The Shop That Ben Built

It brought me great hope that the most popular house ever built on TV's Grand Designs programme was Ben Law's woodland home. This seems to me the epitome of bioregional living: borrowing to meet your needs from thelocal natural environment. While searching for images to cheer up my book I found out that he has also built a beautiful shop call Lodsworth Larder. Like the growth in farmers' markets, the popularity of this shop, which I hope is stocked with local produce, indicates that the self-reliant communities built on strong local identities that a bioregional economy would entail are appealing, even to those who find out about them from the internet.

Amongst greens nothing raises tempers more than discussions about consumption, which are often held defensively and with large amounts of guilt flying about. I think this is because consumption is related to our identity, and we make our identities in relationship with others. We might think of the human need for identity within community as one of needing to ‘know your place’. In modern human communities this has come to mean knowing your place within a hierarchy, in a system based on power, a power you generally express through the acquisition of money and its use in a process of competitive consumption.

In a bioregional economy identity would also be about knowing your place, but in the real sense of experiencing your local environment through your consumption of local foods and products made from natural materials. In such an economy we would all need to have a role in production, and so we would all come to understand at least one aspect of the natural world very intimately. Our relationships with each other would be mediated through our varying skills and knowledge of the resources and species we jointly depend on for our livelihoods.

The bioregional economy is primarily a local economy, and so our identities would be based more strongly on local products and environments and less on the disconnected global identities which are costly in energy and resources, and also seem to bring little true satisfaction. In redefining identity as relational I believe we could substitute strong and pro-ecological identities for the destructive identities of the global shopping-mall. Instead of going shopping we might aspire to what David Abram describes as ‘the respectful, mutual relations that must be practiced in relation to other animals, plants, and the land itself, in order to ensure one’s own health and to preserve the well-being of the human community.’ (The Spell of the Sensous, p. 121)
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A New Ethic of Consumption

Let's start with a cliche: you are what you eat. I've been interested by the growing number of people who have food allergies and digestive problems. Of course some of this results from stress, and no doubt post-modern, identity-related orthorexia has something to answer for too, but would it be too fanciful to suggest that we have treated our environment badly and it is now biting back?

Eating is the most direct way in which we come into relationship with our environment by literally consuming bits of it. In this act we cannot deny our dependence on the natural world around us. Some of my more consciously spiritual friends remember this by giving thanks to whatever they believe in rather than thoughtlessly tucking in.

There are other thoughtless ways in which we can consume the environment. I recently spent a delightful weekend in the Peak District, which was somewhat spoiled by a band of sweaty fell-runners. I'm sure that many of these guys, for such they were, love mother nature as much as I do, but the fact that they were delivered to one side of the peak in question in a minibus and then collected by the same bus 30 minutes later on the other side suggested a significant limitation of their commitment to the environment they were consuming.

So I would like to join the call for a rethinking of our consumption of nature, whether in food or leisure. More than a source of internal combustion, food is a gift, the most basic way in which we can acknowledge our dependence on nature in our daily lives. A chance for a meditation of re-embedding. At a seminar I attended in Belfast recently Peter Doran referred to this kind of practice as 'askesis', a sort of lived philsophy. A way we can inhabit our bodies as part of our environment and distance ourselves from our minds and the destructive discourses of consumption they have bought into.

I'd like to think that the rapid growth of interest in edible environments and edible estates is an indication that such a process is already underway. It seems to me it offers hope of 'the great re-embedding' that is the route to a healthier relationship with our planet. Tweet

From ethical to bioregional consumption . . . and production

As we move towards a world of less trade we need to be thinking about how we will get hold of the things we really need. We can start making the adjustment now in our own consumption. This has two big advantages. First, it means that when the changes come - and they may be sudden and rapid - we will already be mentally prepared. Secondly, we can support the development of the markets offering the kind of goods we will be buying in the future, thus easing the transition.

Here are a few examples. I have a beautiful mug that I bought at a Christmas fayre. The local potter had just dug a hole near the college where she teaches and burrowed out some clay. She had spent a long time refining it and then turned it into a mug. This is an exceptional mug because she usually buys in clay from Staffordshire. She was as delighted as I am to see the exact colour of pottery made from Stroud clay. It is also unique since she only made one.

I also have a rush hat made by Sheila Wynter. Sheila goes every year in the right season with her son to the river Avon just above Tewkesbury. Here they dabble in the mud and cut the rushes. She brings them home and dries them in her workshop before weaving the hats. They have a curious rustic look which my daughter points out is just the look of the hat worn by the artist in the famous Van Gogh portrait.

For me these items exemplify everything about bioregional consumption. Obviously the first and most important factor is that they are made locally with local inputs. But there is the depth of relationship between me and the person who made the item that fills me with delight every time I have a cup of coffee or go out wearing my hat. Of course for me they are also object lessons which people I meet - unfortunately for them - cannot escape.

