Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
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About this ebook
The bestselling author of The End of Nature issues an impassioned call to arms for an economy that creates community and ennobles our lives
In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer synonymous with "better"—indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. McKibben puts forward a new way to think about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases, he says, need not be at odds with the things we truly value.
McKibben's animating idea is that we need to move beyond "growth" as the paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. He shows this concept blossoming around the world with striking results, from the burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those who worry about environmental threats, he offers a route out of the worst of those problems; for those who wonder if there isn't something more to life than buying, he provides the insight to think about one's life as an individual and as a member of a larger community.
McKibben offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. Deep Economy makes the compelling case that the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own.
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best sellers Falter, Deep Economy, and The End of Nature, which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the winner of the Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called “the alternate Nobel.” He lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org; his new project, organizing people over sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act.
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Reviews for Deep Economy
177 ratings13 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I really wanted to love & learn from this book, but I had to put it down because of the way the author talks about animals. There are so many instances in which he seems acutely aware of the ethical implications of animal agriculture - for example, mentioning the pleasure an animal had been feeling just hours before becoming his meal, yet pointedly declining to reflect on the human choice to put them there.
For someone obviously invested in exploring human rights & environmental ethics in farming, it felt pretty disingenuous for him to blast factory farms for keeping animals in cages & the inefficiency of the dairy industry, then continue to brag about eating animals as long as they suffered nearby. For anyone critical of animal ag, this might be a no go depending on your willpower to push through it. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a book of journalism, not political or economic analysis. It does a great job of bringing the reader's attention to the links between the environmental and moral limits to endless capitalist growth, and the essentially social or psychological impulse to reconstruct society on a smaller, more personal scale. But as none of the factors McKibben suggests we need to balance are conveniently measurable in dollars (pretty much the only universal measurement left), he's left with examples, stories, anecdotes. If they echo your experience, you'll probably accept his larger thesis; if they don't, you'll probably complain about the book's lack of rigor, as though that makes its points moot.
I'm already on board with these ideas, so for me it was a quick read, giving me more examples and variations of the kind of thinking needed to sustain civilization globally and locally at something approximating its current standards. Where I live, this is the stuff of everyday life and casual conversations. Reading the book just filled in some of the background I'd missed.
Worth noting: I was surprised as I read by how little the book was affected by the experience of the economic crises and political changes of the last five years. In a revised edition I'm sure McKibben would point to them as examples to support his thesis, but it's actually nice that the book as-is allows the reader to supply the updates from his or her own experience. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Deep Economy is an important book both because of what he gets right and what he doesn’t get right. McKibben isn’t a vegetarian, but vegetarians should read it anyway -- it shows the direction in which many people are moving in response to the growing environmental crisis. It leaves me alternately wanting to praise it because of his excellent summary of the overarching problems of our time, and blast him because of the things that he totally flubs.I disagree with much of what he says about food. He talks about eating locally which is great, but he just totally ignores eating low on the food chain, and eating unprocessed food. Processing of foods and eating high on the food chain (translation: animal foods) consumes a lot more energy than transportation. Importing rice from the Philippines (say) rather than from California might actually save energy, because irrigation-centered rice in California is so energy-intensive (and shipping rice by boat is not that bad). Another information tidbit: on average and per calories, the trip by the consumer to the store consumes slightly more energy than the transportation of the food from wherever to the store. (Pimentel, "Food, Energy, And Society.") And I am really annoyed that he wants to factory farm rabbit meat.So sorry, I can't give this a really good rating. He gets a lot of stuff right, including a lot of stuff that the animal rights crowd misses, but I can't agree with much of what he says.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a very important book that everyone should read. McKibben has many ideas for making this a better world. The chapter on eating locally led me to several other books.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5McKibbin's a great, earnest writer, and here he treads a narrow, winding path between ecological doom-and-gloom and societal hope; however, to maintain this tone, he doesn't put forth an excessively strong argument. It's great preaching to the choir, and maybe a good book for someone who's thought only peripherally about things like community and the locavore movement, etc. But it's not likely to win over any converts from the Other Side (whatever side that is).
