Why local?

Why local?

A local economy is the key to a healthy community. Over the past hundred years, the United States has lost most of its local economies to the global economy, and the result has been loss of livelihood, loss of social cohesion, and loss of culture.

I. Livelihood
The global economy seeks to represent the well-being of its members through monetary symbols, such as “gross national product”. Reporters for the industrial economy tell us the result of increased efficiency has been unprecedented prosperity. However, profits which are reported on paper, however, do not in fact represent the well-being of our communities, families, and selves. In fact, an economy based on monetary profit is worse off when its communities thrive by living off of its own resources. “Subsistence is bad for the industrial economy and for the paper economy of the financiers; it is good for the actual, real-world economy by which people live and are fed, clothed, and housed.” Windell Berry. Therefore, as the industrial economy grows stronger, our communities are struggling more than ever. Industrial capitalism prospers by producing commodities at lower and lower prices, and by replacing labor with technology. This system forces country people to move to the cities so that industrial agriculture can expand. Meanwhile, communities are becoming more and more dependant on commodities that are produced elsewhere.
Besides the loss of self-sufficiency, communities have lost the power to choose products that sustain their needs. Whereas communities used to thrive by meeting their basic needs first, today families are surrounded by the cheaper and cheaper electronics while nutritional food is harder and harder to find. When communities produced their own food, they looked poor on paper, but their most important needs were met. Once, economy and community were synonymous, so that local activity met local need. Now, with one global economy, decisions on what is produced are made outside communities, and with monetary profit as the only goal. Profit makers can prey off communities by selling them products they don’t need, or selling products they do need for high prices. Only an economy that is alienated from communities can take advantage of people. When an economy is local, the workers are the decision makers, and the decisions are based off of first-hand experience of actual need.

II. Social cohesion
Social cohesion was lost in Western society when our local communities lost a sense of place. A sense of place is the feeling that you know who you are because you know where you live and that you are a part of the place you live in. This attribute has always been at risk in the US, where a culture of opportunity leaves us always looking for the next frontier. Communities with a sense of place, however, have a commitment to one another. When people interact on a daily basis, they are more likely to care for one another and want to help one another succeed. In old communities, this quality was an economic asset, and now days it is sorely lacking.
In addition, small, place-based communities passed knowledge and skills down through the generations. Work was a communal activity, and overlapped with play, such as when families harvested crops together and shared a meal afterwards. Today our work and play are segregated, and our work has little to do with the people around us. Loss of interaction with our neighbors has starved us of the economic and emotional support that comes from living in community.

III. Loss of culture
As we have lost connection with our neighbors, we have also lost a connection to the work we do. When economies were local, each product had meaning because of the connection it had to the person that made it. Products were not taken for granted, and were more likely to be given a proper value. Because they were made locally, products carried local culture and values with them.
In colonialism, the colony exported only raw goods and imported only finished goods. In our society’s version of colonialism, corporations take only labor from communities, and communities import only finished goods which they had no part in making. The result is one global culture, defined by the leaders of global corporations. Monoculture overwhelms local culture, and feeds itself by telling the world what to buy. Local knowledge, skill, and creativity, which once allowed communities to be self-sufficient, are now close to being lost forever.