"Local and and regional economic policy-making ... would give more attention than today to:
In the place local economic policy-makers, in pursuing the three points mentioned above, would, for example, encourage energy conservation and, where this is possible, the use of local energy sources to meet a greater proportion of local energy needs. That would reduce the dependence of the local economy on outside energy sources, and increase the proportion of local income and expenditure available to circulate locally. As a spin-off, it would also contribute to environmental sustainability. Encouraging more recycling of local waste is another policy that would contribute both to greater local economic self-reliance and to environmental sustainability. In suitable localities and regions, increasing the proportion of local food consumption met by locally produced food could do the same. Energy, waste recycling and food are just three examples of many possibilities for local import substitution that systematic new strategies for increasing local or regional self-reliance would be able to pursue. And, of course, the volume of goods transported between localities will be lower, if localities generally become more economically self-reliant than today."
"Following scientists like Jullian Huxley and mystics like Theiland de Chardin, increasing numbers of us feel that progress is connected with the evolution of consciousness. We feel that social progress is to do with an increase in people's capacity for self-development, and we are coming to see a progressive society as one which positively enables its people and its communities to develop themselves. The mechanistic models of Newtonian science and utilitarian philosophy are losing their energising power as vehicles for the idea of progress. They are being replaced by the developmental models of biology, psychologt and evolution."
"Increasingly we feel that progress requires us to throw off the domination of big corporations, big government, the mass media, the powerful trade unions, the professonal monopolies (for example, in education, medicine and the law), the big money-dealers like banks and building societies - in fact, to liberate ourselves from excessive dependency on the whole complex of formal institutions which make up the over-developed, over-extended modern state." "An immature society is one whose members have their values and their responsibilities externally defined and imposed, for example by commercial advertisers and by agencies of government; a mature society is one whose members define their own needs and assume their own responsibilities. The consumer society plus welfare state is, in this reckoning, an immature society in a state of dependency. A more adult society will be one whose members are more self-reliant and more self-responsible." |
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Communism has collapsed and socialism is discredited. "The end of history"? No. Precisely the reverse. 20th-century capitalism and socialism have propped each other up. Both have belonged to the modern industrialised period of human history, when the powerful interest groups of business and state have dominated people, and Euro-American culture and power have dominated the world. An emerging post-modern worldview foreshadows possibilities for a new path of progress, more deeply concerned for people and Nature. Based on articles and lectures for a wide range of readership and audiences, this book explores what this new path of progress could mean for politics, work, welfare, health, money and taxes, energy, the life of families and neighbourhoods, the world role of today's rich countries, and other aspects of the human predicament today. |
Robertson, James:
'Beyond the Dependancy Culture. People, Power and Responsibility' |