Factors That Are Missing

The local bank or Savings and Loan was a wealth builder for the community. Farmers and merchants, miners and the schoolmarm but their money into savings at the bank and the bank lent the funds out to local people who needed it to build their house, buy a tractor, stock a General Store. The interest paid increased the value of the bank and thereby its ability to grow the community.

Today with all of the NAs, banking and the wealth it helps build is drawn away from the community to disinterested investors who live on the few percentage points that loans generate. The rural areas and small towns pay that interest to them. When a big box store moves in on an area, they come fully capitalized and ready to mine the money from the communities they serve. They don't lodge their revenues at a local bank and don't fund their store construction with local money that will keep a portion of the cost of operation in local hands.

When ones food come in a metal can from 1,000 miles away, little wealth is kept in the small towns. Local food works the other way. It keeps local money local and may bring wealth into the small economy. When Wal-mart locates 30 miles away from a dozen small towns and rural areas, all the clothing and appliance money leaves the community.

Sustainable economic activity depends on the ability of a dollar to recycle in the community several times before it evaporates. A dollar spent externally is gone at once. This is why many small communities try to trade on their status of being a place where people will come to spend their money. In the absence of MMFF to generate raw wealth, tourism and visitors provide the money the communities keeps spending externally. But if the town or area that is not much more than a few homes along a now bypassed highway, they have little hope of being such a place where people will come and spend money. A tiny strip mall or building supply center cannot sustain an entire community.

Not every town can be the home of an antiques market or an outlet market for several coat and shoe manufacturers. Unless there is a lake, a mountain with snow, a navigable river, vacation villas are not going to be built. Being too far out from an urban area is also a barrier to survival.

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Other blog posts that are related in a Series

todays-reasons-to-exist
shared-history
reason-to-exist
factors-that-are-missing
sustainable-community

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A Sustainable Community

The work that I do to earn the money to pay my bills and fund my retirement has taken a left turn into a different province. The work that I have been doing is so tightly related to the whole picture of American life that this new direction will circle back on all that has been accomplished by the company and people who work there. The new word is Sustainable.

Individual people have a sense of what sustainability is while businesses and power brokers do not. Built into the human psyche is that biological imperative to procreate. Each person feels a need to pass on his or her genes, ideals, morals and wealth to a next generation. Fathers want sons to carry forth the surname. Fathers start businesses with their name and add "Son" or "Sons" to it in the hopes of sustaining the hard won successes of the father. Boards of Directors will adopt and abandon any name which suits its goals to sell goods and services to make the profit it needs to satisfy the investors. Corporate businesses will hire and dispose any employee who they feel benefits the bottom line. For businesses the world is composed of lines that have a beginning and an end. They prefer it that way.

Consider the timber logging industry. They get legal access to a stand of trees, cut them all down and move along to a new stand of trees leaving the clear cut slopes to fend for themselves. It's a beginning, a middle and an end. No feeling of responsibility remains after the last tree is cut. After all there are more acres of trees to conquer.

Coal mining operations are the same. Dig coal, pile the tailings and move on. They sell the coal, bury the dead and discharge the injured. Coal matters. People don't. Coal is wealth. People are liabilities and expense. As long as there is a vein of coal to dig the mining companies can proceed in straight line along the seam. As long as there is another miner, old miners are put aside like a rusty drag line bucket.

We allowed industries to turn greenfields into brownfields and pull up stakes leaving the land to sit vacant and poisoned. Beverage containers typically track a linear path from manufacture to a landfill serving one portion to a customer.

These paradigms of consumption work only as long as there is an ample supply of materials and energy to make things and ample space to dump the trash afterward. This model of sustainability is depends on the idea of infinite supply and cheap processing. It depends on a society willing to allow a business to ignore the negative side of production – the waste products.

Through a much maligned Federal oversight and regulation, many industries have been required to restore their wastelands to pre-operations conditions. They have been required to do a better job of not mucking up the environment in the first place. Businesses respond reluctantly when they respond at all. They cite the increased cost of their goods and services to the consuming public as the reason to be allowed to pollute the air, water and land. Businesses are willing to pick up and move when they have fouled their sites. Settlements of people are not so inclined or mobile. They end up tolerating the non-sustainable practices of businesses.

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Other blog posts that are related in a Series

todays-reasons-to-exist
shared-history
reason-to-exist
factors-that-are-missing
sustainable-community

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