Half the chicken in British supermarkets is contaminated with campylobacter. Live birds are stacked in enormous towers while awaiting slaughter. They shit on each other. People want cheap food. Ground water is running out.
We are paying the price for the deep wells. The fact is, however, that small farms produce more food. You can intercrop different kinds of plants. Remember that and support them.
The Cuban boycott helped Cuban farms to get small. It probably saved them. Part 3: All for One, or One for All Houses are now being developed to help people stay to themselves.
As Margaret Thatcher said, "There are no such thing as 'society. Selfishness rules, even in Christianity. We now have hyper-individualism The former Soviet Union is the most toxic place on earth. When Wal-Mart expands, all sorts of small businesses disappear. More Wal-Marts means more poverty. People are happier with marriage, families, friends, community. The key to change is local. When Congress "deregulated" radio and ended the "fairness doctrine," the change was dramatic.
Hate radio began. And Clear Channel controlled over stations. How is this deregulation? Locals could not even get local news on the air. In Powell, Wyoming, a red-state town, the citizens kept a Wal-Mart out and built a clothing store. Americans are the energy-use champions of all time. Japan leads the world in building a decentralized solar-panel energy economy. Hyper-individualism has been spread by our tv shows.
People around the world want to live like that. Vermont has a family forest program for local lumber that preserves forests. Part 5: The Durable Future About 30 million Chinese people a year pour out of the countryside into the city, the greatest migration in history.
They want to be like America. It's just not possible for the earth to allow that. It cannot even handle one America. The deserts of the world are growing relentlessly.
Mexico lost 1. An impoverished coffee grower in Uganda gets shillings for a kilo of coffee. Starbucks gets the equivalent of 5, shillings for one cup of coffee. All of the value items we buy at the grocery store? It's the same way. A surprising fact: McKibben saw many protestors in China. Farmers and workers were upset about their treatment.
McKibben's hope of developing more community spirit here in the US does not fill me with the optimism he wants. Daniel Amstutz, who oversaw agricultural reconstruction in Iraq, was a former Cargill executive. That says it all, doesn't it? View all 6 comments. Everyone in the world should read this book and everyone who lives in a consumer obsessed society like the United States should be forced too.
I'm only half way through this book and already know that this is possibly one of the most important books I have read in my life. Not only does it clearly and logically present everything that is wrong with our obsessiveness with producing more and doing it faster, which most every socially conscious person is already aware of, it also lays out very clea Everyone in the world should read this book and everyone who lives in a consumer obsessed society like the United States should be forced too.
Not only does it clearly and logically present everything that is wrong with our obsessiveness with producing more and doing it faster, which most every socially conscious person is already aware of, it also lays out very clear logical alternatives that can change our society from one obsessed with industrial growth to one focused on improving the way humanity utilizes our natural resources in a way that is much more in harmony with nature rather then the current method of the raping and pillaging of the earth that will, if no change is made, inevitably lead to if not the demise of humanity, then war and famine that this world has not yet experienced.
In short he shows the reader everything that is distressingly wrong with our globalized society then gives the reader realistic hope for the future. Sep 07, Doug Forrester rated it really liked it. Surely it would be pushing for radical socialism for the sake of radical environmentalism. Instead Bill McKibben wrote a book I'm still grappling with.
His first line of attack is economic growth itself. First he argues economic growth is unsustainable. This is his strongest argument in the short-term but his weakest argument over-the-long haul.
There are alternatives to fossil fuel when it becomes t When I saw the title "Deep Economy" I had a sort of fascination as if I were watching a train wreck. There are alternatives to fossil fuel when it becomes too expensive to run our economies. We won't have an end to growth but simply growth with different economies. In the transition the short-term it will appear economic growth has stalled. However there's a more pressing problem if we continue to grow off fossil fuel we risk massive damage to the oceans, our climate and the air.
McKibben's strongest argument is one I actually first ran into in Richard Layard's "Happiness": Economic growth is no longer making us happy and it's actually beginning to harm things that do make us happy family, friendship, community, leisure time.
It's hard to emphasize this enough but we are as irrational as a gold fish. If you place fish food in a goldfish's tank they'll eat until they die. We do the same with income. We tend to treat income as a good long past when we started giving up more important things for it.
With our obesity epidemic we may be more like the goldfish than we think. On a grand scale a focus on economic growth also leads to isolation. Income divides between the wealthy and everyone else tend to grow faster than the economy. Mass migrations tend to leave people not trusting the newcomers or even their own neighbors.
