pay[ing] local taxes to maintain local infrastructure and social services’. Prescient
guidance also emanates from the third author, John Ralston Saul, who extols the
importance to us all of participatory government, namely that ‘The power we
refuse ourselves goes somewhere else [and that]...If the citizenry agree to
exclude themselves from any given area, they are automatically excluding the pos-
sibility that in that domain the public good could have any role to play.’ It is also
Saul’s assertion that transaction costs – which includes the costs of criminal activ-
ities, crime prevention, and welfare support – is a ‘superstructure now far too
heavy for the producing sub-structure’. His call is to rail against corporatism and
rally for participatory democracy. Finally in this quartet is the work on Natural
Capitalismby Hawken, Lovin and Lovin (1999) which sets out the policy param-
eters for energy, food and fibre, mineral, water resource, mobility, construction,
waste management and other aspects of sustainable production, consumption and
discard.
Daly and Cobb, Korten, Saul, and the Hawken, Lovins and
Lovins writings arch over my Matrix. Savour the connection
between their maxims and my assertions for conservancy with
development.Is pragmatic neomodernity as set down in these pages all that
new? Logically considered, I think not, for there exists the prece-
dent of a once better-balanced lifestyle in the Old World, and
wondrous living examples of human harmony with nature in
a few remaining parts of the low-economy Third World. These are
available as working models, showing a previous way and
current principle. A more sustainable future within the OECD
generally – and the Anglo settler societies specifically – pleads for
political and professional horizons to be widened; for the kind of
service to communities which commits to providing householder
variety and security, positioning every individual to feel certain
and assured that their progeny can be socially secure within the
habitat they will in turn duly inherit.116 Practice
Between 1960 and 1990
I had opportunities to
work with ‘natural
economy’ communities
in Sahelian Africa,
Melanesia, Afghanistan at
peace, and the upper
Amazon and Rio Negro.
These were
opportunities to
observe customary
kinship clusters, with
admiration for the
adherence of my hosts
to their environment as
the guiding vector in
their lives – not on a
consciously sustainable
basis, but simply as the
way of life.