Index

17: Book review: The Bioregional Economy

land, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

Molly Scott Cato, Routledge/Earthscan ISBN: 978-0-415-50082-1 Pb. 250pp. £29.99

The case for a bioregional approach to the management of natural and human resources is presented with clarity and vision in this ground-breaking analysis of the evolution of the unsustainable market economy. Leading green economist Molly Scott Cato argues that science presents irrefutable evidence that the present economic system poses threats to the sustainability of the earth’s ecosystems. Rather than impose limits and restrictions on resource use, she calls for the re- enchantment of our relationship with the biosphere through imaginative creativity. A bioregion is a local area defined by its geographical features rather than a political area. Its streams, rivers, hills, valleys, soils and woodlands form home not only to the local human community but also to the plant and animal populations of which humans form a part. The bioregional approach to economics allows the concept of a local economy to cover not only human provisioning activities but also the entire range of the social, political, psychological and spiritual life of the community.

The concept of bioregion contrasts sharply with the market model of the economy as developed over the period of industrialisation. Under the market model land ceases to be the source of all life, the essential resource for ecological, social and spiritual renewal. It becomes merely any substance lying around on or under the land available to be taken from the land for the purpose of producing a concrete item for sale on the market.

At the same time people cease to be “people or citizens or even workers”. The existence of a “labour market” transforms the economic agent into a mere marketable entity to be employed in the production of saleable products.

Thus the world economy is capable of “subjecting the surface of the planet to the needs of industrial society”. The land is taken forcibly from the people through enclosures and made into a commercial resource. Technology artificially forces the increase in productive capacity, and the system of surplus capacities extended through international trade, creating overseas and colonial markets, and the result is an un-sustainable global market mechanism dominating all economic
life. Cato cites Karl Polanyi: ‘Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life’, a modern, short-lived aberration. For Cato, as for Polanyi, ‘economic life’ is the tangible relationships between humanity and the sustaining life forces of the Earth. The market, on the other hand, operates as a mythical force under the Utopian illusion that financial relationships are of sole significance.

Although written with an academic market in mind, this work is far from being a dull, negative critique of the finance-dominated global economy. On the contrary, it is packed with insights into workable alternatives. Kropotkin is cited:
“the greatest sum of well-being can be obtained when a variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community; and that man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only.”

Here, as in her other recent works, Cato is most interesting on the subject of the guild socialist critique of the wasteful production, disregard for nature and damage to social wellbeing that is the inevitable result of capitalist market philosophy. The medieval guild system was designed to prevent exploitation of people and natural resources for private profit by providing “a moral framework within which skilled work, and the sale of its products, could take place”. Finance capitalism forcibly swept away these restrictions, to make way for economic ‘progress’ and the corporate state.
Citing contemporary authorities, Cato demonstrates that “work is a process of mediation between human beings and the natural world”, arguing that it is now necessary to restore the dignity and spiritual value of work. The division of labour disastrously divides people from each other and from the local natural environment, its species and their habitats. A bioregional approach to production and provisioning would, she suggests, re-embed productive systems within their social and environmental settings. However, questions of the source of the political and legal powers necessary to challenge patterns of ownership and control of resources are only tentatively raised. Presently finance, backed by legal and military force, can intervene in any bioregion of the world to extract valuable resources, leaving a wasted and degraded land.

The Bioregional Economy is an artfully assembled review of good practice at household, local community, national and international levels, deserving to be study read by the widest possible readership. This book will be welcomed by all who have the remotest interest in the future of humanity on the Earth. Full of insights which go to the heart of the contemporary malaise, this work offers academics and social activists alike the solid foundations for building interlinked networks of ecologically and socially sustainable local economies. More importantly, it offers the ordinary men and woman the inspiration to tackle the future with hope and enthusiasm. Without the political will of the common people to bring about change in their own homes, all reforms, rules and regulations will merely serve to accelerate the degradation of the social and life support systems of the world economy.

Frances Hutchinson - from The Social Artist Spring 2014 p.17

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