New Economics
Llandeilo is a small town in the Tywi valley, Carmarthenshire, Wales. The ‘Transition Town’ movement aims to prepare communities for a future in which fossil fuel use will be drastically reduced, and as one consequence, far more production will be for local consumption.

Transition Town Llandeilo has a New Economics group, led by Gerry Gold and to which I belong. We have discussions that often centre on the failure of capitalism, but I get the feeling that several of us are not at all sure what should replace it. There are enthusiastic views in favour of Marxism, co-operatives and commonwealths. Maybe we should start with the possibilities contained in our environment and people, and work out from those beginnings, rather than deciding on a structure and adapting to it? Already, keen gardeners have persuaded the National Trust to release land at Dinefwr Park for allotments: perhaps we just need more useful projects like this?

I wonder, though, if it’s possible for one project to lead to another, and another, until the local economy is ‘sustainable’ in terms of resource use, without an infrastructure for the transfer of permissions, funds, and expertise. Transition Town Llandeilo doesn’t have a deep pocket, and is not an agency of government. The lack of funds and power is a barrier to getting things done. Yet is ‘getting things done’ the way forward? Perhaps we should be an enabling group, with visions of many ways forward. Can there be one infrastructure capable of allowing ‘many ways forward’, or are we talking about multiple-choice infrastructures?

The thought of multiple infrastructures worries me, as they could create as much trouble as a whole school of octopuses suffocating an unlucky diver with dozens of their tentacles. Without a system for bridging the wide gap between conventional and New Economics, though, the new ways are likely to remain marginalised.

New Economics are about a lot more than just money and production. They are about creating economic systems that the Earth can sustain far into the future, systems that are flexible enough to cope with climate change and democratic enough to prevent corporations from determining the fate of societies. A counsel of unattainable perfection, perhaps, but we need to try because the alternative is to devour everything and then to fester in our own waste. Current economic policies encourage growth as the way to prosperity, but Earth is a finite system, in which perpetual growth is impossible. This common sense was reinforced in 1972 by Donella H Meadows, Dennis L Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W Behrens III, the authors of the classic The Limits to Growth.

I’m sure we need a New Economics infrastructure, one that can plug in to national and local government to source permissions. The quantities of permissions and prohibitions that tower over our lives restrict innovation to an alarming extent. If you want to start a small farm and woodland, perhaps on a permaculture model, acquiring the land is just step one on a long, long journey. Planning law is suburban in outlook, liking to keep homes and work as far apart as possible. Development agencies would rather talk to one multinational than to lots of individuals. Planners often regard the countryside as a mega-park, not as the source of our continued survival. One obvious way forward is for proponents of New Economics to stand for election to councils and to Parliament… worthwhile but, on its own, too slow.

John Christopher’s 1956 novel The Death of Grass has just been reissued, by Penguin. In the book, the Chung-Li virus has destroyed grasses – including cereal crops – around the world. Government, and the infrastructure that government manages, break down. Starving people take the law into their own gun-toting hands, and being quick on the draw is the difference between dying, and existing a little bit longer. Christopher makes a plausible case for the end of infrastructure marking the end of civilisation. Maybe what we need is a New Economics infrastructure which can link into government as we know it, but which can also function independently as networks of local cells. Perhaps I should say ‘groups’, in case ‘cells’ comes over as subversive. (All the surveillance that goes on these days is really hampering debate, as to avoid trouble there is a big temptation to speak in platitudes.)

So far there’s no sign of Chung-Li in Llandeilo, but I don’t think we should wait much longer before building a New Economics infrastructure. Several areas in the UK are a long way further down the road. Stroud in Gloucestershire, for one, and Totnes in Devon, where Transition Town pioneer Rob Hopkins is a leading light. There are over 150 Transition Towns around the world, the majority in the UK but also in ten other countries including the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. The transition concept gives communities a way of alerting themselves to the coming challenges of peak oil and to climate change. And come they will.