New Years ideas - self-suffiency version

In my experience, the greatest driver for taking care of the resources we have and not abusing or overusing them, is the idea that you've got to take care of yourself. For example...

When I was at WWF a gentleman from WWF-Peru spoke about transforming forestry policy. Previously any logger who wanted to log 1000 ha (or 100...it's been a while) or less applied for a plot of land and got one year to log it. This policy led to large logging companies exploiting resource-poor loggers in such a way as the large companies would provide equipment, and take most of the profit, if the smaller loggers applied for the land. The resulting cycle was rampant deforestation - take all you can in the time alloted.

WWF staff worked to change the law so that small loggers could apply for larger plots of land and longer time periods. They helped teach best practices for sustainable logging and the small loggers organized a co-op which provided needed resources and even health insurance. As a result, the industry is now far less destructive and one of the co-op members had the first baby in their family to be born in a hospital.

Because the co-op members knew they would have to sustain themselves from a single plot of land for many years, they changed their practices from overconsumption to sustainable consumption.

This guy was sick of paying to dispose his waste. So, now he uses it to create his own energy. In my ideal world, this happened because the onion farmer had to pay the true cost of all the processes involved in his business. As money is a measure of resources, it was cheaper, and therefore less resource consumptive, to recycle his own waste for energy.

Here are my specific ideas on how to encourage self-sufficiency:

No more subsidies!! Stop making logging/cattle raising, etc cheaper than it really is. Pay the real cost of growing trees and cows and people will value the products more and waste less. This can be expanded to seriously reducing the size of the federal government. The USDA is mostly a large farm subsidy. The meat explosion/tenderizing experiment wasted lots of money, time and C4 with no usable results. If the beef industry found this to be a useful, profitable tool, they would have done the work themselves. Turns out you can tenderize meat with C4, but it is far too expensive, and therefore resource consumptive, to be practical.

Encourage returns to town-square style businesses. More walking. Less strip malls. Buy your meat from the mom and pop butcher who got his meat from a local small-scale farm. I want to know where my meat came from. I want to drive by the farm and keep an eye on how they run things. I want to talk with them at the town festivals. I love that this is a consumer-driven initiative. I think it is hindered due to federal subsidies that favor interstate trucking. Reigning in the feds and returning power to local or state governments will be a huge help here. States are already returning to protectionist policies in the current economy. Indiana roads built by Indiana companies. Returning power to local entities and encouraging states to be more self-sufficient and take care of themselves has other benefits, including populations decreasing in unsustainable areas that rely on importing basic resources (Vegas).

Finally - Shorter work-weeks, longer vacations. Let's decrease the standard work week to 30 hours and increase standard vacations to 6 weeks a year. This will decrease our production capabilities - less work means less consumption of resources for both industry and workers. We'll get our GDP in line with lots of lovely places to live. We'll decrease our purchases of disposable crap. We'll have fewer closets, fewer TVs, fewer cell phones. Even though production would likely decrease, there will still be things to be done, which means 3 people working 40 hour weeks becomes 4 people working 30 hour weeks. Additionally, we'll have time to do more things that increase individual self-sufficiency - gardening, canning, cooking our own food rather than relying on microwaves. We'll repair broken items instead of quickly buying new - mend socks, resole shoes, fix up cool old lights from Goodwill.

What do you think?