The Territories of Hope

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the Territories of Hope The Expectations and Opportunities for the Commons ROBERT MACDONALD The Okanagan Institute

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Long ago, Adam Smith wrote about the “invisible hand” of the free market, a phrase straight out of phantasmagorical literature and horror movies. His idea was that the economy would somehow selfregulate and so didn’t need to be interfered with.

So still goes the justifications for capitalism, which have created the current toxic mix of unsustainable wealth and unspeakable poverty in our world. Our tax dollars pay to make the world safe for corporate interests, and those corporations hand over huge sums of money to compliant politicians to regulate the political system to continue to protect, reward, and enrich corporate interests.

What really should interest us aren’t the corrosions and failures of this system, but the way another system, another invisible hand, is always at work. The invisible claw of the market may fail

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to comprehend how powerful the other hand is the hand that gives rather than takes.

The market economy is based on competition and selfishness. On the other hand huge areas of our lives are based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return - all principles that have little or nothing to do with competition and selfishness.

Think of the acts of those - like daycare workers and nursing home aides - who do more, and do it more passionately, than they are paid to do. Think of the millions of volunteers, who give back to their communities without expectation of reward. Think of those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than profit. Think of the armies of the unpaid who are at work counterbalancing and cleaning up after the invisible hand and making every effort to loosen its grip on our collective throat. Such acts represent the relations of the great majority of us some of the time and a minority of us all the time. They are all ages, the young and and the old. They are the nine-tenths of the economic iceberg that is below the visible horizon.

The free market economy is only kept going by the collective effort of the members of this great good army, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate

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for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, compassion, and mutual aid. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the evictions, suicides and drug deaths that don’t happen, the forests that aren’t levelled, the watersheds that aren’t poisoned and depleted, the species that don’t go extinct, the violence and crime that doesn’t happen, the discriminations that don’t occur?

The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, the wounded, the lonely and the dying, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional and spiritual support. In the meantime, others work to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts to give and create hope.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. The true

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make-up of the world, though, and what actually sustains life, is far closer to home and more essential to hope than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Let’s remember that most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit or a paycheque.

It’s done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism and compassion, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for itself becomes feasible.

Something in our natures, starved in ordinary times, is fed by the opportunity, even under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected.

Let’s look at three realms of activity that can inform us about our current condition here in the Okanagan: water, food and shelter.

First, water.

In the last 20 years, global environmental alarms have risen to a high-pitched scream. So has our anxiety about our seeming powerlessness to do much as individuals about things like global overheating, ozone depletion, the health of the oceans, and on and on.

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A whole lot of people seem to have come to a similar conclusion at the same time: if global problems seem too large for most people to grapple with, it is within our reach to take responsibility for our home places. Clean water is a good organizing principle. A watershed offers a reasonable scale of endeavour that’s a good fit for human visceral and mental capabilities.

Watershed groups and riverkeepers and lakekeepers are organized toward a variety of ends - ecological restoration, conservation and preservation of lands, development of sustainable resource management strategies, environmental education - usually in combination. Most create situations that get neighbours, often with conflicting ideologies, working together toward a common goal that places them in a benign relationship to their home places and each other. Such situations create an accelerated learning environment in which people are not only directly exposed to the lessons of their home ecologies, but they find themselves learning from each other.

Do this long enough and you may find yourself and your community edging forward toward a 21st century model of the way we humans have lived for 99 percent of our time on Earth - in intimate and very practical relation to a place large

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enough to feed us and small enough to understand and appreciate fully.

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians visited the Okanagan recently, and speaks passionately about critical social and environment issues, especially water: “We must confront the current economic system and work to create new economic, social and resource policies based on the principles of inclusion, equity, diversity, sustainability, and democracy. We need to promote local sustainable food production practices, local sustainable goods production, and a conversion from fossil fuels to safe, alternative energy sources. Economic structures should be designed to move economic and political power downward, toward the local, rather than the global, and the power of transnational corporations and speculation capital must be constrained and brought under the rule of law. The rush to privatize every area once considered a common heritage must end.

To truly share the world’s water sources in an equitable and responsible way, we must recognize water as a shared common heritage to be fiercely protected, carefully managed, and equitably shared. Because it is a flow resource necessary

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for life and ecosystem health, and because there is no substitute for it, water must be regarded as a public commons and a public good and preserved as such for all time in law and practice. Freshwater is central to our very existence and must be protected by public trust law for the common good, not for individual profit. Of course there is an economic dimension to water, but under the public trust, governments are obliged to protect water sources in order to sustain them for the long-term use of the entire population, not just the privileged few.�

Now let’s look at food.

Food sovereignty is not just about food.

Rather it acknowledges food as the common ground for all peoples and identifies it as a starting point and guiding theme for broader change. Food sovereignty suggests that it is impossible to explore how food is produced, traded and consumed without questioning the whole fabric of global economics and society. This includes everything from resource-intensive industrial production of crops and livestock, to the emergence of technologies like genetic modification and nanotechnology, to the patenting of traditional knowledge, and the increasing corporate control of food production and trade.

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Food sovereignty is intrinsically about connection to land and connection to place. It recognises that those who maintain living traditions of closeness to the earth are best placed to make decisions and advise on how land should be used and how food can continue to be cultivated, traded and consumed in their communities and beyond.

