Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Reconnecting Through a Bioregional Economy

Molly Scott CatoProfessor of Strategy and Sustainability

University of Roehampton

Where are we going?

• What is driving the proposal?

• Why a bioregional economy:– Work– Consumption– Provisioning

Ecological CrisisFisheries 85% of the world’s fish stocks either fully exploited or

over-exploited1

Water By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity

Forest loss Expanded by 25% between 1990 and 2005Species loss The current extinction rate is between 1,000 and 10,000

times higher than the natural rateTopsoil 285m. of total 1500m ha. lost between 1985 and 2000Nitrogen Cycle Human activities now contribute more (210m. tonnes)

to the global supply of fixed nitrogen each year than natural processes do (140m. tonnes)

Coral reefs 75% of the world’s reefs are threatened7

Climate Change Likelihood of significant warming already occurring at the continental scale in North America, Europe, and Australia—IPCC

Parameters for the Proposal• We need to reduce CO2 emissions by around 90% by

2050 (Zero Carbon Britain Report and Tyndale Centre)

• There is no evidence that we can decouple economic growth from energy and materials use in anything like the necessary time-scale (Jackson, 2009)

• To live in the hope of a techno-fix is irresponsible• We need to address lifestyles (given global equity)• We need to change the structure of the economy

Objective for the Proposal• To achieve the best possible

level of well-being for the least possible use of materials and energy

• To take steps through participation and engagement before the crisis provokes more authoritarian responses

• To focus the economy on quality rather than quantity

Extract I: Karl Polanyi: My Defunct Economist

What is a bioregion?

• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries’

• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region

An economic bioregion

• A bioregional economy would be embedded within its bioregion and would acknowledge ecological limits.

• Bioregions as natural social units determined by ecology rather than economics

• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic resources such as water, food, products and services.

• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity

Problems with Bioregionalism

• Balkanisation: The Power of the Soil

• Parochialism: Drudgery and Slippers

• Stagnation or ‘Dynamic Equilibrium’

• The parable of the false teeth

Extract II: Defining the Bioregion

Work as Craft

• Capitalist work relations are dominated by the division of labour

• We are divided one from another

• We are divided from the natural world

Auto-ethnography?

• Published in 1776, on the cusp of the industrial revolution and before its technological advance had had the chance to impact significantly on social and economic structures.

• David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) set the parameters for the world of laissez-faire capitalism and export-led growth that we inhabit today.

The Wealth of Nations

• Archetype for the division of labour that was used to minutely subdivide tasks within workplaces to achieve efficiency

• Increased profits but no consideration of social and ecological ‘externalities’

The Famous Pin Factory

• Fourier was critical of Smith’s depiction of work as a ‘unversal bad’, a myth that undercut attempts to improve the quality of work.

• Factory work crushed the God-given passion ‘the Butterly’

Toil and Trouble?

• Workers should enjoy good rewards, variety and autonomy and were properly rewarded; work could be ‘a servant of the passions and thus a route to self-expression and self-realisation’

Loss of Identity

• ‘to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.’

• E. F. Schumacher

Adam Smith or Adam Bede?

• The novel explores the frustrations and satisfactions of productive and spiritual life through the experiences of its central character

• The eponymous hero of her novel is a journeyman carpenter in rural England some two centuries ago.

• A more rounded and humanist view of the nature of work, and one quite at odds with the economistic conception of Smith and Ricardo.

Consumption for Satisfaction

• Confusion of needs, satisfiers and goods: Max-Neef

• The problem of ‘cathexis’, as exploited by Steve Jobs

• The need to stimulate desires rather than satisfy them

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’ Wordsworth

• ‘As a nation we are already so rich that consumers are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy a very large share – perhaps as much as 40 per cent – of what is produce, and the pressure will get progressively less in the years ahead. But if consumers exercise their option not to buy a large share of what is produced, a great depression is not far behind.’

• A McGraw-Hill executive writing in Advertising Age in 1955

• ‘They wander through the shopping-mall winding passages, guided by a semi-conscious hope of finding an identity badge or token that will bring their selves up to date – and also by a semi-conscious apprehension that they might not notice the crucial point at which what were badges of pride become transformed into badges of shame. . . If identity jigsaw-puzzles are available solely in the commodity form, and cannot be found outside shopping malls, the future of the market is assured.’

• ‘In contrast, the mass-produced artifacts of civilization, from milk cartons to washing machines to computers, draw our senses into a dance that endless reiterates itself without variation. To the sensing body these artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and even alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the specific “functions” for which they were built. Once our bodies masters these functions, the machine-made objects commonly teach our sense nothing further; they are unable to surprise us, and so we must continually acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest model of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves.

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Production for Provisioning

• Enclosure deprived the population of the means of subsistence.

• Loss of connection with the land

• Links to our colonial history: extracting resources from the land of others

Extract III: The Provisioning Potential of Woodlands

Life is relational not rational

• ‘Our ideas about our place in the world pervade all our thought, along with the imagery that expresses them, constantly determining what questions we ask and what answers can seem possible.’ Mary Midgley

• Rationalist, capitalist models of economic life have lead to the ‘disenchantment of the world’

Conclusions

• We need to take action urgently to address the ecological crisis

• The bioregional proposal offers the possibility of greater accountability: protect your own backyard

• A globally local proposal• Diverse proposals are welcome, so long as

they meet the parameters

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

www.greenhousethinktank.org

Green Economics (Earthscan, 2009)

Environment and Economy(Routledge, 2011)

The Bioregional Economy (Earthscan, 2012)