Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

March 21, 2007
Bill McKibben | Scholar in Residence, Middlebury College

For the first time in human history, “more” is no longer synonymous with “better” – indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. We need to move beyond growth as the paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. In this world, we will begin to think in a new way about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all.

Three fundamental challenges to our “fixation on growth” have emerged: we are producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress; we don’t have the energy to keep producing at our current rate; and finally, growth is no longer making us happy. How do we find a different path?

Speaker Details

Bill McKiibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about risks associated with technology and “progress.” McKibben studied at Harvard, where he was the President of the Harvard Crimson, and wrote for the New Yorker for five years. Since 1989, he has published eight books, including The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information, and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. Prior to his position at Middlebury, he was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships, as was awarded the 2000 Lannan Prize in non-fiction writing.