Food producers are ready, able and willing to feed the world’s peoples. But the heritage and capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food are being threatened and undermined by neoliberalism and the global market economy. We need to reclaim the hope and power to preserve, recover and build on our food producing knowledge and capacity.

Food sovereignty is the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and the right to define our own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, process, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation.

Personally and professionally I think that the sustainable production of food, is something that

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people are drawn to, that they do because they believe in it. In a culture where food is corporate, and production and profit often, unfortunately, come before food safety and quality, we all suffer.

Wild, local, organic, and biodynamic foods are the way back from the brink of extinction, and critical to a sustainable world.

Lastly, let’s look at shelter - specifically in the context of sustainable, low-carbon communities.

Sustainable communities are characterized by easy access to transit, a wide variety of house types, and services and job sites very close at hand. Finegrain interconnected street networks ensure that all trips are as short as possible, disperse congestion and are compatible with walking, biking and transit.

Sustainable communities locate commercial services, frequent transit and schools within a fiveminute walk. People will walk if there is something to walk to. The most important walking destinations are the corner store and a transit stop. A minimum gross density of 10 dwelling units per acre is required for this to work.

Sustainable communities locate good jobs close to affordable homes. The trend toward ever larger commute distances for workers must be re-

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versed. “Good jobs close to home” is a fundamental requirement. The vast majority of new jobs are compatible with complete community districts.

Sustainable communities provide a diversity of housing types. Zoning laws have tended to segregate communities by income. Communities designed for only one income cannot be complete, and when repeated throughout the region, they add to transportation problems.

Sustainable communities invest in lighter, greener, cheaper and smarter infrastructure. Suburban homes have at least four times more infrastructure per dwelling unit than those in walkable neighbourhoods. Exaggerated municipal standards for roads and utilities cost too much to build and maintain, and they destroy watershed function.

Smarter, cheaper and greener strategies are required.

David Suzuki, the renowned scientist and writer, has vacationed with his family in the Okanagan since 1979. In a recent column he laments some of the changes he ’s seen: “Once, productive soil generated a cornucopia of good food. Now, much of that land has been converted to accommodate big houses and boutique vineyards often run by absentee owners. I doubt

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that any local politicians in 1979 would have opted for the kind of places their communities have become today. Yet this is happening all over the country, as people seize the short-term benefits of an economic shot-in-the-arm from opening new developments, filling in wetlands, diverting streams, and so on. In the process, the communities that attracted people in the first place are disappearing.

The problem is that agendas based solely on economics and politics are, by definition, shortterm. That is the very nature of these activities.

We have few mechanisms to define what people like about the communities they live in, what they hope will still flourish when their children grow up and start having children of their own.�

Sometimes it’s helpful to have others see what we may not be able to ourselves. Where our hope used to be, we now face doubt, decline and debt. We ’ve spent decades borrowing against the future. We consumed like there was no tomorrow. And there may in fact be a much reduced one for our children and grandchildren as a result.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the

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world. We are reliant on it for stability. When growth falters - as it has done recently - politicians panic, businesses struggle, people lose their jobs, and a spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

What ’s the alternative? A steady-state economy where resources are valued not wasted, where food is grown sustainably and goods are built to last. Where energy security is based on the use of renewable sources, and communities are valued as a country’s strongest hedge against social, economic and environmental instability. It operates at the human scale, and above all it recognizes nature’s limits.

It is possible to move a national economy to zero growth - without a crash - through less private investment, more public spending and by reducing the working week so more people are employed.

We have to create a more resilient society based on a clear understanding of the limits within which we must live, one in which the responsibilities and rewards are more evenly distributed. Our future depends on it.

We need the future in the same way that we need air, food, and water - other resources threatened by our habits of greed and indifference. Not

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just any future, but a future in which tomorrow is better than today. We need to know that our actions in the present will count toward something, will be meaningful. The future belongs to everyone, and anyone can access or use it, through the power of imagination.

The commons is anything that no one owns but everyone can access and use. The Internet is a commons, at least for now. So are the oceans and our atmosphere. The radio spectrum is a commons.

So are our streets, parks and water delivery systems. All of these things require intention and cooperation to maintain, lest we use them up. In other words, all the commons need people to care about them. They need cultivation.

So does the commons we call the future. We don’t cultivate the future with shovels or software, but through stories. The future is, in fact, just a collection of stories that we tell each other. The more and the better stories we tell - and the more people we share them with - the more we strengthen the commons of the future.

It’s time for us to take back the future from our old bad-habit selves, and give it new life.

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This essay was delivered in a public presentation in Kelowna BC on Thursday 4 August 2011.

Published by the Okanagan Institute, and copyright under Creative Commons.

The type used is Monotype Fournier.

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the Territories of Hope The Expectations and Opportunities for the Commons Something in our natures, starved in ordinary times, is fed by the opportunity, even under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected.

We need the future in the same way that we need air, food, and water - other resources threatened by our habits of greed and indifference. Not just any future, but a future in which tomorrow is better than today. We need to know that our actions in the present will count toward something, will be meaningful. The future belongs to everyone, and anyone can access or use it, through the power of imagination.

It’s time for us to take back the future from our old bad-habit selves, and give it new life.

Robert MacDonald The Okanagan Institute