modern world. This political, economic and ideological complex has to be eroded and replaced on every level because its destructive dynamic is at the heart of today's local, regional, national and world crises.
The development of locality based ecological restructuring is already happening and will continue. Over the last ten years there has been a development of different ways of approaching agriculture, different ways of approaching urban ecology and urban economics, a move towards small scale appropriate technologies. Because these trends occur locally, even outside the market, they escape the full force of competition. But for these trends to be carried through to a full and adequate fruition they must find a way of challenging the assumptions of the power economy in the minds of ordinary people so that millions of people can come to see there is a more constructive way for them to pursue their interests, so that holistic development comes to be recognised and supported in policy. Otherwise the fossil fuel amplified productivity of large- scale, world -focused, industry will continue to develop on its destructive path.
The fuel amplified productivity of modern technologies cannot easily be competed against on world markets. But these technologies can supply products so cheaply partly because there is not a proper accounting for their destructive effects on communities and the environment.
The competition of this kind of economy is crushing. It is, however, a competition based on not paying for what economists call 'external social and environmental costs'. Indeed, as I shall show, if would be impossible to pay for these costs. They are often on too big a scale. Also they often cannot be calculated because they only become clear after a long time lag. When such 'costs' do become clear they alter so much that it becomes impossible to set a clear measurement of how they are entering into, and modifying, the general dynamic of planetary change.
What economists call 'social and environmental costs' are not minor changes in need of adjustment marginal to a basically rational, private interest led, economy. These social and environmental 'costs' are more accurately conceptualised as irreversible changes in the direction of human and natural history. As such they cannot be dealt with by adjustments 'at the margin' of economic markets. They require social, political, and cultural shifts in life styles and community social organisation.
Economic fallacies - why market competition does not optimise well being
Private interest, the market and competition as the driving force for change in the world accelerates the decomposition of the social and ecological environment. Unrestrained competition sounds wonderful because the message is that it makes the economy 'more efficient'. This efficiency is, however, calculated solely from the point of view of private industry.. The winners in competition are the most powerful - they have the money to buy the new technologies, to keep abreast of the latest markets, to hire lobbyists to talk to politicians.
This idea of competition is, therefore, a very handy way of thinking to allow the strong to drive the weak to the wall. The misery of the unemployed is not then totted up as a money calculation and counted as part of the overall cost revenue analysis that underlies economic decision making. Mere human misery does not have a clear monetary value - but it does have profound long term effects - according to other circumstances it may lead to social conflicts, a rise in criminality, long term health deficits. The miseries of the unemployed are passed to their spouses and their children. No theoretical notion from the cosiness of the tutorial room like 'external social cost' can do justice to, or calculate, the brutal way that long term unemployment alters the history of localities. In a parallel fashion we can say that the loss of species and biodiversity is not adequately conceptualised when the notion of ' environmental costs' is chalked on the department of economics blackboard.
In current thinking about development the market is claimed to function basically adequately as a co-ordinator of productive activity but needs to be adjusted and helped somewhat to make the right decisions. The hard version of this idea is that the 'value' of the environment needs to be calculated for all major economic decisions. For example, if a firm wants to develop a site it makes its own calculations about additional costs and additional benefits (revenues). The financial costs and revenues to the firm are assumed to approximate the costs to society in using resources in the development of the site in the intended way, as well as the benefits to society (as measured by what people are prepared to pay, which will become the revenues of the company as a result of its decision). To these internal private calculations, the theory goes, the state should organise a means whereby costs to the environment and society ' external' to the private calculations of the firm should also be brought to brought into consideration. Then all will be well. More specifically this means principles like 'polluters should pay' the costs of cleaning up their wastes so that the external cost of what would be pollution becomes an internal cost to corporations (financial costs of clean up).
In the even more timid version private business following their interests only gets it wrong because of a lack of knowledge about costs and benefits. So government departments will send officials round with glossy leaflets telling companies how much money they can save by energy efficiency, for example, or how to make money by developing renewables - or how cleaning up their act will please customers and so is good for business. This way the British government will meet its obligations after the Rio Earth Summit.
There is, of course, a minimal truth in all of this (as there is in much of economics) - but it hardly touches the historical dimensions of the problems we face. The historical magnitude of our problems, whether there will continue to be life on the planet, can only be truly addressed if the government is able to abandon the centre point of their collective delusion - that economic rationality and human progress means, above everything else, that if people and corporations are encouraged to make as much money as possible then all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
For example, in an act of policy vandalism when the Conservative British government set the framework of their 1989 Water Act they excluded mining operations from the legal penalties against discharging toxic water as they thought this would undermine coal privatisation. Now it may be possible to calculate relatively easily what the internal financial costs will be that will be saved by no longer pumping water in redundant mines - but the 'external' environmental and human catastrophe that could result from this might not emerge for 10 to 15 years and would be incalculable and of historic proportions. It easy to calculate the financial losses internal to the farm industry of banning the sale and export of beef - but the 'external' human catastrophe that might not emerge for 10 years if BSE carries over to yet more people is not calculable. It could be of historic proportions. It might be possible to calculate the 'internal costs' to ICI of a delay in banning CFCs - but the 'external' cost to the environment and human society of transitional arrangements which perpetuate its production cannot be known yet. It could be a plague of skin cancers of historic proportions. It might be relatively easy to calculate the internal financial effects of a ban on tropical hard woods on logging companies- but if such a ban cannot be enforced, and the trees continue to come down, the human and environmental costs are incalculable.
