The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (46 page)

This suggests one more wrench may be needed in our post-growth toolbox — a way to make elements of the new post-growth economy visible and accessible to the community at large. The following is a strategy that you personally may not have the means to fully realize. But you could work with others to pursue it, and it is an idea that could be taken up by existing community organizations (including Transition Initiatives, Common Security Clubs, or Community Action Agencies).
¹³

Why not rent a storefront and give the new economy a presence on Main Street? Here’s the rationale. As America adjusts to the New Normal of tight credit, chronically less-affordable energy, high unemployment rates, rising levels of homelessness, and steeply declining tax revenues strategies will be needed to help swelling ranks of low-income people adjust and adapt. National policies designed to ease credit, lower mortgage rates, or provide basic financial assistance (including extended unemployment benefits) may help over the short term, but over the longer term many needs will be better met locally by largely volunteer-driven non-profit organizations, co-ops, and hybrid public-private agencies and programs.

Many of these kinds of organizations already exist, but (like Transition Initiatives and Common Security Clubs) they are largely invisible. What’s required is a way for them to become persistently recognizable. What better way than to plant them together right in the middle of town?

Even the earliest towns had a center, which was usually occupied by an open plaza where people could gather informally, a market, a ceremonial building, and a civic building of some kind. Everyone knew where the center of town was, and it was there that the life of the community came to focus. In many modern industrial cities (particularly in the US), the downtown has withered. Shopping malls, government complexes, and mega-churches are distributed throughout the city and its suburbs, all connected by hundreds of miles of highways. Nevertheless, the center of town still has symbolic and historic meaning, and as cheap transport fuel becomes a thing of the past city centers may regain their former importance.

If the new economy is to have much chance of taking root, it has to be planted in an identifiable location. Imagine the transformative potential of a loosely coordinated national network of locally-based Community Economic Laboratories (CELs), each equipped to help citizens solve practical problems arising during the breakdown of the old growth-based, fossil-fueled economy and the evolution of its replacement.
¹⁴

The mission of a CEL would be to increase personal and community resilience by bringing together in one place the essential elements of a new local, resilient economy.

While for most citizens goods and services have traditionally been delivered by way of market relationships based on jobs and commercial interactions between individuals and for-profit businesses, even in good times some individuals occasionally (others chronically) require special assistance, which is usually provided by non-profit service agencies or government programs. In especially hard times, large numbers of individuals and families lose jobs and incomes, and therefore access to the goods and services that the market economy formerly provided them. At the same time, tax-starved governments are hard pressed to step in to make services available to rapidly expanding rolls of unemployed. At such a time, it could be helpful to explore new and innovative ways of fostering self-sufficiency through the coordination of a variety of cooperative, nonprofit, market-based, and government-led ventures that spring from, and are adapted to, unique local conditions.

The CEL would be a local multi-function hub consisting of a number of independent organizations and businesses dedicated to helping people impacted by hard times, and to providing the armature around which a new economy can be woven. It would offer a variety of services, as well as opportunities for self-improvement, learning, enterprise incubation, and community involvement. Some possible examples of participating organizations and businesses:

• A food co-op

• A community food center, including commercial food-processing, food-preserving, and food-storage facilities available at low cost (or on labor-barter basis) to small-scale local producers
¹⁵

• A community garden with individual beds available for seasonal rental, as well as communal beds growing produce for soup kitchens

• A health center offering free or inexpensive wellness classes in nutrition, cooking, and fitness

• A free (and/or barter) health clinic

• Counseling and mental health services

• A tool library, or an open-source customizable set of industrial machines
¹⁶

• A work center that connects people who have currently unused skills with needs in the community — work can be compensated monetarily or through barter

• A legal clinic

• A credit union offering low-interest or even no-interest loans (on the model of the JAK bank in Sweden)
¹⁷

• A recycling/re-use center that turns waste into resources of various kinds — including compost and scrap — and into re-manufactured or re-usable products

• A co-op incubator

• A local-currency headquarters and clearinghouse

• A local-transport enterprise incubator, possibly including car-share, ride-share, and bicycle co-ops as well as a public transit hub

• A shelter clearinghouse connecting available housing with people who need a roof — including rentals and opportunities for legal organized squatting in foreclosed properties, as well as various forms of space sharing

• A community education center offering free or low-cost classes in skills useful for getting by in the new economy — including gardening, health maintenance, making do with less, energy conservation, weather-stripping, etc.

