Here’s a concept we should all know: peak oil. Peak oil is that point at which at least half of all planetary reserves of oil have been extracted from the ground. Once this point has been reached, increasingly sophisticated and expensive technologies are required for further drilling (think of the Alberta tar sands). Output drops accordingly. Eventually, more energy is required to drill for and refine a barrel of oil than the oil itself produces (1).

     The implications of peak oil for a global economy organized around the concept of unlimited economic growth, with its expectation of an unlimited supply of cheap energy, are ominous indeed. The idea that present rates of consumption can be maintained indefinitely, (again, with its unspoken assumption of an endless supply of cheap energy) and that developing nations can hope to obtain to rates similar to our own, is already causing us to test the earth’s natural limits in such a way that we are pushing them toward a world-wide systemic collapse.

     Bill McKibben, in his latest book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, demonstrates why we need to fundamentally reconsider our assumptions with respect to limitless economic growth. But unlike other commentators on the subject, McKibben goes on to offer us a glimpse of what an alternative future might look like. More important, he shows us that, contrary to much writing on the subject, our addiction to growth isn’t making us wealthier. And even when it does make us wealthier, it isn’t making us happier.

     According to research cited by McKibben on the subject of human happiness, it takes about USD $10,000, per capita, to meet basic human needs. Once this threshold has been passed, the extent to which money and “more stuff” can make us happier attenuates to ever-diminishing returns. One study quoted shows how a sampling of some of Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans” had scores rating their overall happiness virtually identical to those of Pennsylvania Amish and only slightly higher than those of Masai tribesmen. Correspondingly, increases in the rates of suicide, of divorce and depression, seem to track increases in the rate of consumption by Americans.

     What’s worse (affront of all affronts), Europeans consistently score higher than Americans in terms of happiness. But how can this be? Every American knows she makes more money, knows that the United States is the mightiest nation the world has ever known, so how is it that a European can claim more life satisfaction? Well, for one thing, Americans work longer hours than their European counterparts. The more efficient US economy also demands more mobility of its workers. We are expected to move to where the jobs are. Whereas Europeans are more likely to live closer to the communities in which they grew up. They are more likely to know their neighbors, more likely to possess a stronger sense of community. Sure, we Yanks make more money, but we need it: for the extra commuting costs, for child care, more work clothes, for more health care. Simply put: Europeans work to live; we live to work.

     And though our economy may experience more growth yearly than the EU’s, this growth isn’t making us richer. Median income in the United States remains what is was roughly 30 years ago, in terms of real dollars. Our growth contributes more to increased inequality and insecurity than to increased wealth.

     What does McKibben see as a way out of our malaise, as a solution to the problem of imminent environmental collapse? His answer is unusually straightforward:  to build smaller, more localized economies, to build more community, to human-scale what is now globally-scaled. He calls his ideas the “economics of neighborliness.” A recurring metaphor for these notions is the farmers market. Here local farmers bring their infinitely varied, organic produce to an open market for sale. No need to truck tomatoes from across the country, for example, wasting enormous amounts of fuel in the process, when a far tastier product can be grown nearby.

     And not only is the local produce superior than anything that can be purchased in the standard chain megastore, but a farmers market also helps to foster a stronger sense of community. People are much more likely to talk to one another in a crowded farmers market than within the isolating grid of the megastore, where the focus is on enticing the individual tastes of the atomized consumer. Complimentary to the farmer’s market is Community Supported Agriculture. Here, consumers pay local farmers a few hundred dollars during the winter, and then receive a weekly assortment of vegetables throughout the growing season and into the fall. The author also introduces us to various urban farming experiments presently underway, in such unlikely places as downtown Detroit and Shanghai. Each instance recounted by the author serves to demonstrate the various ways that such enterprises create and shore up community.