People tend to "Bowl Alone". McKibben calls this blindness to people "autistic economics". McKibben I should note does think economic growth is useful to a point, especially for developing nations. McKibben then attempts to describe what a replacement to our dysfunctional economy might be. He does not offer up tired communist or socialist centralism. He moves on to local economies, farmer's markets, an attack on industrial farming, and a focus on local culture.
McKibben suggests the move to massive industrial farms using expensive chemicals, shipping their products halfway around the world, might be better replaced by a focus on local farms feeding local people.
McKibben also suggests local media radio stations as an alternative to the media conglomerates that feed the same bland news and entertainment to Eureka, California as to Eureka, Kansas. McKibben does a good job attacking our goldfish-like hunger for faster and faster growth long after it's started to hurt us.
McKibben has to be tentative and experimental in suggesting an alternative because alternatives to the hedonistic merry-go-round are just being tried. Dec 17, Melissa rated it really liked it. This was my first book written by Bill McKibben, a journalist and environmentalist. I think I have been wanting to lighten my carbon footprint but needed a little guidance on how to go about doing it.
Living in Europe has opened me to be more accepting of local suppliers and retailers; the fact that shopping at our base commissary is a chore could be another reason I am happy to buy and live the European way.
So it should come as no surprise that the chapters dealing with American style of agric This was my first book written by Bill McKibben, a journalist and environmentalist. I was also very interested in how politics were given the local is better treatment. Granted, the author lives in Vermont, a more liberal area of the U.
The only area of the book I had to disagree with is the part where he talks about local currency; it seemed to be more of a throwback to the early days of the republic and was difficult for those living in border areas to live and work with differing currencies of the individual states. I think most of the ideas found in this book resonate with me because I read about them post global recession, so the ideas were not as radical some were indeed necessary and some were probably implemented in and thereafter as they were in Overall, I found this book to be useful in helping me start my journey to living less globally and more locally.
Jul 19, Patadave rated it it was ok. If you've never been exposed to environmentalism or green philosophy this work can serve as a general introduction.
But, frankly, who hasn't been exposed to this stuff? A thin work of popular journalism with no substantive economic analysis at all. Jan 13, Justin rated it it was amazing. The rise of a new economics. That is what McKibben succeeds in describing through Deep Economy. After years of the 'Cult of Growth' dominating modern US politics, the Vermont environmental writer argues that its time we invest in our communities.
Perhaps the wonders of globalization argued for by the likes of Friedman, Krugman and countless others are really just creating an illusion of wealth, economic growth that is merely overshoot and and consistent undermining of the communities that build The rise of a new economics.
Perhaps the wonders of globalization argued for by the likes of Friedman, Krugman and countless others are really just creating an illusion of wealth, economic growth that is merely overshoot and and consistent undermining of the communities that build a society.
McKibben comes from the position of a political neutral, stating that Democrats and Republican are handicapped by the obsession with the unrealizable ideal of unlimited growth. But what does a non-growth based economy look like? Maybe it looks a little bit like today with Keynesian theories as our last effort to stave off the collapse of a system built on making money out of nothing but the exchange of personal values and community structures for a few percentage point increases in GDP.
Maximizing utility has brought about many changes in the US landscape,a prime example being the consolidation of local media among corporations. And as cited in Deep Economy when one South Dakota town contacted local radio to help out in an emergency, repeaters for ClearChannel stations don't really help to get messages out to the public.
The other problem with our society is that consumption reigns king, a key portion of our GDP oh This consumption is quickly depleting material inputs and releases damaging externalities accelerating climate change and making industry suffer in the long term. Simply put, we get paid too much, work too much and buy too much. There is an alternative and that option is exemplified through the leadership of cities like Curitiba, Brazil, communities that start from the bottom up.
The solution is a society that builds cost effective bus rapid transit, values pedestrians over drivers, and the impoverished as citizens instead of degenerates. Societies such as these exist but aren't as "efficient" as most investors would like. And duly so, even Bhutan has rejected western ways in measuring happiness instead of GDP a method that might have far more actual value.
A point is reached in every society where certain people have enough and more simply doesn't make them happier. The US has arrived at the point where so much more is making us much unhappier. Becoming unhappier with longer working hours, less time with family and bigger more isolating possession all while the people we sweep under the rug for our societal needs are beginning to lose their jobs, turning into hopeless machinations of society.
Many economists cite the fact that severe economic times result in new theories of economics. Perhaps our rulers will heed the advice of McKibben and begin to invest in communities Oct 24, Jessica rated it it was amazing. I picked up Deep Economy as a sort of economic primer, hoping to become a bit more fluent in the language of acquisitions and nets and grosses. I also hoped that Bill McKibben would help me find a better response to those who still haven't converted to the cult of buying local.
