A Few Moments Deep in Thought

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Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007, $25) by Bill McKibben. To purchase this book, visit our online book store.

At the beginning of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, the Bank comes to tell a sharecropper to get off the Bank's land because the sharecropper can't get a high enough crop yield. The Bank reasons that it can get more and better crops with bigger, better machines and mechanized farms and tells the sharecropper he must leave the land on which he grew up and break that connection with his home. "Funny thing how it is," the sharecropper concludes. "If a man owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it, that property is him, and some way he's bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn't successful he's big with his property. That is so."

That same disconnect between the concepts of more and better that Steinbeck so aptly captured in 1939 still exists today. And not only does it still exist, it's the driving force behind virtually all of the environmental and social problems we face, reasons Bill McKibben in his recent release, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

A stimulating philosophical approach to the global problems on the table—climate change, poverty, loss of communities, mental health—McKibben's book centers on the idea that these problems all stem from an out-of-control quest for more in order to make our lives, our cities, our bank accounts, better. But "more" for some people inevitably results in less for an even larger segment of the population, like the small family farm that's driven to bankruptcy by government-subsidized agribusiness or, to use another of McKibben's even more psychological examples, the mere fact that, despite a tripling of the per capita gross domestic product since 1950, polls show that the number of Americans who consider themselves "very happy" is steadily dropping. And, he points out, this unencumbered growth isn't just making us unhappy; the planet and its rapidly dwindling resources can't sustain it

But Deep Economy is not just a rant against rampant consumerism. McKibben is quick to point out that there's inherent value in seeking less. People who've shunned big box retailers with their cheap prices in favor of local retailers are discovering a domino effect: People support local businesses, businesses have more money to pay in taxes, roads improve, schools improve—quality of life in a town improves. One of McKibben's most eye-opening examples is Cuba, an island isolated, literally, by the ocean and by government trade sanctions. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba found itself without allies and without trade partners, citizens had to find a way to feed themselves. The result is what McKibben calls "the world's largest working market of semisustainable agriculture," relying not on imported food from the far corners of the globe but on small private farms and thousands of urban gardens (given the inability to import synthetic, fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides, many also employ organic growing methods). Cuba can't seek more, and they've created an entire food system on less and one designed to feed the masses, not line the pockets of huge businesses.

McKibben's underlying point throughout this book is that we don't necessarily need to sacrifice "more and better" while seeking "less"; we just get "more and better" of a different sort—sense of community, happiness, climate stability. We live in a culture where stuff defines our sense of place among our peers, and while many of the solutions he proposes to what he calls our "ecological peril and psychological malaise" require serious shifts away from that current thinking, those solutions exist all the same. They just need more attention.

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