The following article was featured in the February 2006 issue of Vermont Commons.

by Kirkpatrick Sale

Economics of scale is what conventional industrial economies are all about, finding ways to more profitably and efficiently exploit nature. But the scale of economics is what the new economies of the future must be about, finding the ways to live so that healthy communities may foster a healthy earth.

There are only two essentials to consider in coming at the problem of the optimum scale for an economy to produce and distribute goods and services: the natural ecosystem and the human community. An economy that does harm to the natural world—depleting resources, extincting species, maltreating animals, producing pollution, piling up wastes—has grown too large; an economy that is out of democratic and humanitarian human control—where decisions are made by a few distant corporate individuals and a polity whose choices are beyond individual influence—has grown too large.

Let us take the economic scale that is optimum for the earth’s systems. It would be based on conservation, stability, sustainability, recycling, harmony. That means, for starters, an economy at a bioregional scale—that of a watershed or river valley, or a mountain system, or a lakeshore—for it more or less dictates the economy appropriate to it: an economy based on a watershed, for example, automatically considers downriver populations as well as headwater ones. The human constructs would adapt to the environment rather than be imposed, and human uses would be confined to those the bioregion allowed.

In Vermont terms, it would be possible to think of the western watershed of the Connecticut River, with all the rivers running eastward from the Green Mountains, as a bioregion (though it would of course demand cooperation with the New Hampshirites, who share the Connecticut). Another bioregion would encompass the watershed to the west of the Green Mountains, to Lake Champlain.

In this case, dairy and general truck farming would naturally be at the heart of the bioregional economy, although if a truly ecological sensibility informs it, those farms would not allow the disastrous sort of waste runoff that now so badly pollutes Lake Champlain and other waterways. Nor would they use artificial chemicals and fertilizers. Nor would they have factory farms of 1,000-plus cows and 100,000-plus hens. An ecologically based agriculture would depend on solar power appropriate to the region, on human-powered machines, on organic and pest-management systems, perennial polyculture and permaculture, with markets geared to seasonal and regional foods.

And the economic scale desirable for the human community would be one in which decisions about the economy—what is produced, from what resources, by whom, for whom, how distributed, how recycled—are made democratically by the various units, from towns to bioregions. Most power would locate at the level of the community, and it is there that we can imagine effecting some basic economic justice—specifically, practices of workplace ownership by the employees, workplace democracy for decision-making, and workplace commitment to the immediate surrounding populace—all of the things that are impossible with large scales and distant chainstore corporations.

And here we come to an essential element of a stable economy that dictates much of its scale: self-sufficiency. If the farms of Vermont were part of a self-sufficient economy, feeding the 620,000 people within its borders as its primary mission, there would not be such a concentration on dairy farms (and the resultant pollution problems) and there would be a far greater diversity of animal products and crops, ultimately to the health of the ecosystems.

Self-sufficiency is operable only at a limited scale, where humans are able to understand the resources at hand, can perceive and regulate the variants in the economy, and be sure that production and distribution is made rational and systematic. It is certainly possible at a bioregional scale, at least bioregions conceived as no bigger than 10- and 20,000 square miles (depending on the size necessary for resource variables), and in fact state governments right across the country even now calculate much of their operations on geographic areas of such a size, though they usually think in terms of watersheds or forests or deserts rather than bioregions. (Although in fact the Federal government has begun to calculate at this scale, with a bioregional map recently put out by the Bureau of Land Management.)

In terms of population, too, there is a limit at which rough self-sufficiency can be achieved. I did a lot of analysis of this for my book Human Scale some years ago, and I found that historically self-sufficient communities with economies of some complexity tended to cluster in the 5,000-10,000 population range—one urbanologist, Gideon Sjoberg, has said that “it seems unlikely that, at least in the earlier periods, even the larger of these cities contained more than 5,000 to 10,000 people, including part-time farmers on the cities’ outskirts.” Medieval trading centers commonly held up to 10,000 people for centuries, and even when larger cities grew in the 13th and 14th centuries to 20,000 or even 40,000, they were typically divided into quarters--literally four parts—of 5-10,000 people.