The notions of 'external' social and environmental costs are only useful as concepts if they are calculable - so that we can judge what the effects of these giant decisions are, weighing up the advantages and disadvantages on a common scale (in economics this is a money scale). But when we are dealing, as in these cases with decisions whose internal effects on corporations can be calculated but whose external effects may be changes in the course of human and natural history the idea that we can continue to take 'economic decisions' based on cost calculations is theoretical garbage.
Not only is there no chance of knowing beforehand but there is no place, even in retrospect, where one could draw the line and say this was the effect of this decision and this was not. Economic decisions and activities impacts into the life of communities and the environment. creating chains of consequences which are destructive or constructive. For example in Thailand the disappearance of forests has destroyed the basis of forest communities whose young members have few other options than to go to sell their bodies in the sex trade -stoking the holocaust of the world AIDS epidemic. This epidemic is spreading in chains of infection. Each single infection that had its roots in an infected person who moved because of the forest clearances could be said to be part of the 'external costs' of hard wood logging. At what point in the chain of infection does one draw the line?
In Chaos Theory it is recognised that even tiny differences in starting conditions, added into a process of development of generalised interdependent flux, over time gives rise to major difference in pattern evolution.( James Gleik, Chaos: Making a New Science, Cardinal Books, 1987 pp 9-31 ) This sensitivity to initial conditions has been called the 'butterfly effect' as the idea is that something as small of the fluttering wings of a butterfly, added into the flow and eddying of air currents will, over time, effect the whole dynamic of weather systems. Since economic decisions and activity impacts into the fate of communities and environments it becomes impossible to know what the effects of any economic decision are since the effects of those decisions enter into the whole process of evolution of planetary ecology. This compels us to work from a different basis for all policy in the ecological age, a non economic assessment. Decisions must be made instead on holistic assessments of communities about their needs in their environments. To be sure they will be made by people pursuing their interests - but the focus of what is considered 'interest' will shift to the local conditions of life. Decisions will come to be seen as being made by people in relation to their interpersonal, social and physical environment - rather than merely as consumers. Decisions will be taken more in environments by the people who would feel the effects of those decisions -not from far away by people who get the advantages but not the catastrophic disadvantages.
Right wing governments hail economic theorists who say that all will be well environmentally as long as firms are forced to pay for the environmental costs, for example, of pollution. Leaving aside that it is impossible to do more than arbitrarily decide where to calculate these costs there are yet further problems. Someone has to recognise where the problems are, to notice the pollution, the traffic, the eyesore, and then local communities must be strong enough against the external interests to campaign for something to be done about them. This means people, acting in the role of citizens, independently of vested interests, drawing attention to issues, trying to get their magnitude taken seriously and then showing how things could be done differently. Local communities must be empowered to make this possible - and this in turn implies a different concept of rights in law in relation to the environment. Where communities have been impoverished by the power economy the problem to be addressed is precisely that they do not have the economic and political strength to resist environmental and community destruction. To the extent that economic theory, the theology of money power, does address these issues it says that environmental costs can be measured by what people would be prepared to pay not to be polluted. What a convenient way of measuring things when impoverished communities cannot afford to pay anything.
Killing people legally through environmental pollution - ecological ethics and law
There is now a need for a different paradigm of environmental and community law which recognises people's equality as world citizens and which re-establishes or strengthens community collective rights to the patterning and use of land (and water and air). (Crudely, a very much strengthened land planning system - but one determined by communities not by experts or distant politicians).
At the moment environmental rights (for example in retrospective compensation claims) are individual rights which relate only to property ownership. In disempowered areas people have little property. It usually translates into what people can sell. If all they could sell was their labour power on the market at a very low wage they are then, in cases of ill health or death, as in the case of Union Carbide compensation to the Bhopal disaster victims, entitled only to receive a tiny pittance. This is an economics in which powerful interests are at a stage where the next step is virtually calculating the rate of return on murder. A recent book edited by Vandana Shiva illustrates this well in a chapter aptly titled 'Killing People Legally Through Toxic Waste'. It quotes a corporate document, from the Occidental Petroleum Company, which proposes the estimation of the likely cancer and sterility rates associated with a product and then goes on " Calculate the potential liability including 50% for legal fees...Should this product still show an adequate profit, meeting corporate investment criteria, the project should be considered further." (Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development, Edited by Vandana Shiva, Earthscan , 1994.) Clearly there is a need for legal changes that enshrines people's rights as community members in relation to their environment - rather than just as individuals in relation to their property.
The ethical principles which should underpin ecological law are those which has been accepted in times of crisis and change throughout the history of humanity as the most fundamental basis for regulating human relationships.
Tzu-Kung asked, 'Is there a single word which can be a guide throughout one's life?' The Master said, 'It is perhaps the word shu. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.' (Confucius. The Analects, Book XV)
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Matthew 22, 39)
So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of establishing universal law. ( Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)
Love is not something that can be generated by an act of will - but as an ethical principle this practical notion of equality is fundamental to survival in the ecological age. Translated into ecological economics and ecological law it would mean, for example when making an ecological compensation claim, that the appropriate scale should not be based on the income lost to someone made sick by an ecological crime. They might have been earning only a pittance. The claim should be calculated on the income level of the state or corporate executives who were responsible for the decisions that made them sick. This would force these executives to regard others as their equals not, as in the words of the arrogant American millionairess, as merely 'little people'.
