How To Thrive In the Next Economy

* Book: How To Thrive In the Next Economy. John Thackara. Thames & Hudson, 2015

URL = http://www.doorsofperception.com/thackarathrive/

Description

John Thackara:

"Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, I describe how communities the world over are creating a replacement, leave-things-better economy from the ground up.

Each chapter is about creative ways to tackle timeless needs that matter: restoring the land, sharing water, making homes, growing food, designing clothes, journeying, and caring for each other. I write of soil restorers and river keepers; seed savers and de-pavers; cloud commuters and e-bike couriers; care farmers; food system curators; fibershed stewards; money designers and more – from Bali to Brazil, as well as Delhi, London, and California.

Throughout the book I celebrate the power of small actions to transform the bigger picture – especially in the ways projects are connecting together as social and ecological systems: food commons, social farming, fibersheds, cycle commerce, and care cooperatives. These arrangements add up to a new kind of social infrastructure for the next economy: local money, mutual aid, platforms for sharing, Commoning, and Earth Law.

I conclude the book with a celebration of the ways artists in different cultures are opening our minds to different ways of looking at – and acting in – the world. Seen through this new lens, the health of living systems is the ultimate measure of wealth, and work is a natural way to thrive, not just survive.

Read together, these examples add up to a joyful new story about what an economy is actually for. In place of an obsession with stuff, money, and endless growth, the book describes social practices that do more with less, and cherish all-of-life, not just human life. Growth, in this new economy, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. Its core values are stewardship and health, in place of extraction and decay." (http://www.doorsofperception.com/thackarathrive/)

Review

"It is often assumed that if we tell another story about ourselves we will stop destroying ecosystems and start caring about each other. Story-based messaging, John Thackera once observed however, is not changing behaviour.

What we need is encounter and acts of engagement.

In How to Thrive in the Next Economy he shows how small organisations all over the world are creating a grassroots culture that sets out to cherish life rather than extract from it. These organisations and collaborative ventures are driven, not by an individualistic desire for power, but by collective necessity and ‘cluster under the umbrella of a social and solidarity economy’.

In the ‘fibresheds’ of California artisans and growers look to reverse the trends of the highly damaging global clothing business by growing indigo and cotton (for jeans) and raising their own livestock.

The book weaves a web of connections between an inspiring range of future-thinking responses to the problems of a world under severe stress, from the networked mobility system Mobiltoop in Belgium to the Ugly Indian street renovation in Bangalore. Many help restore the ecological and social relationships that have been fragmented by industrial development: ‘rewilding’ cities, cleaning rivers, creating ‘pollinator pathways’ for bees and meeting hubs for people.

As a collective pattern they tell a new story: how people in Britain and elsewhere are moving beyond me-only consumerism towards a community-minded share of the commons … that can include land, watersheds, biodiversity, common knowledge, software, skills or public buildings and spaces. No company or government created these common goods… we inherited them from previous generations and have a moral obligation to look after them for future generations.

The book runs through an A-Z of some of the current thinking about grassroots and community change. Framed by a set of our current environmental crises, the text revolves around 10 main chapters ranging from health care to transport to farming. But rigid and linear it is not: thinking in systems means looking at the life and our communal place in it in very different ways.

Thackera is a tireless traveller and goes into places with a sharp eye and a peerless ability to ‘join the dots’.

His global report is stacked full of examples and entry points into the kind of thinking that sparks turnaround action: salt-laden soils wrecked by cotton growing in Uzbekistan are restored by planting of liquorice; when concrete is poured over miles of grass and woodland in the US, a ‘depaving’ group breaks it up and creates tiny gardens in the spaces that open up; in Chicago, a former meat-packing plant transforms itself into an urban farm; as shoe leather factories in Ethiopia pour toxic waste into the rivers, a design group along the Ganges looks at how the industry might rework itself.

