On Saturday, November 22nd, at 3PM at St James Place in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Samantha Power and Tyler Wakefield will deliver the 45th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture. The title is The Promise of Bioregional Economies. Registration is now open.
REGISTER FOR THE 45TH SCHUMACHER LECTURE
Author and political historian, Kirkpatrick Sale, captured the vision behind the Bioregional movement in his 1983 E.F. Schumacher Lecture, Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism.
Selections from Sale’s pioneering work follow:
In The Interpreters, a book by the Irish author known as AE, written at the height of the Irish Revolution, there is a passage in which a group of disparate men, all prisoners, sit around discussing what the ideal new world should look like. One of them, the poet Lavelle, argues fervently against the vision put forth by one prisoner, a philosopher, of a global, scientific, cosmopolitan culture. “If all wisdom was acquired without,” he says, “it might be politic to make our culture cosmopolitan. But I believe our best wisdom does not come from without, but arises in the soul and is an emanation of the earth-spirit, a voice speaking directly to us as dwellers in the land.”
To become “dwellers in the land,” to regain the spirit of the Greeks, to fully and honestly come to know the earth, the crucial and perhaps only and all-encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate, specific place, where we live: Schumacher says, “In the question of how we treat the land, our entire way of life is involved.” We must somehow live as close to it as possible, be in touch with its particular soils, its waters, its winds. We must learn its ways, its capacities, its limits. We must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its fruits our bounty.
That, in essence, is bioregionalism.
ECONOMY:
The economy that comes into being within a bioregion also derives its character from the conditions, the laws, of nature. Our ignorance is immense, but what we can be said to know with some surety after these many centuries of living on the soil has been cogently summarized by Edward Goldsmith, the editor of The Ecologist, as the laws of Ecodynamics—to be distinguished, of course, from the laws of Thermodynamics.
The first law is that conservation—preservation, sustenance—is the central goal of the natural world, hence its ingenerate, fundamental resistance to large-scale structural change; the second law is that, far from being entropic (that’s an image rightly belonging to physics, errantly borrowed by scientific ecologists), nature is inherently stable, working in all times and places toward what ecology calls a “climax,” that is, a balanced, harmonious, integrative state of maturity which, once reached, is maintained for prolonged periods.
From this it follows that a bioregional economy would seek to maintain rather than exploit the natural world, accommodate to the environment rather than resist it; it would attempt to create conditions for a climax, a balance, for what some economists have recently taken to calling a “steady state,” rather than for perpetual change and continual growth in service to “progress,” a false and delusory goddess if ever there was one.
A bioregional economy would, in practical terms, minimize resource use, emphasize conservation and recycling, avoid pollution and waste. It would adopt its systems to the given bioregional resources: energy based on wind, for example, where nature called for that, or on wood, where that was appropriate, and food based on what the region itself—particularly in its native, pre-agricultural state—could grow.
And thus this kind of economy would be based, above all, on the most elemental and most elegant principle of the natural world, that of self-sufficiency. Just as nature does not depend on trade, does not create elaborate networks of continental dependency, so the bioregion would find all its needed resources—for energy, food, shelter, clothing, craft, manufacture, luxury—within its own environment.
And far from being deprived, far from being thereby impoverished, it would gain in every measure of economic health. It would be more stable, free from boom-and-bust cycles and distant political crises; it would be able to plan, to allocate its resources, to develop what it wanted to develop at the safest pace, in the most ecological manner. It would not be at the mercy of distant and uncontrollable national bureaucracies and transnational governments and thus would be more self-regarding, more cohesive, developing a sense of place, of community, of comradeship, and the pride that comes from stability, control, competence, and independence.
In what was perhaps one of his most prescient perceptions Fritz Schumacher realized that the market economy of twentieth-century capitalism erred fundamentally, because it erred repeatedly, against nature. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” he wrote. “The market represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them.” And this is why, as he points out, conventional economics makes no distinctions at all between primary goods, “which man has to win from nature,” and secondary goods manufactured from them or between renewable and nonrenewable resources or the environmental and social costs of developing one against the other.
A bioregional economy, in sharpest contrast, makes—in fact is grounded in—these vital distinctions.
Please join us November 22nd in Great Barrington to hear leaders in the contemporary Bioregional Movement.
All the best,
Staff of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics