Enough is Enough

The expenses scandal has operated as a metaphor for many commentators on the state of our society, precarious state I might say. The hapless politicians, who were only really playing the game, have become the repositories of repressed desires from all sections of society, who relieve their own stresses and strains by these projections. Moat-owners manques and those envious of the owners of two homes have relished the destruction of the paragons of a former culture which is now passing into obscurity.

Because Greed is no longer good and is no longer fashionable. The Janus-headed crisis that we are living through - a crisis of capitalism perhaps - has forced a subconscious realisation that the long-held and much supported ideology of acquisition and accumulation was destructive for us all and, most importantly, for our beautiful planetary home. From this perspective, a home that has some minor semblance of Balmoral is no longer an obscure object of desire: it has moved through being a source of mockery to seeming 'So last paradigm, darling'.

This can only bring relief to a green economist. As we need an end to economic growth, so we inevitably need an end to the culture of frenzied accumulation that has dominated our popular culture for the last 30 years or so. Before the advent of Thatcherism there was a memory (affectionate in some quarters) of the frugality of the war years and a balancing reaction from the post-materialist hippy generation of according a value to simplicity. Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics , with its tales of the satisfaction of pre-capitalist indigenous societies, is a leading example of academic work in this vein.

People with less sophisticated cultures than our own know when they have had enough. Once they reach that point they stop working, sit about, natter, and generally enjoy themselves. Remember what that felt like? Changing our culture to one of sustainability will mean restoring the concept of 'enough' to our economic and social lives. It will mean a focus on satisfaction and sufficiency rather than greed and growth. This was the consumption ethic that characterised societies of the past, and still characterises peasant societies today.

Gary Snyder describes this as a subsistence economy. He makes clear how such an economy, being well-grounded in all senses, is also respectful of other forms of life and of our dependence on it for our survival:

‘A subsistence economy is a sacramental economy because it has faced up to one of the critical problems of life and death: the taking of life for food. Contemporary people do not need to hunt, many cannot even afford meat, and in the developed world the variety of foods available to us makes the avoidance of meat an easy choice. Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.’

The disarray amongst MPs is only a reflection of our own individual struggles with the daily temptations to over-consume and to over-compensate for our spiritual want with material excess. Tweet

Home-grown Hats

Most of us can trace our families back to the generation that left the land. In my case this was my grandmother's parents, both of whom lived in the small Devon town of Ivybridge. I'm proud to say that various bits of the family still make their living in Devon and from rural trades.

I have always been most proud of my second cousin who is a thatcher. At a recent family event I discovered that he has now become a teacher but another cousin has, inspired by his example, taken up the thatching trade. My practical limitations give me immense respect for people who actually have a craft and so I was full of interest. This was somewhat diminished when he told me that the thatch he uses on the cottages of Devonshire is actually grown in China.

Here is what William Cobbett has to say on a similar subject (in this case Leghorn bonnets) in his Cottage Economy (written in 1820-21):

'The practice of making hats and bonnets, and other things, of straw, is perhaps of a very ancient date. . . In this country the manufacture was, only a few years ago very flourishing; but it has now greatly declined, and has left in poverty and misery those whom it once well fed and clothed.


The cause of this change has been, the importation of the straw hats and bonnets from Italy, greatly superior, in durability and beauty, to those made in England. . . It seems odd that nobody should have set to work to find out how the Italians came by this fine straw. The importation of these Italisn articles was chiefly from the port of LEGHORN, and therefore the bonnets imported were called Leghorn Bonnets.

The straw manufacturers in this country seem to have made no effort to resist this invasion from Leghorn. And, which is very curious, the Leghorn straw has now begun to be imported, and to be plated in this country. So that we had hands to plat as well as the Italians. All that we wanted was the same kind of straw that the Italians had: and it is truly wonderful that these importations from Leghorn should have gone on increasing year after year, and our domestic manufacture dwindling away at a like pace, without there having been any inquiry relative to the way which the Italians got their straw! . . . There really seems to have been an opinion that England couldnot more produce this straw than it could produce sugar-cane.' Tweet

Making Good Use of the Things that we Find

This blog is called Gaian Economics to engender a sense of reverence for nature and recognition that all our resources - everything whose study falls within the remit of economics - comes initially from the Earth. Indigenous peoples tend to have this recognition at the heart of their culture and practice - a belief they sum up by using phrases like 'The Earth is Our Mother'.

I remember learning in school about the Inuit (we called them eskimos then, of course) and how they used every last part of the caribou: skins for blankets, hides for wigwams, sinew for thread, bones for needles. Not a scrap was wasted, we were told, and we marvelled at this. Such a contrast to the way we lived even then.

