C REATING SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS Self-provisioning and living from the natural environment

I NTRODUCTORY D ISCUSSION Why do people work? How many different reasons can you think of? How many people would still work if they had enough money to live on? Might they make different decisions about what work to do? Why is there a problem with the work-life balance?

A NTHROPOLOGY OF HUMAN SOCIETIES Side by side with family housekeeping, there have been three principles of production and distribution:  Reciprocity  Redistribution  Market Prior to the market revolution, humanity’s economic relations were subordinate to the social. Now economic relations are now generally superior to social ones.

C ITIZENS ’ I NCOME Automatic payments depending on need Tax-free and without means Income tax and employees’ national insurance contributions would be merged into a new income tax The tax-free allowance would balance out the Citizens’ Income for higher earners

I MPORTANT CHANGES IN WELFARE 1. Citizenship becomes the basis of entitlement 2. The individual would be the tax/benefits unit 3. The Citizen’s Income would not be withdrawn as earnings and other income rises 4. The availability-for-work rule would be abolished 5. Access to a Citizen’s Income would be easy and unconditional 6. Benefit levels would be indexed to earnings or to GDP per capita rather than to prices.

I NDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE All land is sacred. It is their bible. Indigenous people do not see the land as a commodity which can be sold or bought. The do not see themselves as possessors but as guardians of the land. A fundamental difference between the indigenous concept of land and the western idea is that indigenous peoples belong to the land rather than the land belonging to them. Zapata and Schielman, 1999: 236

O THER SPECIES ‘people are not orthodox individualists... they feel that they live within a vast whole—nature—which is in some sense the source of all value, and whose workings are quite generally entitled to respect. They do not see this whole as an extra item, or a set of items which they must appraise and evaluate one by one to make sure whether they need them. They see it as the original context which gives sense to their lives... From this angle, the burden of proof is not on someone who wants to preserve mahogany trees from extinction. It is on the person who proposes to destroy them.’ Midgley, 1996

B UDDHIST ECONOMICS ‘May All Beings Be Well and Happy’ ‘Right Livelihood’ should not sacrifice the well- being of other species Shamanistic need to ask permission to consume other creatures

F UTURE GENERATIONS Importance of intergenerational equity inherent in the Brundtland declaration that is the basis of ‘sustainable development’: Meeting the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs

T IME FOR QUESTIONS...

T HE BIOREGIONAL ECONOMY A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life- place’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries’ Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region

[We] have ‘forgotten’ that the economy and all its works is a subset and dependent upon the wider ecosystem... Modern citizens have not only lost contact with the land, and their sense of embeddedness in the land, but at the same time they have lost those elemental social forms of more or less intimate and relatively transparent social relations. Thus a basic aim of bioregionalism is to get people back in touch with the land, and constitutive of that process is the recreation of community in a strong sense. (Barry, 1990: 9).

L OCALITY BUT NOT AUTARKY Cultural openness and maximisation of exchange that can be achieved in a world of limited energy, within a framework of self-sufficiency in basic resources and the limiting of trade to those goods which are not indigenous due to reasons of climate or local speciality.

A CCOUNTABILITY AS RECONNECTION Each bioregion would be the area of the global economy for which its inhabitants were responsible—if every local community protects its own backyard, and especially if employees have ownership and control of the own workplaces through the expansion of worker co- operatives, then we can expect higher levels of social and environmental responsibility

C OMMUNITY NOT MARKETS  Reclaiming of public space for citizenship and relationship.  ‘putting the economy back in its place’  ‘The agora is first and foremost a place of public life and civil society’

C ONVIVIALITY INSTEAD OF PRODUCTIVITY I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members. (Illich, 1974).

A N EW C ONSUMPTION E THIC Quality not quantity Embedding in the environment Borrowing resources from the local natural environment Celebration of the bioregion: produits du terroir, skills relevant to local production, festivals of local wildlife

T RADE SUBSIDIARITY Local, non-intensive goods such as seasonal fruit and vegetables and other raw materials which can be grown without much complex labour input. Global, non-intensive goods, which do not need much labour but require a different climate from our own. Local, complex goods that require skill and time to produce but not the import of raw materials. Global, complex goods that need technical expertise and considerable time to produce and for which raw materials or the size of market suggests a problem with local production.

F IND OUT MORE : My blog: spot.com/ spot.com/ Stroud Communiversity: wealth.org.uk/ wealth.org.uk/ Course in Cardiff on Economics for a Small Planet, September 2010