What follows from the whole preceding analysis is that the connected wave of innovations of the future needed to resolve the environmental crisis and the crisis of depressed regions must be very unlike what has happened in the past. The changes that will come must involve not only different technologies and ways of organising production, they are inconceivable without far reaching changes in the structures of economic, social and political power - in which the trend of history to concentrate and centralise power is reversed and different kinds of legal systems and priorities are introduced.
Holistic development and ecological economic restructuring is dependent upon far reaching moral and cultural changes for people acting together in their roles as citizens. The relentless trend in recent times to present political decisions as if they are consumer decisions will need to be reversed. Sustainable development is said to be a form of development which occurs without compromising future generations and world leaders like Margaret Thatcher had all the right rhetoric about keeping the world in trust for future generations. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 they assured us we were safe in their hands. This would have had more credibility if Brazil did not have a reputation for death squads murdering its future citizens who live as street children and if the Thatcher Government had not shown its tender concern for young people by cutting their benefits to less than a adult entitlement, creating an army of young refugees from the market society, child abuse or parental split ups, who sit on the doorsteps of boarded up shops or tramp around dispiriting circuits of emergency day centres, social security offices and night shelters, begging for money to stave off malnutrition..
It is not credible to claim to protect the welfare of future generations without an idea of an inter-generational equality and this itself is impossible without a general culture of equality. Market ideology damages and corrodes the development of community and social responsibility upon which citizenship is based. Adam Smith claimed' the invisible hand of the market' supplied people's needs through everyone pursuing their individual self interests. The argument was that if the market demand for a product rose this would push up the price of that product and make it in the interest of others to produce more. Thus people following price indicators in their own self interest supplied what society needed. It was like an invisible hand co-ordinating the specialist producers.
Actually it is not at all the case that the market works as a socially co-ordinative system because people are pursuing their self interest. What makes the market 'work', to the extent that it does, as a co-ordinative system, is only that everyone is playing the same life game. The drive for money as a common criteria for social action leads to a common life style. The way people play or are obliged to play the same money making game glues society together on a particular path of development. Because everyone is playing the same game in terms of motivations, criteria and measures of success, interdependency in capitalist social relationships is thereby made possible. However because the greed-logic motivations and criteria of this game puts people at each others throats (competition), and drives the weak to the wall - it is inherently destructive of people, communities and environment. The market system works for those who have money - and it generates increasing inequality. In Britain in World War Two the health of those who were not soldiers or war casualties in many cases improved. Throughout society as a whole people were playing another kind of (deadly) "game" - defeating an enemy. In that context considerations of social solidarity and "fair play" came forward and the price system was regulated though rationing so that everyone got fair shares.Otherwise the market would have operated in the way it usually does - in a crisis the rich and powerful gain the advantage. Shortages would have put prices up so that only the wealthy would have had access to many goods and they would have made big profits out of the national emergency and the general misery. It was because people had learned this lesson that the National Health Service took medicine out of the price system so that free health care was considered a right. This was a major improvement for most people.
The market is inherently destructive of people, communities and environment. In this sense a cultural revolution is needed in which people start playing a different life game. Not the communist game of class struggle for a planned economy but an attempt to develop a movement of constructive projects and initiatives to reverse the trend to destruction in community and environment. (As well as a strategy that is fiercely critical, because our collective survival is at stake, of all those economic and political tendencies that are moving in the wrong direction for private gain. There is a need also to develop a legal framework in which these interests can be challenged and controlled by their fellow citizens regarded as real equals under the law).
Directions for Not for profit entrepreneurialism
Entrepreneurial skills need not necessarily be hitched to the interests of economic giants pursuing the maximum private monetary gain. In the voluntary sector and communities there have always been small scale attempts to develop project initiatives for social and environmental goals. In such projects people are dedicated to the cause, not of enriching themselves, but improving their estate, providing a better form of hostel accommodation for homeless people, improving services for disabled people, improving services for themselves in self help initiatives. They are motivated by a sense of community responsibility. They arise in people acting as citizens not as buyers, sellers and producers of commodities on a market. The very existence of this sector gives the lie to the idea that economic decisions must be made on calculations of individual interest (or by top-down clumsy state bureaucracies).
When there are an increasing number of people homeless, when people regularly die or suffer chronic illness from cold, and when long term incomes for the unemployed and those in care are so low, it is vital to develop an entrepreneurialism in communities focused on these basic needs. It is vital to give priority to rebuilding community life, to give support to women in their childcare needs, to see the importance of child safe and child friendly environments and to look at other features of home and neighbourhood based regeneration strategies. As an economic strategy this is the only viable alternative otherwise social decomposition will continue to feed back into political and economic life as rising levels of crime, addiction, prostitution, mental health problems, the offloading of frustrations onto minority racial groups and other vulnerable people - none of which will help local authority economic development departments 'attract inward investment'. Indeed the opportunities for profitable investment for areas in decline will increasingly be for security firms, for lock smiths, and by privatising the police force and jails, for drug rehabilitation clinics and the like.