     McKibben also makes an excellent suggestion about how the US government could contribute to localizing and human-scaling US agriculture. It could restructure its agricultural subsidies away from the industrialized behemoths that now receive the lion’s share of them and toward smaller, local farming units. In the past the federal government played a central role in bringing the price of personal computers down to where the average consumer could afford one, simply by choosing to purchase them in bulk for government offices nation-wide. There is no reason (save the resistance of powerful entrenched interests) that these types of enlightened procurements couldn’t make local organic produce every bit as affordable as the industrialized kind. But the main reason we should support the smaller, local farm is simpler still. On average it yields more food per acre than its industrialized, capital-intensive, pesticide-soaked counterpart. So why do the latter so predominate? Easy: Industrialized agriculture yields more dollars per acre.

     More dollars lead then to increased efficiency, as every effort is made to squeeze as many more dollars out of the production process as possible. The direct result of this enhanced efficiency is that the larger, more abundantly capitalized players come to dominate the industry.  McKibben marshals some frightening facts about the concentration that has taken place within US agribusiness. Gargill, Inc., for example, controls 45 percent of the world’s entire grain trade, with Archers Daniels Midland controlling another 30 percent. Four companies slaughter 81 percent of American beef. And Wal-Mart is at present the number one food seller in the United States. Where does all the consolidation take us?

     Well, when the rest of the world follows our lead, the results are often disastrous. Following the prescriptions of IMF and World Bank consultants, many developing nations have moved to centralize their agricultural sectors along lines similar to our own. The result has largely been the depopulation of rural areas and the creation of mega-slums on the outskirts of large metropolitan areas as farmers and their families, rendered obsolete by a “more efficient” agricultural system, flock by the millions to the cities looking for subsistence. Think A villa miseria outside Buenos Aires, Argentina. Or along the bustee in Vijayawada, India.

     The scale of such misery is reason enough to hope that some other development strategy is taken up by poorer nations. Consider the case of China. Given its current rates of growth, China’s 1.3 billion people may very well be as rich as we are by 2031. Should the Chinese drive as many cars as we do then, they will need every drop of oil presently being produced, plus an additional 15 million barrels a day. If they eat meat as we do, they will require two-thirds of world’s current grain harvest. We can only hope, with McKibben, that the Chinese consider forgoing “some measure of efficiency for other values.”

     If I had one possible criticism it is this: A strain of anti-urbanism (especially in Chapter 4, where McKibben develops his small-is-better thesis with respect to energy consumption and generation), as well as a tendency to romanticize life in smaller, more traditional societies, mars the otherwise judicious tone the author maintains throughout the work. While he does admit that village life is often parochial, narrow, even racist, he nevertheless seems to idealize it.

     Besides, cities have been the seats of civilization since the beginnings of human history. As the philosopher Barry Allen has noted, civilization, itself, is a quality of culture unique to cities—with knowledge being a direct result of civilization. Cities are the sites where diversity is normalized; where the artifacts and practices of many villages combine and recombine over time, resulting in new orders of complexity and new values and new ways of living. A future without cities will be a future without civilization (2).

     And anyone who has ever viewed the films of Ibtisam Mara'ana, the courageous female Palestinian filmmaker—especially documentaries such as Badal, or Paradise Lost--will be quickly disabused of any temptation to romanticize traditional village life. Badal, for example, chronicles the cruelty of women upon other women within the confines of a rigidly patriarchial system of marriage. Badal is the typically non-consensual practice of a marriage broker marrying a less attractive brother and sister off to the brother and sister from another family. Mara'ana herself barely escaped this fate, and now makes films to highlight the oppression that women daily face in villages such as the one she grew up in. The genuinely chilling point of such films is that in many rural communities around the world such practices are not at all extreme examples, but are a routine part of everyday life.

     But these quibbles aside, Bill McKibben has provided us with a thoughtful and surprisingly even-handed glimpse into what a better, more sustainable, future might look like. In many ways, as the book demonstrates so well with so many stories of people working together to improve their lives, it is already flowering all around us.—Tom Allen 

NOTES

1. Kevin Phillips. American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21rst Century (New York, NY: Viking, 2006), p. 21.        
2. Barry Allen. Knowledge and Civilization (Boulder, CO: Westview   

     Press, 2004), p. 217-221.