Imagine a community that acts natural.

Change doesn’t happen because of how we invest our money. Change happens because of how we invest our human energy, and it always has since we came down from trees. Everyone’s got a margin of discretionary energy—ten percent, twenty percent—that isn’t used up making their way in the world. That’s the energy that’s available for social change. If you can get a whole community to start focusing their energy together, building success just as a business builds on successful products, then you get social change.
--Daniel Taylor of Future Generations (McKibben 2007:211)

Bill McKibben explains in "Deep Economy" how the centralized systems of information, food and energy have raised the standard of livings of Americans to an absurd extent; how these systems have deconstructed the ability of communities to provide for themselves some of the time, which is incidentally the beautiful purpose of a community. He did this through his examples of radio stations, farms and electricity generation, and his challenge to eat locally grown food for a year. He depicts Americans’ current system as being an ideological switch that has sunk into many facets of life. Indeed there are less examples of barnraisings and public work within today’s communities. Nearly every study about this phenomenon backs up his arguments about the pervasiveness of the hyper-individual today.

We find ourselves caught in a tragic play called “The Community” where the ultimate expressions of hyper-individualism, what Bill McKibben describes as, “spending less time with friends and family, either working longer hours, or hunkered down in their Internet alcoves,” manifests itself in the stage and the players. The most depressing revelation seems to be that we are models of development, because third world citizens want to replicate our lifestyles and to grow. McKibben rightfully qualifies their argument. “In a world where everyone can watch Dallas, modernity, hyper-individualism, may be a phase through which humans need to pass before they can figure out its limitations.” We have power in this, because this is our culture. We must change the way we do things and operate more locally because we are the model for developing countries. Culture is the only thing we export these days. I am confident that if we ride bikes some of the time, Indians and Chinese alike will ride bikes some of the time.

The greatest challenge to the adoption and success of McKibben’s reforms is the past. People may believe that his ideas are just nostalgic and unrealistic—that if we recreate durable communities, what we are actually doing is returning to some prior state and forming a paradigm of regression. In many of his arguments, however, he illustrates how many of the social ties and ways that people made their living were sources of pride and distinction. The livelihood of farmers has been replaced by oil and the so-called efficiency of large scale-farms. And for what, an incredibly ineffectual lifestyle? McKibben makes the argument that we have sacrificed farm life with leisure time and material goods. The fatalist argument that he consciously confronts is the one beginning, “how will I continue my grand lifestyle…”

He writes in the chapter titled The Wealth of Communities, “We’ve piled up three times as much stuff as people had fifty years ago; we should be able to figure out how to gradually refashion our lives without crashing and burning” (McKibben 2007:174). Many of his examples of resilient communities could indeed be comparable to societies one hundred years ago. What makes his argument so impressive is that he frames it in a way that makes these durable communities seem like lighthouses on the banks of oceans. Take for example his recognition that localities and states are beginning to require their institutions to serve more food from local farmers. This is a new initiative, because state and city legislatures were not proposing it twenty years ago, but it is an attempt to make local farmlands work for local people, which they traditionally have done. In Missoula, Montana these days, “about 85-90 percent of our food comes from someplace else,” but in 1950, people of this valley raised up to 70 percent of their own food. The goal in this valley is to not only make local food responsible to Missoula citizens, but to make it available to them, to make our food deserts bloom again. We can employ the ideas of the globe without relying on the global system.

There is no greater example than Havana, Cuba. Today its citizens provide an estimated 90 percent of the fresh food consumed in and around the city. According to Brian Halweil’s “Eat Here,” they were able to do this with the help of government officials who provided support with “obtaining vacant land, seeds, water and gardening assistance” to a public that was motivated to feed themselves, motivate to collaborate (Halweil 2004:95). But the point, which seems in constant reverence with McKibben, “is not that we need to be Cuba…But could we head in that direction gradually, if we wanted to? This is the crucial question. Is there really a wealth of possibility in our communities, or are we irrevocably tied to our global system, come what may?” (McKibben 2007:77).

Oil was once the main driver of Cuba’s economy. It remains the steam engine of our contemporary inefficient system and it is coming to a peak. “Even President George W. Bush, in his 2006 State of the Union address, announced that we were “addicted to oil,” a recognition slow in coming (akin, say, to Abraham Lincoln using his Second Inaugural Address to note the existence of slavery down south) and therefore all the more ominous in its implications.” Initiatives that boost local production of energy, food and radio waves will significantly move us forward in a future of dwindling oil supplies and backward to a past rich with public projects and social ties. By assuming we are not feeling exactly enriched by our televisions and computers, McKibben is counting on the collective dissatisfaction with our current state of affairs. But he is also relying on not just alternatives, but positive alternatives that “draw less on any well-worked out theory of the future economy than on the simple, growing desire for connecting with place and for community.” The truest metaphor for a healthy environment and community is his comparison of the internet and the farmers’ market.

