The Territories of Hope

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Territoriesof Hope

The Expectations andOpportunities for the

Commons

ROBERT MACDONALDThe Okanagan Institute

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Long ago, Adam Smith wrote about the “invisiblehand” of the free market, a phrase straight out ofphantasmagorical literature and horror movies. Hisidea was that the economy would somehow self-regulate and so didn’t need to be interfered with.

So still goes the justifications for capitalism,which have created the current toxic mix of unsus-tainable wealth and unspeakable poverty in ourworld. Our tax dollars pay to make the world safefor corporate interests, and those corporationshand over huge sums of money to compliant poli-ticians to regulate the political system to continueto protect, reward, and enrich corporate interests.

What really should interest us aren’t the cor-rosions and failures of this system, but the wayanother system, another invisible hand, is alwaysat work. The invisible claw of the market may fail

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to comprehend how powerful the other hand is -the hand that gives rather than takes.

The market economy is based on competi-tion and selfishness. On the other hand huge areasof our lives are based on gift economies, barter,mutual aid, and giving without hope of return - allprinciples that have little or nothing to do withcompetition and selfishness.

Think of the acts of those - like daycare work-ers and nursing home aides - who do more, and doit more passionately, than they are paid to do. Thinkof the millions of volunteers, who give back to theircommunities without expectation of reward. Thinkof those who have chosen their vocation on prin-ciple rather than profit. Think of the armies of theunpaid who are at work counterbalancing andcleaning up after the invisible hand and makingevery effort to loosen its grip on our collectivethroat. Such acts represent the relations of the greatmajority of us some of the time and a minority ofus all the time. They are all ages, the young andand the old. They are the nine-tenths of the eco-nomic iceberg that is below the visible horizon.

The free market economy is only kept goingby the collective effort of the members of this greatgood army, who constantly exert their powers toclean up after it, and at least partially compensate


for its destructiveness. Behind the system we allknow, in other words, is a shadow system of kind-ness, compassion, and mutual aid. Much of its worknow lies in simply undoing the depredations of theofficial system. Its achievements are often hard tosee or grasp. How can you add up the evictions,suicides and drug deaths that don’t happen, theforests that aren’t levelled, the watersheds thataren’t poisoned and depleted, the species that don’tgo extinct, the violence and crime that doesn’t hap-pen, the discriminations that don’t occur?

The shadow system provides soup kitchens,food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unem-ployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends theindigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts theneglected, the wounded, the lonely and the dying,provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousandother forms of practical solidarity, as well as emo-tional and spiritual support. In the meantime, oth-ers work to reform or transform the system fromthe inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch,inroads have been made on many fronts to giveand create hope.

The terrible things done, often in our nameand thanks in part to the complicity of our silenceor ignorance, matter. They are what wells up dailyin the news and attracts our attention. The true


make-up of the world, though, and what actuallysustains life, is far closer to home and more essen-tial to hope than market forces and much more in-teresting than selfishness.

Let’s remember that most of the real workon this planet is not done for profit or a paycheque.It’s done at home, for each other, for affection, outof idealism and compassion, and it starts with theheroic effort to sustain each helpless human beingfor all those years before fending for itself becomesfeasible.

Something in our natures, starved in ordinarytimes, is fed by the opportunity, even under theworst of conditions, to be generous, brave, ideal-istic, and connected.

Let’s look at three realms of activity that can in-form us about our current condition here in theOkanagan: water, food and shelter.

First, water.In the last 20 years, global environmental

alarms have risen to a high-pitched scream. So hasour anxiety about our seeming powerlessness todo much as individuals about things like globaloverheating, ozone depletion, the health of theoceans, and on and on.


A whole lot of people seem to have come to asimilar conclusion at the same time: if global prob-lems seem too large for most people to grapplewith, it is within our reach to take responsibilityfor our home places. Clean water is a good organ-izing principle. A watershed offers a reasonablescale of endeavour that’s a good fit for human vis-ceral and mental capabilities.

Watershed groups and riverkeepers andlakekeepers are organized toward a variety of ends- ecological restoration, conservation and preser-vation of lands, development of sustainable re-source management strategies, environmental edu-cation - usually in combination. Most create situa-tions that get neighbours, often with conflictingideologies, working together toward a commongoal that places them in a benign relationship totheir home places and each other. Such situationscreate an accelerated learning environment inwhich people are not only directly exposed to thelessons of their home ecologies, but they find them-selves learning from each other.