We need an emergency economic strategy in recognition of how desperate things are now in many of our depressed areas. Holistic development, by putting the needs of the last first should start with these things - but it must be connected to the long term strategy involving a positive move towards the ecological economic relations of the future. This has four dimensions. The first is finding means to reduce the sheer volume of production by pooling access to a variety of goods between people. The second lies in an "upcycling" version of recyling by integrating art and crafts into the use of scrap and used products. The third lies in installing or fitting the new technologies that have already been developed like putting water flow limiters on taps to reduce waste of drink water or installing solar voltaic panels on roofs. The fourth lies is in redeveloping the environment in a more fundamental sense - by repatterning based on principles of socio-ecological design.
Community Pools of Goods and Services
While many people are in a state of abject poverty others are wastefully squandering resources. According to the German author Andreas Becker at the heart of the ecological crisis is the growth in the sheer quantity of materials and energy used by the economy. For example between 1960 and 1990 in Germany the number of drink cartons produced increased by 6 times, the number of vacuum cleaners by 5 and the number of motor vehicles of all kinds by nearly 3. The question Becker poses is how can this grown be halted and even put into reverse without a loss in "standard of living". ( "Umwelt Schutz - Abschied von den Illusionen." Rowolt Taschenbuchverlag, Hamburg, 1995). The German branch of the Friends of the Earth asked a scientific Institute in Wuppertal to look at this question and to work out what "sustainability" would actually mean in the middle of the next century. Their conclusion was that sustainability meant that the average industrial country had to reduce the use of non renewable materials and energy sources by about 80% i.e. 3 to 4% a year. Although he is not working from the Wuppertal Institute figures Becker is, in effect, attempting to answer the question how such a big reduction is to be achieved.
This question is very relevant for a strategy for losers. It is virtually the same if one asks how people who cannot afford to purchase a large volume of goods, because their income is low, can enjoy a high standard of living nonetheless.
Pooled resources for use for the use of those sections of society who currently cannot afford ownership of products - can be an inegral part of local development strategies at community and neighbourhood level. In the past local authorities have supported libraries, resource centres, local transport systems and the like as a way of supporting their poorer constituents in particular. It is time to reassert this principle and extend it into many areas of life. (e.g. community transport projects using vehicle pools, resource centres pooling tools, computers and means for improving domestic conditions and production which would otherwise be out the reach of individual households but which can be shared in neighbourhoods or by disadvantaged groups. Toy libraries are another idea - including those which recyle other materials, packaging and scrap for childrens use).
The situation, which seems at first sight hopeless, is actually not at all so at least in the sense that the technological and social institutional forms which could achieve substantial reductions in production volumes without loss of life quality seem to exist. Building resource pools for collective use means not the collective ownership of the means of production (the old Marxist slogan) but some collective ownership of means of consumption and home building developed by impoverished communities as self help initiatives. This would then create a situation where the collective owners had some interest in getting the best and longest use out of their jointly owned assets.
What currently happens in the market is an emphasis on sale of maximum numbers of products rather than on the improving the function, durability and use life of the product. But if products are purchased by use pools (tool libraries, resource centres, car pools etc) from manufacturers then these group purchasers could put pressure on the makers for a different kind of product which might avoid a huge amount of waste. Because library books are used over and again they tend to be hard backs not paper backs. These are longer life and durable.
Pooling usage between many owners makes sense both ecologically and as a way of reducing the costs of ownership if you are not well off.. A car (in Germany) is used, on average, 40 minutes a day so that during 97% of the life of the car it is not used at all. Car pools (e.g.the organisation Stattauto in Berlin) can radically increase the usage of products and therefore reduce the number needed when these are shared between the population as a whole. Pooled use systems also have the advantage of increasing the demand for long life durable products which can be repaired and upgraded by a central service agency because this reduces long run costs to pool members. (A current feature of the not for profit sector in the UK is an enormous demand for mini-buses for the use of this sector - a huge proportion of funding bids to the National Charities and Lotteries Board is for mini-buses. Further the development of pooled vehicles resources in community transport projects might meet this need, with drivers who could flexibly move around with mobile radios).
Members of pools pay for use rather than ownership and this can be done commercially too. Launderettes are examples - and they often perform not only a means of washing clothes but can end up as a bit of a social centre. When ownership and usage are separated then owners ensure that their assets are in use a greater percentage of the time to increase their revenues. They also have an interest in ensuring their assets are in use as long as possible, as well as not having to pay the full cost for new products as a way of upgrading.
There is a huge scope for this kind of thing in the industrial economy which is currently undereveloped because of the emphasis on maximising sales volumes. New approaches would often create craft based jobs at a local level in repair, upgrading, maintenance etc. These would ideally be forms of work organised attached to community and neigbourhood based pooled services. In the long term the re-organisation in the industrial economy might take forms like the following.
The better use of longer life products
Use of the full life of products. This involves, for example, designs which are "timeless" rather than "fashionable" so that there is no encouragement for the product to be discarded for the next model only because of superficial fashionable changes in appearance. (The Volkwagen Beetle is given as an example of a product whose design did not change over a very long period). Use of the full life of the product also means re-use in less intensive roles when quality declines (e.g. rails. first used on high speed tracks are later re-used in places where the quality is not so important - finally in shunting yards etc.)
This also makes sense not just for whole products but also for individual components that, after use in one product, can later be re-used in others - for examples electrical cables, ventilators etc. in electronic products. Once again it is necessary. however, that people do not only trust and want totally brand new products.
