Tim Faulkner: How a new economy might work in Rhode Island

Via ecoRI news (ecori.org)

PROVIDENCE

Ever hear a politician brag about how much open space she protected? Or how much food scrap he wants to divert from the landfill? Or how they both made a neighborhood healthier by shutting down a polluter? Probably not often.

Instead, the words and acts of most elected officials focus on top-down economic development, such as lowering taxes and offering big corporations massive financial incentives to relocate.

That kind of outdated thinking is driving the spread of an altered economy, one that reduces the emphasis on unbridled profit-making and gives priority to health, nature and economic equality. Models vary, but most advocates and practitioners call for a shift to a shared economy, one that relies on local resources and networks and shuns outside ownership.

Statistics show that the current economic system isn’t working. The United States is doing poorly in creating economic equality and providing health care. Success stories abound, as do data, supporting the benefits of spending local. The grassroots-economy movement has been led by networks of artists, environmentalists and social entrepreneurs.

Specific solutions vary. Some say it’s as simple as having consumers, the government and institutions buy locally made products from locally owned businesses. Everything from food to furniture should made using local raw materials and labor and sold in locally owned shops. Bartering is also common, especially for items that can't be produced locally.

This modified capitalism has also fostered a more minimalist lifestyle. Less stuff and smaller homes reduces environmental harm. It also leads to greater contentment. Houses are smaller while the role of nature and open space is greater.

Partisan gridlock and corporate-funded opposition are stalling favorable policies at the legislative level, so the movement so far has adapted through tweaks to existing rules and systems.

Local environmentalist Greg Gerritt and social-enterprise advocate and impact-investor Dan Levinson, of Main Street Resources, recently discussed the issue and policies around a new economic movement.

Gerritt’s economic platform of ecological healing focuses on addressing climate change, ending fossil-fuel use and protecting forests.

Levinson believes that Rhode Island can prosper from a food-based economy and greater simplicity. Solutions include asking large food users such as universities to exclusively buy local; shifting out-of-state tourism marketing funds into attracting locals to local destinations; government injecting money into the local economy by paying premiums to local companies that bid on local projects.

Rather than politicians, local small-business owners should decide where economic stimulus money goes, Levinson said. “Ask these guys where to put it," he said. "They are not going to want to pollute. They treat people fairly. They are not going to ship all over the world."

Tim Faulkner writes for ecoRI News.

Greg Gerritt: Menhaden -- foundational species

Atlantic menhaden.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

PROVIDENCE

I went for a walk on a recent morning in one of my favorite places, on the very old path along the Seekonk River at the edge of Swan Point Cemetery, on the East Side of Providence. I have been walking there for 21 years, ever since I moved to the city. It’s called a river, but it’s really the northernmost extension of Narragansett Bay, with a dredged channel for boats heading up to Pawtucket, and a wide mudflat on the Providence side of the water.

The East Providence side is dominated by a sewage-treatment plant and an old landfill. The Providence side is one of the most majestic forests in New England, a mile along the river of steep bluff filled with 170-year-old hardwoods. Even cooler is that when the old trees fall down, they leave them there. I often sit on a log that likely fell into the water just before I moved here. It’s seriously decaying, lost all its branches a decade ago, but the trunk leaning down from the stone wall protecting the path from high tide, except in big storms, into the sea will still support me when I sit on it, on dry days. Like today.

The spring after I moved here, I saw my first Rhode Island osprey from that fallen tree, and I have even seen a small flatfish swim under me once. Later that same year, I saw my first menhaden and was amazed. For nine months I had been looking into the water every day as I walked the river and saw little life in it, but come August I saw endless streams of 3-inch fish swimming by, almost rivers of fish. I eventually learned what they were. I also started seeing menhaden in August and September downtown in the Providence, Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers.

I started Friends of the Moshassuck shortly after that, as that little river surely needed friends after its 300-plus-year industrial history. I walk by almost every day. Eventually, Friends of the Moshassuck developed a video project on urban wildlife in the watershed. The focus is mostly on breeding toads and the restoration of breeding habitat a ways upstream, but come August and September, I walk along the Canal Street and South Water Street waterfront with video camera in hand, because menhaden continue to fascinate and are the one giant flash of wildlife we see each year in the city.

But I want to return us to the Seekonk River waterfront. On the morning I write of, it was 60 degrees, sunny, calm and the tide was in, lapping the stone wall. And walking along the path for the half-mile I covered, almost everywhere were very young menhaden. From 1.5 to 3 inches, with of course the majority, the great majority, being the smallest size class. A few times I saw menhaden jumping offshore, larger ones from the size of the splashes, which means they are being hunted from below. And below an osprey’s favorite perch, there were the quite stinky remnants of adult menhaden all over the place.

Between the stinky adults, the jumpers offshore, and the rivers of tiny ones below, I could only think of what else happens during menhaden season along the Seekonk River. The osprey have a nest on a platform at the Bucklin Point sewage-treatment plant. This year, for the second straight, they seem to have three youngsters, as I occasionally catch glimpses of five hunting at one time.   All summer we have been seeing one or two, but come August, when the flow of menhaden is at its peak, its time to fledge the osprey chicks, and teach them to hunt. And menhaden is what they learn on, in numbers that even a beginning hunter can make a living on.

But is is not just the osprey. Cormorants are seen year-round, but during this time of year they are found in flotillas. Blue heron numbers multiply in August and September, and one seldom sees egrets except in late summer. Kingfishers are darting everywhere. Even the gulls are fishing. Gulls are not really designed to hunt mobile prey like menhaden; they scavenge and pick up stranded crabs. But this time of year you see gulls sitting on the water trying to catch little fish in the water. I have never seen a gull catch a fish, but clearly it must be a worthwhile source of food as the behavior persists, and one can only think that it works because it is directed at a prey so numerous that even a clumsy gull can catch its fill of prey that swims just below the surface eating plankton.

