Life's Economic Survival Protocol

Book: Life Rules. Ellen LaConte.

URL = http://www.ellenlaconte.com/life-rules-the-book/

Ellen discusses 9 aspects of “Life's /Eco/nomic Survival Protocol” that continuously puts life into upward spiral in spite of the geologic history of crises that life has faced. Her analysis is insightful and fascinating. (David Braden)

Summary

"Among the rules written into Life’s Economic Survival Protocol are local self-reliance, intercommunity and regional functional cooperation, non-carbon energy sourcing, resource conservation, sharing and recycling, and organically democratic methods of self-organization and governance. These rules have worked for Life for two billion years. We can make them work for us, too."

Review

From the publisher:

"Ellen LaConte’s most recent book, has been reviewed by theologian-economist John B. Cobb, Jr., best-selling author of For the Common Good, as the “one book you must read if you want to fully understand the crises that threaten our very existence.” In a similar vein, the influential human ecologist William R. Catton, author of Overshoot and Bottleneck, wrote of the book that “If there were someone with authority to require all candidates for high public office to read certain books in preparation for the responsibilities they aspire to undertake, Ellen LaConte’s Life Rules should be high on the list of urgently required reading.” By LaConte’s own reckoning it is her most significant work to date. Lloyd Wells, an influential community organizer and author of Recreating Democracy: Bringing New Life to American Communities, writes that “it may be one of the most significant books published in 2010.” High praise for the work of an author who is virtually unknown." (http://www.ellenlaconte.com/about-ellen/)

Excerpts

See: http://www.ellenlaconte.com/excerpts-from-life-rules/

Commentary

David Braden:

"Life is built up from individual interactions that produce the flows that constitute the system. Every living thing needs every thing it needs to survive within the range of its ability to interact with the system. It is that set of interactions, within each locality, that constitutes the habitat that we experience. Humans have expanded our 'ability to interact with the system' to include the entire planet. However, certain aspects of that expansion leave human systems vulnerable, such as the need for money to have that kind of range, the reliance on cheap fossil fuels to achieve that range, reliance on a market system that has no use for nearly half of the human population, and the loss of an understanding of the importance of local interactions (or the interactions in a hand full of soil).

Lest we forget, humans are also animals with a genetic make up. We are social animals who evolved in relatively small groups. We are capable of participating in large organizations but, beyond a certain size, organizational decision making becomes inefficient whether we use a top down hierarchy or a democratic process. Research on the genetic basis for the efficiency of small groups has been done by Dunbar, and others, resulting a concept called Dunbar's number. [1]

That research indicates that there is a limit to the number of people for whom we can feel empathy. Within a group that does not exceed that number, there is no need for a lot of rules because we are genetically disposed to work together for the common good. That number appears to be somewhere between 100 and 230 . . . the size of a neighborhood. It is also within this local sphere where we can come to understand our relationship to the plants and creatures that participate in the creation of our habitat . . . who do not have planetary range. It is my thought that, if we focus on building new bridges within the context of that 'locality', we begin to change the world from the bottom up.

For the purposes of the rules humans need at the neighborhood level I have proposed these three simple rules:

1. Everyone gets to make their own decisions,

2. What ever we do is open to all residents, and

3. We measure progress by the diversity of the people, plants and creatures participating."