Counsel for Getting There - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 165

A commodity view of life is interested in domination, control, and profit
and seeks to gain the world by subjugating it to the will of the industrial men-
tality through the economic system. At the core of the commodity worldview
are several economic seeds, such as self-interest, the economy versus ecology
dilemma, the growth/no growth tug-of-war, Rational Economic Man, and
others. We have made the case that it is currently necessary, with respect
to a commodity worldview, to protect the health of the environment in the
present for the present and the future through external constraints placed
on destructive human behavior that ignores, circumvents, and attempts to
control how the biophysical principles function.
A vision does not create a single constraint, where there was none before.
It cannot because everything in the world is already constrained by its rela-
tionship to everything else, which means that nothing is ever entirely free
(biophysical principle 1). A vision determines the degree to which a particu-
lar socially chosen constraint is negotiable (biophysical principles 6 and 7).
In addition, a vision forces a blurring of all interdisciplinary lines in its ful-
fillment, because the power of the vision rests with the people who created
it and those who are inspired by it, not those whose sole job is to administer
the bits and pieces of everyday life, as important as they might be.
What does negotiable mean here? It means to bargain for a different out-
come, to cut the best possible deal. Can we, for example, negotiate with
nature to give us sunnier, drier winters without flooding when we deem
the winters too dark and wet? Can we negotiate for more rain during peri-
ods of drought? Well, we could try, but it would be to no avail. Nature does
not negotiate; therefore, some of the conditions nature hands us are nonne-
gotiable (the biophysical principles). Thus, in some realms, we cannot cut a
“better” deal, one more to our liking.
Because a community's visioning process is public, it gives the people
the right to comment on all aspects of the process (from creating the vision
through its implementation and monitoring), which, in effect, places con-
trol of the process directly in the hands of the people, should they choose
to accept responsibility for the outcome. The responsibility for the outcome
demands an understanding of and exacts the accountability for how people
accept the social constraints dictated by the vision and their compliance with
the limitations of nature's biophysical principles. 14
Need for Bottom-Up Thinking
As we have said before, there is great power in learning to reframe nega-
tives into positives. In doing so, the participants in creating a shared vision
not only understand their community from several vantage points but also
understand that much of the confusion in communication comes from trying