A recent hubbub in the Fairbanks city council about banning the much-loved pass-time of dumpster diving has got me thinking about self reliance: about the economics of self reliance, its relationship to environmental stewardship and sustainability, and of obstacles like this silly ban that governments and businesses so frequently put in the way of achieving it. If there has been one unifying theme behind the articles of my column Outpost Agriculture, it is the importance of building self reliance back into our communities. In this three-part series that our editor has so graciously offered to publish, I will explore the concept of self reliance, not just to define it but to justify it as a strategy that everyone can participate in for making positive impacts on their communities and local environments. The pursuit of self reliance is an inalienable right of every person and community. We need to come to understand that, and learn to recognize the many obstacles that both we and other people have placed in its way, so that we may discard them and change our lives for the better.

Self reliance is an economic term. But when I say ‘economy’ I do not use it as a noun which represents the unnatural system of wealth accumulation based on neo-liberal market theory that the people of our capitalist society currently subject themselves to. The word economy in the classic sense is not a noun but an adjective. It shares the same ancient Greek root with the word ecology: oikos, which roughly means household, but should be understood to mean more than just four walls and a ceiling, and include also the ideas of community and environment. Economy is the nomos or management of the household, and ecology, the logos or logic how the household works. Thus, the two words are fundamentally linked; the management of one’s household must be guided by the laws that govern how it works, in particular, the laws of nature. Thus, economy the adjective reflects far more than the efficient management of so-called ‘wealth’, but instead gauges how well the strategies of people in their households and communities foster a healthy environment capable of providing them sustainable resources.

A completely self reliant oikos is the ideal economic state. Self reliance implies control over the material and social needs for health and safety, like food, water and shelter, with control over the access to and quality and safety of those materials, whether procured directly or through trusted relationships. It must be pursued as a community, not as an individual, because people are by nature social creatures evolved to cooperate and rely on shared resources. (Human nature as an excuse for selfishness has no foundation in science and thus no place in social theory.) By definition, self reliance fosters a healthy and sustainable local environment. A self reliant community is capable of meeting its material needs locally, because distance, whether geographic or social, undermines control. The further away your food source, for example, whether in terms of miles or in terms of people along the supply chain, the less control you have over its safety, quality, availability and fair price. The less we can rely on the people and places within our oikos, the more of our self-reliance we must sacrifice; the more we contribute to the people and places of our oikos, the more self-reliant we can become.

The transfer stations are an excellent example of an informal, community-based institution that simultaneously supports community self-reliance and environmental sustainability through materials recycling. All of us in the Fairbanks area who take regular advantage of the transfer stations but didn’t show up to the council meeting (myself included), are very much indebted to those who did make the trip. Though research has never been done to try and quantify the money they save us or the tonnage of perfectly good stuff they save from reaching our landfills, it seems probable that both numbers would be significant. But while the environmental benefits of the transfer stations are indeed good incentives, they are not our primary reason for visiting them. Nor could we assume that these environmental benefits are merely a convenient side-effect of behavior that is inherently monetary in motivation; for if this was the case it would be impossible to account for how the used goods of the transfer station compete successfully with Wal-Mart’s morality-defying low prices. Instead, through practical values that respect the reusability and durability of goods rather than materialism values which instead respect newness, waste is reduced, environmental resources conserved, and our household and community economies are more self reliant.

Total self reliance as I describe it here is admittedly an ideal form: theoretical and practically improbable. It remains, nonetheless, a valid and appreciable principle that can guide our actions. Sustainability is supposedly this generation’s battle-cry, but we have yet to agree upon a philosophy for achieving it. It is not enough to search for trade-offs and compromises between the things we need and what we think the environment can stand. Trading lands as if they were commodities, creating a wildlife reserve in one place to compensate for strip-mining in another, is not a lasting solution. ANWR is proof that such compromises do not last. Cleaner cars and new light bulbs are indeed important technologies but sustainability isn’t just a technological problem, it’s a cultural one as well. Valuing and teaching our children to value self reliance, however, means committing to a new kind of economy that assigns value with fundamentally different terms, like well-being. With self-reliance as a goal, goals of environmental and social sustainability and health are implied, and moving forward, I believe that building strong local food systems is one of the most logical place for us to start.

Sixty years ago Aldo Leopold called this “thinking like a mountain,” recognizing the beautifully complicated interconnections of nature and finding spaces to plug humanity back into that system. Nature is, after all, the only family we have; at the moment we’re just acting like the estranged child.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Feature Stories, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.