Contemplating More Human Economies

You can’t check your email the last couple of weeks without pop-up headlines competing for your attention - $700B BAILOUT, WALL STREET CRASHING, BANKS FAILING – it’s enough to keep an honest person up at night. I don’t intend to be a cynic, because I realize there are many people out there who have set money aside in their 401(k)s for years now and are feeling quite threatened. But just for a moment, I’d like to talk about the positive potential alive in an economic collapse.

First of all, we need to understand that this nation was founded on values of independence, a direct relationship to the land, and a sense of entrepreneurial enterprise. It was not founded on overbearing corrupt government that manipulates the voting poles, corporate greed that destroys the environment in the name of limitless profits, and a life of 50/hrs a week slavery for the people. In fact, the things that we are experiencing now are the same things our foremothers and fathers were fleeing from when they left Europe.

We are faced with some difficult challenges in our lifetime – we are dealing with a level of human overpopulation that the planet has never seen, empowered with technology that most of us do not even understand. With so many of us competing for a place in the social hierarchy that will meet our basic needs, we simply haven’t noticed the extent to which we’ve become disconnected from a basic human lifestyle and basic animal freedoms.

We are freaked out about the potential collapse of our economy because we’ve bought into the idea of this way of life so completely, we aren’t questioning whether it was something we wanted in the first place.

I feel very fortunate because after spending most of my life in the regular 9-5 urban reality, I did have a chance to break out of that and gain a taste of a simpler, more liberated life. I spent a number of years living in a remote location amongst other people who were deliberately reconnecting with the natural landscape – learning how to construct simple shelters to live in, eat simpler and more natural diets, and build relationships with each other that were not based upon commerce.

We need to wake up to the reality that the economy we are supporting is destroying our environment and our quality of life.

This economy is built upon the exploitation of cheap labor from third-world nations, the use of toxic chemicals that degrade our food supply and the health of our environment, and the pollution of our very life-support systems. Continuing in the current economic system and marketing items as “green” is not enough to rescue our species from this dire situation. In order to be truly green, we need to radically alter our sense of economy. In order to do that, we need to abandon the current one.

Our current economy does not support the free human being. It requires an enslaved human being in order to produce goods, generate profits and funnel those profits up a pyramid scheme to a few privileged multi-billionaires at the top.

During the bailout fiasco, we heard about executive salaries topping $18M. I’m not sure many of us even realized there were CEOs earning that kind of money. Most of us struggle to come up with vacation money for one week a year, or clothes for our kids’ back-to-school events. Didn’t it make us more than a little angry to hear that there are Wall Street bankers earning more money in a quarter than most of us earn in our entire lifetime?

Let’s get real. There is nothing green about the current economy in the United States. It enslaves the masses; it exploits third-world countries; it’s racist and creates social stratas according to skin color and ethnicity; it bulldozes rainforests; it dumps thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals onto our farmlands that end up in our water-table and food-supply; it pollutes our oceans and kills our wildlife; and it feeds the insatiable greed of unidentifiable men who hide behind unaccountable corporations.    

Green means life for the planet, not death. Green means health for humanity, not toxicity illnesses. Green means freedom from oppression, not enslavement. Green means peace, not war. Green means farms, not cities. Green means rainforest, not track housing. Green means community, not dictatorship.

We are living in a very serious situation. Our forefathers fled Europe to escape the kind of oppressive government, social hierarchy and taxation we are currently experiencing – but in our time, there is nowhere to run to. As frightening as it may seem, I am asking you to consider that change is needed – not small change, like bringing your cloth bag to the store instead of taking home plastic, but massive change, like refusing to continue participating in an economy that is oppressive and instead, creating a new one. If we really want to be green, we need a new economy.

A green economy is decentralized and democratic. In a green economy white people dig holes and brown people live in nice homes. A green economy insists that we all live simply, in small dwellings with less material “stuff”. A green economy necessitates we trade skills and share information. A green economy declares we only labor to gather what we need to take care of the basic needs of our village community. A green economy has no banks, no Wall Street, no White House and no Hollywood. A green economy is a village community, with a direct relationship to nature.

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Jill Stephanie Morgyn is a freelance writer and editor, and maintains a blog called "Lessons in Sustainability". She can be reached at www.morgynconsulting.com and www.learningsustainability.blogspot.com.