Imagining the Ideal World - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 144

than this one, which includes many of the other benefits as well, such as
good-quality products, ecological integrity of the community's environment,
social equity for its citizens, and economic stability for its businesses.
4. Have Industrial Lands Available
Most communities desperately seek to have tracts of land (as large as possi-
ble) available for industrial location, as if just having space will attract a large
corporation. In recent decades, however, industrial land became scarce and
prohibitively expensive in the burgeoning Silicon Valley in the area of San
Francisco Bay. Consequently, watchword among communities in the Pacific
Northwest that were desperately seeking an expansion branch of the prover-
bial “good, clean, high-tech electronics” variety was that these companies
would not consider a site of less than 100 acres.
There are not many qualifying parcels in most communities, because, as
already stated, the parcels must be flat and encompass at least 100 acres,
which inevitably means farmland. It is useful at this juncture in the evalua-
tion of the 10 points of conventional thinking to pause and explain the hid-
den consequence of this choice in terms of the biophysical principles that
govern the outcomes of our decisions. The pertinent ones are as follows:
• Principle 1. Everything in the universe is a relationship supporting
relationships, thus precluding the existence of an independent vari-
able and thus absolute freedom from unwanted consequences.
• Principle 4. All systems are defined by their function, not their pieces
in isolation of one another, which includes every economic system.
• Principle 5. All relationships result in a transfer of energy, in this case
from growing food in perpetuity for a community to satisfying the
economic desires of the few for immediate monetary gains at the
expense of growing food year after year.
• Principle 6. All relationships are self-reinforcing feedback loops;
whether “positive” or “negative” depends on whether or not they
satisfy a human desire. The question in this case is to satisfy whose
desire—the wealthy to increase their ability to turn yet a larger
profit, or the poor for readily available, less-expensive local food.
• Principle 7. All relationships have one or more trade-offs. The pri-
mary trade-off of committing farmland to use as industrial sites is
less land on which to grow food for a burgeoning human popula-
tion. This decision carries with it a subsequent trade-off of higher
food prices for those who can least afford them. And there is yet
an additional trade-off of polluting the groundwater from the pro-
duction of industrial waste—pollution that ultimately contributes to
poisoning the oceans, which reduces their ability to feed millions of
people worldwide.