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What Is the Elm Street
Economy?
Pathway to Sustainability &
Sustainable Livelihoods
by Paul and Sarah Edwards Edwards
The Elm Street Economy is one that provides jobs that last, services one can depend on, and a secure future in a strong community and a healthy environment ... where people come first.
Why It's Emerging.
Our complex economic
system is increasingly unstable.
We need a Pathway to Sustainability.
The Wall Street Economy with its vast
government-supported bailouts is far removed from the daily lives of most of
us, but while enriching an elite, it’s causing high levels of stress for
most us, rendering our pension and retirement funds insecure,
reducing access to credit, and burdening us with trillion-dollar tax burdens
far into the future.
The Main Street Economy as we’ve known is struggling. Mom and pop stores are
closing fast. What remains are mainly strip malls and franchises, leaving
one community pretty much indistinguishable from another. Yet even they are
barely hanging on, having primarily become distribution points for the
products and services of companies overwhelmingly produced and brought in
from faraway.
For a year-long history and regular updates of how current economic factors are negatively effecting nearly every aspect of personal life on the Pathways to Transitions website.
Jobs are shrinking, along with benefits. Nearly
one in ten unemployed who are actively seeking a job one, can’t find one.
Many other jobless have given up looking for one. Over 80% of us who still
have a job worry about keeping it. Others are or fear losing their homes.
Budget deficits have State and local governments eliminating the safety net
once provided by basic public services. Our air, rivers, streams, lakes and
oceans are polluted with toxic properties that threaten our health and the
health of the environment. Uncertainty about the future is stressing
everyone.
How It's Happening? Recognizing a pressing need to prepare for a
better future, forward thinking people in communities from coast to coast
are developing what we call the Elm Street Economy. It’s a local economy,
composed of locally-owned and locally-financed enterprises, industries, and
independent practitioners who are invested in bringing long-term well-being
to all living there, including nature. It’s focus is on working together to
create dependable, environmentally sustainable way of life that bring basic
services, products, and resilience back to our local communities.
Be it in a city neighborhood, a suburban
sub-division, a small town or rural community, the Elm Street Economy is
coming to life. It may look a little different from locale to locale, with
urban Elm Street communities growing food on rooftops instead of backyards,
for example, but wherever they might be located, they can flourish due to
values and characteristics symbolized in this logo.
•
Local production of food, renewable energy and goods.
•
Local development of commerce, government and culture.
•
Reduction of consumption while improving environmental and social
concerns.
•
Being an exemplary working model for other communities when the effects
of decline of the existing economy and our natural resources becomes more
intense.
In the emerging Elm Street Economy our communities and lives are shifting from:
Expensive, polluting fuels
→ clean renewable energy
Globalization
→
Localization
Over consumption → meaningful production
High-rise congestion
→
neighborhood and home convenience
Specialized → Generalizes Knowing Generalized
Cash and credit →
Varied means of exchange
Excess → Enough
Why It's Working: Seven
Characteristics
of the Emerging
Elm Street Economy
The Elm Street Economy is a proactive grass roots
response to the uncertainty and stress on our personal and community lives
from global economic instability, resource depletion, and climate change.
It’s a plan B people are drawing on to resurrect strong, resilient local
communities we can depend on first and foremost to meet the needs of a
secure and fulfilling way of life. It’s aimed at providing with the means to
safeguard a secure place to live, healthy food to eat, affordable quality
health care, a hearty, healthy environment, and a less stressful way of
life. In some ways it’s bringing back the best of the past; in other ways is
pioneering something new.
If you’d like to see examples of how people
blending the old and the new in communities across the US, see
Promising Signs Archives on Pathways to Transition.
1.
Turning from expensive, polluting fuels
toward clean, renewable, locally available energy.
Notice
the bicycle, the wind turbine and the solar panels
in the logo? They’re
symbolic of the forces driving the emergence of the Elm Street Economy.