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As a long time fellow traveler of communitarians and the author of a little known/read book on libraries and community, McKibben hit my sweet spot. I guess any book dedicated to Wendell Berry has me from hello.McKibben starts with familiar ground (Americans use up too much of the world’s resources / we are mining most resources) and adds some excellent perspective (pre-1970 houses were the size of today’s garages).He moves on to look at perpetual growth as a trailing indicator of happiness and a poor definition for success. He is not in some mystical world here, but looking at the economics of the matter. If you are hungry, more food keeps you alive. If you are full, more food shortens your life instead of prolonging it. Next he reports on his attempt to eat locally for a year. Those of us in areas that get snow know that this will be a challenge, though our grandparents though nothing of it. Almost all their food came from the surrounding farms, dairies and ranches. Economically, it makes a great deal of sense to support the people of your community by buying locally, since their purchases in turn support you. This means more than just McJobs at WalMart. The box stores are like strip miners and agribusiness – they leave everything poorer than they find it. If it makes sense for Wisconsin to import potatoes from Idaho, it won’t when the cost of transporting them rises. Add in the shared costs of pollution and exhausted energy supplies and local food makes good economic sense. In a chapter titled All for One, or One for All, McKibben looks at hyper-individuality. As recently, the though of walling oneself off from society was considered a sign of either divine spark or insanity. Now I’ve got mine is the motto of the Republican Party, gated communities abound and people don’t even know their neighbors. But this is not just kvetching – he has a plan for turning the tide. It involves again focusing and funding the local as much as the mega. It involves shopping as a member of a community, not as just an individual.In The wealth of communities, McKibben argues that communities are the real measure of wealth and gives examples of real projects that are operating in the sweet spot between too big and too small.Finally, in Durable future, he looks at the very real problem of global poverty and globalization. He does not see it even physically possible for China to become the US in terms of consumption. There just isn’t that much oil as a start. How can we build a future that will work? Progress, if defined as the American way of life, is not a long-term option. It is already too costly for many Americans just in price, not to mention the long-term cost. Again, he gives worldwide examples of people building a future that actually has a future.This is another book that has the power to change your life. If it doesn’t, I hope it at least widens your viewpoint.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"More is no longer better" is the theme of Bill McKibbens new book. It is not only clear that the earth cannot support our current level of consumption and carbon emissions but that more does not make us happy. McKibben suggests that a different economics--one more local in scale--would demand fewer resources, cause less ecological disruption, better weather coming shocks and allow us to find a better balance between individual and community. And, at the same time provide greater satisfaction. McKibben spends a year trying to eat locally (food from within 100 miles of his house in Vermont). It is distressing to see how difficult this is due to the breakdown of local farming infrastructure. (Nowhere in the state of Vermont can he find milled oats, for example.) However, the tide may be turning. He gives great examples of folks banding together on the community level and making a difference. This book provides lots ot think about--the failure of growth economics and what communities might be able to do about it. A highly recommended read.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Deep Economy, Bill McKibben triangulates a range of world problems of disparity of wealth and access among three common factors: capitalism/consumerism, the global economy, and global ecology. He argues that productions’ pursuit of efficiency has essentially crippled itself in the long term by being unsustainable. Furthermore, the requirement of extreme efficiency in order to be competitive in the global economy has widened the wealth disparity gap: large and successful corporations in developed nations have the capital, personnel, and image to continue to build their wealth and better their production; small businesses or developing nations have none of the above, and their chances of competing against more capable mega-corporations shrinks as the global economy gets ever larger.We currently know the sum difference between bottom-line production costs and ability to maximize profit as the ultimate measure of efficiency – the highest good of capitalism. But measuring ‘goodness’ of a system by only these two simply quantifiable values disregards the more qualitative, delicate values affected by the system. Quality of life for workers, long-term sustainability, and overall impact on the environment. So here is Bill’s ecological and sustainable proposal: “I’m not suggesting an abrupt break with the present, but a patient rebalancing of the scales. The project will not be fast, cheap, or easy. Fast, cheap, and easy is what we have at the moment; they are the cardinal virtues upon which our economy rests (and if they also happen to be the very adjectives you don’t want attached to your child, well, that should give you a little pause). The word we use to sum up these virtues is ‘efficiency,’ and on its altar we have sacrificed a good deal….But the time has come to throw some grit into the works. To make the economy less efficient, heretical as it sounds.”It is heresy to American capitalism, no doubt. But as we become more aware of the interconnectedness and ultimate damage American capitalism has done so far both environmentally and economically, such heresy could be a prophetic and necessary voice.