"Internet scale is neither big nor small; it’s distributed, as energy and food supplies may someday be. The small nodes hook together into something much larger, but not so monolithic it can’t easily hive off into new sites and communities and forums. Despite every effort to turn it into one more television set controlled by the largest info-conglomerates, the internet continues to operate more like…a farmer’s market, where a million people bring their produce to sell" (McKibben 2007:173-174).

The phrase “buy local, think global” means employing the ideas of other cultures around the world to further local interdependence and success. McKibben exemplifies this statement.

McKibben is not deceiving anyone when he discusses the examples of working communities around the globe. He is a credible localvore, a man who spent an entire year thinking of creative ways to quench his urge to eat locally. An entire year! The experience has given him a perspective shared by only today’s oldest generation of Americans and recent families that have immigrated from developing countries. He makes it clear many of the world’s alternative communities have made trade-offs. Bangladeshis certainly have the potential to rely on the global market, exporting giant prawns and cut flowers to Japan. These small-scale peasant farmers could reap short-term financial success. But they understand the trade-offs to these policies. As the agricultural analyst Brian Tokar puts it in the “Deep Economy,” the benefits of small-scale farming outweigh “an increasing dependence on unstable world crop prices, rising indebtedness for costly equipment and chemical inputs, and, often, the forced removal of people from traditional lands that have sustained their communities for countless generations” that submission to the global food system unequivocally brings (McKibben 2007:191).

Bill McKibben also makes it clear that the belief that we will be able to continue to rely on a global system, cheap energy, cheap food and menial social ties seems a pathetic and unrealistic vision for the future. This form of thoughtfully honest, forward-looking persuasion is missing in our national debates. It is the reason why Bill McKibben and James Howard Kunstler are absent on the morning talk shows. We do not like to hear that “eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years” and that most of that construction represents terrible growth—growth that separates us from the arts and the forest (suburbs); growth that is not fair (void of equity); growth that, past a certain point, is pointless and does not make us happy.

We might all even agree with Kunstler’s reality. “Most of (everything built in the past fifty years) is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading - the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth’” (Kunstler 1995:10). We may see all of this. But how can we overcome fifty years of growth and its manifestations, including the mindset that says an ever-escalating slope of wealth cures all woes? McKibben, Kunstler, Barbara Kingsolver, David Orr, Daniel Kemmis and Josh Slotnick have compiled quite a case that we can overcome the manifestations of growth by questioning its usefulness and collaborating with people to produce community solutions.

McKibben shows that if you approach an issue with good-natured, sensible ideas, you can fuel a community that rewards citizens (with something more important than growth) who participate. “One form of communal return is that community provides the “stage” upon which the individual may achieve integration,” writes Carl C. Moore in “What Is Community.” “Community is the context in which the person is viewed as complete” (Moore 2001:73). McKibben’s arguments may all the more appealing because they are not politically-charged, nor are they really polarizing issues. He is just asking whether we want to continue down the path of hyper-individualized path that relies on the centralized production and distribution of everything. “Our choices have in some ways built our world. On the other hand, it’s hard to test whether these are the choices we really, or still, want to make” (McKibben 2007:134). Lets talk about choice for a moment. Who can disagree with nutritious food that comes from the fields of someone you know? Who can say with a straight face that Clear Channel Radio is interested in their community and its well-being (or that it is any good)? Who says having a few small wind turbines within your community that capture a part of nature and turn it into power for your home is not a beautiful, real dream for the future? Choices like these, linked inextricably to interdependent communities around the world, are due for an American revival. Sure, to make the harvests of food, information/entertainment and energy projects accessible to many people will not be easy—it will take work, public work. But that is part of the beauty of what people used to know so well in America—that working for people you know is much more motivating than say, people around the globe. The local system demands a much smaller input and yields a much more satisfying output. Working on the behalf of your interest as well as the mutual interest of neighbors will provide the basis of what McKibben calls a useful (and I think hopeful) future. “It’s the emphasis on community, on people working together, that really counts.”

Works Cited
Halweil, Brian. Eat Here. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2004.

Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere : The Rise and Decline of
America's Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon & Schuster, Limited, 1995.

McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy : The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. New
York: Holt Paperback, 2008.

Moore, Carl M. 2001. What is community? Pp. 7 \-15 in Across the Great Divide: Explorations
in Collaborative Conservation and the American West, edited by Philip Brick, Donald
Snow, and Sarah Van de Wetering. Washington, DC: Island Press.