4 Surprising Ways to Solve the Twin Problems of

Economy & Ecology Before Its Too Late

Creative commons
 4 Surprising Ways to Solve the Twin Problems of
Economy & Ecology Before Its Too Late
Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last 45 years.
He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places,
Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving Your
Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to men,
women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout
the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s Health and a
free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. If you enjoy my
articles, please subscribe. I write to everyone who joins my Scribd team.

It’s clear to many that we are killing our life-support system while we continue to
rely on an economy that is committed to corporate growth. That is about to
end. I’ve found Juliet Schor to be one of the clearest voices on what we
need to do individually and as a country.

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College,
she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the
Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor
received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts.

Her most recent book is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (The Penguin
Press 2010). She is also author of the national best-seller, The Overworked American:
The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1992) and The Overspent American:
Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Basic Books, 1998). The Overworked American
appeared on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The
Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe as well as the annual best books
list for The New York Times, Business Week and other publications. The book is widely
credited for influencing the national debate on work and family. The Overspent
American was also made into a video of the same name, by the Media Education
Foundation (September 2003).

May 28th, 2010

I’m back from my west coast book tour, where I spoke to a variety of audiences. In
Seattle I did a talk at Town Hall, and Todd Boyle producer a great video of it. Todd is an
example of a Plenitude creator. Todd emailed me before the talk and asked if he could
film, edit and upload this high quality video. He does this, gratis, for people and subjects
he finds interesting, as a way of contributing to the community conversation. Thanks to
Todd. It’s the full monty for the book, with the slideshow and full Q&A. I hope you like
it.

Here’s the video:

New Work Centers and HTSP

A few days ago I gave a keynote address to the International

Society for Ecological Economics which was held in Bremen, Germany. First time
teleconferencing for a keynote, which was a nice, minimal carbon way to get the message
out. Afterwards, people in the audience asked for some more detail on high-tech self-
providing. Here’s my answer to them, which is also available online here.

I argued that to reduce ecological footprint and solve the unemployment crisis, hours of
work should be reduced. This shares the available work and reduces pressure on eco-
systems. The additional time off work available to households can then be deployed to
what visionary philosopher Fritjhof Bergmann has called high-tech self-providing. That
is, people make and do for themselves in areas such as food, shelter, energy, clothing and
small manufactures. The high tech dimension is that the methods of production used
require sophisticated knowledges and skills and in many cases, computers and other high-
technology machinery. With HTSP, small scale production is high productivity and
therefore sensible to undertake in an advanced modern economy.
The high tech self-providing economy is one that has a great deal of initial appeal, but
also raises many questions. Is it really possible that people could go back to doing so
much for themselves? Is it a viable option for the unemployed? What can be done to
promote such a model?

The answer to these questions is yes, this is a viable model. Once households and
individuals have time available to engage in it, the way to accelerate its adoption most
quickly is to organize it at a community level. Bergmann has been active in Germany for
many years, encouraging what he has termed New Work Centers. These community
gathering places were initially aimed at the unemployed, who were time rich and cash
poor. The centers purchase the machinery needed for some of the HTSP activities, such
as the small-scale manufacturing technologies. (One version of these is the “fabrication
laboratory,” pioneered at MIT in the US, which is a complementary set of small-scale
machines that can be programmed and used to make small numbers of almost any kind of
simple manufactured item.) Centers can also be used to house lower-tech tools for
woodworking, sewing, etc. and they are also centers for skill development. Workshops,
classes, talks and informal skill development activities take place at centers. They serve
as nodes of networks of people who are practicing self-providing (of the high and low
tech variety). By bringing people together who are involved in these activities, centers
lead to faster adoption of this way of life, both because it becomes socially normative and
because of the practical advantages of learning that are possible in a communal setting.
Such centers also build social capital, and with it the potential to be organized for
political change.

In coming years, the economics of HTSP are likely to improve, for two reasons. First,
fabrication technology and practice and other high-knowledge ways of production such
as permaculture are being refined and improved on a continual basis. The extra work
required by early adopters will be lessened over time. The transmission of knowledge and
machinery will become more routinized and easier. These ways of producing things will
become more feasible for those who are technologically less adept. Second, with
economic stagnation and high unemployment likely to continue, and income growth
predicted to be low, the financial benefits to individuals will increase. When households
have surplus time and are short on cash, self-providing becomes a more intelligent way to
meet needs than in eras of plentiful market work and easy money.

Finally, HTSP is also a high satisfaction way to spend time. In contrast to more passive or
spectatorial methods of entertaining oneself, self-providing activates our creative
impulses. That in turn creates deep satisfaction and happiness. In the end, the joys of
making and doing may turn out to be the most important factor promoting a return to this
way of life.