One of the pernicious aspects of globalized markets is that people lose their memory of how to value and protect their local community. Fixated on economic abstractions, our cognitive feedback loops about the local and the real begin to atrophy. This thought is provoked by yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article (May 5, 2005) on Brian Donahue’s efforts to convince the residents of Weston, Massachusetts, to harvest and use wood from town-owned forests.
Donahue is the author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (Yale U. Press, 1999). He doesn’t want people to view their local forests as wild nature that has nothing to do with humans, and therefore should be locked away. He wants his fellow townspeople to participate with the local forests, rivers, mountains, soil and wildlife. That is the only way that people can learn to respect its distinctive features and limits.
You gotta love the Journal for the headline it gave the article — “To Preserve Forests, Supporters Suggest Cutting Some Trees.” It seems calculated to vindicate the pro-development bias of the Journal’s readers while satisfying journalism’s addiction to contrarian angles. But dig a little deeper and Donahue’s agenda is far more radical than selective, sustainable timber-harvesting. At bottom, he wants people to identify with, love and defend their own backyards.
In a time of globally integrated markets and ubiquitous commercial media, this can be a deeply political act. What could be more radical than trying to preserve local natural resources and revitalize local communities in the face of global markets that declare them to be expendable? If we want to find new footings for resisting the supposed imperatives of globalization, localism offers some promising possibilities.
We all know the economists’ arguments for free trade and the comparative advantage of specialization. What they don’t tell us is that the global economy is indifferent to regional ecologies — yet highly dependent upon them. The money economy doesn’t care if local soil, water and air (not to mention communities) are ruined in the course of exporting timber, widgets or whatever. In fact, the money economy has come to expect that “natural capital” (clean air, etc.) will be commandeered to serve as an unacknowledged contributor to global production. It insists upon using and depleting natural capital but refuses to let the accounting metrics for businesses or the national economy reflect this fact. It turns out there is a free lunch — though to admit it would be too embarrassing in this instance. Economists instead call this “efficient.”
These themes are ably developed by Robert L. Thayer, Jr., an emeritus professor of landscape architecture at UC Davis in his book, LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, which I’ve been reading lately. Since we denizens of the global economy are so prone to see economic categories as more real than our own communities, Thayer urges that we begin to validate the idea of “life-place.” He gives all kinds of suggestions for how we can come to appreciate our bioregion, create a local culture that honors it, and then begin a new kind of conversation about economic performance and the good life.
Essentially, we need to re-localize ourselves. I loved the idea of thinking about our “foodshed” — a term coined by W.P. Hedden to describe the geographic area involved in the production, distribution and consumption of our daily meals. “More than half of all international trade involves the simultaneous import and export of essentially the same goods,” economist Herman Daly has written. “Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”
This trend would surely be good news for resources that can’t be moved so easily, like forests. Brian Donahue is surely on the right track.