Sustainable living

I suspect that I am only doing this to avoid mowing the lawn on another swelteringly hot day!!

When I feel guilty enough I will go and finish the entry later!

I have been concerned for some time that we take the inevitable as too "inevitable". I grew up in a time in post-war England when the community was urged to "Buy British". It has never been quite the same in Australia, (largely I suspect, because despite our desire to believe otherwise we are a much more highly urbanised country. And yet our needs are similar.

Small rural communities and local producers teetering on the edge of extinction because imported agricultural products can be imported much cheaper than we can ourselves grow them. Large "industrial agricultural" producers.---by this I mean corporations----are gradually taking over the whole of the agricultural exercise.

The seduction of this is lower prices. The cost of this is ravaged rural communities. The cost of this is tomatoes that taste like cardboard but have a long shelf life.

The ABC's summer program, Bioneers (http://abc.net.au/rn/summer/summer2005/subpages/bioneers.htm) reminded us of this this morning.

It discussed the need for communities to challenge the willingness of government to legislate to adavantage the corporate over the individual. While their case studies were Pennsylvania American, they made a good point. We are some what aware of the rural vote, and occasionally responsive to their pressure; and democracy demands that their voice be heard.

But they are small, and remote. And lack organisation and (therefore) power.

The program above focussed on the legal presumption that corporations are persons, and therefeore compete with real persons on the same footing. The American poet Wendell Berry says in a critique of this "corporations are not persons, they are a pile of money".

He notes that increasingly people are disquieted by the lie that economic rationalism is for the benefit of all. He lists a range of assumptions that are promoted which need to be challenged some of which are listed below

# That stable and preserving relationships among people, places and things do not matter and are of no worth.
# That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns.
# That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy.
# That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice.
# That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
# That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
# That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.
# That it is all right for a nation’s or a region’s subsistence to be foreign-based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled by corporations.
# That, therefore, wars over commodities — our recent Gulf War, for example — are legitimate and permanent economic functions.
# That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications and transportation which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.
# That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.
# That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade.
# That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
# That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one’s natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.

....as we approach Australia Day (26th Jan) it would be good to ask ourselves what we are doing. Who is making the decisions? And how should we challenge that with which we disagree. "Buy Australian" is one program of possibilities....not as easy as we think, but nevertheless we need to address the seduction of the almighty dollar.