Increasing the durability and usable life of products. In 1973 Porsche researched the production of a car that would last for 20 years and run for 300,000 kilometers. Comparing this product with the use of traditional models in regard to production ,use and disposal it would have used 65% less material and 20% less energy. It was never produced because it would not have sold. The initially higher price would have been in a market in which models are expected to be disposed off far more quickly. But it might make an ideal purchase for a network of car pools or a transport system for neighbourhood groups.
Concentrate technical progress towards the further development of existing product models so that upgrading comes through extending the capacity of already existing products, rather than through buying completely new models. (Baukastenprinzip - model kit principle). Given the rapidity of change in the computer sector this has long been a strategy here - creating products so that one can later add CD Roms or slot in graphic boards etc. (A new uses for old computer technology project in Sheffield in the UK is exploring how community level groups might benefit from out of date but still usable computer and electronic technologies).
Creating products in a form which allows them to be more easily repaired. This is very much about creating modular forms as well as assembly which allows for ease of disassembly (e.g. nuts and bolts rather than rivets, screws rather than glue).
Create products so that after their usable life the bulk of their constituent components can be disassembled and then re-used in re-assembled "good as new products" either directly or after further reprocessing. (The recreation of a motor vehicle starter system requires only one eleventh of the energy of a new product and a tenth of the new material. Reuse in reassembly of used automobile components already saves an amount of energy equivalent to the output of 5 American nuclear power stations.)
Organise the design, production and disposal process to facilitate these things (e.g. modular products). It goes without saying that the above technical possibilities need a corresponding design and organisational process - for example labelling and information systems which ease the process of identifying used components and their qualities, functions, capabilities, chemical constituents etc. That way they can be more easily be re-used. (One cannot reuse or process an unidentified object very easily).
Sale of Use and Leasing
Sale of use is not the same as leasing. With leasing a defined product with defined serial number is made availble for a defined time - what is sold perhaps, for a monthly payment, is a guarantee that customer can perform a particular activity or task through having access to a particular kind of product. As opposed to leasing the risks fall on the owner who must ensure that his/her products are reliable. The emphasis in sale of use shifts from access to a product to ability to perform a function - thus, for example, when what matters is getting from A to B it becomes more sensible to arrange (buy) access to the use of an optimal combination of transport modes. Indeed, public transport systems are use systems - the public pays for the ride not ownership of the bus, tram or underground rail. The call for public transport because it is ecologically more efficient has long been a demand of the ecological movement. ( Recently Stattauto has taken to enabling people to hire out their car in their car pool - another way to get more use of fewer vehicles - Der Spiegel, Mietwagen. Geld oder Liebe, no.23/1997).
Bringing about these changes
The ideas from Becker show clearly that enormous reductions in energy and material production are possible without any, or much, loss of - life quality. Indeed it is likely, for example if big reduction in the mass of products circulating were achieved, that life quality could increase.
In a recent essay on "Luxury" in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Hans Magnus Enzenburger suggests that Luxury in the future does not lie in buying more and more products from Duty Free Airport shops but that the money of rich people will go to buying the "new luxuries", the increasingly scarce "goods" of free time, an absence of imposed distractions, undisturbed private space, peace and quiet, personal security and safety and a clean and enjoyable environment. None of these things are closely connected to more possessions and matching higher production volumes. Indeed much lower production through the means discussed here would be likely to open up these "new luxuries" to a greater volume of people - not just to the rich (e.g. in regard to vehicles this would mean less traffic and congestion through parked cars. It would also shift the risk in regard to car theft away from the individual etc. These would increase the scope for virtually all of the things on Enzenburgers list).
What is more problematic is which social/political strategy will overcome the inertial effect of the existing structure of vested interests in economy and politics and bring about this change. Becker makes a strong plea, as with many German greens, for an ecological restructuring of the tax system. He wants to reduce taxes on income and employment which are a disincentive to use labour power and to increase them on the use of energy, non-renewable resources and polluting processes. He argues that this change in market prices would signal, and promote further, the necessary transformation in economic activities in the direction he proposes.. It is unproven, but highly likely that the system changes described here and promoted by these tax changes, would create rather than destroy jobs because of the labour intensity of servicing, upgrading, reassembly, repair etc. Rising production volumes are produced increasingly through automation and do not produce new jobs.
It can be argued, however, that Becker has begged the question - for how do you get to the stage where the symbiotic network of political economic interests which dominates political discourse and the power structures willingly sacrifices its largely production orientation?
Two approaches seem to be suggested. Inside industry itself many trade unionists will perhaps find an interest in exploring and promoting these changes as a way of protecting jobs within their particular sector. They might form alliances with others who have an interest in pooled and cheap access to long life products either because they do not have the purchasing power or do not wish to participate in the "buy new - buy more" system. This might include things like shared workshops and machinery for textiles, woodworking etc. - c.f. Haus der eignen Arbeit in Munich . These can be supported by local people, perhaps with the support of local politicians.
Installing Ecological Technologies at the local level and "Upcycling- Recycling"
Pooling use of goods can extend to pooling access to the means of home making and a host of DIY and neighbourhood tasks. Places like the Haus der eignen Arbeit in Munich (described in more depth in hte next chapter) would enable people to develop the skills to apply the new ecological technologies to their own homes. Things like water flow limiters are easily self installed - and with a bit of training so are solar heating systems. Community resource centres can also combine arts and recycling.
