[THS] Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25332.htm

The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely,
and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors

Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate, and made us the first
people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors -- that has to change.

By Bill McKibben

April 27, 2010 "AlterNet" - - Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than
any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks
the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome
ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will
become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe
or bicycle or computer. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich,
and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no
practical need of our neighbors.

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could
have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been
sad, you wouldn't have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came
before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap
oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand
miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of
what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We've evolved a
neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family
and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close
friends.

I've written extensively, in a book called Deep Economy, about the psychological
implications of our hyperindividualism. In short, we're less happy than we used to be,
and no wonder -- we are, after all, highly evolved social animals. There aren't
enough iPods on earth to compensate for those missing friendships. But I'm
determined to be relentlessly practical -- to talk about surviving, not thriving. And so
it heartens me that around the world people are starting to purposefully rebuild
communities as functioning economic entities, in the hope that they'll be able to
buffer some of the effects of peak oil and climate change.

The Transition Town movement began in England and has spread to North America
and Asia; in one city after another, people are building barter networks, expanding
community gardens. And they've paid equal, or even greater, attention to suburbia;
in the developed world, after all, that's where most people live. Though our sprawl is
designed for the car, the sunk costs of those tens of millions of houses mean they're
not going to disappear just because the price of gas rises. They'll have to change
instead. "Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and
social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land
ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering
adaptation," writes Jeff Vail, a widely read economic theorist who envisions "a
Resilient Suburbia."

In fact, quite sober economists have begun to insist that even in our seemingly
globalized world, our economies are actually far more local than we realize. Despite
the "pervasive image of a single U.S. economy," the economists William Barnes and
Larry Ledeber write, "local economies -- primarily metropolitan-centered and strongly
linked -- are the real economies in the United States." They build, with rich statistical
backing, on the original insights of thinkers like Jane Jacobs, who always insisted that
the city was the fundamental building block of our economic life. These "Local
Economic Regions" comprise the web of transportation and communication links, the
chain of educational institutions in a region, and the web of emotional ties. (My
Vermont neighbors may not care much how many gold medals the United States
captured at the Olympics, but they are deeply involved with how many runs the Red
Sox scored last night.)

Those local economies were originally shaped by geography -- a port, a river, a low
place in the mountains where you could build a canal. For a while those assets
seemed less important; with endless cheap energy, you could always put something
on a truck or a plane. But the cities built on those early patterns persisted; they were
a sunk cost, too. No one was going to move Buffalo, with its museums and
universities and square miles of housing stock, just because the highway had
bypassed the Erie Canal. (And now some of those original assets may be returning to
prominence. The Erie Canal, for instance, has seen a marked upswing in business as
the price of oil rises, because a gallon of diesel pulls a ton of cargo 59 miles by truck,
but 514 miles in a barge.) Shanghai is 7,371 miles from New York. It's true that
Chinese workers cost you a dollar an hour, but at some point the math shifts.

Even David Ricardo, the nineteenth-century economist who helped kick off
globalization with his theory of comparative advantage, never quite imagined the Flat
Earth we've lately celebrated.

It was true, he said, that since Britain could make cloth more cheaply, and Portugal
wine, each country should specialize. He believed, however, that capital would stay at
home, due to "the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of
his birth and connexions and entrust himself, with all his habits fixed, to a strange
government and new laws. These feelings, which I should be sorry to see weakened,
induce most men of property to be satisfied with a low rate of profit in their own
country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in
foreign nations."

David Ricardo, meet Woody Tasch. A New Mexico-based venture capitalist and the
founder of the Slow Money movement, Tasch focuses on finding funds to help local
businesses grow a little larger. Not the kind of money that's looking for a 20 percent
annual gain; when that happens, everything but return gets pushed aside. What
Tasch has in mind is a consistent, sound, 3 or 4 percent return, which at the same
time benefits the community where both the investor and the business live.

"These kinds of local businesses are by definition going to be lower risk, because
they're embedded in their communities, they're cooperating with each other," he
says. They can use those networks to grow, but only up to a certain point -- and you
only want to grow to a point. Ben and Jerry's was great when it was a Burlington ice
cream shop, and pretty neat when it was a regional brand -- but now it's owned by
Unilever. What if your newspaper wasn't owned by some corporate overlord looking
for a 20 percent return? What if a small annual profit was enough? Maybe it would
still be covering the city council and sending a reporter on the road with the baseball
team.

But in our world, it's actually harder than you'd think to stay small. To understand
why, visit the Farmers Diner, one of my favorite restaurants but also a place that
illustrates just how hard it can be to find the sweet spot. How local is the Farmers
Diner? The first thing you see when you walk in the door of their outlet in the
Vermont town of Quechee is a jukebox, glinting like any diner jukebox. Some Willie
Nelson, some John Cougar Mellencamp. But half the albums are by Vermonters.
Phish, sure. But it's Grace Potter and the Nocturnals who get the most play. And
they're just the start. You'll find the Starline Rhythm Boys (singing "The Tavern
Parking Lot") and Banjo Dan and the Mid-Nite Plowboys ("The Cider Song"). And
Patti Casey, of course. Never heard of Patti Casey? Your loss, but that's the point. In
an economy where music comes from L.A. or Nashville, she's from here.

