Sustainable Living and the Abandonment of the Dollar: Food

After air and water, the third most basic necessity for living is food. In today’s service economy in the US, alienation from land and the growing of food is common. Only a small percentage of the population grows any of their own food, with the supermajority relying on purchasing food with dollars at stores, where most of the food (processed and fresh) has been shipped over 1,000 miles before arriving on the shelves.

This is far from a sustainable method of living. Such large-scale distribution of food uses up a lot of oil, both in terms of the gasoline required for trucking and the plastics used in most processed/packaged foods.

In addition, this system has several serious flaws. The “just-in-time” method of inventory management used by most stores means large scale disruptions of the food supply to one’s local area is possible should any disaster occur, as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the recent earthquakes and tsunami in Japan have demonstrated. And, longer term, rising oil prices (and the likelihood of continued increase in prices over the long term as the days of cheap fuel are probably over for good, absent highly short-term gluts of supply) mean inflation in the cost of food in the current distribution system is a given even before factoring in Ben Bernanke’s inflationary monetary policies.

And I haven’t begun to calculate the ancillary costs of damage to the environment in general and arable land in particular from centralized distribution practices of moving mass-produced food across long distances. Shortages of food due to droughts, the ongoing loss of arable land, and new crop diseases thanks to genetic modification of crops certainly won’t help to keep food prices low.

In other words, the cost of the current food production and distribution system will at some point become prohibitive, assuming the unsustainable practices of big agribusiness even produce enough food over the long term for the current distribution system to function.

TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY

Given the above scenario, as well as my goal of abandoning the dollar, I decided that there is no better time than the present to look for and/or start building alternative systems of sustainable food production and distribution. I also look at taking steps toward sustainable living as an effective anti-poverty measure, as food, after housing, tends to be one of the most costly budgetary items in household finances in the US.

Taking on the project of sustainable living has certainly involved a making a number of significant changes in how I live my life, but perhaps not quite as many as one might think. I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and since then have lived entirely in big cities. A lot of writing about sustainable living focuses on farm life. But I have no desire to simply follow the plans of others. I love cities and have no desire to give them up, and I do not believe that I have to buy a farm and move out to a rural location to live a sustainable life. Instead, I try to focus on what I have to work with and seek creative solutions when faced with a problem of urban dwelling. Everyone has different needs, circumstances, resources, etc. I am working with what I have got.

So, while for some moving to a more rural location might be what works for them, I moved from one big city to another, on the same continent, but from west to east, and to another country. One big part of my goal to abandon the dollar was leaving the US, but that is certainly not a necessity, nor does simply moving to another country with a different currency solve the problem. Every currency in the world is tied in some way to the dollar. So when I speak of abandoning the dollar, I don’t just mean US dollars, I mean all currencies.

Living in a large city and having to pay rent on a flat, I am not yet able to fully abandon the dollar. I think of it as a process. But one of the easiest changes I can make in my life, I have found, is to makes changes regarding how I produce and acquire the food that I eat. Thus far, my partner and I have taken the following steps:

* Get involved in a nearby community garden

* Start growing food in the backyard

* Bartering food with friends and neighbors who also grow their own food
* Avoid purchasing packaged food as much as possible

* When purchasing food, buy local

I want to talk in detail about each of these options, but this post is already getting long, so I will address them in new posts in the near future.

But for now, suffice it to say that when fruits and vegetables don’t have to travel thousands of miles before we can buy it at the store, they are very fresh, taste better, provide greater nutritional value, and also last longer before going bad (leading to less waste). Such approaches are also helping us to foster local economies and provide us with significantly better quality of food.

In addition, these simple steps allow us reduce our dependency on the dollar, all the while keeping us well fed on a significantly smaller budget than we had while living unsustainably in the US. When we do go to the store, local, organic foods are largely priced less than conventional foods shipped from far away, and buying bulk goods (stored in jars we bring from home) reduces dollar costs and use of plastic as well. Of course, eating food from the backyard or community garden costs very little in dollar terms, with only minor increases in labor.