Andreas Becker in his book criticises the severe limitations of "recycling" - this is often "downcycling" - making low grade products of little value partly because thrown away materials cannot usually be recycled to the same use. Even the German "Green Point" system which sorts and separates rubbish for easier recycling cannot resolve the fact that a drinks carton is made up of 6 layers of material (3 of polyethylene, one aluminium sheet, a card layer and a layer of colour on the surface of the carton). Again, a mass of products have highly specific components which do not lend themselves to re-use after disposal (e.g. the 5,000 to 10,000 components in a motor vehicle). The "downcycling" is a process which at best delays the polluting dumping of materials, at worst actually involves further expenditure of energy and often quite serious pollution in reprocessing. However a mass of alternative uses for materials are emerging which are not based on "downcycling" but on "upcycling" when materials are reworked by arts and craft people. Textiles, for example, are usually thrown away long before they have worn out because they have gone out of fashion. They are replaced by new clothes or textiles produced in highly polluting production processes. Instead of being thrown away textiles can be re-created at a variety of different skill levels. The results can be very beautiful. By juxtaposing different fabric designs and materials exiciting new products can be made that are unique - not mass produced and which express the individuality and creativity of the producer far more than an off the peg product. Curtains can be made into waistcoats, sheets into colourful carrier bags, scraps into hats.(Cornelia Voss, Kann denn Mode 'Oeko' sein? Einkaufsleitfaden Naturtextilien,Wissenschaftsladen Bonn e.V. 1995.)The principles of recycling using arts and crafts techniques can be applied in other fields as well. There are a host of exciting possibilities for turning machine parts into jewellery, scrap into sculpture.
In this way strategies for change in the industrial economy could find their place alongside the holistic strategies which are emerging for change in the provision of foodstuffs, shelter and domestic/care needs (e.g. community permaculture and community gardening), neighbourhood development, household design and eco-renovation. A colourful aesthetic dimension can be interwoven as part of the way forward which can easily be integrated into hobbies and community arts and festivals. Yet another dimension - perhaps most fundamental of all in the long term - relates to the design patterning of local environments and the use of land. Here permaculture ideas have a lot to offer.
Permaculture, eco-cities and the reclamation of landscapes.
New design patterning of space and location makes possible an entirely different way of organising the economy in countryside and town. What we are talking about here is learning from nature about how species of plants and animals thrive together in interdependent systems in particular landscapes, waterscapes and climates and then designing ecologies that will meet our needs in a similar way. It means human habitats designed to be one thread in the web of life - a thread that enhances and protects the whole.
Permaculture is a body of thinking which has gone furthest of all in working out how this is to be done. The future for ecological economic development is to turn ecological principles, so to speak, 'to good account'. The goal needs to be to make them work for us rather than appear as limitations and constraints. To do this we need to think about the design of human/environment system interdependencies that would meet human needs while retaining and strengthening the self-sustaining and self-regulating characteristics of ecological systems.( Bill Mollinson, Permaculture. A Designers Manual. Tagari Publications, 1988)
That means, for example, in the design of cultivation patterns and buildings different species of plants and animals are put in an optimal relationship one to another and to human structures to use all their species characteristics. In natural ecologies (e.g. forest systems) all the outputs of species are inputs for other species. In permaculture we might therefore use chickens to clear and manure ground (because they like scratching and pecking the soil and have to defecate) as well as using their heat to warm greenhouses at night.
Structures also are designed for multiple function. Thus trellises can separate free ranging smallstock like poultry into appropriate areas, they can support trailing plants like vines, and act as windbreaks and sun traps; again roads and paths can be used as the edges of small dams. These dams can support not only fish and ducks, they can be designed to reflect low winter sunlight onto growing areas and act as a fire control system in the hotter sun facing sector in front of the homestead.
Designing houses in relation to the cultivated environment is also critical. Such homesteads are designed for energy efficiency, for warmth on the house sun side and coolness on its shaded side, also to support plant growth on west and east walls. A key design principle in permaculture is to minimise distances. Those things wanted most in the kitchen - herbs, and then vegetables - are zoned next to the house which is directly integrated into the garden and its structures. More distant zones, e.g. wooded areas yielding tree crops, requiring less visits and more infrequent attention, are zoned further away. Sectorisation designs to get optimal use of (and minimal disadvantages from) the configuration of seasonal and daily sun, slopes and land topography, micro-climate, water flow and drainage, prevailing winds, soils etc.
The system is developmental. While it is designed at the start it is then allowed to evolve to allow for the learning of the cultivator family unit at the heart of it, and for nature to show what this designed environment produces best.
Many elements of this system can be adapted into the extensive green spaces and wooded areas in the existing urban environment. They can promoted as the basis of future urban planning so that towns and cities become much more self-sufficient in their own food production, energy and other needs. . Most urban dwellers have probably lost the skills to cultivate urban agricultures on ecological principles - but project based approaches at the community level could redevelop city green spaces, its buildings and its energy and water flows. Such projects would recreate the cultivation skills among urban populations and where people were too disabled or merely disinclined to cultivate their own gardens and neighbourhoods others could find work doing this for them. (Community projects like these might start perhaps in the gardens of public sector buildings, community and day centres, residential projects and so on).
