Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Rule 3

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

Robert Leslie Fielding: Whenever beginning a scheme to produce anything we should always try to get supplies locally, before resorting to going further afield, and we should help each other.

Bert Thornley: Why do you think we should have what is needed locally supplied locally?

RLF: Well, I should say that the first reason, and possibly the best one is that those living in any particular community will know best what their needs are.

BT: But there are other good reasons, surely, for ensuring that local needs are met by local producers?

RLF: Of course, I should say that communities grow stronger if each helps – doing what they can to help others.

BT: Do you think there are any material benefits of locals supplying for local needs?

RLF: Surely. Those farmers, let’s say, who farm locally will understand what is beneficial and what isn’t; what can be done without disadvantages and what can’t.

BT: Good, let’s deal with the first of these; people living within a community are best placed to know what the real needs of the community are likely to be.

RLF: With the corollary being that the views of those remote from that community will be less well placed to know what those needs are.

BT: We had better be careful, in thinking that, to allow for the fact that there are often experts in practically every field. Shouldn’t their views and their professional advice sometimes be taken into consideration?

RLF: Yes, they should. I am not suggesting that in our efforts to meet local needs we isolate ourselves from sources of knowledge and expertise outside the community, but rather that informed decisions are made by those who have to live any with changes that are made.

A farmer advised to increase the size of his herd of sheep to numbers that cannot be sustained by other resources is asking for trouble.

BT: But surely he would be well aware of that, wouldn’t he?

RLF: He would, but people who find themselves either needing to increase their income or else who are advised to take actions solely on the basis of increasing profits can sometimes be persuaded – often are persuaded – to do things that go against what we might refer to as ‘best practices’.

BT: What might those be?

RLF: Well, returning to our first proposition; members of local communities know what those are; what suits the land and the farmer. Interested parties from outside the community may well be unaware of this, or may actually encourage farmers to ignore such considerations in favour of just a single aim – to increase income.

BT: Isn’t increasing income what farming is all about?

RLF: It is certainly true that farmers have to earn a living, like we all have to do, but my point is that they have to balance resources so that the farm is able to carry on in ways that benefit all; land resources, water resources, animal resources, and human ones, in addition to financial resources – if one is left out of any equation to increase the produce of a farm, others will inevitably suffer and cause problems.

BT: And extending that to the community as a whole, we should include others within that community- other farmers.

RLF: And those that do not farm – everyone has a right to live and make a living, let’s not forget that.

BT: What about local rivalry – even local animosity?

RLF: What do you mean?

BT: If two particular individuals are in competition, how should they proceed? You can’t expect rivals to cooperate when their living is made in similar ways, can you?

RLF: That is how, traditionally, trade is viewed, as competitive.

BT: And is it not?

RLF: It is, but it is something like a self-fulfilling prophesy to say that trade is competitive because that is the way it has always been – competitive between traders – people making something to sell.

BT: And economists speak of equal and unequal competition; the former being something near to the normal position where many produce similar articles, selling to similar customers.

RLF: But I do question whether this competitiveness is the best way to conduct business.

BT: Some would say it is the only way; that it is natural.

RLF: Do you see, that is where we err – we say something is natural when it is nothing of the sort. Natural means of nature, whereas buying and selling is an entirely man made, one might almost say synthetic, arrangement.

A better model in these times in which certain aspects of trade have got out of sync with the environment would be cooperation rather than competition.

BT: Why do you say it would be better – better in what way?

RLF: Competition in trade usually involves different producers making the same product, trying to gain the edge over companies making the same things.

BT: Again, it is natural that one company should try to sell more of its produce than its rival can.

RLF: There you go using that word again. What competitive trade does is duplicate – make the same things regardless of anything but whether the market can stand to have two or more identical products, whereas what I am suggesting is that it would be much less wasteful if one of those identical products was abandoned in favour of something else.

BT: And who would decide who abandoned what? In the present system, the market decides – the consumer decides to buy or not. Could you better that? Could you make an alternative system fair? I think not. Centrally planned economies that have tried to dictate to producers what to produce and what not to produce have traditionally been accused of partiality – of adopting means that are not democratic.

RLF: And that accusation has stopped us from being sensible with our resources, and our needs.

BT: But, again, if you dictate to people what to buy and what not to buy, are you not telling them how to live?

RLF: That's true. We should be educating people how to live rather than, as you say, dictating to them how to live.

Our education systems are predicated on this rivalry, whereas, I am suggesting that they are inappropriate for our survival on a planet with finite resources.

Meeting local needs with locally produced commodities would be one way out of this impasse; educating ourselves to want what is good for all in the community.

BT: But that has always been shunned, philosophically and economically.

RLF: And yet treating everyone as an individual rather that a member of a community is precisely what has led us to our present circumstances – overproducing – wasting – overusing – spoiling.

The new societies that sprang up in the wake of the Industrial Revolution hundreds of years past, had to have dominant ideologies to make people act in certain ways and bring acquiescence.

That is what is needed now, for we are at a point in time in which changes caused by advances in technology, consumer behavior, and marketing, all within the milieu of environmental change, are propelling us towards an uncertain future.

BT: So you think that by concentrating on local needs being met more and more by local suppliers, we can counteract these changes?

RLF: Yes, I do. Local communities focusing, not on commercial rivalries of corporations, but on the real and pressing needs of citizens, would begin to remove this ignorance of ours – an ignorance that has turned into conventional thinking. Treating the world as a place from which we can take and take and never put back is changing our world in bigger and more catastrophic ways than the beginnings of industrialism ever did. Industry is our life – our livelihood even, but, if we are not careful, it will be our undoing too.

Treating the world and its citizens as if we all had the same needs – those foisted upon us by fashion, by conventional ways of viewing the so called good life, is responsible for our predicament.

Treating local needs as real needs rather than the ones we are supposed to desire, but don’t actually need, would go some way towards beating this blindness of ours; it would restore our judgment to our ourselves instead of to corporate ideologies that state financial profit as the one true goal of any activity. That is at the root of our problems.
Robert L. Fielding

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