All of this has also enormously reduced our trash output. With less packaged food due to gardening and bulk purchases, we have noticed a significant reduction in both our trash and recycling. I'd love to get to the point where we produce zero trash and recycling, either reusing or composting (which can go right bank into the gardens) all of our waste, but this is a process and we aren't there yet.

Just a few years ago I never would have even considered spending a significant amount of time thinking about or putting into practice steps towards sustainable living. This is one bonus in our lives that has come from the decline of the US economy. My partner and I never considered trying to do without the dollar before, and felt trapped in almost manic, fearful, career-focused lives. Our first step was determining that we actually didn't want to live our lives around work; we wanted work to supplement our lives.

By focusing on meeting our basic needs rather than an endless black hole of consumerism and wealth accumulation, we began radically changing the way we live day to day. My partner has even changed "careers" and now works in local, organic food distribution, which has obviously become one of our greater interests. Until we can abandon the dollar all together, at least we are working to support local economies and food networks. As well, after rent and other basic necessities, we are looking for every opportunity to convert dollars in to goods that help us toward living a renewable and sustainable lifestyle. For example, rather than saving toward a new iPad (which I know I would love), I prefer instead to save for solar panels.

Sustainable living doesn't have to require moving to the countryside, nor does it have to involve some sort of anti-technology fantasy of living like long-dead ancestors. It is about living within our means with the resources in our immediate vicinity: finanancially, energy efficiently, in a way that helps rather than hurts those around us, and without endless damage to the earth itself. Sustainable living literally feeds us, the 99% percent, and, in our eschewing of the dollar as we meet our basic needs, we starve the rich of the very same dollars they endlessly desire to accumulate from our former patterns of consumption.

Want to Truly Occupy Wall Street? Abandon the Dollar

Everybody is talking about the #OccupyWallStreet protests. I couldn't be happier that people are finally talking about and understanding that the US, as well as Canada and the Eurozone, have been taken over by a small group of oligarchs/plutocrats (the ultra-rich 1%) who are institutionally represented by the giant "too big to fail" banks, multi-national corporations and media conglomerates, all the branches of government and the not-so-public central banks (that are largely owned - literally - by the big private banks), such as the ECB and the Fed. It is a great time to move beyond the myth of the middle class and recognize that, today, we are the 99% fighting against the top .1%-1% who control most of the capital and power.

The protests are certainly a great way to express outrage and demand a change to the corrupt status quo, and they are more likely to grow in size than to go gentle into that good night. But what else can we do? It hardly makes sense, for example, to spend the day, evening, week, or months protesting and then go home and resume participation in a rigged, globalist system by keeping our money in the top five US banks that control over 70% of US deposits, working long hours - if we are lucky enough to have a job with real unemployment hovering around 23% - to earn paper (fiat) dollars that the oligarchs are intent on debasing in value. And for what? All so we can pay rent/mortgage and purchase essentials in an unstable and unreliable marketplace mostly dominated by the large multinational corporations that have spent the last 30 years exporting jobs overseas.

So, what can we do? The answer is as simple as it is difficult to execute. We don't need to only fight and protest to end globalization and the complicitly corrupt political and economic spheres in which we live.

We can leave the global enterprise. Drop out of the system.

The ultimate answer to globalization is radical localism.


RADICAL LOCALISM AND THE ABANDONMENT THE US DOLLAR (AND OTHER FIAT CURRENCIES)

Radical localism begins first and foremost with the goal of abandoning the US dollar, and/or whatever paper government currency dominates the region that you live in.

The US dollar, as the world reserve currency, is the primary means through which the oligarchs assert and maintain their power. I was indoctrinated from birth that money makes the world go round, and that access to money is a requirement to live. This has been largely the case throughout the US, as the previous hundred years or so, and especially the last three or four decades, has seen the US move from having a significant agrarian economy to a more non-productive service economy, led by political and economic policies that have largely destroyed small and family farming.