Throughout history the character of every culture time has been determined
in large part by the available sources of energy. The Wall Street and Main
Street economies we know today were built from vast quantities of cheap,
abundant fossil fuels that heralded in the Industrial Revolution. Abundant
cheap oil in particular has made Western society what it is today. But the
era of abundant cheap oil is on the wane and the implications are already
becoming life-changing.
We tend to take for granted the
amount of energy we have instantly at our disposal everyday. But before the
harnessing of fossil fuels, no human society had anywhere near the amount of
energy we use to keep the current globally-based economy going. But with the
age of cheap, abundant oil now waning, expending the ten calories of
energy as we do now to produce one calorie of food is becoming unaffordable
and unsustainable. As are many other things we expend energy on. Consider
this:
“Every
time you turn on a 100-watt light bulb, it is the same as if you had a fit
human being in the basement, pedaling as hard as they could to keep that
bulb lit. That is how much energy a single light bulb uses. In the
background, while you run water, take hot showers, and vacuum the floor, it
is as if your house is employing the services of 50 such extremely fit bike
riders. This “slave count,” if you will, exceeds that of kings in times
past. It can truly be said that we are all living like kings.”
Chris Martenson, The Crash Course
Just one gallon of gasoline contains is equivalent to approximately 500 human hours work! A typical fill-up of 16 gallons is approximately equal to 8000 human hours or about 4 work-years (approximately 2000hrs/yr).
Reduction of fossil fuel usage and
adoption of non-polluting sources of efficient local energy are hallmarks of
the Elm Street Economy. It draws on beneficial technologies to produce
renewable energy and improve health and education. You’ll see these
qualities reflected in the other shifts that follow, as well
2. Relying
on local resources to meet local needs.
Economic globalization has put our neighborhoods and local communities at
the end of a very long supply chain, making us vulnerable to instabilities
and fluctuations in the global marketplace. The next time
you go shopping, take a look at where the things you bought came from. What
if you couldn’t
get these things affordably from such distant locals because of a devalued
dollar or rising energy costs? If you couldn’t easily forego them, how many
are made with 50 miles of where you live? The Elm Street economy focuses on
providing for the basic needs of everyone in the community with
material,
jobs, and labor that are largely based within our own region.
Some folks, like Dave Ewoldt of
Transition Industries are launching small-scale light
manufacturing and other "industrial" type endeavors at the neighborhood
level that re-use what’s already available in place of complex
technology and global Industrialism’s unsustainable growth from afar.
Others like
Fab@Home
are gearing up to enable home manufacturing using new technologies like
table top manufacturing to produce just about any object in three
dimensions using a wide variety of materials, from chocolate to silicone.
3.
Dropping our role as shoppers for the opportunity to
produce meaningful work.
Notice
there are no malls in the Elm Street Economy logo. Unfortunately our primary
role in today’s economy is to consume. This is evidenced by repeated appeals
by our leaders to go out and shop for the country. “Buy, buy, buy” is the
mantra. Everyone is shaking in their boots these days because people are no
longer spending money they don’t have to buy more things they don’t need.
The US has 22.2 square feet of retail space per person,
while
while other first-world countries have only two or three square feet. But
according to the United Nations’ happiness scale they are far happier and in
the Elm Street Economy
we will be too.
In the Elm Street Economy instead of
shopping and selling things made elsewhere, people are making and/or doing
things for themselves and others that provide for the betterment of people,
their households, and their communities. Their emphasis is on quality not
quantity. They may be engaging in light industry like Dave Ewoldt and
thousands of others or providing services like growing food, sewing,
potting, repairing, hauling, cleaning or teaching others how to do such
things themselves. The emphasis of these activities is on quality, not
quantity. In our course
Sustainable Livelihoods: Now, in Transition and for Tomorrow, we list
hundreds of such ways one can contribute to their local community.
4.
Living and working in or nearby our homes for
ourselves and our neighbors.