The menu, at first glance, looks like any diner menu. Hash and eggs. Liver and
onions. Bacon cheeseburger. Pancakes. At diner prices: $5 for a grilled cheese, home
fries for $1.75. But look a little closer: almost every item comes with a modest
biography. The blue cheese comes from Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro. The yogurt
is from Butterworks Farm up in Westfield, which also supplies wheat flour for the
pancakes. In an economy where diner food rolls up on an eighteen-wheeler from the
factory farms of the South and Midwest, your Farmers Diner patty melt is like the
music on the jukebox: it comes from here.

And it comes with an attitude. One page of the menu is given over to the Kentucky
farmer and writer Wendell Berry's magnificent poem "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer
Liberation Front": "So, friends, every day do something / that won't compute...."
Another is taken up by Thomas Jefferson's 1803 letter calling for a conversion of the
nation's "charitable" institutions into "schools of agriculture" so our citizens may
"increase the productions of the nation instead of consuming them." This may be the
only diner in the world that comes with a mission statement: "to increase the
economic vitality of local agrarian communities." The bumper sticker above the
counter says it even more plainly: "Think Globally -- Act Neighborly."

But it also comes with a problem. In the words of the owner, Tod Murphy, "How do
you create a company that will take food off the farmer's hands in the easiest way for
him, and set it in front of the customers in the easiest way for them, and do it at a
price point everyone can live with?" Tailing him for a day as he made the rounds of
his suppliers shows both the promise and the difficulty of the idea. You could start
the morning in Strafford, say, at Rock Bottom Farm, where Earl Ransom's cows were
producing organic milk and cream on the land where he was born. "I had to educate
people that cream isn't necessarily white," Murphy recalled. "When the cows went
out to pasture in the spring, the half-and-half changed color noticeably, and the
waitresses were afraid people would freak."

It doesn't always go so easily, though. Consider, for instance, the pig. When the first
Farmers Diner opened in Barre, it needed bacon -- you can't have a diner without
bacon. The problem was that no one was producing pork commercially in Vermont.
Fifty years ago, sure, every farm had a few hogs growing fat on leftover milk from
the dairy herd. But as agriculture became a commodity business -- as dairy
producers concentrated on cows, and pork producers on pigs -- that changed.
Vermont dairies became fewer in number and much, much bigger; in other parts of
the nation the same thing happened with hogs.

According to Brian Halweil in his book Eat Here, there's a hog farm in Utah with 1.5
million pigs. That's absurd -- the pigs produce more solid waste each day than the
entire city of Los Angeles. But it's also cheap -- so cheap that it sets the psychological
price for a pound of bacon pretty low. So when Murphy wanted to buy pigs for his
bacon and sausage, he approached a few farmers to see whether they were
interested. One was Maple Wind Farm, a breeder in Huntington raising fifty hogs a
year, mostly to sell at farmers' markets. They're fed on grass and organic grains --
the pork tastes absolutely incredible -- and they fetch good money. "We get $7.50 a
pound for bacon at the farmers' market, and $8.50 a pound for pork chops," says
Beth Whiting, who runs the farm with her husband, Bruce Hennessey. So when
Murphy asked them if they could raise him some pigs at eighty-nine cents a pound,
"we had to bury our laughter."

And yet eighty-nine cents a pound is more than the upscale national pork producer
Niman Ranch pays its contract pig farmers. In essence, it's a Goldilocks problem:
somehow Murphy has to find just the right size. What his operation really requires is
not huge commodity producers or small, incredibly wonderful gourmet farms. "What
I need are 1950s-size farms," he says. Not a million hogs, but not fifty, either --
maybe three or four hundred. Not organic operations necessarily, just family farms.
Precisely, in other words, the kinds of farms that have almost all gone out of business
in recent decades.

Murphy can still find vegetable growers to fit his scale, for example, someone to plant
the five acres of cucumbers he needs for his pickles. But to help rebuild the supply of
meat and chicken farmers, he's launching a nonprofit foundation. Named for a
character in one of Wendell Berry's novels, the Jack Beecham Foundation will help
growers with business plans and marketing strategies. Woody Tasch has been
helping.

All this to make a smoked-turkey club. Or, to read from today's specials menu, some
poached Vermont eggs with Cabot cheddar cream sauce. Or some maple butternut
squash. Or some Cortland apple cobbler topped with local granola, and a scoop of
that Strafford ice cream. With some Grace Potter wailing from the jukebox. For
change back from a ten-dollar bill, it doesn't get much sweeter than this. It should
work. It should spread. If the eaarth is going to support restaurants, they'll need to
look like the Farmers Diner.

Across the country communities have begun to transform themselves. They
encounter the same kinds of problems that trip up Murphy, but they find solutions,
too. Often a farmers' market is the catalyst -- not just because people find that they
like local produce, but because they actually meet each other again. This is not
sentiment talking; this is data. A team of sociologists recently followed shoppers
around supermarkets and then farmers' markets. You know the drill at the
Stop'n'Shop: you come in the automatic door, fall into a light fluorescent trance, visit
the stations of the cross around the perimeter of the store, exit after a discussion of
credit or debit, paper or plastic. But that's not what happens at farmers' markets. On
average, the sociologists found, people were having ten times as many conversations
per visit. They were starting to rebuild the withered network that we call a
community. So it shouldn't surprise us that farmers' markets are the fastest-growing
part of our food economy; they are simply the way that humans have always
shopped, acquiring gossip and good cheer along with calories.

Excerpted from the book EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill
McKibben. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights
reserved. Copyright (c) 2010 by Bill McKibben.

Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, an international
climate campaign.