Those of us who have been building digital communities know that we were simply trying to re-interpret and re-create the rules of real, living, communities. Wendell Berry had something say about this many years ago which applies to the “ecosystem builders” of today.
These “rules” or steps are not optional – you can’t pick or chose. All or nothing. Our survival as a species may depend on understanding this.
These are also the rules for sustainable development. Gandhian all the way.
Supposing that the members of a local community wanted their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, they would:
1. Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?
2. Include local nature — the land, the water, the air, the native creatures — within the membership of the community.
3. Ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.
4. Supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others).
5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.
6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products in order not to become merely a colony of the national or the global economy.
7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm or forest economy.
8. Strive to produce as much of their own energy as possible.
9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community, and decrease expenditures outside the community.
10. Circulate money within the local economy for as long as possible before paying it out.
11. Invest in the community to maintain its properties, keep it clean (without dirtying some other place), care for its old people, and teach its children.
12. Arrange for the old and the young to take care of one another, eliminating institutionalized ‘child care’ and ‘homes for the aged.’ The young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school; the community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.
13. Account for costs that are now conventionally hidden or ‘externalized.’ Whenever possible they must be debited against monetary income.
14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.
15. Be aware of the economic value of neighborliness — as help, insurance, and so on. They must realize that in our time the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, leaving people to face their calamities alone.
16. Be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
17. Cultivate urban consumers loyal to local products to build a sustainable rural economy, which will always be more cooperative than competitive.
From a speech delivered November 11, 1994 at the 23rd annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council.
PS – It’s worth noting that Berry was a Jefferson Lecturer in 2012. Walker Percy was the lecturer in 1989 (scrap book and publication).