Sustainable Communities
Book Reviews

The Sustainable Communities Committee recommends the following books and booklets. Call the LWVS office (447-VOTE) about availability of the materials.

The following booklets are part of an Environment For Life Conservation Issues Forum Series by Izaak Walton, League of America Sustainability Education Project:

• Coming To Terms With Sustainability--Forum agenda and activities to present sustainability concepts to participants in workshop format
• Securing Your Future: Pathways to Community Sustainability--Communities and sustainability; case studies of Seattle and Chattanooga; indicators
• Monitoring Community Sustainability--Getting started with Community Sustainability and communicating indicator findings
• Four Stories -- Coastal community connections; cultivating farm communities; natural communities; and building urban communities
• Community Voices for Sustainability--Workshop Agenda and activities

BOOKS

10 Easy Ways to Buy Recycled: A Smart Shopper's Guide To Closing the Loop by Mack Makower, 1997--This book helps us close the loop. We can reduce, reuse, reclaim, and recycle. But we must also Buy Recycled. It lists ways to recycle and it explains what is already recycled and available for purchase. It lists governmental and other agencies where you can obtain more information.

Your Money Or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Rohn, 1992. -- This books contains suggestions for transforming your relationship with money and gain fincncial independence.

The Affluent Society byJohn Kenneth Galbraith, 1958--You may already have this book on your shelves. It spoke to the issues of Sustainable Communities about 40 years ago, but few took heed.

The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken, 1993 -- This clear, straightforward explanation of the slippery slope we are on to environmental and economic degradation is combined with plausible suggestions that we can take to create a restorative economy. Although not yet available at the League office it is an excellent companion to this month's unit meeting.

Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development byHerrman Daly discusses several basic rrors in conventional economic theory. Daly explains the unsustainability of quantitative growth, and clarifies that we can have sustainable development AKA qualitative growth. As an analogy, we simply cannot grow by getting fatter and fatter. However, we can develop by becoming dancers or joggers or learning ASL or many other things (some of which may entail modest growth in our muscles)

Accurate economic theory must be based on the actual relationship of the economy and the ecology. Although conventional economic theory tends to assume that the ecology is a subset of the economy, the economy is actually the subset. Ecological rules are based on (at least) the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology; economic rules--about the exchange of goods & services--are based on human custom within the constraints of the ecology.

Standard economic theory has been called "market fundamentalism" by George Soros. Daly also firmly disagrees with the notion that the market can do everything. While markets can optimally allocate goods and services based on relative scarcity (as described in microeconomic theory), they cannot address absolute scarcity, nor can they adequately determine optimal distribution and scale. The distribution of resources is politically determined as a function of government and culture. The physical scale of the economy is constrained by the natural laws listed above. We currently have no economic tools or indicators which adequately address the optima of distribution and scale. Lastly, the three optima (of allocation, distribution, and scale) are independent, that is, none of them can be controlled by controlling either (or both) of the other two.

Most of the errors in conventional economic theory arise because economists have no training in the natural sciences. One of the major errors of microeconomics is the confusion of GNP (a measure of money exchange per unit time) with welfare (a measure of subjective utility). This error leads to analytical difficulties when these two phenomena vary differently from each other. One of the major errors of macroeconomics lies in the concept of the circular flow diagram which only describes the flow of money between households and industries and back. This is like describing our physiology based only on the flow of blood and ignoring digestion, which includes eating and eliminating.

Daly also explains two fundamental errors which effectively undermine current theories supporting free trade. The first one is the confusion mentioned above between GNP and welfare. The second is that Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade theories are based) assumes that capital is fixed within national boundaries, rather than freely moving about globally as so much of it does now.

To summarize the situation, current economic theory is like riding along in a cart (quality of life) behind a horse (the economy) and letting the horse decide where we should go. Sustainable development consists of determining what paths are actually available to reach economic systems with optimal allocation and distribution and scale, and then steering the horse toward the selected form.