All these projects might appear small and some of them remain as ‘blue sky’ enterprises, yet Thackera is unabashed about their potential to change the hearts and minds of people. Current scientific thinking demands that we cite scores of data and ‘facts’ to prove an argument about climate change. A desire for romantic narratives and happy endings distracts us from engaging in the world with our senses. Thackera wisely avoids any kind of mechanistic or utopian thinking and goes for a quantum approach: looking at the cultural and ecological systems at a broader and more connected level." (http://grassrootsdirectory.org/2015/12/28/review-how-to-thrive-in-the-next-economy/)

Discussion

On the importance of positive stories

"“Since How To Thrive In the Next Economy was published in the autumn, my 29 conversations about the book have prompted all kinds of feedback. One question has cropped up repeatedly: In a world filled with melting ice caps, war, species extinctions, and economic peril, how can I possibly argue that the small-scale actions I write about can transform the bigger picture for the better?

My answer: It depends how you frame the picture.

Take, for example, COP21. For many people I met, the outcomes of the climate summit in Paris were grounds for anger: A reference to “environmentally and socially sound technologies”was stripped out; aviation and shipping were simply removed from the agenda; and, although a warming limit of 1.5°C degrees is mentioned as a desired destination, the actual outcomes in the text lead us on a 3°C of warming pathway.

What most worries many policy experts I met is that 1.5°C number; it opens the way, they say, for the the so-called ‘overshoot scenario’. This describes a moment a few years ahead when, as the impacts of climate change intensify, panicked governments will feel compelled to deploy geoengineering fixes and so-called negative emissions technologies. As explained by Fred Pearce in Yale e360, “the real game, many believe, is to unleash the forces of capitalism in the name of fighting climate change”.

Foxes mobilised to save the rabbit? Sure. Quite apart from their vast costs, and the fact that they are unlikely to work, post-overshoot techno-fixes would almost certainly entail land grabs, social injustice, and a massive loss of biodiversity – as is happening, right now, with biofuel production.

The thing is, COP21 is not the only game in town. Around the world, millions of grassroots projects tell a different story to business-as-usual – but they are scattered and, for the most part, unseen. In Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken estimates that there are a million such grassroots projects and rising – and their variety is dazzling: His appendix of project types, alone, is 100 pages long.

Some of these projects cluster, for the most part informally, in social solidarity movements such as Transition. When I started writing my book,Transition Towns had just just two groups; today there are more than 1,300 in 45 countries. And across the global south La Via Campesina, a coalition of 300 million small-scale farmers, is strengthening their agro-ecological approach to stewarding the land as well as defending their rights.

With their focus on social and ecological justice in everyday life, few of these social movements challenge mainstream political parties directly for power. Their impact is nonetheless political, but in a different way: As Transition founder Rob Hopkins puts it, “ultimately, you can get more done at the local level, and seeing real change happen rebuilds belief that it’s possible to shift power back.”

Belief in the possibility of change is a huge if intangible positive. So, too, is the proliferation of new social and economic models – from commoning, transition, and sharing, to local money, off-grid energy, and maker spaces. These are the infrastructure of the next economy – only they’re based on social energy, not concrete. For a taste of the scale and depth of what’s cooking check out the P2P Foundation website; hundreds of cases are also mapped on the Real Economy Lab website.

Technology plays an important if supporting role as a means for new social relationships to flourish. Using mobile devices, collaboration software and cooperation platforms, local groups don’t demand things like complementary currencies – they build them. Some new software also makes it easier to organise the governance of common goods, or manage trust in decentralised ways.

The most important technologies are more earthly, than virtual – those to do with the restoration of soils, watersheds and damaged land. The ClimateTECHwiki alone lists 260 promising techniques – from beach nourishment, t0 urban forestry.

But back to that first question: do these myriad stories add up to a viable alternative to the system that’s wrecking the place now? On their own, probably not. But for me, the most important unfolding transformation of all is the emergence, in many places at once, of a new understanding of our place in the world.” (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-13/are-positive-stories-enough)