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5McKibben has a gift for language and also researches his books well. Here he questions the logic and purpose of the growth economy and offers a superior set of ideals to seek instead. The book is in the tradition of Thoreau, but updated and more attuned to the pragmatic details of changing the course of our culture from an unsustainable path to one that is durable, authentic and centered on human well-being.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deep Economy reads as a response to two very influential economic works: Adam Smith's The Weath of Nations (alluded to in McKibben's subtitle: The Wealth of Communities) and Thomas Friedman's much more recent work, The World is Flat. McKibben argues that economic theory and political doctrine valuing growth above all has led us to debase the environment. Moreover, since increasing wealth provides diminishing returns, we are not even becoming happier through this destructive growth. In fact, people in developed countries (particularly America) are becoming less happy. McKibben's urges us to return to community values and local economies. Doing so, he says, is the only way we can regain happiness and avert environmental disaster. Actually, he presents the latter as all but inevitable and asserts that we will need to rediscover local economies because working together in communities will be the only way we will be able to survive the effects of global warming and environmental degradation.The most interesting thing about this book for me was the conscious dialogue McKibben had with the field of economics. He is very consciously responding to the religion of economics that he traces back to Adam Smith. Importantly, his argument is not with Smith's book itself. He notes that Smith believed that community structures would enable markets to function properly. Smith assumed, for example, that people would know the merchants selling them their goods, and this would prevent dishonest behavior and prevent consumers from making uninformed choices. Today, however, as McKibben argues, markets have gotten so big that they no longer work in our best interests. His most compelling arguments probably center on food. He demonstrates that the food we eat increasingly travels immense distances to reach us, and he argues that this is the result of the economic doctrine: it is less expensive to have one farmer manage a huge monoculture crop than to have many small farmers. The tragedy is that those many small farmers would grow crops in a more environmentally sustainable manner, they would grow a greater variety of food (thus supporting the varied tastes of local consumers), and small farms would actually grow more food per acre.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have been making personal lifestyle changes for years now. I've replaced toxic home products with non-toxic products, and now I'm replacing those products with handmade cleaning and beauty mixtures I make from simple ingredients. I've reduced my family's CO2 output down to just 10% of what the average American household emits. I live in a small apartment that has a relatively small land and utility impact. Most of my furniture and at least half of my clothing are used. I eat just about as locally as I can. I don't live perfectly sustainably, but I'm doing a pretty good job.And there came a point a few months ago, where I realized that all of those personal changes were great, but not enough. I needed to do more. Because as I make these changes, I am confronted daily by hundreds of people around me who are not making those changes. And as I make these changes, our community, our city, our state, our country and the world as a whole still has a lot of work to do.So I came to read Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben. And I loved it. It was a book that exposed some of the real risks of climate change and resource depletion. And then -gasp- it began to delve into possible solutions. It hinted at an idea I'd been thinking about: that sustainable living is not just about eating locally, it's about living locally.It is a wonderful gateway into the world of a "green", socially responsible economy. From here, I have gone on to learn much more....
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ideas on a new way to look at our economy. Measuring in human satisfaction and fulfillment instead of measures like GNP growth. How community and ecology interact with economics. Why localization of the things we buy and eat and the energy we use makes sense for the future. How these things might impact global warming and other issues harming our planet and ways of life. Why it makes sense to move away from the extreme individualization of American culture to something more community focused.Extremely well written, researched, and thought out thesis on where the world should be moving to save it's future. Individualized to what each of us can do to make our lives better while helping the planet.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm not at all interested in economics, so some parts of this book were over my head, but most of it was accessible. McKibben has some great ideas that need further exploration.