This multi-part series will profile businesses and organizations contributing to the growth of the local living economy in the greater Charleston, SC region. This post provides an introduction to the concept, why it is relevant, and a profile of Lowcountry Local First.
When I think of a ‘local living economy’ I think of vibrant, engaging opportunities for exchange that provide mutual value in a way that enhances life for all involved. Over the past 50 years or so, there was a shift where local capital began to be exported to sources centralized ‘elsewhere.’ Going local by contributing to your ‘local living economy’ helps shift some of this back.
In the first video of this series, Jamee Haley, Executive Director of Lowcountry Local First, talks about several of their initiatives. One of these is The 10% Shift. In the greater Charleston area, if we shifted 10% of our annual budget from non-local businesses to local independent businesses, we could create $140M in new economic activity, $50M in new wages, and 1,600 new jobs.
While a global economy has many benefits, it also produces gross inefficiencies and hidden costs when it comes to producing goods and creating trade. It is tremendously profitable and effective to find the lowest cost labor farm somewhere in the world to produce cheap goods. It is now clear that this approach is not always the best approach, either for humanity or the environment.
Our global economy is effective at many things—moving huge quantities of goods across great distances, creating efficiencies of scale, lifting many out of poverty, putting some into slavery (illicit labor practices with child slaves producing chocolate, for example), the sharing of knowledge across political and ideological boundaries, and turning mortgages into profits are some examples.
While there are the highly effective benefits of a global economy, it is also the most wasteful system ever invented. Examples abound…Some Australian macadamia nuts are shipped to China where workers crack them open and extract the nut, box them up and ship them back to Australia to be packaged and sold as a local product. English apples are flown to South Africa to be waxed and flown back again to be sold to consumers. The list goes on and on and it has been made possible by cheap oil and cheap/slave labor.
What people are now doing is question which of these activities are worthwhile, especially when it comes to improving living conditions for the locals, wherever the locals may be (meaning, at every point along the supply chain). How does “it” improve the lives of the people who live and work within the local economy? There is an enormous amount of information available now on sustainability and global supply chains and logistics that address many aspects of these, and related issues.
What going local does is it gives YOU, and me, a say in all of it.
In the US we vote by where we spend our dollars. From this perspective, ‘going local’ is a powerful strategy to help repair much of the damage we have already inflicted — to our ecosystems, our economies, and ourselves. A new future, very different from the old centralized industrial institutions of power, is being created. This is a future that is more dynamic and more Integral. By transcending that which is ineffective, wasteful, and destructive of people and nature, we can shift to a new, and better, place.
In her recent article, Localization is the Economics of Happiness, Brook Jarvis states, “People (and, increasingly, governments, from Bhutan and Bolivia to Britain and France) are beginning to ask a very simple question: What’s the economy for, anyway? Do the rules and policies we create to govern the flow of money and goods exist to create ever more money and goods, or to improve our lives? And if we decide we’d like to prioritize the latter, how do we rewrite the rules to do that?”
One realization (one of those common sense, that is not so common sense, realizations) is that going more local has a significant impact upon our happiness. Once you are no longer just a detached purchaser of goods, but an active participant in all aspects of the purchase, including getting to know who is behind what you are buying, you become more interested and involved. And this full engagement is much more personally fulfilling.
A leading network at the forefront of supporting ‘going local’ is BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. It is North America’s fastest growing network of socially and environmentally responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks in 30 U.S. states and Canadian provinces representing over 22,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada. While aspects of their approach often come across as anti everything corporate, which doesn’t include all the good work of a lot of multi-national companies, what BALLE is doing overall is highly effective, needed, and inspiring.
Updating...
