Domesday survey to avert doomsday

I've just spent a sublime half hour in Tewkesbury Abbey for choral evensong. There were another four people enjoying the transcendently beautiful singing, from the men's voices of the Schola Cantorum, who outnumbered us by about two to one. This tradition of singing evening prayers has been going on in our cathedrals for around a thousand years, kept alive by the dedication of those who value the ethereal rather than the financial. Once might say the same about our Gloucestershire apple varieties and old spot pigs. In these days of crisis and rapid change I find these traditions deeply comforting.

The Abbey building dates back to 1121, before the Medieval architects discovered the flying buttress, or whatever else it was that allowed them to build enormous height without the support of hefty pillars. Its style, therefore, is sold, stocky and reassuring. It was built just thirty-five years after the Domesday Book was first published.

The domesday survey was compiled by William the Conquerer so that he could assess the exact value of the land he had just invaded. This was to be his source of power and wealth so he needed to know, virtually down to the last chicken, exactly how much he had to bribe the barons with and to extort taxes from. I doubt if there has been such a thorough survey of our natural resources since that time.

The name 'domesday book' did not come into usage until the late 12th century and I wonder whether it was a statement on the devastating effect on the lives of the English people caused by the shift from the essentially egalitarian Saxon farming system--based on strip farming and common rights to land use--to the fedual system. Under feudalism the king owned all land, which he could give to barons who would then live without having to work. Their tenants owed them both farmwork and war-work.

1066 is remembered as an important date because of the battles that were fought in that year. The fundamental shift in economic structure and power is rarely taught in schools. Yet it was at this time that the focus of the economy changed to be about the financial rather than subsistence value of land. As we move towards an economy that is more self-sufficient in food we need to have similarly detailed knowledge of the land that is available to us and what purposes it could serve in terms of grazing land, arable land, forestry and so on. The land that we discover should be once again a common treasury for the people of Britain to feed themselves from. It is about time we reversed nearly a thousand years of feudal servitude. Tweet

Rents and tears

I recently had the pleasure of sharing a platform with David Boyle of the New Economics Foundation, and we will be together again on Thursday. The focus of interest for both of us, and for those who invite us to speak, is the strange death of the real economy in the UK and the need to rebuild and revive our local economies.

David edits NEF's newsletter radical economics and has an article in the most recent issue called 'The Unbearably Empty Economy'. He highlights the hollowing out of the British economy so that businesses are 'little more than packaging for computer programmes, call centres and contract staff, while the corporations have divested themselves of most of their skills and activities except financial services'. He also asked the question: 'When was the last time you were in a shop where the person serving you knew more about the product that you did yourself?'

His concern was the loss of meaning in the economy but the more serious aspect is the loss of ownership and control. The economy is now being driven by a very small number of very large investors simpy as a mechanism to extract maximum wealth for them. This is the real 'unbearable lightness' at the heart of 21st century capitalism. The classical economists would have despised this from of economy, since they recognised the rentier class as parasites who obstructed useful economic activity. But now, whether by gambling on the stock-market or watching our house prices rise, we are all being encouraged to ape the rentier mentality rather than engaging in useful productive activity.

The latest wheeze of the late-capitalist wizards is the private equity company which profits by investing borrowed money. Public listed companies, those whose stock is sold on stock markets, are subject to some degree of regulation and auditing. Life is easier for the footloose private equity company, usually headed up by a dashing young Turk, who can persuade a bank to lend him a laughable sum of money which he uses to buy out a public company. He can then sell the assets of the company, or rent them back to the main business, in the case of shops, for example. The cash thus realised is used to pay off the loan, leaving the private equity company owning the real business.

Recently bastions of our economy such as the AA (formerly a mutual), Debenhams and NCP have been hollowed out in this way. Now the private equity players are aiming at Sainsburys, an attractive target because of its large land bank, and possibly British Airways. Because such buyouts are supported by borrowing rather than capital investment there are also huge tax advantages involved in acquiring assets in this way.

This is just the most recent form of asset-stripping, sucking money out of the real economy. We need to respond urgently and our response needs to be in the form of bringing about mutual or community ownership. This is particularly important in the case of land, which has become a target of speculation recently and has doubled in value over the past year. We need to work to build up a network of Community Land Trusts, and on the production side to establish and maintain our own businesses as co-operatives, and use our consumer power to support the co-operatives that others work for.

Tweet

Habitat and yoghurt culture

In the ethereal realms of academic discussion the buzzphrase of the moment is ‘ecological modernisation’. This phrase relates to the idea that, now that we have won the argument that the ecological crisis is real, there is a struggle going on about how to respond to it. This struggle boils down to a choice between business-as-usual with a few green tweaks, or a wholesale reorganization of society and economy. The question being asked is whether it is possible to have a sustainable world without fundamental social and economic change.

In the field of habitat the ecological modernizers would like to expropriate and commodify the learning that has been developed in low-impact communities, wipe it clean of its radical overtones, and make it profitable business. They are seeking to divorce the technological wisdom from the social wisdom that gave it birth. They are ignoring the lessons of holism that are the most important lessons of the sustainable vision. Knowledge based on practical experience cannot be reduced to information to be written into technical manuals.

Much of the knowledge about how sustainable communities might look has been garnered within the Ecovillages network, co-ordinated by Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn Foundation. He recently published a book sharing some of this experience. The communities he studied are found in rich and poor societies and offer an experience of creative living. He likes to think of them as ‘yoghurt culture . . . small, dense and rich concentrations of activity whose aim is to transform the nature of that which surrounds them’.

Most of the ecovillages are success stories, but many ‘collapse’ because of the difficulty of building new relationships and social structures. It is vital that we do not see these shorter-lived projects as ‘failures’. The learning and positive experiences generated by experimental living are not lost when the people move on and the structures decay. Learning to live experimentally requires learning to accept that the natural life-span of some of these ventures may be short.

Is it possible to build sustainable communities without asking questions about ownership, equality and hierarchy? In my view, not only can we not ‘solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’; we also cannot save the planet without asking questions about who owns it. The message of ecovillages the world over is that these issues are intrinsically linked to the building, physically and metaphorically, of a sustainable future. Tweet