Prologue

Excerpt

The End of a World
Lewis Mumford coined the apt phrase “Power Complex,” indicating the convergent forces in government, industry, finance, and military that control our society.  But the Power Complex, as increasing numbers of people see, is in its last years, and unless sufficient numbers of people can agree on what a sustainable culture might look like, and begin working to achieve it, chaos and violence will follow the approaching collapse.

The desire for unlimited control, which is the goal of the Power Complex, is a telling instance of rigidity: it is persistent and undeviating. It has an autonomous life, for as one set of leaders re- tires or dies, another set—a virtual carbon copy—replaces it.  The Power Complex is rigid in its dogma of free trade and unrestrained competition. Everyone everywhere must see things as it does. If not, it will force compliance, as John Perkins testified in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.  A healthy society is defined in part by its ability to take self-corrective measures; whereas dogmatism and the desire for total control are forms of rigidity, and rigidity is a sign of death.

Conversely, flexibility and adaptability are signs of life and health. As the seventy-sixth verse of the Tao Teh Ching says, “When living, man is supple and yielding; when dead, man is hard and stiff. When living, all animals and plants are soft and pliant; when dead, they are withered and brittle. Thus, being inflexible and unyielding is part of dying; being flexible and yielding is part of living.” Like a belief system before it dies, a civilization rigidifies as it atrophies: dominant beliefs become dogma, and the civilization becomes incapable of adapting to change, incapable of self-corrective, rectifying measures.

Regionalism and Possibility
A new world, now in embryo, is struggling to be born.  Human scale communities and human scale sustainable institutions are arising around the planet, and they are arising in reaction to the inhumanity and self-destructive tendencies of the present system.

As of this writing small community discussion groups on various facets of community sustainability are meeting regularly in cities as well as rural towns. People across the country from all walks of life now share an increased sense of the urgent need to build local and regional economies.  They may seldom articulate exactly what needs doing, but they know that our present system is collapsing.

Over the past few years increasing numbers of people have been promoting local food systems, local energy production, and community development banks as means by which to restrict the reach of transnational corporations and large urban banks into every corner of our economic and cultural life. These tools are understood to be a means by which to retain more dollars within local economies.  Now what some people are coming to realize is that local strategies for economic sustainability can be applied on a regional level.

Sections, Regions and Bioregions
Once upon a time the United States was a quiltwork of distinct regions.  For example, Colonial New England’s democratic charac- ter was shaped by its Congregational churches, in which the congregants of each church formed that church’s governing body. The churches also served as town meeting halls, where local affairs were decided.  The coastal South, on the other hand, settled by Anglicans, was hardly as democratic.  Both the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina coastal regions were hierarchical, with slaves at the bottom and wealthy planters at the top and yeomen farmers and poor whites in between.

Large-scale, easy-to-spot distinctions between Colonial New England and the coastal South are as clear as the differences be- tween each of them contrasted with the Middle West frontier or the Spanish Southwest.  The regionalization of the United States exists now only as an imaginative possibility, but for several hundred years it existed in fact.

Regions lack strict definition since they are creations of natural forces and therefore lack definite boundaries. Regions blend into one another, in imperceptible degrees, as the agricultural land of the Midwest prairie yields to the Great Plains, and the plains in turn are transformed into desert.  Within the last few decades, regions have been defined most commonly in terms of their g ology and topography, their watersheds, their flora and fauna.  When viewed in this perspective, Maine has more in common with Canada’s maritime provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland) than with other New England states, while northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia share more features with each other than with their neighboring states and provinces.  In fact, these Pacific Northwest entities are the subject of a pro-business separatist movement that would like to see them form into the independent nation of Cascadia.

The idea of an independent nation in the Northwest originated with Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned the “Republic of the Pacific.” According to one anonymous internet source, one of the goals of “’The Pacific Northwest Economic Region’ is to build a world class workforce to make the Pacific Northwest economic region competitive in worldwide markets . . .”

This view of regionalism is called bioregionalism, and I contend that harnessing the idea of a bioregion with the strategies of local economics is our only effective counter to globalization and the collapse of our economic system.

Centralization versus Decentralization
Some degree of centralization is needed to implement the most ba- sic functions of a national economy and government.  The United States, however, has concentrated finance and business in so few hands that studies by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and economist Edward N. Wolff of New York University reveal that 35 per cent of the national wealth is held by 1 percent of the population. Centralization not only has consequences for the aver- age man’s net worth, but for people’s perception of their power. Under excessive centralization, with its techniques for propaganda, citizens become accustomed to the status quo and forget that things were ever done, or could be done, differently.

As we have heard many times, the Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity.”  The present collapse of our economy is a blessing in disguise. E.F. Schumacher advised us years ago to rethink our ideas of scale and to ponder the idea that in the economic and social spheres “small is beautiful.”  I will add that only the relative smallness of a region will allow for the creation of a human-centered society, one that can nurture the individual to full development.

The establishment of decentralized regional economies and cultures is a prerequisite for the reestablishment of the human being at the center of society, not at the periphery, where we are at present.  The following essays are intended to make the present state of affairs clear beyond question, and to offer hope in projects across the globe that have enhanced local and regional self-reliance and self-sufficiency.  These projects include closed agricultural systems, manufacturing and farm cooperatives, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, the Bank of North Dakota, and more. These proven experiments could be harnessed to create thriving, self-reliant and self-sufficient regional economies that now seem beyond our dreams.

The Garden
I return again in thought to my Driftless region, as I do every day, wondering if it is possible for those of us who live here to over- come our egocentrism, our fear, our provincialism (“we’ll take care of our town, you look out for yours”), and our conservatism (“life was good when I was a kid, let’s keep it that way”).

In the past three decades Americans have become increasingly divided, while their leaders have become increasingly divisive.  Regionalism is a constructive art, and when fragmentation is a culture’s driving force it is extremely difficult and often im- possible for separate and conflicting interests to collaborate. The creation of just one regional economy and culture would involve hundreds perhaps thousands of small acts of cooperation and collaboration: it would involve the transformation of every function of the region’s economy and culture. Can this be accomplished when all the signs of a decayed structure surround us?

We have no choice but to try. If any rural region of America has a chance to minimize the suffering that the impending collapse of American society promises, it is the Driftless region.  The Driftless can in truth become the veritable garden that appears when seen from a ridge top. But to rebuild that garden and create a quiltwork of agricultural cities within the Driftless, we must become unstuck in fear and denial.  We must realize, like our forbears, that survival depends upon cooperation. And cooperation will come only when we see ourselves as Americans, not as Republicans or Democrats, as pro-gun or anti-gun, as pro-this or anti-that.  But that time is coming in the Driftless region, where people thirty years ago dis- missed my idea of a decentralized regional economy as simply crazy, are now recognizing it as our only hope for survival.