And in the first chapter, Bill McKibben clarifies GDP and GNP just enough to then claim that economics is much, much more than acronyms that try to measure the quest for monetary growth. Part personal challenge, part econ I picked up Deep Economy as a sort of economic primer, hoping to become a bit more fluent in the language of acquisitions and nets and grosses.
Part personal challenge, part economic treatise, Deep Economy articulates an economy that keeps people in mind, and that's willing to say 'enough' when what we have is, in fact, enough. McKibben practices deep economics in his community near Burlington, Vermont. From his year long pledge to eat locally and sustainably to the numerous examples of others whose livelihoods may never be accounted for in national economic statistics, McKibben stands by his claim that 'more' and 'better' can no longer be the sole indicators of a thriving economy.
Though he doesn't promote a new and specific means of measuring economic success, McKibben points out various measurements in other countries, including the index of well-being in Great Britain and the index of community vitality in Canada. He also includes as examples of successful local economies, Ithaca, NY - where locals trade a community currency - and Kerala, one of the poorest states in India, which has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Deep Economy is to nudge us non-economists into thinking economically. And by that, I simply mean questioning how we can arrange our bartering and trading, buying and selling to affirm ourselves and our communities.
That kind of economics doesn't even need an acronym. Nov 22, Aaron rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: anyone rethinking how we do business in relation to the environment and community. McKibben explores the moral consequences of hyperindividualism where ones own pursuits limits the freedoms of others. He shows how we are literally consuming ourselves out of existence.
He documents the trend of our culture moving towards a community oriented life and demonstrates that our current economic models do not adequately account for our happyness and quality of life. This is not a doom and gloom book, rather the author points to emerging trends that suggest that we our slowly moving away McKibben explores the moral consequences of hyperindividualism where ones own pursuits limits the freedoms of others.
This is not a doom and gloom book, rather the author points to emerging trends that suggest that we our slowly moving away from mass consumption and glorification of self to an awareness and need for others. I loved his one year diet that he tried where he ate only locally grown food. The food was bland at times but the relationships he made in the effort far outweighed the paucity of choices during winter months think roots! The book is filled with a lot of useful statistics concerning the interelatedness of energy, culture, environment and our economy.
Shelves: non-fiction. McKibben presents a view that I have increasingly found myself taking lately: why can't we just have enough instead of making ourselves crazy and our world toxic struggling to have more? He does a wonderful job of making the philosophical argument for slowing down. I don't have sufficient economic knowledge to judge his arguments in that realm.
I found his anecdotal evidence compelling, but I could not easily discern how these small projects and groups might have scaled up. Also, I would have li McKibben presents a view that I have increasingly found myself taking lately: why can't we just have enough instead of making ourselves crazy and our world toxic struggling to have more? Also, I would have liked some more broad-spectrum data. McKibben never attempts to establish the standard of living that he proposes this world could sustain, and I suspect that failure stems from an apparent reluctance to tackle population growth.
This lurking issue nearly surfaces repeatedly in the book, but it only ever gets a passing treatment. Still, on the whole, the book does a great job of presenting a view from well outside the mainstream. This book is much better than it could have been.
McKibben has an excellent way of getting ideas across, not only through concrete examples, but also in the language he uses to capture the abstract. There were only a few places where I found myself skimming, because he was covering well-trod ground or going into too much detail. The book is about creating an alternative to growth and international trade by focusing on values and things local. But McKibben is a realist; rarely do his values take h This book is much better than it could have been.
But McKibben is a realist; rarely do his values take him beyond the practical. A solid 4. Apr 06, Alexandra rated it it was ok Recommends it for: over-eager liberals. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer synonymous with "better"—indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites.
McKibben puts forward a new way to think about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases, he says, need not be at odds with the things we truly value. McKibben's animating idea is that we need to move beyond "growth" as the paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment.
He shows this concept blossoming around the world with striking results, from the burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those who worry about environmental threats, he offers a route out of the worst of those problems; for those who wonder if there isn't something more to life than buying, he provides the insight to think about one's life as an individual and as a member of a larger community.
McKibben offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. Deep Economy makes the compelling case that the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own. But this bracing tonic of a book also throws the bright light of McKibben's matchless journalism on the vibrant local economies now springing up like mushrooms in the shadow of globalization.
Deep Economy fills you with a hope and a sense of fresh possibility. Bill McKibben provides the simple but brilliant answer the economists have missed—we need to create 'depth' through local interdependence and sustainable use of resources. I will be requiring this inspiring book for my students, and passionately recommending it to everyone else I know.
A saner human-scale world does exist—just over the horizon—and McKibben introduces us to the people and ideas leading us there. Bill McKibben - Author.
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