I spent this past weekend with my good friends Lydia and Robert, co-creators of Thrift Cottage, and had the usual restful and inspiring time. Robert's knowledge of the natural world - trees and woodworking are his speciality - is something he has learned from joiners and carpenters he has worked with who come from a different era. He is always full of wisdom about his craft that is humbling to somebody like me who lives from their brain.


This weekend's gem was a short history of faggots and tallow. These two fundamental parts of the lives of our ancestors just a generation or two ago have slipped out of consciousness. The only picture I have ever seen of a faggot is on the woodcut from Foxe's Book of English Martyrs, but I was interested in converting garden and agricultural waste into fuel and so asked Robert how it is done.

His brother is the tallow man - he recreated by laborious practice the means of extracting this most useful substance from sheep's testicles (didn't I say everything had a use?) following instructions he found in a book from the 1960s. Boatbuilders and joiners are still using blocks of this natural lubricant. Robert says it is the best way of easing a screw into a piece of oak and the only lubricant that resists the tree's attempt to use its natural juices to keep it there. That puts high technology into its place. Tweet

Filthy rich

I have long cherished a vision of how a caring, sustainable economy will replace corporate capitalism. I imagine a hacienda set deep in the South American jungle. It is covered with graffiti and has broken windows--markers of previous violent attacks which failed. But the jungle is more persistent and powerful than the colonial power and green tendrils creep around the building and through the windows until it is completely overwhelmed by nature.

I was reminded of this vision when I first heard Rob Hopkins talking about bringing productive trees and plants into the city. Why shouldn't our verges and parks throng with whortleberries and wild strawberries? Here in Stroud the town council has agreed that in future trees planted in the town should be fruit-bearing. We already have one of our main cycleways planted as a linear orchard, preserving local apple species and providing fruit and conviviality in the autumn

Shortly after I read about Havana's organiponicos, or urban gardens, often roof gardens, I gave a talk in Birmingham called 'Who Will Feed the Cities?'. Walking back to the station through the urban moonscape that is central Brum I began to imagine the car parks filled with productive raised beds, and vines and fruit trees trained along the brick facades.

It has cheered me no end to see a similar vision being shared by advertising creatives. I first noticed the Baxters Farmers' Market soup advert, where the urban cat is replaced by a piglet and a bride's bouquet is made of carrots. This was followed by an advert for E-On where giraffes invade the office and a beaver is found in the water-cooler.

It seems to me that this is the opposite impulse to that which continues to drive well-paid executives into the countryside, which they immediately neutralise and suffocate with their 'city ways'. How welcome to see an invasion of the city by revolting peasants and their filth. Tweet

Everything is never enough

I couldn't have made this up--and I didn't. It is the marketing slogan for Molton Brown, purveyors of perfumed cosmetics to the high and mighty. It is a perfect mission statement for the consumptive economy we live in. To be the change we want to see in the world in economic terms we all need to cultivate a consciousness of sufficiency and think hard about what enough is, perhaps rather than what is enough.

Enough is a vital concept: if we have enough we are not deprived. To learn this we need to begin to share the mindset of subsistence societies, like those reported by Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics, who managed to meet their needs in only a couple of hours a day and spent the rest of their time playing, singing, carrying out rituals, resting, and so on. Ray Mears' current TV series is exploring just this issue, helping us into the sustainability mind-set of our neighbours.

Working more hours and buying more things will never bring us sufficiency, just an endless cycle of more unsatisfied wants, and more work to earn the money to satisfy them. In an article I am very proud to have called 'Sen and the Art of Market-Cycle Maintenance' I have explored the way in which the combination of the concept of ‘relative deprivation’ and the advertising industry create a world where we will always feel the need for more. The maintenance of this feeling of scarcity is necessary to encourage the increasing consumption that economic growth requires. Here is what Marshall Sahlins wisely said about this:

Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples. The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity.

Three assumptions underlie the ethic of scarcity:

• There is shortage and if I do not immediately take my share, there will not be enough for me. This understanding is partly one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the wartime rationing experienced by the older generation who have bequeathed us their fears, but is reinforced constantly by advertising urging us to buy now before stocks expire.
• You must take what you can now and then keep it. Giving to somebody else will mean you are left short of something you need. This leads to hoarding of unnecessary items which might be useful to somebody else.
• You will be left without and there will be dire consequences because nobody will help you. In other words it is an ethic based on fear.

To turn these around we need to create our own ethic of plenty with the following assumptions:

• There is plenty for all our needs: nature is bountiful when we treat her with respect and care.
• Sharing is good for the giver as well as the receiver and moves us towards the kind of world we want to live in.
• You can trust others to look after you: we are better at looking after each other than selfishly competing.
  

Time to stop. I expect you've had enough. Tweet