rain and the rhinoceros

Supposing that the members of a local community wanted their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, they would:

(1) Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

(2) Always include local nature - the land, the water, the air, the native creatures - within the membership of the community.

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

(4) Always supply local needs first. (And only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others.)

(5) The community must understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labour saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

(6) If it is not to be merely a colony of the national or the global economy, the community must develop appropriately scaled value-adding industries for local products.

(7) It must also develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm or forest economy.

( It must strive to produce as much of its own energy as possible.

(9) It must strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community, and decrease expenditures outside the community.

(10) Money paid into the local economy should circulate within the community for as long as possible before it is paid out.

(11) If it is to last, a community must be able to afford to invest in itself: it must maintain its properties, keep itself clean (without dirtying some other place), care for its old people, teach its children.

(12) The old and the young must take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school. There must be no institutionalised ‘child care’ and ‘homes for the aged’. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

(13) Costs now conventionally hidden or ‘externalised’ must be accounted for. Whenever possible they must be debited against monetary income.

(14) Community members must look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programmes, systems of barter, and the like.

(15) They should always be aware of the economic value of neighbourliness - as help, insurance, and so on. They must realise that in our time the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighbourhood, leaving people to face their calamities alone.

(16) A rural community should always be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

(17) A sustainable rural economy will be dependent on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more co-operative than competitive.

Summarised from an article entitled ‘Conserving Communities’ in Resurgence magazine (May ‘95, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (North Point Press), 1985.

The world would be better offif people tried to become better,and people would become betterif they stopped trying to become better off.For when everyone tries to becomebetter offnobody is better off.But when everyone tries to become bettereverybody is better off.Everyone would be richif nobody tried to become richer,and nobody would be poorif everybody tried to be the poorest.And everybody would be what he ought to beif everybody tried to bewhat he wants the other fellow to be. 

In Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes.