Our problem is not too few jobs, it is an economic structure that creates too much dependence on paid employment and then pays people to do harmful things while neglecting so many activities that are essential to a healthy society. It is instructive to remember that until the last ten to twenty years, most people served society productively in unpaid work in the social economy. In many instances, these societies had a stronger social fabric and offered their members a greater sense of personal security and fulfillment than does our own.
Although initiatives toward creating sustainable livelihood economies may evolve in different ways in response to different circumstances and aspirations, we may infer some of their features from the above principles and examples. For example, in urban areas, they would most likely be organized around local urban villages or neighborhoods that bring residential, work, recreation, and commercial facilities together around sustainable production to meet local needs with a substantial degree of self-reliance. They would feature green spaces and intensive human interaction and seek considerable self-reliance in energy, biomass, and materials production.
Human and environmental productive activities would be melded into localized, closed-loop co-production processes that recycle sewage, solid waste, and even air through fish ponds, gardens, and green areas to continuously regenerate their own resource inputs. Urban agriculture and aquaculture, repair and reuse, and intensive recycling would provide abundance livelihood opportunities in vocations that increase sustainability. Organizing these activities around neighborhoods that are also largely self-reliant in social services would help renew family and community ties, decentralize administration, and increase the sharing of family responsibilities between men and women. Needs for the transport of people and goods would be reduced. Locally produced foods would be fresh and unpackaged or preserved in reusable containers.
We might find a wide range of traditional and electronic-age cottage industries, many involved in various kinds of recycling, existing side by side with urban agriculture. Family support services such as community-based day care, family counseling, schools, family health services, and multipurpose community centers could become integral neighborhood functions, engaging people in useful and meaningful work within easy walking distance of their homes. Many localities may issue their own local currency to facilitate local transactions and limit the flow of money out of the community. Most adults would divide their time between activities relating to the money economy and those relating to the social economy. We would see a return of the multifunctional home that serves as a center of family and community life and drastically reduces dependence on the automobile and other energy-intensive forms of transportation. We might line our byways with trees rather than billboards. We might limit advertising to product information that is available on demand, only when we want it.
(From the book”When Corporations Rule the World” by David Korten, pages 290-1)
