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Archive Alternatives Seeing the light Communities, families, schools and businesses around the world are questioning the global economy and working together to find alternatives. Walter and Dorothy Schwarz report on their three-year search to find the post-consumer radicals socities Guardian Unlimited Wednesday February 3, 1999 A growing counter culture of radical communities around the world is founded on the conviction that the global consumer economy is a disaster and will soon collapse. Their alternative is to "live lightly" and, from three years spent travelling around the world visiting them, we would say they are working with considerable success to bring about the alternative to globalisation: the relocalisation of economies. From Britain, Holland and the US to Australia, India and Japan, we found these pioneers differing widely in the way they live and the solutions they have chosen. But they all agree that the global economy has four fatal, and worsening, flaws. Firstly, there is widespread feeling that it is grotesquely unfair, enriching the few at the expense of the many. In the rich North, an underclass of the underpaid or unemployed has re-appeared, while millionaires proliferate. In the South, farming for a global market benefits the rich, forcing poor people off their lands into towns where neither sufficient work nor adequate infrastructure awaits them. The global economy cuts down the trees, pollutes the rivers and factory-trawls the fish on which the poor depend. Secondly, it is seen to lower the quality of life for almost everyone on earth - even those whose standard of living it enhances. In the rich North, even well-paid people are increasingly insecure in their jobs and have to work harder and harder to keep them. The "cheap" food we enjoy in our supermarkets is not cheap when we count the pollution caused by the packaging and transport of the goods. In Britain, almost 30 per cent of children suffer from asthma at some stage and traffic fumes hasten the death of 24,000 people a year in the UK. Thirdly, it is seen to be evidently unsustainable: it has been calculated that several planets the size of Earth would be needed to realise its implied promise that some day everyone will live like they do in America. A market from which nobody can hide is reducing all values to those of a hamburger/Coca-Cola society. This is a new global empire, sustained by corporate vested interests more powerful than the world has ever known. In India we found boundless enthusiasm for Western-style comfort and affluence. But even here, individuals and groups have begun to question the benefits of the global economy and of so-called economic development. Not content with protesting against gigantic dams like the Narmada, which flood poor people's homes and mainly benefit the rich, they are building small dams and installing village systems for sharing the water and boosting local self-reliance. So the radicals in the rich North and in the poor South speak the same language. They demand locally-based economies which reduce the needless transport of people and goods, offer healthier and tastier food and more work as essential local needs are fulfilled that cannot be "afforded" today. More goods will be made locally and built to be repaired rather than replaced. Complementary local currencies (Lets), already flourishing in many cities in Britain and around the world, would oil the wheels of an informal economy. Nobody knows how many people already inhabit the "living lightly" culture because many do so part-time or intermittently. Surveys in Britain and America show millions of "downshifters" - more every year - cutting back on spending and seeking more balance in their lives. People already living full-time in this post-consumer society appeared to us to be happier. They include families doing it on their own, like Daniel and Suzanne Cooper and their three children, who grow almost all their food on their farm in a remote Welsh valley. The Coopers get their electricity from the sun and wind, their water from the stream, and spiritual satisfaction from the trees they have planted. Others have stepped cautiously into more communal living through "co-housing". Here, private homes are clustered round a common, car-free space where children are safe, food can be grown, and a common house offers shared meals as often as the members want. Hundreds of co-housing groups flourish in Denmark, and the movement is spreading in the US, Canada and Australia. Lifestyle movements include the downshifters of the Voluntary Simplicity Movement in Seattle, who take courses in opting out and teach to buy only what you need. Post-consumer society is deeply concerned with healthier food and sustainable farming. Organic Roundabout, one of the fastest growing businesses in the West Midlands, distributes boxes of organic vegetables, with members living and working co-operatively. Community-supported agriculture - a way of organic farming that is profitable to the farmer and the consumer - flourishes in the US and is starting in Britain. Customers pay in advance for a share in the coming season's crop and then collect their freshly-picked veggies every week. Many success stories of post-consumerism are in towns and cities, where most of humanity will soon be living. The VAKgroep, a community of mild-mannered anarchists in Utrecht, Holland, have lived and worked for many years in a complex of housing and successful business co-operatives. Maleny, a small town in Queensland, Australia, has grown from a degenerated cattle town into a model of conviviality, with co-operatives giving loans, training for jobs, issuing local money, selling organic food, recycling waste and running a popular bar and restaurant. More thorough radicals of the new society live in communities, spiritual or profane, dedicated to a sustainable lifestyle and post-shopping values. The future international city at Auroville, in south India, already has 1,200 members from 31 countries. Their mystical aim is to accelerate evolution by raising human consciousness; The Directory of Intentional Communities lists more than 500 in the US; The new paradigm - in which co-operation, not competition, is the norm - is taught in schools like Brockwood Park, Hampshire, and Schumacher College, Devon. Typically, students cook their own dinners, clean up the premises and work in the vegetable garden. This is a pioneering culture: you have to be tough and resourceful and co-operate with others. We found its members more interesting than the mainstream because they ask so many questions, kinder because community is their deepest aspiration. It is a prophetic culture, denouncing corrupted values, predicting that the global economy will collapse and be replaced by a new paradigm. We hope that there will not be a collapse, but a dual society in which the official economy will go its way, enriching its favourites and impoverishing its victims, allowing an alternative culture to become an alternative economy. The two cultures must eventually co-operate because each has something to offer the other. Meanwhile, most of us in our hearts will be somewhere in between the two. Walter Schwarz was a foreign correspondent and religious affairs correspondent for the Guardian. Their book, Living Lightly: Travels in the Post-Consumer Society, is published by Jon Carpenter (15).
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