Many communities already host one or more of these services, businesses, and organizations, but typically they are scattered throughout town. This is a disadvantage: individuals and families who have recently become jobless or homeless may be disoriented and less mobile, and therefore unable to access a variety of geographically dispersed opportunity centers. Commercial space in the downtown areas of many cities is already abundantly available due to the recession; if a CEL were able to obtain use of an iconic vacant building formerly housing a bank or department store, such an edifice would lend architectural validity to the efforts of community members to come together in providing for their neighbors.

Like a shopping mall, the CEL would be most successful if “anchored” by two or three substantial enterprises — such as a food co-op, community service organization, credit union, or transport co-op. One possible “anchor tenant” (or, in ecological terms, “pioneer species”) would be a Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm Incubator (SCUFI) program, designed to train aspiring commercial urban farmers, assist with startup financing, help secure land, and provide them with technical and business support.
¹⁸

Uniform national “branding” of CELs would be much less important than each community’s sense of ownership of its unique, successful co-laboratory. Nevertheless, a national network could help quickly disseminate best practices, success stories, challenges, and other relevant information.

The CEL idea is not entirely new, and there are already several existing projects that have at least some of the characteristics described above:

• Social Innovation Center in Toronto (
socialinnovation.ca
)

• Working Centre in Waterloo, Canada (
theworkingcentre.org/wscd/wscd_main.html
)

• Bucketworks in Milwaukee, WI (
bucketworks.org/about-bucketworks
)

• Springboard Innovation Centre in Torfaen, UK (
springboardinnovation.org.uk
)

• The Hive in Portland, OR (
leftbankproject.com/hive
)

• The Plant in Chicago (
plantchicago.com
)

• Citizen Space in San Francisco (
citizenspace.us
)

• ShareExchange Project in Santa Rosa, CA (
shareexchange.coop
)

The last of these is in my town and just opened; it already hosts a Made Local Marketplace, the Sonoma County Timebank (an alternative currency), the Green Bough Health Cooperative, and the Work With Lounge (an entrepreneurial co-working space and micro-enterprise business incubator).

What Might a Sustainable Society Look Like?

Are these strategies sufficient to smooth our way through the economic and environmental crises of the next few decades? Unfortunately, no: It’s going to be a bumpy ride in any case — though a lot bumpier if we do nothing. As I have emphasized already, much work needs to be done in terms of national and global economic and environmental policies (the kinds of responses discussed in Chapter 6); yet even if needed national and global monetary and energy reforms were to be enacted — and this would be no small accomplishment — we would still face decades of perilous environmental, economic, and social challenges.

Still, it’s useful to contemplate a best-case outcome. Assuming we do everything right, what could we achieve? How might the world look as a result?

What the facts require is pretty clear: The best-case scenario we come up with, if it is to be realistic, must fit several non-negotiable criteria. The economy of the future will necessarily be steady-state, not requiring constant growth. It will be based on the use of renewable resources harvested at a rate slower than that of natural replenishment; and on the use of nonrenewable resources at declining rates, with metals and minerals recycled and re-used wherever possible. Human population will have to achieve a level that can be supported by resources used this way, and that level is likely to be significantly lower than the current one.

But these criteria leave many details open to conjecture. What technologies could we develop and use under these conditions? Exactly what size of population would be sustainable? The two questions are related: the level of population that is sustainable will depend on what kind of technology we are able to develop and use. The supportable population size will also depend on how much we degrade soil, water, and climate
before
we achieve a condition of sustainability.

Some of the best recent writing on futurology is contained in John Michael Greer’s
The Ecotechnic Future
. Greer, ever the historian, manages to be both realistic and hopeful:

The generations that grow up in a world after industrialism will face many of the same kind of challenges that their ancestors did in the dark ages that followed other high civilizations. Some of those challenges must be confronted as they emerge. It may be possible, however, to counter or even forestall others by drawing on the resources of industrial civilization, to hand down valuable tools and insights to those who will need them. While Utopia is not an option, societies that are humane, cultured and sustainable are quite another matter. There have been plenty of them in the past; there can be many more in the future; and actions we can take today can help make that goal more accessible to the people of the ecotechnic age.
¹⁹