Our food comes from farther and farther away, fertilized with more and more fossil sources. It arrives on more and more trucks burning fossil fuel. Our banks are bigger but no longer subject to state regulation. The large corporations and the World Trade Organization (WTO) do as they please. Other people's trash is one of Maine's fastest growing businesses.

Two-and-a-half more "earths" would be needed to support today's population if everyone were to use as many resources as Americans do on a per capita basis.

We've run out of cheap energy and room to grow. [John Howe at Common Ground 45MB mp3]

One corporation's profit is someone else's loss. There is no more room to grow.

Our future depends on

1. Our committing now, seriously, to rebuilding a fair, community-based, local and democratic economy. A no-growth economy.
2. Our empowering our citizens and communities by decentralizing resources and responsibilities.

The mistake that Jimmy Carter made was to try to explain to the American people that energy strategy was a technical problem an equation of supply, demand, and innovation. It is not a technical problem; it is a political, human problem.

Two-and-a-half more "earths" would be needed to support today's population if everyone were to use as many resources as Americans do on a per capita basis. [more]

Consensus trance: growth

The standard solution embraced by the organized money and political "elite" - more economic growth - won't get us out of this predicament because that kind of growth is the problem.

The foreign [out of state] and alien [out of country] corporations are strip mining our people, our communities, our state, the rivers and the oceans. This is called growth. Maine is our home; but for the foreign and alien corporations, it is merely another resource on the planet from which to extract the maximum profit. Nestle's, Anthem, Florida Power and Light and Wal-Mart are vacuuming up every nickel. This is called growth. This growth is cancer.

Every day Maine's domestic businesses are being killed off - the local supermarket carrying local product from local farms, the auto repair shop that will work you in, the banker who recognizes you. This, we are supposed to know, is good because it represents growth and progress. The destruction of our small towns, the destruction of our small schools, the loss of skills and knowledge.

We're adults; it's time to stop growing.

Who is driving the bus?

What's a TIF [Tax Increment Financing]? No big corporation left unsubsidized [by we-the-taxpayers].

Why are we subsidizing jobs - jobs that often vanish - at the biggest corporations at a price many times what the workers earn?

Why are the big corporations still polluting?

Who says burning more trash and poisoning our air, soil and water is a good idea?

Do we close schools? What do we teach? Does it have to be the same everywhere?

Are these political decisions or are we willing to leave them to the bureaucrats and lobbyists? What about our next generation? What about our seventh generation? Who's driving this bus and where is it going?

The power that has accrued in Augusta needs to be pulled back to the towns, to the watersheds, to the pulled back to the towns, to the watersheds, to the bioregions. To the citizens. The right scale for decision making will be the smallest comprehensive scale. For a school it might be a town, for a river it might be the necklace of communities along the river, for the air pollution from Ohio, it might be the entire state, NH and VT.

The continued emphasis on regionalization and efficiency takes Maine in the wrong direction. We need to decentralize; DEP, BEP, DMR - they can provide technical expertise to the necklace of communities along the rivers, but those communities must decide about the dams. Not the state, not the lobbyists, not the WTO.

Business as usual no longer works. Right here in Maine. Growth is the problem. Right here in Maine. Our survival depends on our shrinking radically. That means - first among many things - a strong local economy based on respect, conservation, the complete environment. It means support for a domestic economy. Right here in Maine. Right now.

We must challenge population growth, waste, overuse of energy and natural resources. We must challenge the organized money and wealthy interests that run our state as a private fiefdom. We must take care of our own needs locally wherever possible.

No more business as usual. Let's put people first.

Do one thing

I challenge you to do one thing. I challenge you to take an action. A small, quaint step, but a first step. Drive 55. You'll save energy. You'll get five more minutes of WMPG or WERU on your commute to work. Every time you come on someone else driving 55, know that's someone else that gets it too. Put on a sweater. Turn down the heat. How silly of Jimmy Carter, to suggest we need to start somewhere.

Plant beans. Lots of beans. So when you find your neighbor in your garden you can discuss the different ways to cook all those beans.