It was that eating of plankton that drew me to an analogy. I went to Yellowstone a few years ago, and there is one place in Yellowstone in which it is easy to see bison, the Madison River Valley. You look over the valley and there are bison everywhere. Bison need to drink pretty regularly, so they need to stay close to rivers. And then you realize that at one time, 200 years ago, there were herds of bison along almost every river in the grasslands of North America. And now there is one river valley that has a free-ranging herd and you remember what we have lost when you see what we still have.

Menhaden are the keystone species of the coastal estuaries in eastern North America. Osprey have returned since we stopped using DDT, but their continued recovery depends very much on menhaden. Eagles eat many as well, and the return of bald eagles to Rhode Island is an ongoing wonder. Three kinds of herons, egrets and kingfishers all rely upon menhaden to build up a little fat before the hard times of winter.

Seals have returned to Rhode Island, and stripped bass and bluefish make fishermen happy; they all depend upon schools of menhaden. One way you know this is true is because the schools of little ones always vastly outnumber the schools of big ones. Many die to keep the circle of life flowing.

Straying a bit from the bison analogy, we can’t afford to have menhaden in just a few places, and even more than bison, menhaden need the whole sea to do their work, to be food for all things great and small. No park could contain a school. What we have to do is protect the entire species, make sure that when people take some for our needs, that we leave enough for everything else. We must manage menhaden based on ecosystems needs, not human greed.

I strongly urge you to support menhaden management based on leaving enough in the sea for the circle of life to flow abundantly along our coasts.

Greg Gerritt is the founder/watershed steward for the Providence-based Friends of the Moshassuck.

The Seekonk River.

Greg Gerritt: Give up on economic growth

 

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org) Editor’s note: The following speech was given by Greg Gerritt, founder of the think tank ProsperityForRI.com, at a March 3 discussion, held at Brown University and co-sponsored by Main Street Resources and ecoRI News.

I have been asked to provide a bit of context and contrast this evening about the economic environment we find ourselves in.

Economic growth is dead in the old mill towns of the industrialized West, and it is never coming back. There will still be economic growth in the tropics and Asia, the places there are still untapped natural resources and indigenous communities to plunder, and the cities are swelling with people streaming out of the countryside. But in the eastern United States and western Europe what passes for growth is simply the financialization of the economy that is letting the 1 percent scoop up all of what is called growth, while everyone else gets poorer, ecosystems collapse and infrastructure fails.

On Jan. 31, the entire front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review section was devoted to three books exploring the end of economic growth. It is time for those working in economic development to understand the new environment better and to prepare plans that match its opportunities rather than repeat the old stories. Don’t try to spin the growth machine faster, that makes it worse for most of us. We must adapt Rhode Island economic development to the low-growth environment and work to create a more widespread prosperity through reviving ecosystems and economic justice.

The Brookings report offers Rhode Island jobs for 20 to 25 percent of the population, with no plan on how to create jobs in the neighborhoods that need jobs at a living wage. It promises riches if we take orders from the Koch brothers, underfund our infrastructure and our schools by cutting taxes, and bet on industries that are harmful to the community or make jobs disappear. We are admonished to follow the dictates of the business climate indexes, but there is no correlation between a state’s business climate rankings and the health of its economy.

While simple and efficient processes are important, the history, resource base and culture of a community are much more important than the business climate in determining economic success, and there is no evidence that lax environmental, public health and safety standards improves the economy in our neighborhoods any more than subsidies to the 1 percent to build baseball stadiums.

Our response to climate change is much more important than the business climate. Our willingness to end the use of fossil fuels, create zero-net energy buildings, generate electricity from the sun and wind, grow much more of our own food, and sequester carbon in the soil will determine our fate.

As growth and jobs fade into the sunset, reducing inequality in the ownership of assets becomes much more important. As (French economist Thomas) Piketty notes, the growing inequality in and of its self is grinding down the economy. An economic plan offering subsidies to the rich for industries that are shedding employment, and chock full of subsidies to the real-estate industry is one that leaves our communities behind.

I would like to have more time to devote to the relationship between what is happening in the forest and what is happening in Rhode Island. The World Bank says that keeping the forest in the hands of the forest people, and assets in the hands of the poor, gives better outcomes than any other strategy for development, and may be the only chance we have to stop climate change.

This information needs to inform how we redevelop our old riverine neighborhoods. The disempowered, disenfranchised and marginalized people of our environmental-justice communities mirror many of the problems rainforest people have in dealing with development, and the solutions in the forest work here, too. Build economies from the bottom up, not the top down.

A holistic approach to the health of our communities — reducing pollution, reducing harms, good nutrition — serves our communities better than our current obsession with using high-tech biomedical businesses to grow the economy.  Here is one little fact: It is absolutely impossible to have affordable health care for all if you use the medical industrial complex to drive economic growth. When the healthcare industry grows faster than our wages, the industry draws investment while most of us still cannot afford to go to the doctor.

Finally, pay attention to the resistance. It is global, and brings the wisdom of the world to your neighborhood. Building more fossil-fuel infrastructure such as gas pipelines and power plants will create stranded assets, pollute vulnerable communities and add to the climate disasters.

We can live in Flint, Mich., we can live in Ferguson Mo., or we can have prosperous communities that heal ecosystems and practice justice. It’s your choice.