On a modern American scale, then, we might imagine a mixture of somewhat self-sufficient cities within more self-sufficient counties within mostly self-sufficient bioregions within a totally self-sufficient state, and then the economy of self-sufficiency might be quite complex indeed. In terms of Vermont, this might be a mix of relatively self-sufficient cities (Barre, Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington (divided into quarters), Essex, Hartford, Middlebury, Milton, Montpelier, Rutland, South Burlington, and Springfield are obvious candidates), within ecologically determined more self-sufficient shires (an Otto River shire, say, and shires for the West, Black, White, Winooski, Lemoille, Passumpsic watersheds), within the two self-sufficient bioregions on either side of the Green Mountains, within the state—whose economy, if independent, could be just as self-sufficient as it desired.

Such self-sufficient units would need to be guided by certain maxims to provide a full range of goods and services, and they would need to adhere to them with some ingenuity. But the maxims are all simple and thoroughly practical. They would include the principle of sharing, at the community level, an adherence to recycling and repairing (or at a more complex level, remanufacturing) almost everything, an emphasis on handicrafts and bespoke production rather than manufactures and mass production, a commitment to using local raw materials instead of imported (and especially local foods, cheaper, fresher, safer, better-tasting, healthier), a nurturing of local ingenuity without patent and copyright restrictions, and an agreement to abandon as unnecessary and undesirable almost everything manufactured at the factory level anywhere and anyhow. All of which is no more complex than the old New England adage:

Use it up, wear it out,
Make it do, or do without.

What follows are what I take to be the essential elements of a philosophy that would guide a bioregional economy, which I have constructed from a wide reading in alternative economics, including E.F. Schumacher’s great range of writings (particularly “Buddhist Economics” in Small is Beautiful) mixed with various economic ideas expressed by the Buddha himself, and not least from the ideas I enunciated in the “Economy” chapter of my Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (University of Georgia Press).

All production of goods or services would be based primarily on a reverence for life, a biocentric understanding that life means more than humans—it means animals, birds, insects, plants, trees, it means the living ecosystems, streams and rivers, forests and wetlands, hills and mountains, clouds and rains, and it means fundamentally the living earth—Gaia herself—understood as the only living, self-regulating planet in the galaxy (and one which will not take human abuse indefinitely without striking back).

All systems have limits and they must be learned and adhered to in every economic act, and overuse of a resource or species, or their depletion and exhaustion, would be seen as a criminal act of violence, and overproduction of a resource or a species, such as the human, would be seen as a criminal act of avarice and greed, not to mention stupidity.

The primary unit of production would be the self-sufficient community, within a self-regarding bioregion, which would strive to produce all its needs, shunning long-distance trade except for non-essential objects of beauty, and essential political and economic decisions would be taken democratically at that level, mindful of the health of the entire bioregion.

Consumption would be limited, for it is not a rightful end in itself but merely a means to human well-being, for which only a little is necessary to satisfy vital human needs: the goal of economic life is not the multiplication of wants but the satisfaction of basic needs.

Everything produced and the means of its production would embody the four cardinal principles (these are my distillation of Schumacher’s intermediate technology) of smaller, simpler, cheaper, safer—that is to say, technology on a human scale, comprehendible, affordable for all, and non-violent.

The only jobs would be those that enhance the worker, contribute to the immediate community, and produce nothing but needed goods—and that means goods, not bads.

All people who wish to do so would work, for the purpose of work is not to produce things to satisfy wants but rather primarily to nourish and develop the individual soul, aiming at fulfilling the highest nature of the human character, including identification with community and the satisfaction of its needs.

All economic decisions would be made in accordance with the Buddhist principle: “Cease to do evil; try to do good,” and the definition of good would be that which preserves and enhances the integrity, stability, diversity, continuity, and beauty of living species and systems; that which does the contrary is evil.

That is, to my mind, the essential moral and intellectual guide to a right and successful bioregional economics.
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Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of 12 books, including Human Scale, The Conquest of Paradise, Rebels Against the Future, and The Fire of Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.