La Proxima Economia

La Próxima Economía

Transición de la globalización al eco-localismo

“Cualquiera que crea que el crecimiento económico puede ser eterno en un mundo finito, es un loco o un economista”

Kenneth Boulding

En el largo plazo, la economía y el medioambiente son lo mismo. Si algo es anti-medioambiental es anti-económico. Esa es la regla de la naturaleza.

Wendell Berry, uno de los mayores pensadores y escritores de nuestros tiempos, hizo la siguiente observación:

Hemos vivido bajo la premisa que lo que es bueno para nosotros es bueno para el mundo. Hemos estado equivocados. Tenemos que cambiar nuestras vidas de manera de vivir de acuerdo a la premisa contraria: lo que es bueno para el mundo es bueno para nosotros.

Esto requiere que hagamos un esfuerzo en conocer el mundo y saber lo que es bueno para él. Debemos aprender a cooperar con sus procesos y respetar sus límites…sólo la humildad y reverencia ante el mundo permitirá que nuestra especie pueda permanecer en él-

En los próximos minutos les mostraremos algunas de las formas en que hemos intentado conocer el mundo…

…aunque estamos lejos de conocerlo como lo hace el astuto Sr. Zorro.

Pero antes, me gustaría presentarnos. Esta es mi señora Kris y yo soy Doug Tompkins

Entre ambos hemos creado 4 organizaciones sin fines de lucro dedicadas a la conservación y tenemos un conjunto de campos en Chile y Argentina.

Nuestro trabajo de casi 20 años, se ha enfocado en 4 áreas principalmente:

Parques y Conservación de la Biodiversidad

Primero: resguardando la biodiversidad al establecer nuevas áreas estrictamente protegidas

Hemos tenido la fortuna, ya que a través de nuestras fundaciones, hemos adquirido cerca de 800.000 hectáreas de tierras para la conservación y parques de acceso público.

Y hemos creado tres parques nacionales, además de otros 10 proyectos en Chile y Argentina. El Parque Pumalín, de 300.000 hectáreas, será eventualmente donado al sistema de parques nacionales de Chile

Restauración y Reforestación

Segundo: restauración ecológica. Tenemos muchos años de experiencia en restauración en varios tipos de ecosistema, desde la Savannah en el noreste Argentino, hasta los frágiles pastizales de la Patagonia.

Agricultura con la Naturaleza

El tercer foco de nuestro trabajo es la agro-ecología, donde con buenos

The third focus of our work is agro-ecology, where good organic farming methods produce conservation benefits as a consequence of production.

Environmental Activism

Our forth primary interest is supporting citizen activism and public education.

Ironicaly this observation was made by a prominent politician himself, who said: "Intense, incessant citizen pressure is the only thing that will save us. We must assume that we are surrounded by rapacious developers, callous industrialists, inept public agencies, and insensitive politicians, and our only salvation is in our own two hands."

Yes, we DO need a new economy, yet one founded on thrift and care... on saving and conserving... not one based on excess and waste.

For this we must refocus our values, and like our gardens prepare our soils before we plant.

Here are some of the values that underlie our work and our vision for a future green society:

BEAUTY AS A BASIC

Aesthetics Inform all Things

The words of Sandra Lubarsky point us in the right direction regarding aesthetics:

It is the absence of beauty that has confounded our efforts on behalf of sustainability. If the word sustainability means something more than mere survival and perseverance, then we must speak

of beauty. For beauty is the value that is intrinsic to the ecological paradigm.

We name as beautiful those things that are life sustaining and life enhancing: Babies, bodies of water, flowering plants that promise nourishment affiliations that bring us to life. And they are among the very things we naturally describe as beautiful.

Likewise, in our human environments, we demonstrate a preference for material forms that somehow embody aliveness. Beauty is no mere sentimental, idiosyncratic human affect; it is our way of describing our encounters with vitality, with life-affirmative patterns and relationships.

It is our shorthand for those experiences that exceed survival and enable us to flourish. At the base of life itself is an intrinsic desire not only for quantity of life, but also for lives of quality. This desire lies at the heart of our work to save the world.

In considering how beauty and the economy relate, we should heed the words of Josiah Stamp, who said:

Indiference to the aesthetic will in the long run lessen the economic product... attention to the aesthetic will increase economic welfare.

PURE WATER

(we see as) A Basic (social) Responsibility

We have nearly 100% pure water on our farms and around our land conservation projects.

This is almost a luxury in today's world, and the trends world wide are negative.

Although our terrestrial sweet water may be 100% pure, our marine systems are now beginning to feel the contamination of industrial aquaculture.

Our rules for the managing of our lands are zero contamination and the social obligation to keep all water pure.

Just imagine if everyone made such a commitment to pure water and then lived up to it. We'd live in an entirely different world.

CARE FOR SOILS

Practicing the "Law of Return"

Healthy soils are every bit as important as pure water.

On a recently acquired farm in Entre Ríos, Argentina, we found this kind of erosion... which must be stopped at all costs.

And it is costly... Opening up ground by plowing or disking is dangerous.

Perhaps plowing or disking once, only to establish pastures like this, which then when well managed, can actually build soils.

For us, composting from only on farm inputs, complete nutrient recycling and soil building are the foundations for a healthy farm, a healthy community and ultimately a properous society.

For in the long run, there will be no agriculture, no community and no economy without healthy soils...

MEANINGFUL WORK

Agrarianism as a Practice

One definition of meaningful work is doing something in life that does NOT contribute to the degradation of soils, or to the extinction of species, or increase climate change.

Some may say that does not leave us many options.

But there are abundant opportunities to find meaningful work, including of course good farming.

Reducing our ecological footprints is the fundamental challenge of our time.

Imagination, good will, a love for all nature and care for our own human societies if carefully directed... leads to meaningful work and THEREFORE to a meaningful life.

SCHOOLING AND EDUCATION

Passing the Cultural Blueprint Forward (to the next generation)

As Mark Twain once remarked "Don't let your schooling get in the way of your education"

And then there is the question of what kind of schooling and what kind of education.

Our children and the next generations will require an education that will give them the world view and the skills of systemic analysis to discover and reverse the root causes of climate

change and the extinction crisis.

And within that systemic analysis we must demystify the dogma that ever more high technology will magically provide solutions to the crises of extinction and climate change.

Until we have adequatelly taught this to our children, or they have learned it themselves, we are destined to only deepen these related crises.

LOCAL ENERGY

Renewables and Contemporary Sunlight (, solar power)

The world and its economy turn on energy. The real question is: Do we have an energy shortage or too large a demand?

Ever larger development projects such as megadamns irreversibly alter watersheds.

Massive and sometimes thousands of kilometer long powerlines disfigure the landscapes, magnifying the impact of the damns.

"Techno Saviors" attempt to replace obsolete technologies with new ones like industrial wind turbines. The visual polution and other impacts they create, are accepted as another

"price of progress".

Desperate measures to keep the industrial growth monster alive like increase nuclear power are being discussed in many nations.

All of this to feed the insatiable appetite for growth, and the purported benefits of the globalized economy.

But this is a dead end street and we must rethink our course ahead and look to a local economy based on low-tech yet what we may call “ADVANCED” technologies.

Energy should be produced locally and not shipped enormous distances.

We need small scale hydro to keep river systems healthy...

And small scale wind energy that keeps visual pollution to a minimum and is safe for birds...

And a reawakening to the real meaning of HORSE power.

We must reorient our economies to use only non-polluting, local, small scale energy sources that do not diminish biodiversity, change the climate or reduce beauty in our lives.

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