A body of thinking is now developing around the idea of Eco-Cities. The processes of climate, water, plants and soils, wildlife and food growing are re-thought of as interrelated aspects for a design process that works with nature - to create diverse, multifunctional cityscapes working with an economy of means to get multiple benefits. There is space here to mention only a few of these benefits. "Plants will function to improve urban climate and air quality; produce wood; encourage wildlife diversity; provide diversity of place and amenity values. The enrichment of the soil from sewage treatment works and other unused city resources will form the basis for an urban agriculture and a productive landscape. Rainwater will assume social benefits while solving environmental problems. In addition to processing urban wastes, the sewage treatment plant is connected with soil fertility, agriculture, forestry production and wildlife habitat...."(Michael Hough, City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular, Croom Helm, 1984 pp 242- 3). Ecological, functional and economic objectives are integrated in the management of open space - not just in recreational parks but in every area of the city. Appropriate ways of working with, and learning from nature, are built into multifunctional uses for local land along communication links, in industrial zones and parks, on derelict land, sewage and waste treatment areas, golf courses, cemeteries, residential and commercial streets and squares, rooftops, vertical surfaces (walls). Single uses for open space are avoided. In addition to ecological benefits a productive and working landscape in the city makes it a more interesting and diverse place in which to live. It thereby reduces pressure on the surrounding countryside as a place of recreation. The more narrowly-defined 'economic' benefits lie in a reduction in the costs of forms of landscape maintenance that work against nature like some unnecessary mowing; the productive use of space that would otherwise be 'economically idle'; the productive use of vast city energy, nutrient and water flows which otherwise damage the eco-system. In this model, far from 'the environment' appearing as a constraint it appears as a resource. Far from the environment 'surrounding' an economic productive process that somehow seems to be more valuable, the goal of economic activity becomes to enhance the environment itself by working with nature to improve the quality of life. The economy becomes a means to develop a healthy environment in which to live.
Specific strategies will also be needed for landscapes devastated by large scale industry, air and water pollution, derelict sites, oil devastated coastlines, radiation contaminated regions, spoil heaps and open cast mining areas. These vast bleak monuments to our industrial civilisation will have to be reclaimed in cautious, piecemeal trial and error strategies if we are to redeem our promise to future generations. Undoubtedly permaculture has much to offer here - because of its integrated approaches, its techniques to recreate soils, its use of natural processes, speeded up - like succession planting. Somehow in all of this local communities must find new futures - most probably in the forest economies of the future.
Ecological restructuring should be prioritised first in deprived areas
The development of design principles and technologies associated with these ideas, the work on energy efficiency, the development of renewable ways of generating power need to be happening now. They should be happening first in the depressed and deprived areas in urgent need of regeneration. In deprived and depressed areas essentials like food, shelter and energy are priorities in any case. Moreover this represents an economic future for those areas because once the capacity and the skills have been developed in deprived areas for this new way forward these skills can be utilised in adjacent areas, continuing the process of ecological restructuring. By helping people from areas of dereliction to work in a field where there is no serious national or international competition we would create the community enterprises that would soon be able to offer ecological services to the wealthier areas of our cities ( drink water saving, ecological garden design, forest garden development, insulation services, installation of solar voltaic panels etc.). The ideas and technologies for these ecological services can be developed by international co-operation and environmental technology transfers, exchanges of experience and ideas.
We can create a circulation of wealth and development within regions by giving the poorer districts first priority to install the 'soft energy' organic technologies of the future. This would then enable them to later sell these to the wealthier neighbourhoods creating a circular positive development process within cities and regions. Areas would become less imbalanced between districts and neighbourhoods, more socially stable, and ecologically harmonious. This will be a process in which all will be the beneficiaries.
Disabled people, racial minorities, women, children and young people in sustainable development
It is blindingly obvious that such a form of development is highly relevant to many serious areas of social concern. For disabled people, for example, local design of the built and cultivated environment is central to mobility, opportunity and safety. Strategies of community care would become much more successful in a neighbourhood focus which would enable people to find their needs met where they are (as well as rehabilitative work projects making for local integration).
Many racial and other minorities will often be found to have skills relevant to redeveloping neighbourhoods.. As they are from Third World societies they will often have peasant skills - very useful for developing green cities.
Because the centre of gravity of women's lives is much more towards the home and neighbourhood women have always been the leading activists in community and neighbourhood development and would undoubtedly play a leading role in holistic development imposing their own needs on the process - needs which are neglected in orthodox development approaches. Holistic development is also very much about the relationship of women (and men) to children.
Earlier we pointed out that sustainable development implies a kind of intergenerational equality if it means handing over to the next generations the earth in as good a shape as we have got it (In fact there is an extensive need for making good the damage already done). If the planet is to survive children born today ought to be able to hope to live at least to 2070. If these children are to survive they will have to carry though the most colossal restructuring in world society and economy - for as we have shown it is not decisions in a few power centres that will save the species but a major change in everyone's way of life. There is no possibility whatsoever that children will be able to do this if we continue socially typical ways of child rearing in brutalising environments.