Perhaps most importantly of all, they are expensive. In the global economy you seek the lowest price. In the bioregional economy the adman's slogan 'reassuringly expensive' may be a better guide. My rush hat cost £24. Given the amount of work for Sheila in cutting the rushes, preparing them, and weaving the hat this is an absurdly small amount of money. But if it had been made by a Chinese slave it would have cost a fifth of this price. So when you consume bioregionally you will have much less stuff, but it will be of vastly better quality.

It's not just about consumption; it's also about production. I came to know Sheila because I am learning basket-making from her. If you are the sort of person who bemoans the fact that there is so little available to buy from local producers you can start by choosing to buy what there is and paying a just price. But the next step is to start making something yourself - the guidelines are that it should be something that is genuinely needed in the community and that you can find the materials locally.

And remember the other hint from Robinson Crusoe: use what the global economy has already invested energy in to the maximum before you resort to buying new of any sort. So patching and mending and buying from charity shops is a good solution for stuff your local economy doesn't provide yet. Why not go for showy, artistic patches: make a political statement with your darning! Tweet

Business as battlefield

I had an unexpected treat on Friday. I was at a seminar in Cardiff on Sustainable Production and Consumption. If you've read any of my posts on bioregional economics you'll guess that I was delighted to find out that such a concept exists at the highest levels of government. Slightly more depressing is the realisation that it was invented at Rio in 1992--a full 15 years ago and yet very little has been done.

There was a stirring presentation by a lady from DEFRA who explained everything that is being done to 'green business'. The consumption end is more of a problem, as she rightly admitted, since buying less stuff is not good for business. This prompted me to question how attempts to move towards greener methods of production can be consistent with an economic system that has as its central tenets growth and free trade. She gamely took this on the chin and later invited me to join the UNEP group exploring whether the economic system itself is the problem. I await a phone call . . .

I have slipped into a generalised whinge: back to the unexpected treat. This was a presentation from Ken Peattie, boss of Cardiff University's sustainable business wing, known as BRASS (most of its staff don't seem to know why). His presentation consisted of a demolition of the central business metaphor of the battlefield. This reminded me of a book I edited years ago that was a history of the post-war development of management consultancy. It made a similar point that demobbed officers formed the majority of the first entrants into this dubious profession.

The organisation of business in the post-war world was left in the hands of people whose previous experience of organisation and management was in the extreme culture of the military. Perhaps it is not surprising, once we realise this, that the spread of the managerialist culture that management consultancy bring with it has led to the launching of a long sequence of syntactically impossible wars against unsuspecting nouns such as terror, drugs and cancer. Equally unsurprising that these wars have been a disaster for all except those who produce and sell the relevant weaponry.

Professor Peattie developed his theme by pointing out the consequences for the environment of the business battle. More and more areas of our planet are coming to resemble the classic images of battlefields. Social impacts ranging from stress-related disease to continuing poverty in the poorer countries of the world can be belittled as 'collateral damage'. Those who fail to thrive in this aggressive, militaristic economy can be dismissed as wimps and cowards.

The increasingly unethical nature of modern business is justified, within the economy-as-war metaphor, under the slogan 'All is fair in love and war'. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that business is regarded with contempt by many of our most creative people, with only those with a shortage of morals or imagination being attracted to becoming businessmen.

In the summer I attended a family wedding--always a good setting for undercover social research. The person to my right was a policeman, which did not give me much encouragement and we didn't speak much. To my right I had a spivvy looking chap who introduced himself as an entrepreneur, which he qualified by saying that this meant he was a bastard. Should this defensiveness be seen as a sign of hope? Are entrepreneurs becoming as ashamed as smokers and drivers and people who fly to Amsterdam for the weekend? And he didn't even know I was a green economist.

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Men and Sheds

This is the name of a book I'm giving my brother-in-law for Christmas. I'm very proud of my brother-in-law, whose name is Nick. He not only won a coveted Ivor Novello award but was also so cool that, instead of attending the presentation, he stayed at home to put up his shed. Also grateful since he has sorted me out for a website and also persuaded me to start this blog having heard enough of my moaning about not selling enough of my books and having my ideas ignored.

So what is it with men and sheds? I can't claim to understand men, never having been one, or at least not in any lifetime I can remember. My guess is that it is something to do with the way women tend to dominate the domestic space. Presumably sheds give men a space where they can be themselves. Homes, these days, have become spaces for competitive domestic consumption, the realm of the domestic goddess. I can see that a shed is a place where you can be relaxed and messy, and perhaps just yourself.

The fetishisation of home furnishing has reached such a pitch that people no longer invite friends into their homes for the shame of what they might find there—last year’s style of sofa would be social death. Fashion was always capitalism’s favourite child, but it has now been allowed to run around all areas of our lives, throwing tantrums if we dare to express our individuality rather than buying the latest designer label. The brand has become an expression of who we are, and those who can only afford the cheaper brands are themselves branded as losers. To avoid this shame a friend insists on pronouncing Lidl as lidèle, imbuing the pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap supermarket with a contintental air that saves his blushes.