Do this long enough and you may find your-self and your community edging forward towarda 21st century model of the way we humans havelived for 99 percent of our time on Earth - in inti-mate and very practical relation to a place large


enough to feed us and small enough to understandand appreciate fully.

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadiansvisited the Okanagan recently, and speaks passion-ately about critical social and environment issues,especially water:

“We must confront the current economic systemand work to create new economic, social and re-source policies based on the principles of inclusion,equity, diversity, sustainability, and democracy. Weneed to promote local sustainable food productionpractices, local sustainable goods production, anda conversion from fossil fuels to safe, alternativeenergy sources. Economic structures should bedesigned to move economic and political powerdownward, toward the local, rather than the glo-bal, and the power of transnational corporationsand speculation capital must be constrained andbrought under the rule of law. The rush to priva-tize every area once considered a common herit-age must end.

To truly share the world’s water sources inan equitable and responsible way, we must recog-nize water as a shared common heritage to befiercely protected, carefully managed, and equita-bly shared. Because it is a flow resource necessary


for life and ecosystem health, and because there isno substitute for it, water must be regarded as apublic commons and a public good and preservedas such for all time in law and practice. Freshwateris central to our very existence and must be pro-tected by public trust law for the common good,not for individual profit. Of course there is an eco-nomic dimension to water, but under the publictrust, governments are obliged to protect watersources in order to sustain them for the long-termuse of the entire population, not just the privilegedfew.”

Now let’s look at food.Food sovereignty is not just about food.

Rather it acknowledges food as the common groundfor all peoples and identifies it as a starting pointand guiding theme for broader change. Food sov-ereignty suggests that it is impossible to explore howfood is produced, traded and consumed withoutquestioning the whole fabric of global economicsand society. This includes everything from re-source-intensive industrial production of crops andlivestock, to the emergence of technologies likegenetic modification and nanotechnology, to thepatenting of traditional knowledge, and the increas-ing corporate control of food production and trade.


Food sovereignty is intrinsically about con-nection to land and connection to place. It recog-nises that those who maintain living traditions ofcloseness to the earth are best placed to make deci-sions and advise on how land should be used andhow food can continue to be cultivated, traded andconsumed in their communities and beyond.

Food producers are ready, able and willingto feed the world’s peoples. But the heritage andcapacities to produce healthy, good and abundantfood are being threatened and undermined by neo-liberalism and the global market economy. We needto reclaim the hope and power to preserve, recoverand build on our food producing knowledge andcapacity.

Food sovereignty is the right to healthy andculturally appropriate food produced through eco-logically sound and sustainable methods, and theright to define our own food and agriculture sys-tems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those whoproduce, process, distribute and consume food atthe heart of food systems and policies rather thanthe demands of markets and corporations. It de-fends the interests and inclusion of the next gen-eration.

Personally and professionally I think that thesustainable production of food, is something that


people are drawn to, that they do because they be-lieve in it. In a culture where food is corporate,and production and profit often, unfortunately,come before food safety and quality, we all suffer.Wild, local, organic, and biodynamic foods are theway back from the brink of extinction, and criticalto a sustainable world.

Lastly, let’s look at shelter - specifically in the con-text of sustainable, low-carbon communities.

Sustainable communities are characterized byeasy access to transit, a wide variety of house types,and services and job sites very close at hand. Fine-grain interconnected street networks ensure thatall trips are as short as possible, disperse conges-tion and are compatible with walking, biking andtransit.

Sustainable communities locate commercialservices, frequent transit and schools within a five-minute walk. People will walk if there is somethingto walk to. The most important walking destina-tions are the corner store and a transit stop. A mini-mum gross density of 10 dwelling units per acre isrequired for this to work.

Sustainable communities locate good jobsclose to affordable homes. The trend toward everlarger commute distances for workers must be re-


versed. “Good jobs close to home” is a fundamen-tal requirement. The vast majority of new jobs arecompatible with complete community districts.

Sustainable communities provide a diversityof housing types. Zoning laws have tended to seg-regate communities by income. Communities de-signed for only one income cannot be complete,and when repeated throughout the region, they addto transportation problems.

Sustainable communities invest in lighter,greener, cheaper and smarter infrastructure. Sub-urban homes have at least four times more infra-structure per dwelling unit than those in walkableneighbourhoods. Exaggerated municipal standardsfor roads and utilities cost too much to build andmaintain, and they destroy watershed function.Smarter, cheaper and greener strategies are re-quired.

