my small home town Helensville, population 2,700), I feel com-
fortable about town meetings, but am often dismayed with insen-
sitive decisions emanating from the remote county centre over
on the other coast.^12 Taking another personal example: acade-
mic meetings throughout my university time have often been
tedious, yet opinions get aired and fair decisions are converged
upon, even when the support funding is decided by a robotcracy.
Of importance in all of this is the fact that not only is open democ-
racy a function of smallness, but also that governance via sub-
sidiarity is fair. Above all, the small nation-state works better
for its populace than a superpower; the million population city
works better than a metropolis; the valley region works better
than the amalgam state – and so on down to the already estab-
lished balance of the town meeting, community board or
Landsgemeindegathering. Small-scale governance will not save
the world, but it does ensure that local sanity prevails, conserves
the local environment, and can be made to work for the local
economy.The substance and hallmark of a sustainable lifestyle is a slowly improving overall
economic standing, increasing levels of employment, steady-state ‘youthful’ population,
and a protected conservation estate. Better a locally fashioned conservation with
development goal than the inferno of lineally increasing resource capture and
exponentially increasing levels of pollution.
For Anglo New World nations there are options to declare and decide upon:
opposition to the rampant exploitation of finite resources, achieving a steady-state
population, denying biological pollution of the biosphere, avoiding the chaos of
unemployed in the workforce. In terms of the previous chapter, the wealthy
peoples of the world now have the knowledge, from which they are positioned to
wield the powerand fashion the control– to produce a balanced environmental
and socially harmonious outcome. What is needed is recognition of entropic
fragility, and respect for genetic inheritance; for nations to be eager, communities
to be empowered, and individuals to be committed to living cleverly and sus-
tainably from their resource interest.
This need is traversed and reviewed in the six expressions of
crisis given in box 3.1 as The ever-changing scenewhich sug-
gests a haemorrhage of change. Mixing metaphors further, box
3.1 also suggests that the family silver is being sold off, and the
roof is about to fall in! In fact material comfort, a well-established
infrastructure, social connectedness, sound education, an aware-
ness of lifestyle values and issues, and an environmental sanctity,
all remain. Jane Jacobs highlighted this potential within a talking-
heads dialogue, Systems of Survival (1992), as two moralities:
commercial(trading) and guardian(territorial) syndromes which
‘underpin viable working life’. People are mostly divided by these syndromes,
yet they realize that there is a better way forward. Indeed they also knowthat84 Practice
Also to be considered is
the view that ‘if the
citizenry agree to
exclude themselves from
any given area, they are
automatically excluding
the possibility that in
that domain the public
good could have any
role.’
The Unconscious
Civilisation, John Ralston
Saul, 1997‘[B]ig government can
be as unaccountable and
destructive of societal
values as can big
business.’
When Corporations Rule
the World, David Korten,
1995.‘I write in the face of
modernity’s incoherence:
the wealth amid poverty,
the domination amid
rhetoric of equality, the
rape amid love of people
and nature, the noise
amid the music.’
From Richard
Norgaard’s Development
Betrayed, 1994.