You’ll
notice in the Elm Street Economy logo that people are living, working, and
recreating in or nearby their homes. Usually they work for themselves or
their neighbors. A local economy is a nearby economy.
Some people define local as the distance one can comfortably ride a bicycle
to and from. Others limit the meaning of local to the distance a healthy
individual can walk to and from. Still others see is anywhere easily
accessible by public transportation. But whether it’s in apartments,
converted office buildings, or single family homes our work, daily life,
family life, and entertainment need no longer separated by long, stressful
commutes and crowded venues. Like in the Elm Street Economy
logo, residents of Oakland, California’s Temescal neighborhood are part of
the Urban Homesteading movement, growing vegetables and herbs
and raising chickens for themselves and local restaurants. Architects
Catherine Chang and Chris Andrews live in the neighborhood design and
remodel the craftsmen homes there.
5. Becoming Jacks and Jills of all trades; master of one.
Over the past 100-some years, we’ve turned many routine aspects of our lives over to specialists and professionals to the point that we’ve become unable to or feel unqualified to do the kind of basic things for ourselves that people have done for themselves throughout history. From raising our children to planning a wedding or repairing a window screen, we’ve come to believe we must hire experts or specialists to do things for us, at least, buy their how-to books, take a class, or have a consultations with them if we were to dare try doing them ourselves.
People in the emerging Elm Street Economy are busily
re-empowered themselves to develop a wide variety of daily living skills and
abilities, freeing themselves from having to pay others for things they can
do themselves. But they are also honing their special, more complex or
challenging talents and abilities to support themselves by providing help to
others in the community who don’t have the time, energy, ability, or
proclivity to carry out themselves.
Contractor Max Vogals in Oakland community is an
example. Using recycled materials, he supports himself helping neighborhood
residents and businesses with building projects they can’t take on
themselves. Allison Ewoldt of Tucson, AZ, is another example. She’s teaching
piano to the children in her neighborhood. In our community, Lia Sluyter
does alterations; Linda Madden provides therapeutic massage – something it’s
quite difficult to do for oneself!
6. Using a variety of means for exchange and investment.
The Elm Street Economy is built on local investments
and local exchange of products and services through personal
relationships with friends and neighbors we know and trust.
Investment and financial resources in the Elm St Economy are primarily being
generated within the local community and retained within the community.
Local investment is occurring through community banks, microloans,
Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) networks, Solari
Circles and credit unions. Exchange of products and services isn’t
limited to cash, check, or credit card purchases. Many needs are provided by
voluntarily helping one another, lending and sharing, arranging for
exchanges or swaps, setting up re-giving networks, bartering, using time
banks, local currency, and setting up peer lending programs.
7. Choosing simple satisfactions over the burdens of excess.
Realizing that the scale of life has become too
complex and too large, those who are building local economies people realize
we not only have to stop growing, we have to cut back. As financier and
philanthropist George Soros has pointed out, we’ve overshot – at the
personal, local, state, and national levels, as well as in the use of our
natural resources. We’re deeply in debt at all levels. So for those in
the Elm Street Economy, excess is out; satisfaction is in.
Like families in the early 1900’s, those who are
part of the emerging Elm Street Economy find they’re happier and healthier
doing meaningful work within their community in exchange for more free time
and a chance to simply enjoy the basics of a secure, pleasant life. They no
longer crave lots of expensive possessions they would otherwise need to
work long hours to pay for.
The
kind of discretionary items we once spent many hours working to own just
aren’t needed in the Elm Street Economy. Their idea of what they “need” has
shifted from such things as gala catered parties and diamond-studded doggie
collars to enjoying the security, comfort, and pleasure reliable and
affordable local healthy food, sufficient water, sturdy, temperate shelter,
comfortable clothing , energy, security, health services, sanitation,
transport, maintenance, community, education, trade and technology, strong
community ties, entertainment, and a meaningful spiritual life.