Children are the most disempowered social group of all. Childhood disempowerment creates personalities in the long term that cannot easily cope with empowerment - i.e. the self confidence and learning ability to move constructively into new and unfamiliar activities and settings. Child abuse is not only those spectacular cases of cruelty featured in social work reports but a taken for granted assumption of the priority for adult agendas at home and at school. Where the feelings of children are constantly overridden they grow up without the assertiveness, confidence and ability to determine their own purposes and follow their own agendas. Environments which make for over protective supervision of children, or which stress parents into frustrated and angry behaviour that is soaked up by their children are also damaging. They tend to form personality structures that in later life are either passive (unassertive) and/or authoritarian/conventional (depending on whether dealing with someone with more or less power than oneself). Other children who have been the victims of adult power grow up as recidivists - angry, resentful and distrustful. (And are not helped by dealing with professionals who solve their childhood-created feelings of smallness, their inferiority complexes, by feeling big at their clients expense).(Alice Miller, The Untouched Key, Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York, Doubleday 1990. John Holt,How Children Fail, Penguin, 1982. For a description of the psychological effects of repressive childrearing in a former communist country see Hans Joachim Maaz, Der Gefuelhsstau . Ein Psychogramm der DDR. Knaur Verlag, 1992 pp 31-40).
Such problems cannot, of course, be dealt with by mass therapy. But Community empowerment can, in the long term, provide the context and the means for tackling these problems. In community empowerment it will be necessary for people to develop assertive, but co-operative ways of sticking up for themselves while being able to work together. In the context of assertiveness training people can begin to learn, through reflecting on their own experience, how damaging some forms of child rearing can be. In addition child care arrangements (particularly for single mothers) will take the pressure off the mothers that so often gets unloaded onto children as they soak up parental frustration.
Holistic development means promoting a recognition that people have rights in relation to spatial designs that are healthy for relationships (described above). As these ideas become common place it will be easier for people to reflect on their emotional lives, without therapy, in such a way that relationships between people can become less interfering and less focused on who controls who. It will help promote communities and families where people will have the space to follow their own feelings and become their own person rather than being the subject of petty squabbles and power rivalries as they turn frustrations against each other generated in the mean and frustrating conditions that they are forced to live in. (Brian Davey, Mental Health and the Environment, Care in Place, Vol. 1 No. 2 June 1994)
This means child friendly environments - including community safety measures and places for children to develop their own lives, as they grow older, away from the too close supervision and interference of adults. A particularly important issue is in relation to the growing impact of traffic on children's lives. It is well know that asthma which is the result of traffic generated air pollution is now a serious problem for children. In addition recent research has shown that there has been a dramatic decline in the freedom of children (and their parents) due to rising traffic volumes. These are documented, for example, in a Policy Studies Institute publication "Children, Transport and the Quality of Life" which shows that in 1971 80% of seven and eight year olds went to school on their own but now only 9% are allowed to do so, over 80% of schoolchildren own a bicycle but only 2% cycle to school. The PSI argue that children's physical development is being restricted by this as children a re denied the opportunity to routinely maintain their health by getting on foot or cycle on their own - "with the result that the great majority do not reach the recommended threshold of heart rate in medical tests of fitness - and will therefore be more susceptible to serious illness in later years" . Add to this "children get insufficient freedom from adult supervision allowing them to develop coping skills, self esteem, a sense of identity and the capacity to take responsibility, and to use their minds creatively - all basic elements to their mental health." Parental lifestyles are being constrained and child escorting to school makes a significant contribution to road congestion at rush hours. "The economic resource costs of escorting children to school based on the Department of Transports methods of valuation is between 10 and 20 billion pounds annually" ("Children, Transport and the Quality of Life", Policy Studies Institute No. 716, Mayer Hillman (ed.) London 1994)
In conclusion - finding a common journey
Discussions about policies and futures sometimes get stuck in fruitless discussions about the feasibility or not of utopian visions of what a future society would be like. In conclusion I want to emphasise I do not put forward these ideas as a description of an ecological society. Rather they are meant as arguments for what we can be getting on with now to alter the trend of the present - to alter our direction into the future. It is meant as a suggested route so that we can co-ordinate a journey to better places - more than a description of a final destination. Future generations will decide their own journeys in the different conditions we bequeath to them. To elaborate this metaphor this journey can be seen as a game for our lives. Money making and the accumulation of power as life games played at the expense of others has bound society on a path of destructive development. We need, therefore, to create shared understandings about new co-operative and constructive life games to meet our needs and improve the community and environment. These would be focused on regional and local development and would entail the empowerment of hitherto deprived communities. The vehicle for empowerment would be the development of collective initiatives where powerless people identify their needs and pursue agendas they define for themselves in initiatives they plan and implement themselves. Power is the application of energy for purposes and 'empowerment of the powerless' means the development of their initiatives for change through their own projects. When initiatives are planned, designed, and implemented from the bottom of the power pyramid of society then powerless people can ensure that they are relevant to them and they will be the beneficiaries.
This is likely to be a process with no particular end to it - as the potential for destructiveness will always be present in the human species. Future generations will have different battles to fight - if indeed the human species does survive the current crises.. All that we can do now is try to understand as comprehensively as we can today's problems and, as comprehensively as we can, find strategies to meet them. As I have argued, in today's world local and regional strategies of redevelopment can entail a move away from technologies based on fossil fuel guzzling and toxic systems. They would make localities more independent thus shifting the balance of social, economic and political power to local level. They might make for far reaching changes in mass psychology and culture - and we might stand a chance of surviving in the post nuclear ecological age.
© BRIAN DAVEY