As far I knew when I was growing up, food came from the grocery store and was purchased with dollars. My father and mother went to work every day to earn dollars. I quickly learned when I went to college that I needed dollars to pay tuition, rent, utilities, restaurants and grocery stores. Dollars, for most of us, are the medium of exchange through which we acquire almost everything we need or want. And thus, finding ways to make, earn, and/or acquire dollars became a necessity for the very act of living.

And I still do rely on dollars to a certain extent, even though my goal is to abandon them altogether. It is not easy to do without them, by desire or necessity, when almost all the networks, markets, exchanges, and systems require them as a condition of their functioning. This is the social, political, and economic trap most of us find ourselves in.


WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE THE DOLLAR OBSOLETE?

What will it take to make a life without the dollar but still be a part of my local community? I can talk about gardening, bartering, credit unions, solar power, collecting rainwater, bicycles, etc. All of them are important and contribute to my goal. But nothing will really change as long as almost all of us are still dependent on the dollar.

The fact is that I can't do it on my own. I have to do it as a part of a community, or at least with other consenting adults who live nearby. Even with a strong, organized movement it won't be easy.

Radical localism encourages building local networks and communities to create new methods and mediums of exchange and collaboration. It won't do any good for me to decide on my own to abandon the dollar if payment is demanded only in dollars for everything I can't provide for myself and my family.

I need other people, movements, numbers, and not only to have an easy and workable alternative to a monetary economy. There are people and institutions - the oligarchs, corporations, banks, and governments - who want to see anything happen but a wholesale abandonment of the system. They want profits, control of our capital, and taxes. They would so much rather we just protest. They are experts at ignoring protests, no matter how disruptive they are. And if they can't ignore them, they'll agree to get rid of some figureheads, as what happened with Mubarak in Egypt, and spend their time orchestrating replacements who will continue to maintain enough of the status quo to satisfy the oligarchs.


CLOSING BANK ACCOUNTS AND ENGINEERING INVOLUNTARY CUSTOMERS

One recent protest that is gaining momentum is a mass closure and withdrawal of funds from accounts at the major banks. This is certainly significant and worth doing as there is no sense in supporting them. But I question whether or not the banks and the government didn't already expect and plan for this. Bank of America and the other banks, for example, who recently instituted a $5 monthly ATM fee, were certainly not oblivious to the fact that they may lose a lot of clients when they added the fee (even if the banks hoped to avoid huge losses by instituting the fees at the same time).

I suspect they have planned all along to replace these voluntary clients with involuntary customers. How does the government force people to become customers of the big banks? By giving the banks sweetheart, exclusive contracts to distribute government benefits through debit cards backed by mandatory, individual accounts.

Lose your job (or have a baby or a disability)? If you want unemployment in California, the state government no longer sends you a check. They have Bank of America send you a debit card. Poor and hungry, like 45 million others in the federal food stamp program? Congratulations, in more than half the US states you are now a customer of JP Morgan Chase. To add insult to injury, JP Morgan is helping to continue to ensure record unemployment by exporting all of the labor for this new program overseas.

The big banks are not going anywhere, no matter how many customers they lose, when they have gained 10s of millions of customers just this year through these contracts. These government programs make sure that those most vulnerable in the economic system remain entirely dependent on it, and on the dollar. And I am not talking about the kind of dollar that consists of green ink on special paper. I am talking about digital dollars, the dollars in a bank account that exist solely as a number called "balance" on the computer screen. Dollars that the government and banks control access to. Both the government and banks can keep a record of exactly what recipients purchase with those digital dollars, creating numerous privacy issues, as well as conditioning millions to no longer think of paper bills as dollars, but electronic/digital/virtual dollars as dollars.


TWO VISIONS OF A CASHLESS SOCIETY

What I have presented here are essentially two contrary visions of a cashless society: one in which the government institutes and maintains a society in which the large banks are the gatekeepers of a cashless society built on credit and debit cards, and another in which the 99% collectively abandon the monetary system altogether.

My goal to leave the dollar behind will not happen overnight. But I/we can start now on establishing new networks and communities that operate outside, and alongside, the current monetary system. As these networks grow, hopefully they can fulfill more and more of our essential needs until we no longer have any reason to use the dollar at all.

This would be a true revolution.