What about this example of sofa madness reproduced from the Guardian:

At one minute past midnight last night, Ikea's new flagship store opened in north London, and managers expected that around 2,000 bargain-hunters would quietly file in. The British, after all, have a reputation for being decorous queuers. But Ikea had not predicted that up to 6,000 people would descend on the new store, in Edmonton, with a stampede to get in resulting in a frightening crush. Thousands had been lured by bargains—some of which were only available until 3am even though a 24-hour opening was planned—such as 500 leather sofas for only £45. Cars were abandoned on the roadside as shoppers attempted to reach the store in time to secure the best offers.

Six people were taken to hospital, including a man in his 20s who was stabbed nearby at around 1.30am. He was said to be in a stable condition, and it was not clear whether the incident was related to the opening. According to a senior fire officer, ‘There were crush injuries and people suffering from shock from the pushing and shoving.’ Nine ambulances attended the scene.

This is all unnecessary sacrifice at the altar of the growth fetish, that sanctum sanctorum of neoclassical economics exposed so brilliantly by Richard Douthwaite in The Growth Illusion. It is also unsupportable within the confines of a limited planet that is already creaking at the seams. In spite of the money, energy and intelligence spent persuading you of the need for elaborate consumption patterns, this particular mindgame—elsewhere I have called it ‘Sen and the art of market-cycle maintenance’—is easily defeated. You can get together with your friends, green friends are particularly useful for this, and establish your own ethic of consumption based around minimizing carbon and maximizing self-expression.

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Feed Me!

The publication of a report on ethical consumption sponsored by the Co-operative Bank was rapidly followed by an article in the Economist telling us we are wasting our money. We can ascertain that the real food movement is building in power and starting to threaten the mega-food corporations. This is unsurprising since ethical consumption now accounts for 5% of all spending, overtaking spending on alcohol and cigarettes. The various co-operative shops take up a similar proportion of the total retail market.

The report shows that sales of organic food increased by 30% from 2004 to 2005, with a nearly 40% increase in fair-trade purchases and nearly 55% increase in sales of ‘sustainable fish’. Some of these rather dubious categories cause me to have a little sympathy with the Economist's scepticism, but I interpret these consumption changes as indication of a deeper concern about how we are feeding ourselves.

Food offers a perfect case-study of how the domination of the profit motive distorts the system of distribution in our globalised world. Economics is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Economics as ‘the study of how scarce resources are, or should be, allocated’ . How can capitalism possibly justify itself as an efficient system, never mind the only system in town, when it achieves this so badly that we have some people dying of starvation and others dying of obesity? No, it isn’t the vending machines, or the corrupt dictators it is the economic system that is to blame. Green politics is about limits and meeting needs, and an efficient economic system would respect these; conventional politics is about profit, and profit can be increased by the encouragement of greed. That is the central explanation for the rise in obesity.

We are encouraged to be greedy, to buy a new sofa to sit on while we over-consume and absorb advertising to persuade us to consume even more, interspersed between programmes instilling our patriotic duty to keep the economy afloat by shopping and terrifying us that we are heading for premature death because of, yes, over-consumption. This is the sort of self-contradictory message which generates internal confusion and mental dis-ease. No wonder that people over-eat to try to fufill the hunger that artificial and chemically based foods cannot satisfy. And no wonder that rates of anti-depressant prescription have increased by 125% between 1993 and 2002. Profits are made by advertisers, food corporations and drug manufacturers, while the costs are borne by us, not consumers but human beings.

Is it too outrageous to see a link between the pseudo-religious commitment to growth amongst policy makers and the accompanying growth in our waistlines? Clive Hamilton identifies the addiction to growth as a ‘fetish’ which he compares to the cargo cults that grew up in Papua New Guinea in the 1930s. ‘Cargo cults and the growth fetish both invest magical powers in the properties of material goods, possession of which is believed to provide for a paradise on earth.’ The fact that ever-increasing consumption does not bring happiness is not an exciting new thought for most environmental campaigners, but the fact that a book called Growth Fetish received such wide publicity may be.

Our need to be fed runs deeper than just our daily bread. We have lost our relationship with the land and with other people. We have lost our ties to those close to us in our own communities in a world where we buy stuff on faceless estates made by nameless children in countries we could not locate on a world map.

Stroud Community Agriculture offers a model for how we might rebuild meaningful economic relationships, and the sense of wholeness and purpose that comes with these. The strap-line for the community agriculture project in Stroud is—‘Become a Member: Share the Harvest’. We do not buy our vegetables, we support the livelihoods of two farmers who manage the rented land by buying a share of the farm; we contribute our own time on fortnightly workdays; and we collect our share of whatever was produced that week. The farm also organizes festivals and events to mark the turning of the year.

This is a wholly different relationship to food and one that leaves you feeling satisfied on all levels. Food arrives not only infused with the vitality of your local soil but with a real sense of belonging to you. Ownership is not a right. Unlike the sanitized meaningless exchange of money for dead, pre-packaged vegetables that takes place at Tesco, in the world of owning your own food pounds sterling are a debased currency and only physical work will do. In the new green economy we have all to become producers; demonstrating our principles through ethical consumption will not be enough.

Find out more about community farms here.

You can find out more details of the ethical purchasing report here. Tweet