David Suzuki, the renowned scientist andwriter, has vacationed with his family in theOkanagan since 1979. In a recent column he la-ments some of the changes he ’s seen:

“Once, productive soil generated a cornucopia ofgood food. Now, much of that land has been con-verted to accommodate big houses and boutiquevineyards often run by absentee owners. I doubt


that any local politicians in 1979 would have optedfor the kind of places their communities have be-come today. Yet this is happening all over the coun-try, as people seize the short-term benefits of aneconomic shot-in-the-arm from opening new de-velopments, filling in wetlands, diverting streams,and so on. In the process, the communities that at-tracted people in the first place are disappearing.

The problem is that agendas based solely oneconomics and politics are, by definition, short-term. That is the very nature of these activities.We have few mechanisms to define what peoplelike about the communities they live in, what theyhope will still flourish when their children growup and start having children of their own.”

Sometimes it’s helpful to have others see what wemay not be able to ourselves. Where our hope usedto be, we now face doubt, decline and debt. We’vespent decades borrowing against the future. Weconsumed like there was no tomorrow. And theremay in fact be a much reduced one for our chil-dren and grandchildren as a result.

Every society clings to a myth by which itlives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. Forthe last five decades the pursuit of growth has beenthe single most important policy goal across the


world. We are reliant on it for stability. Whengrowth falters - as it has done recently - politicianspanic, businesses struggle, people lose their jobs,and a spiral of recession looms. Questioninggrowth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealistsand revolutionaries.

What ’s the alternative? A steady-stateeconomy where resources are valued not wasted,where food is grown sustainably and goods are builtto last. Where energy security is based on the useof renewable sources, and communities are valuedas a country’s strongest hedge against social, eco-nomic and environmental instability. It operates atthe human scale, and above all it recognizes na-ture ’s limits.It is possible to move a national economy to zerogrowth - without a crash - through less private in-vestment, more public spending and by reducingthe working week so more people are employed.We have to create a more resilient society basedon a clear understanding of the limits within whichwe must live, one in which the responsibilities andrewards are more evenly distributed. Our futuredepends on it.

We need the future in the same way that weneed air, food, and water - other resources threat-ened by our habits of greed and indifference. Not


just any future, but a future in which tomorrow isbetter than today. We need to know that our ac-tions in the present will count toward something,will be meaningful. The future belongs to every-one, and anyone can access or use it, through thepower of imagination.

The commons is anything that no one ownsbut everyone can access and use. The Internet is acommons, at least for now. So are the oceans andour atmosphere. The radio spectrum is a commons.So are our streets, parks and water delivery sys-tems. All of these things require intention and co-operation to maintain, lest we use them up. In otherwords, all the commons need people to care aboutthem. They need cultivation.

So does the commons we call the future. Wedon’t cultivate the future with shovels or software,but through stories. The future is, in fact, just acollection of stories that we tell each other. Themore and the better stories we tell - and the morepeople we share them with - the more westrengthen the commons of the future.

It’s time for us to take back the future fromour old bad-habit selves, and give it new life.


THE OKANAGAN INSTITUTE IS A GROUP OF CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS THATHAVE GATHERED AROUND THE GOAL OF PROVIDING EVENTS, PUBLICATIONSAND SERVICES OF INTEREST TO ENQUIRING MINDS IN THE OKANAGAN. WEPARTNER WITH INDIVIDUALS, ORGANIZATIONS, INSTITUTIONS ANDBUSINESSES TO ACHIEVE OPTIMAL CREATIVE AND SOCIAL IMPACT. OURMISSION IS TO IGNITE CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION, CATALYZECOLLABORATIVE ACTION, BUILD NETWORKS AND FOSTER SUSTAINABLECREATIVE ENTERPRISES. WE PROVIDE INNOVATIVE CONSULTATION,FACILITATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND CREATIVE SERVICES.

W W W . O K A N A G A N I N S T I T U T E . C O M

This essay was deliveredin a public presentation in Kelowna BC

on Thursday 4 August 2011.

Published by the Okanagan Institute,and copyright under Creative Commons.

The type used is Monotype Fournier.



the Territories of HopeThe Expectations and Opportunities

for the Commons

Something in our natures, starved in ordinarytimes, is fed by the opportunity, even under theworst of conditions, to be generous, brave, ideal-istic, and connected.

We need the future in the same way that weneed air, food, and water - other resources threat-ened by our habits of greed and indifference. Notjust any future, but a future in which tomorrow isbetter than today. We need to know that our ac-tions in the present will count toward something,will be meaningful. The future belongs to every-one, and anyone can access or use it, through thepower of imagination.

It’s time for us to take back the future fromour old bad-habit selves, and give it new life.

Robert MacDonaldThe Okanagan Institute

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The Territories of Hope